we started out the school year with our middle school counselor's breakfast that was actually held again virtually unfortunately that was in october so we invite middle school counselors and also some principals and assistant principals from all of the communities and you can see outline there those are all the topics that we cover and basically want to give an overview of what's going on what's new at greater lawrence tech and this year we also went over in more detail admissions policy changes that were part of the the new state regulations and what the impact that was having this year on our admission cycle we followed that up with scheduling middle school visits in our four district communities i feel like it was maybe about 50 50 some were virtual and some were in person and that really we left that up to the individual communities and schools as to what their preference was so that was kind of case by case for the most part the schools have the eighth graders only some schools will also invite the seventh graders to those visits we also attend some events in the community we had some virtual parent information sessions that was on zoom in november and december they weren't really attended as as well as we would have hoped but we did provide those the past two years virtually again our open house for the past two years was also virtual so go to cte is our online application portal so this system actually went live earlier than the previous year it was live and we started taking applications as early as september so it's a very brief online application that students and families need to fill out they create an account just provide middle minimal information and that starts the application process so once it's signed by the student and parent it's it's considered a submitted application the middle school counselors are notified that a student has applied each time there's an applicant from their school and then it is up to them to upload to the portal all of the required information so the full year for seventh grade and the first quarter or first trimester eighth grade grades attendance and discipline record and also a counselor recommendation so i did attach the selection criteria there this year what we what we did end up seeing i think due to those admissions changes where we changed the points for grades so this year an a and a b average were they were both worth 30 points where in the past there was a bigger divide for an a and a b and a c was 25 out of 30 points so it was you know very close behind that and the reasoning for that was to make things you know the process more equitable for english learners and special education students another big difference this year was that discipline had a very minimal impact because of the the new changes with deci only very very serious um incidents actually count and students don't lose discipline points for for most offenses so out of 1500 applications we only had two students lose points for discipline which is very very different and i think kind of a combination of those two factors did result in higher scores overall for a lot of our applicants so in the uh for the appeals process in the letter that we send to any student who is not accepted who who is put on the wait list we didn't deny any student this year you were either accepted or you went on the wait list in that letter we did reference the appeals policy and you can see that in the attachment that was in your packet basically the the family would have to submit either a letter or an email to us or some in some cases they did call to request an appeal they had to it had to meet the criteria for an extenuating circumstance as outlined in the admissions policy and they were also required to provide documentation of the extenuating circumstance that would be submitted by the middle school counselor or an administrator so we reviewed all of those appeals i don't have the exact number i believe it was roughly 75 to 80 which is a very high number because it appeals appeal truly should be just for an extenuating circumstance so that's really kind of a rare circumstance it might be something like a student who was homeless or in foster care and had to move didn't have transportation to come to school a family that was displaced because of a fire um so it's hard you can't really outline exactly what all of those situations would be um but it really is something that's outside of the norm so 75 to 80 is a high number yes i just when you said that 75 to 80 appeals um it seems it's not the only time we get phone calls but we do get phone calls when a particular student in our community didn't get it what could they do so my thought is if in the past there haven't been near the number of appeals how much additional time is spent like how long is spent on each appeal and if we're looking at 70 to 80 appeals whereby prior to this year some of them would have been declines and of course we aren't declining so i'm just thinking of the workload on that one issue was it a huge difference well i have to say it's actually lower that it was so my first year in this position so that was 2019 2020 we had over 100 appeals but that was very tough because we had sent out the decision letters right really the same week i think that the pandemic hit in school went remote and we were doing everything virtually so that was very tough so we were very sort of lenient about that and there were i would say over a hundred and there was not a very clear criteria and then the admissions policy at that time last year i feel like it was a similar number and it is a huge amount of time so between going through all of the documentation and communicating with the families communicating with the middle schools i guess it would be hard for me to estimate but it is a lot of time so what we do is we go through all of those appeals we look at what the family is saying first and foremost like what the reason is for the appeal and if it seems like it is something that's you know outside of the the realm of you know what is quote unquote normal we also look for the documentation from the middle school unfortunately i think what happens is a lot of families that submit an appeal they end up requesting letters of recommendation from a teacher or a guidance counselor or an administrator saying why the student would be a good fit but that really doesn't meet the criteria for an appeal so it is very time consuming thank you let's see uh oh sure hi um back so you meet with the um guidance counselors because i'm thinking of a case where a guidance counselor told the student because they were wait listed after i had the conversation with a parent to sign to apply for an appeal guys counselor told her you're an iep so you don't even qualify so are they guidance counselors in the schools getting the information of what are the criteria's for applications so you're are you i just want to clarify are you asking are the guidance counselors in the middle school giving accurate information to the families about appeals a lot of what are our criterias when you meet with the guidance counselors because like i said the parent got frustrated didn't want to appeal because the guidance counselor said your child's an iep and they don't qualify to go to glts and i explain to the parent that's completely wrong but right so my question and i think and john and i have had this conversation are the guidance counselors in the ascending schools getting the correct information because a lot of the times they're either giving that's and that's the first one i've heard but yeah the other times are the guidance counselors are not submitting the informations right so um really we deal with so many middle schools that i you know i have to say that they're not all the same and we have great relationships with many many of the counselors in a lot of the middle schools i have heard similar situations comments about you know special ed students not being accepted i haven't heard that about not being eligible for an appeal and when you hear something like that you really have to have all of the information to understand because there's so much room for miscommunication so it could be that a counselor said just the fact that you're on an iep does not mean that you are eligible for an appeal which would be accurate just being on an iep does not make somebody eligible for an appeal so it you know it's really hard to say without having all of the specific facts about each situation but we do at the middle school breakfast we talk about the appeals process we provide it in writing and before we sent all of the decision letters in march we also sent an email to all the counselors to let them know that the letters were coming out to be prepared and a reminder about the appeals process and what was required pretended if a student has an iep that doesn't prevent them from being accepted but we shouldn't know that they have an iep it's a blind admission so in most cases we don't know students on an iep i mean it can happen for some reason we we find out but has no impact at all whether they get accepted or not no it's it's blind admission so there is a voluntary section on the application where a student and family can check off if they're on an iep or if they're an english learner whether they check it off or they don't we still um score each application the same way the o3u it's not on our end um and i think i was clear about that it wasn't our information given it was the guidance counselor at the ascendant sending school with one that gave the wrong information um thank you vivian did you have a question okay um in reading this template letter that gets sent out it states if there are documented extenuating circumstances who makes the determination of what's considered extenuating so that would be myself and one of the guidance counselors we meet together so i work with the same person so that there's consistency so it's not just myself looking at that so it would be the two of us so reviewing the letters reviewing the documentation that's provided and then if it looks like you know and we try to always you know give the the student the family the benefit of the doubt but if it's pretty clear-cut that it's really just sort of like a letter requesting reconsideration because you know family history with glts or because you know they always wanted to do a b and c something like that like unfortunately those are not extenuating circumstances so those are very clear-cut there's definitely some subjectivity you know to the admissions process and and criteria um also on this letter it states uh following that specific sentence if there are documented extenuating circumstances circumstances that may have affected an applicant's point total you may request an appeal do the parents receive what the point total is is there a breakdown as to how the student was scored so we don't send that out in the letter but certainly if they call and request that information we can provide it so how would they be able to appeal and know what documentation to provide if they don't know where the student was quote unquote lacking in whether it was attendance whether it was an academic issue so i i remember kind of having this and addressing this before you know generally parents students the schools know that what the criteria is it's grades discipline attendance and recommendation which is a small number of points so you know whether somebody loses two points here three points there and the reason why i asked is because i've gotten many phone calls and i am sorry for cutting you off um some parents they they feel they think or they know that their student is academically there's no issues attendance there's no issue so they have a hard time understanding as to what you know what went wrong why are why is their child waitlisted right so again it's hard to even um when they're calling a committee member asking what to do and you tell them to appeal it's kind of blindly appealing not knowing what documents need to be provided right no i can understand that for sure and what we tell them um when they call when we have these conversations is that there was not a problem with your student's application but if we're looking at the students who really you know we're very solid right there are definitely some there it's very obvious they might have lost all of their points in one area and in those cases it's a lot more clear-cut but when we're looking at the number of applications that we have and the students that we're accepting right now we're still accepting students with around 69 out of 75 points which is very high it's roughly 10 points i think above where we were by september of last year so that's we try to have those conversations with families to make them understand that there was not a problem with their application you know if they lost maybe you know if they got i shouldn't say loss if they had 9 out of 10 on a recommendation 25 out of 30 for grades um maybe 20 out of 25 for for attendance there is not a specific issue or problem at all with that student it's just the number of applicants that we have so we do try to get that message across but i think what's really difficult is there are some students and families who really are you know very upset when they don't go when they don't get accepted they don't feel that they have other great options if they don't want to attend their high school in their community so some of them really are just feeling i think a little bit desperate and want to do whatever they can to get their student in and it's really um it's very difficult it's heartbreaking sometimes when you you know read some of these letters and um we just know it's just we don't have the space available so i think we still have roughly 800 students on the waiting list right now right roughly i have uh two more or maybe one with an addition to that one is i heard you mention like a portal so for those who and i'm thinking of trying to streamlining or making things more efficient on everyone's end so do we have something in place where a parent who is considering appealing that it's done electronically in submitting the documentation electronically and they're able to log in and check the status of that appeal as opposed to having to contact the school committee member not knowing what's going on and that way it's you know the confidentiality of whatever information you you know you guys are able to provide the parent in explaining where that student is right in the waiting list um or various documents missing that way it's done electronically um and then the second part to that initial question is there has been conversations in our previous meetings where we have discussed how there is a lack of communication on admissions end considering that some parents have mentioned that they have appealed and once an appeal has been submitted they have not heard anything on our end so i would like to know what are we doing to kind of improve on on that side of things so first in terms of your question about the portal there is not currently a feature that i'm aware of in go to cte where somebody can just electronically submit an appeal i would it's something we could certainly look into but i would maybe hesitate to do that because that's so very easy to hit a button which then creates possibly a lot of unnecessary work when really a phone call is actually more effective where we can actually have a conversation with a family about their status is something that we could certainly look into but in terms of knowing the status of the application they can log into their portal and it will let them know you know if there's an incomplete application it tells them you know if they're accepted or wait listed so that status information is there but as far as the appeal it's certainly something that we could consider and look into in terms of the communication again i would go back to i feel like there are such so many situations that are very individual and there may be a perception on the part of a family that somebody didn't get back to them but it could be simply a miscommunication where maybe they're waiting for a decision when we've asked them to submit documentation from the middle school that we haven't received yet so you know and i'm sure you get many of those phone calls and it is tough because it's you know confidential student information you're not able to directly get that information for the families but i would always you know encourage them to um to reach out to ask for clarification if they feel like somebody hasn't gotten back to them because i think lots of times when we sort of dig into it and you find out what's really happened not to say that we can't miss communication with 1500 applications and you know there's a just so much documentation and communication around not just admissions but then it's the enrollment process so it's certainly possible um from time to time that we could miss something or you know i know myself i've gone to call somebody back you know a half hour after they've called me and i get a message that says their voicemail's not set up or their voicemail box is full so you try again so i can certainly see how things um you know can be missed from time to time but i think the admissions staff does an incredible job with with the volume of everything that they're handling but i would definitely just encourage um you know that family to reach it back out to ask for clarification another great thing this year is through the fund 106 grant through desi the equitable access grant for cvte we were able to hire an eel recruitment specialist so juliana garcia who is previously an ial para here so she joined our staff in january so she has been a tremendous help in terms of helping us to reach out to families particularly spanish-speaking families helping to get documentation for incomplete applications particularly students who are maybe coming from out of the country so they don't have the documents that we're looking for helping with enrollment paperwork you know she makes appointments sometimes she'll help them on the phone she'll make appointments and they come in and sit down and actually physically complete the paperwork she also helped us to reach out to the freshmen who had not done the placement test and as of this afternoon i think all but 10 incoming freshmen have now had a placement test which is really incredible so that's really been a huge plus having her support with the communication um so you did mention that there when the parents receive the acceptance or the the letter per se we don't know if um regardless if the the student was accepted or not they are they are notified that they could log into the portal of showing that that that student was waitlisted exactly seen it on the letter itself yeah so that's just part of the application system so they can log into their account at any time they can update their contact information and they can see their status throughout throughout the process okay clarify that for me again so when when the parent is initially applying it is then mentioned that they are able to log back in to check on the status even well after a decision has been made i don't know that that message would specifically be there i think of it as just any other sort of online system that you have whether it's your your bank or your you know x2 for student records it's just sort of that system that's there i don't think that there would be a specific message stating that all right well just to finalize my point superintendent um ms richardson i really would hope that you guys would consider um how we can improve in simplifying this a bit and if taking the consideration of adding that an electronic feature where parents are able to upload the documents because we already know that it is part in order for you to appeal you have to submit documentation so i i don't think a parent is going to go out of their way to just click appeal without having to do their homework and go out of their way to provide the necessary supporting evidence as to why they're appealing right um so there's a way that we could kind of have that conversation right um and think of ways to improve the admissions process please um let's let's get this conversation going sure absolutely vivian yeah right okay you're set okay uh frank if you could hold on one second zoila was next zoila thank you mr cher my question was related to the question that um vivian is um was making is the parents looking to know what why they didn't make it to school why they didn't make it and they are in a waiting list um and it seems to be again they had no idea why they were wait listed or why they didn't make it so that and i i don't think just a phone call i understand you say a phone call is more effective but i don't think it's working the phone call is definitely not working otherwise we wouldn't get the call and the question why we didn't get you know why we didn't get my student didn't get into the school so i agree we need to i mean we need to um improve in the whole admission process but that's one thing that keeps coming back to us people family do not know why they were they went into the waiting list and that's a problem they need to know ahead of time i believe you i heard you saying that the counselor has some information so what is the information that goes back to the counselor of the the descending school so you're asking what information the counselor receives about the appeal or just in general about the admission so the information that they get is just about the appealing so after a parent or student submit the appeal they would typically reach out to the counselor or it might be an assistant principal or another administrator in some cases asking for documentation of the extenuating circumstance and then it would be up to the middle school either the counselor or the assistant principal to provide that documentation on their behalf sometimes they email it to us or sometimes they will upload something into the portal but that that additional documentation needs to come from not from the parent in some cases there could have even been a doctor's note for example you know that addressed a student's attendance that would have made it you know an impact and then we wouldn't need the middle school counselor for that but we do need that sort of outside documentation about the extenuating circumstance and that that piece of the process and i agree if people are confused they don't feel like they have the information then we certainly need to take a look at that and see how we can clarify it but i do have to say that the appeals process has improved once we added that component about the contact from the middle school no okay okay mr cervelo thank you seeing a lot of students and coming off of every two very rough years um are you seeing a trend of a lot of students that did great when they were in person but then suffered during remote that completely affected their the grades coming in you can you can certainly see that with some students for sure that with the seventh grade when they were remote most of the year they did much better when they were in person and then the other one would be um yeah i know because that's one of the biggest trends you've seen not just here everywhere the remote was not working for anybody yes i mean let me correct myself it worked for some people um it didn't work for everybody you see saw kids that did bad in person hit remote then they started achieving i mean you saw achievers they were achieving but then remote came and then they they went fell behind yes um one thing that vivian said so when they apply on the portal is there thing showing what they're missing um because if they're looking at that then they should be able they should know where they are in the application process um i think you should they should also know where they are in the appeal process because that that helps them out um because i do get the complaints that they've called or they submitted i mean because i'm looking at it and i always tell them write a letter some submit it in um but one person stopped me um at a meeting and said well i called and i'm not getting a call back i'm like did you write a letter um because that's what you where you should start oh no they suck a call and i'm looking at here saying that they can call um but then a lot of times they're not reaching anybody or if they do they get a brief thing and they never get a call back so if it's added to the portal they could be directed there and there should be a easier spot where they could request a a um an appeal um but a lot of problems i also see not an hour in i see in the ascending school where the counselors aren't sending the information so i mean that's just two things that could actually get better proof so that's why my concern is what kind of information are they getting in the ascending schools that they're not following through thank you leo mrs fitzgerald yes i i had a couple of thoughts we are seem to be more hung up on the appeals process than we are on the actual application process the bottom line is that um as of this date which was last week whatever we have 423 new students that have we've accepted them and they've accepted us we know there's a little wiggle room for a few more not a whole lot more because we've asked the superintendent not to super load until we have space and teachers and everything but my point is that perhaps a gentle opening to the letter about either you've been accepted or you've been wait listed is letting them know everybody we had 1700 applicants or whatever and starting off that way we only have 425 slots available um congratulations you have one of those 423 or unfortunately you have been wait listed so that people are a little more realistic i'm going to use an example as pretty much everybody knows my involvement as a volunteer at the y and that includes their camps both camp otter which has room for 1700 camper weeks camp nakomas which has far less up on lake winnipesaukee and camp lawrence my own granddaughter because she didn't get her application in on time is um and she's only eight is number 46 on a wait list usually they can only take two or three off that wait list and that's because some parents plans have changed from whenever so realistically we would love to take everybody that applies and is eligible but we can't so i think if we fine-tune our communication that some of the things that we're all talking about as a committee and i didn't just receive calls this year first time ever not just from another parents whose kids had been wait listed but from other communities where they said oh i know mrs fitzgerald she'll help you out well mrs fitzgerald can help them out except to tell them the process and that's what i did with every single person but i will say this is the most i've ever had and i do think we need to come up with a full communication plan as part of it but we can't take them all right yes i am nice hope built on my merlin just said because she said her granddaughter didn't make it and she is the number 40.
and at this point we can present it it can be reviewed and if if if it's presented for a discussion in action then at that point the board can take the action it deems it appropriate at that time we wouldn't have to wait till july is correct deal or do we have to well you would you the the item is more than simply saying we're going to do it or not there would be a resolution that is presented doesn't have to be the 28th but currently it's planned to be on the june july 28th and that resolution would include what the ballot language would be what the project list would be what the dollar amount would be it's a it's a fairly long comprehensive resolution at the june 28th meeting it would be appropriate to direct staff to bring the resolution back to the board for um for a decision if that's the desire of the district of the july meeting all right uh great uh further comments remember the committee so during the june 28 i'm just recapping um during the june 28 special board meeting there will be a presentation pretty much what dale presented today right and then during that meeting the board will give direction to us which way to go and then whatever direction if there is a direction that will be brought back to the board on july 21st which will give us enough time to uh work with the resolution and all of the information that needs to be presented in the resolution correct dale correct all right for the comments do you have anything else all right i'll go ahead and cap it with my sorry emma i'm on my phone uh connected um no i think this information is very good um thank you del for and your team for capturing it um and i think just you know as as the support from the community on this past measure as well you know i think it's good news good news for alum rock so thank you you're welcome thank you thank you um if you're i'm really heartened by the support and the trust that alum rock has in uh the element community uh has and alum in the work that it's doing uh as seen by some of the more um these individuals that are high propensity voters i mean having talked to many of them in recent times uh have been at their door they study the issues um they're usually very invested in the community they've been long-time residents um our homeowners are paying property taxes and they're very very invested uh and so they they are people who are aware of what's going on in the community and for them to have and demonstrate this trust um is it means a lot uh i'm i know i can speak on behalf of the district that this means a lot that these uh people who are time and time again four out of four three out of three are regularly voting um and so they they um it's very very impressive especially after they've just come out they were they were asked for support and right again they're saying hey this is what's what we need and they're stepping up to it again very uh impressive uh dale go for it um yeah let me just add one thing that i think you i think you're dead on i've failed to mention that at the superintendent's request we did not go into the field to ask voters how they felt about the potential bond measure until the day after the primary was over so there was no confusion people weren't saying i don't know what this is about or they thought they were talking about something else we made sure that they are separated number two is um there is an excellent article that was written by a reporter for the san francisco chronicle uh having to do with the jefferson union high school district's teacher staff housing which you had a presentation at this committee some time ago comparing it to the work that's being done in the san francisco unified school district we have a copy of that article you can find it on my linkedin page if you just go to linkedin dale scott you'll see it posted and it's a fascinating article it's well done and it's very laudatory towards jefferson um so i highly recommend it great all right uh if there's no further comments from uh members of the committee uh give me a quick second let me get back to the agenda and we've gone through the next steps uh dr bauer your team you all know the the next steps i'm looking forward to seeing what the uh the board as a whole has to say about this and what direction they will ultimately provide to the administration so um is there a follow-up meeting that we need to have to um move forward or does the committee are the next steps already kind of laid out i think from my from my end i think we got what we need right because the board needs to hear the report from the survey and then during that moment the board will direct us one way or the other and once that happens which is next week that will be a good amount of time to prepare the resolution because in the middle of it you have the fourth of july um you know holiday and there's stuff out and things like that so you know you we will be ready for july 21st if if that's what the board wishes as we are according i see your hand i'll call you right quick uh i just have a comment from the best practices that we saw from jefferson uh union high school district there was a committee that they had in place already that continued to work would we have to i'm just thinking out loud we have to take action to convert this committee into a similar type of committee that continues to move forward with the bond or does the committee just continue to do its work and we just grow as needed um just for future thought if we have to take action or get redirection from the board um i was just gonna add um you know regards to the purpose of our committee if there is like a i don't know formal if you can call it that way recommendation um to the board and you know i think we've kind of come up with it here as you know the next steps but does it have to be formal do do we say you know do we all agree that this is the next steps we go in and that these are the recommendations that this committee moves forward in or not and maybe dell can or go ahead board president um dale from your experience at jefferson union high school district that committee did a gap to get read they have to get new direction from the board or they just continue doing the work they were already doing previously um there was there was not a committee prior to the passage of the bond issue in jefferson they didn't have a committee like yours i heard i heard two questions or the first question being is there is there a need to have official action by the board to convert your committee into it's really up to the board there's no set uh format uh you can have this committee continue on you can have a different committee it's really going to be however you want it second question i thought i heard was whether it made sense for this committee to make a recommendation to the board regarding its next step maybe i misunderstood that question but that's what i heard that's correct yeah that's correct dale is there a need for a formal recommendation from this and i don't know if it's something that you answer or president it's just a question i had i'm happy to give my opinion i think it's i think it's would be a very strong move and a very appropriate move but it's not a requirement i'll uh well as part of the next steps and we'll go ahead and take action to move forward with the recommendation to the borders as a whole um do you want to put it up put a put a um put forward a recommendation uh we'll remember sure i moved to move in following the timeline presented in the presentation towards the uh i mean i don't know we want to do the full picture or the bonds um help me with the language there you can keep it fairly broad just so that we have more flexibility at the board okay towards the teacher housing towards the um yeah all right so let me give you let me help you out with some of the language is that right thank you yes please uh we recommend that we move forward with uh the um placing a bond uh in accordance with the findings i don't know hold on man yeah go ahead dale give us some language i would i think a resolution um the question that the board considered the passage of considering urging the board to consider the passage of the resolution to place the uh reauthorization bond on the ballot which would include teacher staff housing perfect all right uh you got that dr bach or uh can you share what you got from that please um i got passage uh resolution to place um authorizing on the on the ballot reauthorizing we are re-authorizing on the by to include the teacher housing yes needed yeah let me just say it again that i think it would be appropriate that the committee um move that the board consider a measure to place the bond on the ballot the reauthorization bond on the ballot which would include teacher staff housing all right so uh moved i got a motion uh trevor is there a second yeah all right thank you saw a motion by board member second by trevor uh all's in favor please indicate by saying hi all right uh any opposition oh hold on i gotta call you as i see you because we're on uh we are in um all right um board member hi trevor hi dr bauer aye uh camaro hi and is there any other members of the committee that i am missing no all right um motion passes myself 49 one two three four four uh with two members being absent correct all right motion patent motion is adopted um great if there's nothing else in at this point there's no follow-up meetings and uh dr brown if you can place the discussion about the committee on the agenda as well uh hopefully we'll make that fairly quick and just get authorized by the board to continue with the work on the on on the workforce housing stuff issues as we move forward so the committee will just have to continue to have the charge because we had stated uh when we initially spoke that it was going to be nearly focused and very um it was going to be a short time frame so i want to bring him bring it back to the board to see if the board has a desire to continue to allow the workforce housing work for the teacher workforce housing committee to move forward continue to work uh all right if there's nothing else then we'll go ahead and adjourn this meeting at 5 10 p.m dr bauer and you won this for june 28th yeah should be uh right alongside that way everybody knows what we're talking about perfect okay and it should be after we've already we've we talked about another item this this side of the recommendation okay that way it makes sense for the board members as they're just okay considering if there's no further questions comments from members of the committee then at this point i'll go ahead and adjourn this meeting at 5 11.
a sense of connectedness elementary at 59 middle school at 52 and high school at 41. so elementary level is their percentages are the highest amongst the three levels the next uh area of priority is priority seven which is access to broad course of study here we are looking at elementary and secondary class schedules and master schedules to assess that we're offering our students access to different courses and we are specifically looking at our english learners and our students with special disabilities to ensure that they have access to these programs as well courses are offered um at each of these levels you'll see that uh we are at a hundred percent uh on data on this uh area of priority and our and when we interpret the data we see that there's a need to offer extended instructional time which for example would be your zero period or your seventh period um and then also the a3g credits that are available to our students um some of the broad course of studies that are included for elementary students are english math social sciences visual and performing arts health physical education for our secondary students we're looking at english math social sciences science foreign language visual and performing arts applied arts career technical education and physical education and again we're reporting on the areas of our progress and interpreting the data and then using the data to inform our lcap that is um our my last slide this again gives you an overview of the local indicators that we'll be reporting to the california school dashboard in addition you have the report that goes more into detail in terms of each of the specific areas and if there are any questions i'd be happy to answer at this time are there any comments by board members yes i do have um i want to ask regarding the food safety perception where um you know elementary 64 middle school 62 in high school 54.
budget balance carry forward estimated at 29.9 million dollars and then the trickle or the transportation revenue control limit is set equal to fiscal 2022 so the comparison the budget parameters you can see the teacher experience index in the middle where it's gone down here you can see the total weighted student count in 2022 adopted we grew from adopted remember that when we adopted the budget in 2022 we also assumed a 400 student loss so not only do we recover that 400 student but we also increased over about and above that so our revised number three was forty five thousand and our proposed is forty four thousand about five hundred and eighty reflecting that four hundred student estimated loss then the base level amount you can see the two percent increase over here the transportation support limit um seven million five hundred thousand about in comparison to the transportation revenue control limit the nine point three million and then classroom site fund is added here to remind us that the classroom siphon has continued to grow over the last two years and the budgetary amount is 708 dollars per student so i'm highlighting these two things you can you can see from the revised number three our transportation support level was just under six million in comparison to the revenue control limit the difference between the revenue control limit and the transportation support level is levied against the taxpayer here in gilbert public schools and so that dollar amount or that difference is decreasing which means more of the transportation revenue control limit is being funded by the school finance formula so that results in savings to the gilbert public schools taxpayer before i go any further are there any questions on any of this okay great thank you so now we're getting into the high level the budget capacity so note that the revenue control limit reflecting those students and the base level amount mostly the base level amount has increased by about 1.2 million dollars year over year note the 15 percent override that too has increased about two almost two and a half million dollars it's a reminder that the m o override is based upon the prior year student counts not the current year student counts so the revenue control limit is calculated based upon the current year student counts and the override is calculated with all the parameters associated with the new year's budget the new base level amount the new tei etc but we're using the student counts reflected in the 2022 budget then you can see the budget balance carry forward calculation estimating the 29.9 million dollars and the prop 123 and tuition in going up a little bit to 2.2 million dollars and then note the energy water savings transfer that is going away we made our final payment and so there's no longer any additional need to take money out of maintenance and operations and put them into that fund the other thing i wanted to remind everyone is this transfer emino to unrestricted capital that 20 million dollars that you all approved and the final revised budget for 2022 putting that money into unrestricted capital and not leaving it in maintenance and operations for two reasons the 20 million dollars is largely one-time money and in addition unrestricted capital is eligible to earn interest earnings and we are able to increase our budget capacity associated with those increases in interest earnings so the budget increase from revised number three is 11.8 million dollars that's for information we always share with you the delta between the prior year budget and the current year budget or the current your proposed budget we are not using that 11.8 million dollars though as part of our budget balancing calculations this year because of this budget balance carry forward situation so we opted to balance the budget considering the the monies that we had available that we know we have available and that look budget to budget so the other the other notable event that occurred in the current year is in january february time frame you approved policy db that is the budget policy where you agreed that we would allow school carryover into the subsequent year what that did is required us to establish budget balance categories and one of those categories are assignments so in this particular case you can see our budget balance carry forward estimated at 29.9 million dollars we estimated that our school carryover will be about 400 000 about 20 percent of the allocation and then we also in that in that budget policy db defined that we would like to have a target of a four percent carryover in our maintenance and operations budget so we've assigned that as well leaving an unassigned budget balance carry forward of 18.5 million dollars this treatment that you see here in front of you will be evident when we do the comprehensive the annual comprehensive financial report which will be presented to you in december of 2022 any questions on that this is something a little bit new that you haven't seen yet i i do want to comment that we are in a really good financial position and i think that's very positive and i thank you for that hard work to get us there i mean it does help the federal funds and the esser funds too but but it is nice to be in a good financial position yeah it is okay so the fiscal 2023 proposed classroom site fund budget capacity so based upon that information that we are looking at a 208 dollar per weighted student count an amount it calculates out to an allocation of 20 and just under 28 million dollars you can see right here in addition we do have an estimate for our budget balance carry forward into this fund of 13.7 million dollars there's interest earnings we are able to increase our budget capacity and classroom site fund by interest earnings and our new budget limit is about 41.7 million dollars reminders the fiscal year 2022 amount per weighted student count was 733 dollars and the new one is 708 dollars it looks like it's a decrease but remember that for the fiscal year 2022 budget we were told be careful because of that 733 dollars 192 dollars per student is considered one time calculating that out in this budget balance carry forward that 192 dollars per student amounts to about 7.1 million dollars so 7.1 million of that 13.7 million is due to that one-time money so we've been sharing a lot of information through our school business school association of school business officials here in arizona and i stole this this graph to give you an idea of what classroom site fund has looked like since its inception back in 2000 and it might have been november of but the first fiscal year that it was available was fiscal year 2003.
um we and the districts we currently have are i don't know this is the last this should be the last pieces of the puzzle great so tonight we're bringing forward the intergovernmental agreement for district 73 and 76 for your approval can i have a motion to approve the intergovernmental agreement second any questions or discussion for errors do it would you call the board please certainly so hi garson hi moons i weisberg all right ben joseph hi frost hi no hi carrie seven to nothing okay and the next item is the approval of our 2022-2023 student guide book um you may recall we had shared um earlier address with you in may and um just for ronnie and grace's sake um this is a one of our board items that's cyclical it comes up each year and um you may recall when your student gets the guidebook that has a calendar on the back side but all the rules in the front side and all of those rules that students are required to follow throughout the day are um in the guidebook that the board of education formally adopts and we have a group of faculty and our deans our administrative team members and also a small parent group that takes a look at it as well and the fact that the board approves the student guidebook each year allows then there to be some consequences given to kids when they break those it's unfortunate it doesn't happen a lot but sometimes it happens and we need to have those in place so tonight we're bringing forward the final draft of the 2022-2023 student guidebook for your approval you have a motion to approve a student guidebook so moved sorry any other questions after the explanation for eric the board page isn't yes today okay they're aware so subject to subject to those changes okay um so this is a voice vote all in favor of the resolution say opposed it passes unanimously okay the next item is the approve the approval of the final 2021-2022 school calendar remember this is again an annual item this is not looking forward this is actually looking backwards this is the calendar that we send to um isbee just identifying exactly what the days were that we were in school that we weren't in school and it's kind of like the year in review but it has to go before the board before we send it to isbe okay can i have a motion to approve the 2021-2022 school second any further questions yes yes thank you okay would you pull the board please certainly moon's eye why is this all right joseph joseph hi frost hi no no hi so hi courson hi carrie seven to nothing okay and the next item is a first reading of um board policy updates uh issue 108.
it really started in earnest in 2019 we formed another committee of citizens that took a deeper look at this um at our needs it took looks at programmatic needs in terms of how we use spaces today what enrollment trends would be how we might use spaces tomorrow how much space we would actually need to do these sorts of things and what the what was working what wasn't working and really related it to the educational needs of the district not just here is the current condition of our actual facilities so what we did come out of that plan we basically realized that the master facilities plans we did one in fact operate eight continue to operate eight schools despite declining enrollments it makes sense as a community continue to operate six elementary schools one middle school one high school but also looking at those facilities the condition of four of them where we're not as good as we would have otherwise have liked they certainly were in poor to fair condition need extensive work and to make them meet our current and future needs we would have to and many more likely than not actually tear them down and rebuild them so um and looking at that we started looking at funding sources and options and looking at what money was available to us to actually carry out that plan and we realized that you know there was different approaches there's option a which is we would let the property taxes um go down because the bond levy that we have for not that we're currently paying for our facilities would expire and the board has no choice about that without passing another referendum which means that we'd probably have something in the order of about 40 million dollars to put toward our facilities over the course of five years which is not nearly enough compared to what we identified in terms of of needs we looked at option b which would theoretically generate about 180 million dollars of money toward those improvements but would continue the tax so taxes would continue forward for another 20 years at the current bonded interest rates and that would um get the vast majority and i wouldn't say vast but the majority of the work done that we wanted to in the next five years and we looked at option c which would generate something about 250 million dollars that would do the vast majority of that work that we had identified but would increase taxes by 50 percent over our current bond and interest levy so it wouldn't increase the total tax rate 50 percent but the bond and interest portion of that tax rate so that brings us to our results and recommendations from community engagement so having considered those that plan and the funding options for it we went back to the community and said hey you know what are the expectations in terms of what we want as batavians for our schools and what are we willing to pay for and i'll let lisa give you a description of the results of it right i know that this is such a big decision for the board and you've been elected by the people and you have no intention of putting something on a ballot that the community does not want so there it you have to be think big when you think about getting that feedback and so we did have a consultant help us with this who has this expertise and put together a citizen committee and there was a bea member on that committee that was the one staff member and then tony and i and mark's served as advisors as well to do whatever work needed to be done behind the scenes just to get the tasks done but really it was a committee of citizens and their job was to get as many people talking about this as possible and they presented this to you so i'm not going to repeat everything that they said they just were here last month but what they you know what went out were emails uh several revisions to the website social media not only ours but holly got all other different the batavia women's club the rotary club batavia main street the chamber of commerce the city of batavia all these people are retweeting our information we went and spoke at the city council we got um the the committee members went and emailed everybody that they knew and so they made phone calls we we had principals make phone calls we had direct mail we had the batavia magazine that goes in your mailbox the batavian batv signs of banners we did literally everything we could think of in order for you to hear from the most number of people does that mean everybody engaged no does that mean everybody heard these things no they didn't we heard from a couple that said i never knew any of this was going on we had a lot of these things and so i would any we heard it from a couple people and i said well what could we do differently to make sure that we reach you so um one recommendation from the committee was to make sure whatever we do moving forward it's that big of an effort keep going and keep engaging so they said there will need to be a lot of communication about whatever it is that you decide and the committee of citizens took all the information from the open houses from the community engagement sessions that were interactive and from the survey and they met and they discussed and they deliberated and they said that you should their recommendation is that you would put option b on a ballot and there's a lot of information in that report that they gave you as far as what the what is the community thinking about the districts and about what the role is of school in a community not just which option it wasn't that easy of a survey it was pretty complex and the survey was adjusted statistically to make sure it represented the whole um community the whole school district so even though well women took the survey more than men so 71 percent of the respondents were female but what the statisticians do is they correct for that and make sure that those scores are not weighted as much as scores of the people in different bands when they took the survey so what you're seeing is their best guess of how batavia if everybody in batavia respond in the batavia school district responded um how they would have answered and the so yeah they recommend that you um are very clear with the community about the state of the economy and that um we can't give you a project list because we don't know when things go up for bid or the bond market at the time we um sell those bonds so they are what they're saying is make sure you're very clear about that with the community don't over promise but they did recommend option b i don't think we're there yet okay i said so the timeline is that tony that is my i think there are a couple logistics that tony can go over i'm i'm accidentally moving the agenda as we're talking sorry um there were a couple things i don't know if you noticed that but sorry that was me um tony you have the rest sure yeah uh the one thing i want to caution is that option b as it existed and what we've contemplated up till now needs to change as a result of what's going on in the economy is that the bond market has increased dramatically quickly compared to work it's talked about this and so that limits just like when you go when you buy a house and interest rates go up you can't necessarily buy as much of a house as you or the other otherwise would have the same thing that happens with bonds and uh the other factor is is that you know with the lumber prices increasing and other construction inflation costs increasing you're not going to get you're not going to be able to build build as big of a house either and so those two factors uh are significantly changing the scope of what we can accomplish with the money that we have available frankly the money just doesn't go as far under these economic conditions and that's the way the economy is today now who knows what the economy will be like when we actually issue these bonds and that will change the plan to some degree it could be better it could be worse maybe we'll be in a recession and interest rates will come down and maybe even construction costs will come down it's very difficult to say um but either in either case it's time to move forward we our bonds are expiring in 2025.
she's number 46 on a wheel lately so my question is do we have a process on the waiting list that we know exactly where people are so the expectation of yeah i'm going to make it oh i'm not going to make it and how can i move forward that is a great point um thank you madame because i have that in mind the process of what is the waiting list how we are how are we accounting for who who gets um the next available seat um based on that 800 that we have on the waiting list if you can answer that for me yes so we don't give anybody a specific number on the list and there are a couple of reasons for that one if you're a number 792 out of 800 that probably doesn't feel too good in the past we actually denied a certain number of students because you know we felt like it was sort of unfair to have them expect that maybe they would get in and that we knew that they didn't have a chance but the department department of education didn't like that we denied students um and even though we explained the rationale for that they they were not pleased with that so we changed it and everybody was either waitlisted or accepted so i understand the point with that a couple of other things if somebody calls and i tell them you are number five on the list right now then we have 10 appeal hearings and we decide we will admit some of those students on the appeal that person might go from number 10 to number 15 and be very upset and want to know why their position changed we also have sort of a rolling admissions policy so even though our deadline is february 1st we continue to accept and process applications after that so we could get you know another 20 students who have a higher point total and then that person's spot on the list changes again which i think would be very um frustrating okay yes thank you mr share that is another of my question why do we keep getting accepting application when we have so many students that are waiting for a chance and i know what you just said um that you're looking for people that had a great point but why why do we do that that person needs to wait if they didn't apply on time why are we even accepting more application it just it makes no sense to me so that is just the way that the language is written in the admissions policy it's certainly something that we could look at some schools do have a hard deadline and some don't we should have a deadline absolutely and it because we keep building on a list that is not going to it doesn't have end and then we have we're going to continue having access families because there's no way they're never going to get in because every day a person that's more qualified is going to be applying it just doesn't work i mean it doesn't work in my head that we have that and we're okay with that it just doesn't vivian so i just want to understand a little bit regarding what you just mentioned so if someone applies after the deadline who is considered more qualified they have a better chance at getting in from those that applied on time yes that's insane to me i don't think that's fair francis i'm sorry excuse me francis frank the guy in black um first of all thank you for being here i know sometimes this feels like grueling it's a difficult conversation there are no easy answers um one if they weren't on the waitlist or being denied we wouldn't be getting the calls we never get the calls hey thank you my kid had gotten in and i'm one that gets a lot of calls from different communities outside my own very few from my own um but with that there's several things um yes um and i'm not sure and you could correct this on the hard deadline is this you know allowing that um that's question one so in our admissions policy february first is a priority deadline so anybody who applies by that date we make sure that they are considered in that first round of acceptances and that's somebody's best chance of being acceptance accepted because that's when we send out 500 decisions so it is possible for somebody to have a good score who ends up not being accepted if most of the seats are filled so we call it we say it's a priority deadline and we try to include even somebody who applies after february 1st but they have a complete application before we send out the decision letters in march we'll also include them in that first round which is where a person that applied after becomes gets put forward before a person had already applied because the application wasn't approved because it's missing information um even though they had a good score in certain things um but there was something you mentioned that that just i'm start desi was not didn't like our reasoning for denial letters can you elaborate a little bit on what that reason was so when we had to do the waitlist data collection last year and i was speaking with somebody from the office of ccte about what we were submitting and after we submitted our report they had questions for me so i spoke with them on the phone and they wanted to know if we had a specific cutoff score and how we determined who was denied and who was wait listed so i explained that we looked at the number of students that we had who we accepted and then what that wait list would look like and i can't tell you the exact numbers but say it was roughly you know 800.
do we know why because it should be higher this is still where i feel kids are not building stage absolutely um and and part of part of what we need to consider is our return back from uh the kovid 19 pandemic and student sense of feeling safe that's that was part of it making sure that they understood that we had a plan and we had a safety protocol in place for them for so for some of them coming back that may have been something that influenced the lower um responses in this in this area we've also been exposed to a lot of situations right that students are aware of and so that also affects uh their sense of safety so you know to respond to that we want to ensure that our lcap has um actions and services that support uh some of these areas right so making sure that we have things like positive behavior and intervention supports for our students we want to ensure that they have mental health services readily available to them you know we have a professional learning for our staff uh to ensure that they are uh preparing to to support our students through restorative practices and partnerships with like western justice no but i also would like to and i think it's always been low as far as before the pandemic if we can maybe get um when our word packet you know what was the past percent uh moving forward yeah we can't be interested to see that because i recall it's always been very low like that before the pandemic and yolanda do you do you want to do you want her to include also the comparisons to that because they have statewide and national data as well yes yes thank you any other comments by board members thank you sorry about my throat moving to item 9.2 approval of the 2223 local control and accountability plan may have a motion make a motion to approve move by board member rodriguez pena is there a second second second right seconded by board president grier any discussion uh i and not discussion but i have a request um so i know we mentioned it briefly we talked about it briefly last week but um as the dust settles with the state budget right and then it becomes clear that maybe some of the things that we're best we're investing right current supplemental concentration dollars on things that now the state's going to be funding i would like to come back to the board a conversation early on in the year so when we come back in august around what those are what kind of dollars we're talking about and and start that discussion about what you know what what adjustments do we make and i'd like that that conversation to start at the board level thank you any further discussion hearing none let's go for a vote and adrian are you able to access uh online voting all right let's proceed with a vote yes and the item pass is five zero moving to item 9.3 approval of the 2223 adopted budget is there a motion moved by secret member arianes and seconded by board member rodriguez pena any discussion similarly along those same lines i would like us to have a conversation in august or if it makes more sense to wait until we have our um what do we get in september which financial report is that personal that has our like that has the end of your balances um i'd like to have a conversation i would like it to at the board level for us to understand all the pots and monies that we have you know i mean very clearly i'm even like simple like infographic approach very clearly um the pots and moneys that we have one time are ongoing um and i'm talking about the new investments right as well understanding like how much has been expended right and a summary of what that has been and how much you know how much is left in our plan for those dollars to to sabrina's point last week right i think i'm not sure that even we as a board have a handle on all of those investments and i would like to understand where we are with with those possibilities so that we can be transparent thank you any further discussion being done let's move to a vote and the item passes 5-0 now we come to item 9.4 on the agenda assistant superintendent of business services contract amendment the amendment to the assistant superintendent of business services employment contract extends the term of the contract by one year from june 30 2024 to june 30 2025 and the assistant superintendent will continue to receive the same salary and fringe benefits as provided in her current contract there are no other changes to the assistant superintendent's contract may i have a motion to approve second moved by board member arianas and seconded by board member rodriguez pena is there any discussion being none let's move to a vote and the item passes 5-0 moving on to item 9.5 assistant superintendent of human resources contract amendment the amendment to the assistant superintendent of human resources employment contract extends the term of the contract by one year from june 30 2024 to june 30 2025 and the assistant superintendent will continue to receive the same salary and fringe benefits as provided in his current contract there are no other changes to the assistant superintendent's contract may i have a motion i took a motion to approve 9.5 moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member arianis is there any discussion being none let's move to a vote and the item passes 5-0 item 9.6 superintendent contract amendment the amendment to the superintendent's employment contract extends the term of the contract by one year from june 30th 2024 to june 30th 2025 and the superintendent will continue to receive the same salary and fringe benefits as provided in his current contract there are no other changes to the superintendent's contract may have a motion a motion to approve closed by more six moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member arianes any discussion being none let's have a vote and the item passes unanimously moving to item 10.0 or section 10.0 consent calendar and item 10.1 approval of the consent calendar may have a motion can i pull items 12 10.12 and 10.13 please ten point twelve and ten point thirteen the board member cruz gonzalez that's the motion to move to get hold ten point twelve and ten point thirteen the police department mou's is there a second seconded by board member rodriguez pena my motion is to prove the consent calendar pulling items ten point twelve and ten point thirteen so moved and seconded is there any discuss well i'm sorry let's move to a vote uh first by cruising in dallas and seconded by rodriguez pena do you need a hand vote pope or can we do it online well wait a moment the item pass is five zero now moving to section 11.0 items pulled from the consent calendar 11.1 approval of the agreement between azusa unified and the azusa police department is there a motion make a motion to approve second moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member discussion i just want to point out that the wrong item was pulled up above it says the one i'm looking at is the is the interquest k-9 okay as long as we're talking about item 11 what was previously 10.12 okay okay again to be clear the item that was pulled is was the original 10.2 or i'm sorry 10.12 agreement between ausd and azusa police department so um yeah i can just i just i want to speak to this i think i feel um i feel that there are better uses for these dollars than to pay for sros on campus there are even better uses for these dollars to partner with the police department on on being able to provide a safe environment for our district i think about our security guards who are concerned that they don't have enough training um and so i i personally am still opposed and i continue to be opposed to the idea of us having police officers on campus um and us paying for it for them out of our education dollars so that's why i pulled the item i have to be different on that um i'm sorry i was only looking in this place i'll go yes started okay thank you i have to different on that because i know you know it's not only about the police on campus you know it's safety they're educating the students and prevention and especially by looking at the dashboard how long how people are not feeling comfortable and we need to be honest here you know we have parents that are concerned emerging into high school we've already had situations we can't stay away from that and that's like nothing's gonna happen i feel we need to be proactive um by using the sros on campus i don't think the security should handle situations that a police officer is trained to do yeah we can train them but they're not still they're not police officers so i think it's it's very important that um we keep the sro on camp and spend that funding because i don't want to hear later something happens and we will get stewed and pay double because we didn't have the right precautions and we didn't you know um be preventive about having things not happen or helping us out remember iran is i think it's very important that we have the sros at our school district at the high school and i'm even you know considering to to bring them to the middle school with all the school shootings that have been happening throughout our you know our our country um local things that have been happening you know i get it get a phone call from a stu uh from my student that at the high school there's not enough um you know uh police the incidents that happened last week at the high school were just not okay and one of the things that my student my dog that is that i am just so glad to see a police officer here i feel safe i think we need to and you know i i think being in in that you know that first day of school at summer school and it was just really crazy i'm sure i shared that with you guys last week i i would not think about this twice and i would always always support the sros at our schools thank you remember chris gonzalez i just want to clarify two things and make it very clear one when i suggested that we could use dollars to train our security i was not i was not implying that we would want them to do anything that a police officer is supposed to do so i just want to make that very clear i'm just saying you know we heard very clearly and i think we we know that there's there is that need so i want to make that very clear i also just want to make very clear that research time and time again across the state nationally shows that having an sro on campus does not make your school safer in fact it doesn't make it safer and what happens is your arrest rates go up your your referrals to police go up whereas and it doesn't help the culture the culture that you have in your school is what drives for that safety and the relationships you build and so a lot of the work around sort of justice is actually more impactful and creating that safe environment that everyone feels safe in than paying for a police officer there so i just again i just i want to i want to make this put the make sure i put and i'm happy to share any of this research with anybody who would like to have it i in fact i'll send it to arthur and he can share it with the board i have a question regarding that and and the research is fine but i want to know this is the unified school district how many arrests have we had you know how many incidents have we had and and also you know when they're present they're not only there just to arrest before there i've seen them give awards to students at um sierra high school uh participate in the t at um azusa high they give awards like student of the month awards at glaston high school he will come and speak to the parents and the parents want to know you know why is the cop here that was your question when i went to coffee with the principal and he explained what he does and if they had any questions at wherever his office is they can go you know and speak to him and the parents are more comfortable knowing like why is he there why is a cop part from the school so i've seen him also intermingle with the parents and with the students and i think it's great because they should not be afraid of the police officers thinking that they're going to just be there to arrest them because that's not what they only do do we have any data i'm kind of just speaking to what they were both saying um on how many arrests you know how are they engaging with our our community our school community um are the sros implementing programs how they're connecting to you know to the students to the parents um [Music] yeah do you guys have any of that data and i can pull that and organize something for an update for the board great thank you board president do you have any comments no comment yeah so if we're going to pull data i hope it's not just a rest but it's more comprehensive because you know they have referrals they have they give kids contract i mean i've heard examples right around any further discussion um hope are we it's going back and forth so you need a moment to get the electronic school board to the right item before we vote all right so 11.2 the item under that was moved and seconded and discussed let's move to our vote board member yes board member cruz gonzalez no remember ariana's yes board member for president grier yes sabrina beau yes so hope does this mean that the next item is 11.3 so item 11.3 approval of the memorandum of understanding between azusa unified school district and the city of covina may have a motion make a motion to approve in a second moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member arianes any discussion so i'll use my opportunity to tag my discussion onto this item this conversation is really very impassioned from many different perspectives and it is almost exactly the same conversation we had last year and so i will echo my sentiment from last year that i i don't believe that it is an either or proposition of so sros or no sros i think that there are always ways to do more certainly we heard from our campus aides that they they are begging for additional support and i think that in our national climate of heightened awareness around school safety in particular and the youth youth data what our own staff you know on the on the ground everyday staff when we have 2000 students on a campus i think providing that additional training is is necessary and should be prioritized and i also think that it's looking at the structure and the process is our vital components of the culture and so i also echo what board member cruz gonzalez is saying uh around what do these artifacts and norms say about our culture and how are they supporting the culture that we want and i would ask then for a presentation not only a presentation of data but maybe even a presentation with our law enforcement representative so we can talk to them as we bring other department heads and shares here to the board um so we can have that more robust personal discussion no other discussion then let's move to a vote for 11.3 oh i'm sorry i hope uh it popped up online do you need a hand vote okay so uh okay so the item passes four 1.
so you can see the dollar amounts to the left the left axis is the dollar amount available to gilbert public schools and the right access is the dollar amount per student so you can see that it it was pretty flat initially it increased in 2006 2007 through 2009 then plummeted in 2010 representing the crash that occurred due to the housing market here in arizona and it stayed low are a little bit on purpose the jlbc the joint legislative joint legislative budget committee opted to keep the amount the same to not increase the deficits associated with the school districts throughout arizona since 2014 we've seen a steady rise and then in 2022 the large increase associated with that 733 dollars and then the 708 dollars per student that we see today representing over 25 million dollars of new money to gilbert public schools reminder about classroom site fund it is designated for those employee groups that are eligible primarily our classroom teachers and the statute did change a year ago allowing this money to be used for our student support personnel such as our speech-language pathologists our occupational therapists physical therapists as well as social workers and psychologists so i wanted to make sure that that was pointed out here as well um mrs betts i do i do want to remind the public that doesn't the classroom site fund come from the .06 sales tax it does along with a contribution from the state land trust okay that's correct so again dollars per count was one time amounting to about 7.1 million dollars in 2022 just a reminder so the 2023 proposed spend increases now we have all of our budget capacity and our available monies and now we're going to look at well how much how much are we recommending to you to be spent in new in new expenditures for fiscal so our medical insurance premium these these are non-discretionary increases items that we don't have a lot of control over generally speaking so our medical insurance premium increase is one percent we had other insurance premium increases we we were obligated to go out for bid for several of our health insurance programs that resulted in an increase of about 120 000 general inflationary increases this is the first time in the last three years that we've presented to you an increase in budget budgetary spend due to inflationary increases as i indicated earlier over an 8 percent inflation that's how we calculated that 1 million dollars is looking at all of our fuel and all of our utilities and increasing those by that um i think i think we use seven and a half percent to arrive at that one million dollars and then special education increases we have seen continual increases in our special education costs over the years and so we have budgeted one to two million dollars of spend increases also over the last three years total increase need is 3.42 million dollars i wanted to point out to all of you again that the inflationary increases are impacting our schools as well and so we are making a recommendation that we increase our discretionary allocations to our schools to reflect the five dollars per student at the elementary and junior high and eight dollars per student at our high schools any questions on that okay great so these are our discretionary budgetary increases and a reminder again that these are all consistent with the strategic operating plan adopted by you all in gilbert public schools so we are recommending programmatic increases to include instructional coaches behavior coaches they were added in mid-year 2022 also fte for acceleration campuses all of these items were specified in the strategic operating plan starting salary increases again for competitiveness and struggling to find these positions we increased the starting salary as well as made equity adjustments for those that are still with us to make sure that we don't create that compression issue that we've seen over and over again so this impacted our speech language pathologists psychologists otpts and nurses about 250 thousand dollars last year you all approved that we would buy back sick days from our teachers so we are buying back sick days from our support staff our hourly support staff at 10 cents per hour that's a cost of about 500 thousand dollars just remember a reminder 10 cents per hour does not seem like a lot of money but if you consider the fact that 260 days of work so remember you have to include holidays etc multiplied by eight eight hours and then a 10 cents per per every hour that amounts to 266 dollars for the year and our buyback rate that has been in existence here in gilbert for a long time is um 65 per day so the the 10 cents more than pays for the value of those two two sick days at 131 inc so 266 dollars in comparison to 131 so that total of discretionary increases is just over 5 million um the other thing i wanted to point out the master capital planning this was not included last two weeks ago when we proposed the budget however it was that night that you approved the award of the master capital planning partner to or cut winslow and so um we added that 500 000 additional cost here on this grid so the total now is just over 5 million dollars so our budgetary increase is associated with competitiveness for retaining and attracting employees so you can see the certified employees hourly employees professional exempt and administrative employees whenever we made an adjustment that was applicable to a particular employee group such as the 10 cents per hour we added the 10 cents per hour before we added the pay increases in addition for our certified employees taking advantage of the change in law due to classroom site fund we decided that it would be better if we could put more of the classroom site fund performance pay onto the base as ongoing salary so we made the recommendation to you and this has been approved that 14.95 for 1 495 of the former plc stipend would go to the certified teacher's base salary and then if you all remember we came back to you on april 4th and said hey we just received the classroom site fund allocations and we'd like to recommend an additional one percent increase in ongoing salary which brought us up to that three percent ongoing salary increase which you can see in all of our employee groups going down to the professional and exempt group of employees we also continued our buying back of sick days for our professional exempt employees adding 200 or 250 depending upon whether they were 12 months or 10 or 11 months um and then we increased three percent uh note 2 that the three percent that was a one-time stipend in the current year which was just paid today by the way the second three half of the three percent stipend was paid today we made that ongoing and then increased that total amount by the three percent so we've done that for all employee groups except for the hourly employees and again a reminder the reason that the hourly employees did not receive the three percent ongoing stipend and then the three percent on top of that is because you all approved a dollar fifty pay increase for all hourly employees back in september of twenty one and the value of that dollar fifty was depending upon your hourly rate was between four and twelve point two percent so we we already did realize giving all of our hourly employees that three that three percent one time making it ongoing back in september of the current year so that total for all of our salary increases was 11 million dollars so now we go to budgetary savings so the premium holiday credited back to maintenance and operations you also approved a premium holiday we plan on that premium holiday occurring on pay period eight which is over fall break in addition there is an arizona state retirement rate reduction that has a value of about 60 thousand dollars it's not nothing so there's a little bit of money there in addition uh as we've indicated before there we are expecting a 400 student loss so we would expect if we do realize that loss we would have that many teachers less of a need and so that would save us about 1.5 million dollars and then finally that energy and water performance lease paid off that was savings as well for a total budgetary savings of just over 2.6 million dollars and just to clarify that decrease in personnel would be taken care of through attrition absolutely okay thank you then the total budgetary increase need um this is where we are um we're going to do the math so to speak so ongoing available from budget balance carryforward we had the conversation that we have 29.9 million dollars of one-time money available in budget balance carry forward based upon history vacancy savings all the other all the other transactions that occur at the end of the year we believe that about 5.8 million of that represents ongoing money so we're crediting that back against those increases in expenditures there's the projected ongoing savings of just over 2.6 million dollars there's the total non-discretionary increases remember that was inflation special education health benefit premiums etc and then finally the total discretionary increases of just over 16 million dollars leaves us with a budgetary deficit of just over 11 million dollars so now how are we going to close that 11 million dollar gap so this is balancing the budget so the budget balance carry forward 5.8 million dollars we've already considered you can see that the one-time money then of 24.1 million dollars that's left reallocation of mno expenses to other funds we do this annually we have dual credit that we offload emino expense into the dual credit fund other the instructional improvement we have class size reduction in instructional improvement all those types of journal entries that occur at your end we are expecting that to realize about three million dollars of ongoing savings in m l and then increase the classroom site fund contribution uh seven million dollars going now to to be able to be allocated to more of our personnel throughout gilbert public schools because of the change in statute so that's seven million dollars of new money there along with eight hundred thousand dollars of new money one time um that that would take care of the pay for performance additional cost associated with speech language pathologists otpts etc that are now eligible for classroom site fund pay for performance so finally our total ongoing is 10 million dollars our one time available is 24.9 so the deficit was 11 million dollars available ongoing is one million dollars so we need one point just over a million dollars per year out of this one-time money to draw down to balance the budget making this a very sustainable budget plan over at least the next three to five years so we feel very confident that this is a good budgetary plan before i go further are there any questions on that well i was just going to mention that you said the governor's budget was probably the least favorable and my understanding is the legislature is working on that budget there might be something dropped tomorrow but they have until june 30th yes that's correct it's coming sometime so one of our requirements in the budget document is to present to you the average teacher salary and presented on the budget document so we did change this up from the proposed budget so note that the average salary of all teachers employed in 2023 we expect to be 62 297 dollars that's different from two weeks ago because we decided we have a group of employees that are rolling over into next year and are staying with us they've signed their contract we have a bunch of new employees that have come on board that have signed their contract so we have the data so we went ahead and ran the average salary in 2023 for those employees that have committed to gilbert public schools in addition to that so remember that those salaries already account for the 1495 of the money that was formerly in pay for performance that goes on the base and then on top of that they received the three percent that was one time in the current year to be ongoing and then on top of that they received another three percent so all of that is included in there in addition we also added the 750 of pay for performance we also added the fifteen hundred dollar one-time stipend that you all approved back at the end of march and then we also uh added about 1 491 of general supplemental pays that on average teachers receive every year here at governor public schools and that's how we achieve the sixty two thousand two ninety seven so the average salary of all teachers employed in the prior year 2022 was 57 we are comparing apples to oranges at this point in time so i wanted to make sure that that's clear we are transitioning to include all of the supplemental pays moving forward so right now that five thousand dollars more reflects an eight point eight six percent increase based upon the calculation in the budget forms but when we truly look at the average salary increase from last year to the average salary increase in the current year it amounts to about 8.5 percent so the 1495 added to the base along with a 3 percent added on top of that and then three percent added on top of that contributed to that total of about 8.5 percent which is real and when you look at the budget documents you'll see all of those notes in the box where we're describing to the public how the changes have occurred over the the last few years do we have an average length of service that this average salary represents the only thing that comes close to it and i don't have it at my fingertips but the um the seeder the sder report that's our employee report that we submit by october 15th of every year that data goes to calculate the teacher experience index so we are over 1.0 on the teacher experience index which means that we and gilbert have more years of service in our teacher population than the average in the state of arizona so that's that's anecdotal and not the data that you're looking for but it does have an indicator that we do have teachers that are in gilbert have been here for a long time and continues to stay with us okay thank you so um the moving away from maintenance and operations now and talking about the unrestricted capital budget for adoption so this is just the math the district additional assistance formula you can see that we're going up about six about 550 000 over the prior year note that there is no adjustment we we opted to keep this row in there for one year to remind you that fiscal year 2022 the current year was the first year in which there was no adjustment into the district additional assistance so we've seen two years of no no negative adjustment the budget balance carry forward adopted was 5.2 we realized 7.4 we are proposing a 28.5 million dollar budget balance carry forward remember that that includes that 20 million dollars that we moved out of mno and put it into unrestricted capital and then the interest earned i also shared why we wanted to why we made that recommendation to you all because we are able to gain interest earnings that increase our budget capacity in unrestricted capital so we know that our interest earnings will be higher this is a very conservative number we believe that 20 thousand dollars will easily be be beat given the circumstances that we are in now with our interest rates so finally the total budget limit in unrestricted capital is 44 million dollars because of that 20 million dollar transfer from mno it's an increased year-over-year of just under 1.7 million dollars any comments or questions about that well i i did want to remind our community that last year was the first year i don't i don't know how many years district additional assistance was we were not given the full amount but i believe it was like eight or ten years it was since 2013 since 2013 this is the last year was the first time we had the full amount that's correct by the formula so you'd set it in a very kind way but the legislature withheld money or just didn't give us our full amount for those seven or eight years so thank you so these are our unrestricted capital preliminary budget allocations at this date so note the pie reflects athletics reflects the contingency so these dollar amounts are not yet allocated out but we plan on allocating them out as needs arise operations note that operations is the in the green i'd like to point out the operations in the green and the technology which is i guess operations is the lighter green technology is the darker green it's important to know that technology and operations have a lot of unrestricted capital costs that are in supporting our schools so these are really non-discretionary costs to the department these monies are going to support the program at our schools here in gilbert public schools um and then schools the allocation for schools and athletics you can see the allocation for schools and athletics and then finally teaching and learning i think is this bucket over here and remember that teaching and learning uh adopted two curriculums two curricula two curricula right barbara two curricula um in during fiscal year 2022 and so that money was added uh and and they they did that in the in last year and then they're also anticipating two areas um in for 2023 as well and those dollars are budgeted in that in that pie as well so again just a reminder this pie does not include the 20 million dollars held in reserves so we thought it was useful to share with you the type of spend that occurred during the current year in unrestricted capital and we'll just go through the pictures fairly quickly you saw these two weeks ago so but these are these are just detailing out some of the monies that were spent by area but library furniture was a big ask associated with our elementary schools and you can see they took advantage of bringing in more innovative type furniture to enhance the desire for our students to go back to the library again just other pictures there scoreboards the last three years we've definitely made an allocation of three to four scoreboards each year and we are in a rotation with all of our schools whether it's women's softball men's baseball or men's and women's basketball we continue to make those allocations the weight rooms we've we were completed those really in in but some work was still done in 2022 helmets and pads these are ongoing expenses that come out of the unrestricted capital budget the white fleet and equipment we've had many vehicles throughout gilbert that haven't been touched since 2003 2004 in dire need of our technology areas as well as operations to replace some of these aging vehicles as well as in our warehouse to be able to move around goods within the warehouse marquis this process regarding marquis was started and i think jason martin was a big proponent of that and participated in that effort since 2016.
um there are a couple of policies in here that are more than just wordsmithing so we're not ready tonight to bring it for a final approval um so we want to just present this as a first reading and then bring it back to you in our next board meeting um and we'll share with you in the meantime um you know kind of where we're at with the policy for colon one six five five two five zero um we just want our attorneys to review those um before we bring them to you for a final review and so for ronnie and grace we actually have ford policy which we'll show you next month when we meet um but one of the because the laws in illinois change so frequently they're in the the illinois association of school boards actually has a service where they um publish updates um quarterly it depends how how often the laws change it could be twice a year it could be four times a year so then what they do is they send recommended policies to school districts based on those changes to law and more often than not there's a lot of word smithing and minor changes but every once in a while there's some substantive changes that we have to decide do we want are we required to adopt them do we want to adopt them do we not want to adopt them so that's kind of where we're at right now with this series of updates we're still needing to work through that with our attorneys and then we'll bring back to you their recommendations so it's the first reading for tonight no action needs to be taken okay um you'll see the items there for personnel that will be included in the human resources report and the consent agenda and that takes us to uh and we will not need an executive session following the meeting and that takes us to the business section shawn and approval of your contract uh it's part of consent it's not got a little it doesn't have an asterisk it's under the hr the whole thing is underneath everything yeah okay so sean that takes us to the adoption of the 2022-2020 budget and public hearing correct so in may we brought to the board not only do we have our finance committee meeting but we brought to the board the changes of recommended changes for our fiscal 23 budget which covers um which basically starts on to july 1st and runs through june 30th our revenues are expected to decrease however we did sell bonds this year so when we take out those bond proceeds our revenues are expected to increase by about 5.5 percent largely because of if you recall the um taxes will be capped um but what we're really looking at is an increase in food service sales um our food sales services our food sales might actually cross four million dollars um this year which is incredible when you consider back in 2015 we were at 1.8 million dollars um so the changes that we've made to a healthy lifestyle of the eating has paid off because over that same time frame the um price of a meal has gone up only 19 cents um so it's it's pretty remarkable um our expenditures are also budgeted to decrease because of construction however if we exclude construction our expenditures are budgeted to increase by less than inflation at five percent over the previous year um and so again these are things that we've talked about previously tonight we'll have to open up a public hearing uh hear any public comment close the hearing and then of course we'll ask the board to approve the fiscal year 23 budget okay can i have a motion to open for a public hearing on the proposed budget so moved second third so we have a first and second uh this is a voice vote all in favor of opening for the public hearing please say hi hi opposed okay we are open for public hearing uh are there uh comments or no comments from the public so can i have a motion to close a public hearing on the proposed budget don't move second no public um okay this is also a voice vote all in favor of closing the public hearing please say aye aye opposed that passes and now i'll entertain a motion to adopt the 2022-2023 is proposed second first and second any questions for sean before we vote on the budget okay would you please pull the board frost hi no hi so hi gorson hi moons i weisberg all right ben joseph hi carrie's seven to nothing and i just like to add that grayson and ronnie we'll we'll go over the budget in more detail with you guys as you go through your board training so we'll you know we'll have plenty of time to answer all your questions so um thank you very much all right on to the halsey detention center um this is the detention center located up on milwaukee uh avenue that falls into um our um our boundaries and as such we have the ability to work with the regional office of education for lake county as well as the detention center um to secure funds from the illinois state government to help educate the children that are at the detention center both there's both those that are there temporarily and they're those that are there on a much longer term basis um this is not none of the all of the money that comes from the state government flows through us and goes directly to them so whatever we receive we pass on to them and it's all based on grants it has nothing to do with any of our property tax dollars i will say that we work with the detention center often though to help them with any kind of equipment that they might need if we have an extra desk or this that or the other thing um we do try to um sell it to them at a much cheaper cost if not um just donate to them depending on what's being donated in the place but tonight we do have to recommend a renewal of that agreement so we are asking the board of education to approve an agreement with the halsey detention center for educational services as presented can i have a motion to approve um yeah so in second second we have a first and second uh any questions for sean i don't think they changed the name of that place yeah it used to be the depthkey center and now it's the halsey center as well um they actually refer to it both when talking to different people so it's a little confusing not exactly sure why in the halls actually i think there's different sections one is where the actual detention center is and i think the other is where they house students that are like almost in a halfway house if you just wonder what happened to mr deputy [Laughter] i just think it's sad that 20 years ago that used to be a drunken alcohol abuse treatment center correct when i was a jail correct and yeah okay any questions uh any other questions i should say uh would you pull the board please certainly no hi so hi grayson hi this is i weisberg all right ben joseph i'm frost honey well carries sound enough okay um as you know every two years the board must appoint a treasurer of the district and since july 1st of 2016 sean has been serving as our treasurer and it's time to um re-identify and appoint sean as the treasurer and isbe identified chief school business officer for eli stevenson high school for a two-year term beginning uh july 1st of this year 2022.
the opportunities you have to pass a question or ask a question of the community and have that timing such that the taxes wouldn't go down is either in november of 2022 or april of 23. our all indications are your best opportunity to pass this question are in november of 22. and to do that to put that question on the ballot you'll have to actually pass a resolution to do so in july so in a month from now you'll have to make that decision um to put the question on the ballot basically i just asked a quick question how confident are we that we can do the necessary work that is you know the emergency stuff like roofs things like that with the money that we will have with option b even if costs are increased i mean obviously we won't be able to do anything that we would like to do but i assume that it will at least give us the ability to do the things that we really need to do that we've been putting off our first objective obviously is to keep our students and staff warm and safe and dry and yes that we'll absolutely do that we just won't be able to do as much of it with the other things that we want to do is improve spaces for educational needs in particular our special education spaces they are more often than not in less than desirable areas of the building or areas of the building that are not designed for their programmatic needs and then other programmatic needs for electives you know building trades at the high school as examples our libraries uh collaborative spaces those sorts of things those will have to be scaled down with the with the money and the inflationary costs that we face i would also assume that with this inflationary pressure that if we do nothing the amount that we're able to do with the little money that we would have left is going to be even worse so the longer you wait the worse it gets i mean absolutely yeah so the option of doing nothing actually looks worse in the scenario so people might say hey you might want to put it off but i think that might actually put us in an even worse situation because the thought that we thought we would be able to do with option one um also scales back significantly well that's what i'd say yeah chris brings up a good point that uh when the economy tanked in 2006 that's exactly what we did part of the reason why we're in the situation right now yeah your buying power for both drops exactly so all the things that people thought we might be able to do we can do about half of let's say right but at least we can accomplish more the other thing is the and this is my opinion from what i've seen in the past because i do these things occasionally is if the bonds fall off and you decide to wait your opportunity or ability to bring it back to the table becomes exponentially more difficult so you know from a board perspective we're kind of between a rock and a hard place right you know and so you try to do the best you can at a certain point that's the position i'm taking and i'm looking at it yeah so so at our next meeting the resolution will be on the agenda i'm assuming we will have a discussion and we will choose either to pass that resolution or not yes so all indications are from i'm gathering from the conversation that you're having is that something indeed you want to move forward with it and that that's the case we'll continue to work with our financial consultants to craft a question and a more definitive financial plan and up then and be ready for you in july and simultaneously begin to um figure out how we can continue to get the word out when it comes to information about this potential referendum as you know when you pass this question in july people will see it on the ballot of course in november and that's not does it does that's not a lot of time at the next meeting can you put on the topic and this is for everybody to kind of agree or not what is the role of the district and the board from that point forward so that it's clear educational you know what can we do to help put that information out and what are we allowed to do as board members as opposed to private citizens certainly we can include that yeah i think that's a really good discussion just because there can uh it can be confusion on that confusion and you can trip up a process that can make it very difficult for everyone i've got three questions for 20 you've already said i just want you to one more time i'll be brief sue um but it's okay option b allows us to move forward with our operational goals which include safety security and comfortable all buildings correct the assumption is however under option b as we've discussed extensively that we would demolish and rebuild louise white and hc storm schools i bring it up because for me everything's been going on world security has been i think on all of our minds and so that's something that's very important to me in that i know the b encompasses making our buildings more robust in that manner simultaneously though i would add and i should have probably added earlier under that budget as i the board may want to consider increasing spending on the capital projects budget in fiscal 23 so that they can address more of the safety and security needs in particular at alice gustafson and jb nelson schools even before we separate as we identified in that master plan as those schools ought to be decommissioned unfortunately financially that's not going to happen at least not in the foreseeable future and because that's the case we have some renovations to i would say moderate to major renovations to those schools to bring them up to security standards that we expect everywhere so um is that something that would come from iraq or capital projects yes um a little yes yeah the answer to that is yes so will you bring us a recommendation from them as to what shifting we should do and what projects that should encompass in the yes and if you are um considering that along with and you do pass this resolution for this referendum question we would move quickly on that because we would want to get those projects out to bid this fall late fall early winter so that they could start next summer as soon as school is out so when would you bring that one that part to us the budget capital projects increase we i certainly could bring that to you in july well why don't you it would just make sense yep yes and then the other components of that would follow quickly thereafter okay uh and the other two parts i had were oh wait you did not say that it was a two-part question he said three questions he said i keep interrupting him i'm sorry that's right uh this is uh i'll be interested in how you answer this question but you know we just talked about the budget in general in general relative to past years the district is in a relatively strong financial position right now healthy position i should say yes and part of that is because we made certain sacrifices on capital projects that was a component of it that was yes is that fair statement okay and that b if that's one that we're considering i'm just going to read from the conditions would allow us to live within our means as a district now we know that things are changing and you know we might not get as much of our money as we were hoping you would get but that's accurate statement yeah okay those are all accurate statements yes i would say well then this last one lisa but i mean based off canvassing all holly's hard work the feedback we've gotten there is support in the community for b at this time he's confirming and i just have one last quick thing the writing of the actual verbiage that's pretty much automatically happens by the lawyers we really can't change any of that i mean we're going to want to get involved well right i mean for the people who are watching it may seem weird that we see and approve fair enough the question one time but that's because we really aren't the experts and we can't understand and it isn't just written by the lawyers because they feel like it in a certain way it is prescribed by law okay so how the question looks there's certain components that they can change but um there's a lot of it that's prescribed by law and sometimes it just feels awkward to the average voter and so often times that question has to be explained to the voters and that's one of the key components of helping people understand like what does this question mean and what does it mean in my pocketbook what does it mean for my child's school and what does it mean for us as a community but they are very awkward questions i've also seen situations where people write it for the constructive of a new school building and they thought they could add furnishings as a part of that and it wasn't written that way so then they couldn't use the bond money for furnishings which which is why it's a big scary problem that you might be running into and i wanted to explain to the audience that they understand that we're although we're seeing it for the first time we understand the concept and it's all legalese and right we won't pick apart the verb exactly good point chris all right so tony you're going to bring us those recommendations from the capital projects group and you're going to include the question the resolution on the next agenda and i will also include kind of the do's and don'ts of what we can say and what we can't say thank you in terms of publicizing that question all right any other questions on that all right final item on our agenda tonight is talking about an executive search firm yes this is my um 10th year of superintendent tendency starting this school year and i am retiring at the end of that school year please hold your applause [Laughter] um right right so i um it's time for you to um invoke board member 101 which is you get to hire one person in the entire organization everybody who's here you get to pick one person and that is what you will be doing during this school year i it is not something that you can most schools do most school districts do without the help of some expertise because um if you just interviewed 10 different candidates everybody has a different idea of what they would want and you're supposed to be representing what this community wants and what the staff wants so a search firm could do things like hold focus groups and get some information from all your different stakeholder groups give that to you so that's the way that people have voice in the process among other options what i did for you is pulled some proposals from different search firms one of them is your iasb so the illinois association of school boards they do a lot of work not as much local as the other three organizations the other three um one of them you used uh 10 years ago when you hired me that would be school exact connect one of them is um and the other two are being used currently by local districts we do have a high turnover of superintendents in king county between the last two years in the upcoming year or two you'll see about two-thirds of the superintendent's turnover and so those other two firms hya and rain associates are being used locally right now with two neighboring districts and they are all willing to come out in interview this needs to be a public discussion and public interview um i would say four might be a lot to bring in and we do want to negotiate and look really closely at their proposals and say well i like this but i don't like this we don't need these services and you can add and remove and so it would be hard to do those with four all at the same time so i'm going to stop talking because this is really your decision but that would be my recommendation that you give me some parameters to go and talk with one or two of them and invite them back for a face-to-face interview with you guys can we do the face-to-face interview in a open session so i would like to put out there that i would like to hear from at least two an interview too i'm a person that's in occasionally a position it does no service to say i can't even break it down to to this group so i would like to see two um you guys look at that wait yes now we're down to two yeah i agree with that i would agree with that um i know lisa shared all this with us i will be completely frank that while i was out of the country i did not read all the um but i don't know if other people had a chance to and if you have some leanings as to where you are thinking we could sort of tally it down so sue just said her top two okay did you write this one all right i'm i'm very passionate about my oh i actually just have one who um the school exec connects okay so sue said hya in school is technical i wonder why they didn't i didn't see batavia as a reference who it was it was um 10 years ago 10 years ago with our current champion i mean that is bad marketing isn't it like step one hey do you remember we hired lisa that should have been the proposal victory might not it might not it's dangerous [Laughter] again that was actually really nice dinner you said that uh did you have any preferred is hya printed out yeah yeah right here oh thank you that was the one that um referred saint charles yes they just did the saint charles search yes okay i have heard a good amount of negative feedback about that individual i don't know how much it impacts this about that search firm or the superintendent oh yay thank you just so with which hype he was talking about the super attendant not the suspect i heard good feedback about the search room from the community well from people that hired them don't they have a warranty so that if yeah craig did you have thoughts um my generalized thoughts are one that um i i really appreciate kind of how school exec broke down the information and presented it in a very clear visual way as opposed because that helps people like us who may not be in the process to understand and parse the data as opposed to at least one of the others that my head was hurting the same time i was always trying to read through it so that that kind of bothered me about that um my opinion of my two would be hya and school exec connect if i had to pick a second i would pick or send you two i would pick the h-y-a yeah i think part of where i have the consensus part of my hya is i actually i have the same two also um so then my question is timing and paring it down to figure out what we actually want from them as lisa mentioned um so they they give you like here's everything we could offer right so maybe the next step would be the interview everybody look really closely at those two highlight the things they like and maybe want to subtract but once after the interview then we just really focus in on one of them and and do that negotiating of we don't want this we do want that just figure out i guess i wrote they said in their thing they'll match any offer right yeah but i thought it was you got everything for this x yeah and they they said they would match any comparable offer so right so what am why would i take stuff away if it's still gonna cost me got you i would you know what i mean but i'm assuming if we took stuff away from someone else that would lower their bed the other one's about the same right but if we took services away couldn't we negotiate and say well we don't need this so right no i mean i i get that tough negotiators too oh i can they all look like they're in the right area where we just swipe oh yeah they were all they were all pretty equitable everything's fast okay no that's what i'm just saying so are we talking inviting them back to the next meeting because we would like to get this ball rolling it is uh superintendent hiring season it is superintendent season yeah i would um do you want to do a five o'clock workshop or just uh during the recording i would actually prefer to if we could do a workshop or shop workshop workshop rj sorry not just because you feed us well i didn't hear did i hear from chris and aaron we all had we all had okay okay okay thank you all right so workshop next meeting we got all those 60 characters yeah 19.
we maybe did 400 on the waiting list and then 400 denied those aren't the exact numbers but roughly you know we tried to be reasonable about that and just knowing that those other students who really were at the the bottom of that list would not have an opportunity and the response was how do you know so it was kind of um you know it was very clear that that was um just not something that they were in favor of i and i agree because i said through any of those cte meetings so i know where that that portion is coming from which is what bronze brings to mind um that the more information the families are getting in the beginning is being more clearer and it eliminates the process of calling somebody saying this is what's going on because when i talk to a parent and they come to me the first thing is how are they grades how is their attendance and i'm and i'm talking about in the seventh grade and so forth and i i bring it up so i started eliminating the process of elimination if they're not from methuen my first my other question is did you reach out to one of your members um from where your communities because if you did then you should continue talking to them um to go through the process before anything because i don't i definitely don't want to be taking on more than i want to um but and like i said if they weren't getting denied on the waitlist and i know which one i'm gonna bring back to think they wouldn't be calling us to say this is happening um and they don't they're not understanding why um so we are a little bit more clear why then it helps them be clear um which so if desi wasn't a proven denial thing is it because the emission policy had changed um so they were already i'm looking at removing the denial process um and just making sure it was weightless because i know we submitted um i mentioned policy to desi last year year before in september or october i think was october right yeah and we were getting approval for it um so is that the change in in the reasoning rationale for removing the denial i think it's really part of that whole process and all of the regulation changes and and to be honest i i feel like it may be because of other schools that are very different from ours with the number of applications so there were some schools that were denying a student admission even if they had the room right so maybe if they got below a certain score they would deny them when they had the seats available so we're in a very different position than that but i i believe that it's really a matter of sort of trying to set a consistent policy even though it doesn't apply to each school equally right um and i i'm completely aware of all those denials and um keeping it to a certain demographic um which is why defus does he has done the whole revamp of the emission policy um and maryland brought up something about the committee had set a number misinterpreting that back probably about a a year ago maybe less um we i brought the point up about not expanding admissions just for the sake of the numbers in that we were in this position many years ago where we just kept on bringing in kids we didn't have the room for them and but they brought in a lot of money because obviously you get x amount and i ask that we never got in that position that that was the reason we were taking them and when we when we discussed this at the last meeting what was the limit that this school could handle and um we're getting really really close to it so when i saw that 423 number as of the 14th um knowing that there will still be some more um that i didn't want us to be in that position where we where were we going to put them and we did we discussed it that length about the safety of the shops and so on and to that point the next one two three pages even though they're not labeled as such um the new applications or for transfers it actually because there's no label at the top it makes it look as if we have accepted 72 kids for um the class of whatever 24 and um six coming in as seniors and so on and i know that's not so but i just want us to pay attention to the numbers that we don't get more kids than we can safely educate and i use that term safely as the criteria can i just clarify what those sheets are that i'm looking at so they are just applic applications for transfer students so uh for the class it says community 2025 so class of 2025 our current freshman so they would be 10th grade transfer students as of last week there were 153 applications and we have virtually no space in the class of 2024 72 applications that's a high number of applications for junior transfers so my point is that we should have a label at the top uh i'm saying what it is because when i first read it i went oh my goodness where are we going to put that many sophomores next year and then when i went back and and looked i realized i never ever remember numbers like this looking for what you would call upperclassmen to transfer in um if the state doesn't get the message or the federal government soon that we need more space i don't know this is this is wonderful but crazy and i'm looking at these numbers and i'm looking at some of these schools um roxbury prep madison the pike um exclu of the sectional studies i believe that's lawrence correct yes um londonderry middle school whitcomb middle school am i is these schools out of districts and i'm looking greenfield common virtual right so in most cases we would just consider those applications or those students out of district and we wouldn't process the applications in some situations if there's a situation with say parents who are divorced or living apart one parent verifies that they live in the the district and that's where the student will be living next year then we do process that application okay so we're not because i remember we voted as not to be um school choice um so we're not so when i saw that i was like wait a minute um okay no i think i'm done completely done and brenda thank you for a great presentation and i know it is grueling sometimes it is but um i you know definitely appreciate the feedback and and hear that the communication um seems to be the the biggest issue at least that we can um you know potentially impact the numbers we can't but we can definitely take a look at the communication mr haydem brenda thank you very much i know how hard your office works i've had a few phone calls same as mr cirillo has from the same probably the same people and i give them the same information that mr cirillo gives him follow the administration follow the admission policy but i also tend to throw you under the bus i have people that i have call you see you there have been a couple people said they haven't gotten a phone call back and i said there's no problem coming down knocking on the door making an appointment i think a personal invitation is always better i like the go-to cte program but i think knocking on your door and sitting down saying talk to me is the best way to do it um again thank you very much it's disappointing we have 800 students trying to get into this building and we can't service them i'm looking at 800 tradesmen we can't train but and we're sorry to put you through this it's unusual for us to have someone who talks longer than the superintendent thank you brenda thank you mr hayden thank you very much a lot of good things came up this evening but we also haven't uh we haven't resolved anything so um superintendent i think we need to work with brenda's with the admission office and if you could report back the second meeting in september on on changes or stuff that we can do uh is that enough time to get into next year's uh next year's paperwork so we have an admissions committee that reviews all the data from this year we'll also uh with the information and the conversations you had this evening we'll bring that back to the committee we will be meeting during the summer to review a lot of the information so that we can try to get that to you uh for the second week uh that's yeah so it will be before we'll get it to you before because you have to vote again on the admission every year you have to vote on me before but i'd like to probably address it there if it's the first week in october yeah you know that's that's fine also we usually start uh we have the uh all the guidance counselors from our sending community come the first week of october so we'll take try to make sure we do it in september just to recap i would like us to consider having deadlines for applications coming in um so it makes it more clear of how you know that that waiting list is the waiting list and nothing else is coming in at a certain time um i would like also for us to consider having a date stamp as you know the the the sample of um marilyn's granddaughter because if we have a stand stamp how application comes in huh great great granddaughter if we have a stamp date times um stamp of one application comes in and there's no question of you know you didn't make it just because we don't have seats then we know who's the next person is even if we have appeals we should be able to know who the next person is in line to get a seat that becomes available i know i also i know that some criteria is here about how people how the points that people get to get you know to get to a point where they get accepted i don't see anywhere um i mean i see 65 i don't know i still don't understand the points the point um situation but um i want to know if we are considering like graduates from the school within this point which is not here but it's something that we can add because we want to have you know give certain points to to a student that the parents came to the school they graduated from the school or you know things like that um i mean it's just one of the things i think that's a reward you you'll have family that graduated here for that you you should be able you should be considered give some points so it's part of the of the criterias um yeah well for now i just want to make sure that those are in in a minute and that we have that in consideration when we are doing changes to the admission thank you yeah they'll they'll be in the minutes but could you forward that section to the superintendent specifically so that we know specifically what uh or write it up specifically one or the other because uh the minutes end up to be 65 70 pages uh and the information gets lost so uh if we can make sure that that gets highlighted give it to sue okay john you had something to say thank you i was just going to suggest that committee email brenda with any thoughts ideas that we talked about tonight even if two weeks from now you something comes to mind that you think might be beneficial when we meet as a committee we can review all of those thoughts and ideas and in trying to make changes that might be impactful or useful in helping improve the process both with communication as well as opportunities for fairness with our students now just uh i would just ask the committee can we uh we put the organizational chart in there committee can review it there will be a few other changes as we make to do some hiring this year that will fall in this packet so as changes i will update the organizational chart for you first meeting in september as well so you can see any changes that might have been impacted based on some new hires that we still need to do mr hadem mr voya i noticed that the or maybe i'm reading it wrong the cte director answers to the superintendent shouldn't she answer to the principal leave the superintendent as far as a backup if there's problems so the cte director under this organizational chart you'll see is answering to the prince is reporting to the principal next time next year so that is a change in our structure mr saul thank you leo 3u um that was one question and the other one is um and i know there's going to be some changes but the school business administrator title um i think that needs to be changed because we already changed that title yes we'll make that what was the other change so the so the business director of finance is also in charge of the transportation or the hr tech business office specialist yes and the coordinator of human resources and human resources director of human resources no because this is here coordinator of human resources coordinator of human resources reports to me to the superintendent there's an office specialist that works both with the coordinative human resources and finance director of finance which is the position we're trying to hire now is that position the director of of human resources the finance uh where it says finance specialists the school business administrators at the very top the gray the gray kind of a brown and grayish color to the right of my where it's a superintendent director a school business administrator reports to the school committee and the superintendent so then that position shouldn't be under the director of finance am i correct finance specialist is someone that is basically works in the business office that supports here says coordinator of human resources is our hr director okay so right here in this organizational chart it answers to the director of finance yeah so you're saying that needs to be changed the coordinator of human resources reports to should be reporting to the superintendent okay um okay so this to me i think this organizational chart completely needs to be done um because it's just all over the place to follow yep um they make it a little bit more simplified because i'm looking at positions that should be answering to you what they're answering to someone looks like they're answering somebody else um there's even one here that says um administrative student information specialist who looks like based on the way the line is looks like the answer to the district committee so i mean this organization is a mess so coordinator of human resources should really be switched with finance specialists that's in the wrong place so there has to be some changes as you suggested around that okay that's well yep okay john will you we can do those uh do those changes then yeah back to us and so as we as we get when we finalize we get a couple hires that are going to be reflected in here um probably within the next couple of weeks i'll send it back to the committee in the next couple of weeks with these changes as well as some new positions in there in the next couple of weeks we'll be we're in the process of hiring the language acquisition specialists who will be reporting to the principal that's not on here yet that's a administrative role as well frank the next meeting is in august but i'll email this just so the committee has it yeah right we will address it uh probably then joyla did you have oh no i know i just thought i saw you put your hand up i'm sorry admiring her manicure i understand okay here we go i don't know what's on or what's off it's wrong are we set with this ladies and gentlemen um okay right i was said at the moment uh building truck excuse me building projects uh superintendent uh here's a there was a request for listing the building projects and the start date and the completion date so you have a copy of that that document do you want me to go through read through it uh are there any questions ladies and gentlemen on any of that uh information mrs fischer oh i thought you said yes oh okay a little sidebar here i guess okay all right we're gonna move on then from building projects uh yes um vivian on the uh building projects um was the guard shack did you mention that there was still um something that had to be fixed or um because this has completed here but it could have i could have sworn you said that some changes were going to be made um yeah so the the actual guard check is complete we are looking at putting another drop gate on the other side also that would be like another building project um at a later point in time it's not actually it's just a matter of putting in another gate but it's not the guard shack itself is completed okay the building itself frank the building itself is complete but the title is not here it says guard shark oh yeah so that was going to throw me off i didn't know we were looking for great whites at the cape or something okay all righty uh request diversity report this was requested so you have a report of uh this was requested by there's a few different reports here yeah you can see the list going down we'll just go down them john oh please uh so uh you have glts current staff people of color percentages requested by uh committee member uh cyrillo the jlts last five-year administrative people of color requested by miss marmal and the handout glts last five-year retention report of people of color requested by mr haydem all are in your packet here we gonna are you gonna take time to digest these or do you have questions and comments now yeah uh francis frank sorry um that was the man in black today um and and thank you john for for giving this um and the reason this is also requested because i know that the last time we you and i were at the budget here in lawrence the city council is over there were asking for this question of the same information um to be turned over to them before the final budget hearing which is the 23rd correct yeah um so and i'm looking in in looking at tom's request of retention for our teachers and i know for research shows that if a child of color sees another person that resembles them their ability to finish school increases um what are we actually doing not only to recruit um but um also retain our teachers because also i mean not just a teacher of color but any teacher who impacts a child's life if they're still there four years later what if they graduate it's somebody they've connected to and it's become their mentor and actually finishes school and actually comes back and sees that same teacher there knows that there's stability in the school what are we doing to address such a thing well in terms of teacher retention we do several different things i think the most important thing i think we do for our teachers first and foremost is when they first come in we have a good program for our new teachers which we spend where they spend the week when they first come in they each get a mentor uh throughout the year uh they are meet with their mentor uh and once once a month they also come together as a group of new teachers again to um to support each other and and continue to learn throughout the year both strategies in terms of teaching and and working uh collaboratively collaboratively with each other uh so that's i think the first thing that we do also one of the things we try to reinforce any concerns or questions that new teachers have we try to direct immediately address immediately any kinds of resource materials materials they need we try to make the new teachers the priority so that they know they're welcomed those are probably the first step in trying to retain teachers then continuing from there we have i think outstanding professional development program here at the school that allows them to meet their state requirements in terms of maintaining their licensure every five years we work to ensure that they're getting each area of the require criterias for renewal of their professional status i think that's one of the things that we do for to help retain our teachers are i think one of the other things the evaluation system we have a highly i believe highly high quality evaluation system that gives teachers feedback uh on what they do well and and where they need to get continuous support our curriculum development process uh is well supported in helping them develop a curriculum that makes them well prepared every day well-prepared teachers makes their job easier and so they feel like they start to enjoy and feel confident in the work that they do i think that's important in terms of re uh retaining teachers we work closely with those teachers who may struggle with particularly in the beginning with classroom management our discipline office i think it does outstanding work to work individually when we find there are teachers who need some support and extra help to support those teachers in terms of almost in every area of the school we provide outstanding resources everything from materials to equipment to tools there's rarely occasion when we don't that we say no to a staff member when they're looking for some kind of a resource uh i think the other thing is i think we have probably uh at least in the top 10 best technology in the state with regards to resources we give our teachers for technology everything from software to equipment support for our teachers so we this year we inc last year we included a support technology for development of curriculum and development of developing technology resources we have a coach for that now that's a great uh i think that helps teachers feel as though we care about meeting their needs this year upcoming year we we hired another coach to support and help teachers with their instructional learning instructional support and resources with curriculum development we also hired us we're in the process of hiring a second coach who can work with them more closely particularly new teachers who may be struggling with the m-town and the vtel uh that again is to try to retain those teachers uh who will also work with particularly the technical side of the house in developing curriculum that meets that provides high quality strategies in terms of working with kids that struggle we have a great special ed department that provides all kinds of individual learning plans that are that are wealth designed well thought out so that and provide teachers with that support we have inclusion classes and we have many many probably more inclusion classes in most schools and we have a program to continue to improve the quality of teacher that work together in teams um special ed and we're constantly training our our special ed staff teachers to provide the kind of support that uh provide special ed students with adaptive curriculum which makes the job easier for all teachers in terms of trying to help student be successful let's see we are providing one of the things that we're providing uh we provide them with a very clean building clean classrooms which is a you know it's to me is you know it feels good to come to work every day in a space that you know uh that i think you're you feel respected when you come to a building that's clean and your classroom is always clean we also provide opportunities for support systems for both maintenance within their space and also support systems for technology when they have a problem with their technology so that makes their job much easier some of the new things we're doing is we're providing a new child care center which one of the major difficulties and challenges for teachers is to find child care help and i think that's one of the reasons an important reason why i think the child care center was important to get is important to provide them it also allows them to participate more after school also gives them peace of mind knowing their child is safe and the child care center will have a high high curriculum a high quality curriculum that will provide learning for uh from uh infants all the way up to five years old when they when they leave the school so it'll be a place that uh and it'll be a place that staff will be well informed and about what's happening with their children and so i think that's very important um i think we provide them with a high quality payroll system a pay pay they're our pay structures very competitive i think our insur our health insurance system what we provide is very supportive we have what we call common planning time where teachers can learn how to collaborate and work with each other in an environment i think the environment in the school itself is very healthy and strong we know we need to do more work around you know supporting our our staff of color so we're looking at making changes to provide that support with committees not only for them but for all staff so that they can learn to work and collaborate better together so those just a few things that i think that we're doing to help you know retain our teachers there's always we're never satisfied we're always kind of looking at you know what more can we do and i think the area of culture is an area that we want to do more work in to help our staff uh feel that they're valued but in the long i think the bottom line i think really is we try to ensure that our teachers feel valued and that they matter and what they do is important to us but most importantly it's that they um that we're clear to clear with them that what they do is making a difference with our students and we try to point out that success to them because it makes them feel uh good about coming to work every day thank you and i know that we've in the last year we've been putting providing more towards that um with the money i brought in for the internal detail um and then teacher what was it um the new position you were talking about the teacher um support person oh yes um those are great um avenues but yeah instructional coach yeah they're going to have three three coat and we also have a new data person that helps them determine you know to look at their own data and help them adapt their curriculum based on the data and this person will meet individually with teachers she meets with groups you know she helps with local assessments as well as state assessments to get a sense of the success of our students and where we need to make some where we have gaps and need to make some changes i mean those are all things that make you makes you makes their job easier that i don't think you find all those things in all schools some schools are stronger than others but um and i am i'm gonna i'm gonna agree with you on that there's not much of that being done um in other schools so these are great things that we're doing now but we've lost teachers because these are things that we didn't put in place then so my question also comes to the point where i'm looking at evaluating stuff that teachers wrote how much of this are you guys putting into thinking about and then not taking it as a bad critique but taking as opportunity a learning opportunity to actually start resolving some of these issues where you could actually be more effective and trust me this school's a lot better than most schools i know out there i think uh well i think you're right frank that uh we are uh trying to do some work too in fact i wrote something down here i left it back at the office but we are we we know that we have to do more work around our culture and our environment to support uh not only our staff but our students of color um that we're not even close i don't think we've even just started to kind of scratch this first to better understand what we have to do you know such as one of the committees that i talked about last week putting together but also trying to take a look at more data of our staff and what what's working for them and what isn't our our staff of color because i think if if we have a culture of acceptance uh of all staff where they feel they are integrated in a in a school system that they are highly valued not just by the administrators but by their colleagues and they're respected by their colleagues trying to understand do they feel that way trying to put a plan in place to help us know that they feel that and if they don't you know what do we have to do to help improve that culture because that then uh trickles down to the students as well if our staff is not feeling it 100 percent maybe our students aren't feeling it 100 so we need to take a look at that as well because that's critically important for our students to feel um uh that as well that uh all teachers value them as individuals uh and uh and feel that uh they should be have all the same opportunities anyone else in the world and i know that many you know the the idea that having uh people within our own in our own system uh whether it be teachers administrators that look like our students is critical and important and trying to figure out how we improve on that is definitely a priority for us and i think it's it's become more and more apparent that we need to do more work on it and spend more time on it so as part of our strategic plan moving forward that our five-year strategic plan that will be a a a large priority of you know significant priority within that plan to take a look at that in our in our five-year strategic plan not just you know not only in terms of within each and every each and every individual shop to assess and evaluate you know the career areas as well to understand better in any of these careers where the challenges are for kids entering these careers for our students of color and you know what what can we do to help improve that work environment that we have some impact on particularly with our advisory committee and some of the work we do with them and that conversation has to happen across the board so we definitely we're putting together our committee our minor committee for improving staff hiring minorities half staff hiring is looking at strategies long term strategies particularly looking at data and looking at the right kind of data so i think you'll see us continue to grow and improve as we looked at as we continue to look at this year's hiring you'll see that we've improved tremendously we continue to improve in terms of our percentage of staff of color that we're hiring and i know one of the concerns for the committee is administration so that's something that we're going to take a closer look at to try to see to take a look at that more closely how do we recruit and and i guess inspire more people of color to participate in our impart apply in that particular area yeah and like i said when i was listening vivian asked for this this particular data and i saw the resistance um this is the stuff that helps improve the school when we know what the small problems are um especially at our level because we're the ones that setting policies for the school um this is not a negative this is actually a positive where we can actually look what what the teachers are lacking not just teachers of color i'm talking about staff in general um no matter where they come from um because we're looking at this and we're able to put things in place will help us to better retain our staff instead of getting a set of them going off somewhere else um for less money because they prefer to be there than than here because of the environment so these are the things we have to look at to start really addressing i want to thank both tom and vivian for asking for this data because this is very helpful to start looking at the next steps of keeping and retaining our staff leo thank you mr adam for mrs linski please are there any new people that are leaving or veterans i should say i know the retirees are going any veterans that are not on the end of this school year is tomorrow right are there any new veteran teachers who decided to go for greener pastures what report are you looking at mr hayden um it's a certain i don't think so because i think that um um the student information officer ms joya did that for the superintendent most recently so i would have to just verify if everyone's there but if it's a if it's a recent report there's no one new that we are aware of okay we have lost a lot of experience as far as retirees just in plumbing alone is over 60 65 years of experience that just left the door and i know there's nothing we can do about that mr cirillo had touched on it and i'm glad he did about how our kids latch on to teach us they latch you can't fool our kids they know they know who to latch on to they know who grew up in the area who who lives around them who's honest when i've had kids come back to me years later and i'm afraid we're losing that with all our veterans teachers that are leaving and i just wanted to thank mr cirello for picking that out thank you vivian okay so i just want to give a breakdown of the three reports that you gave regarding mr hatems um it's kind of hard to even make an assessment as to whether these num these retention rates are actually positive or negative considering that we we barely hired staff of color so to see that only two uh were were terminated or uh or resigned so wait number of terminations are these that they were terminated or they resigned or is that just uh bad wording yeah is it bad wording by using terminations yes so okay so continuing what i was saying it's hard to make an assessment when we're not really hiring many uh staff of color to begin with so when when i'm seeing only two uh two were terminated or resigned for 2020 2021 only three yeah by the looks of it it sounds very like small but for all i've known for all i could for all i could know only two were hired for that year to begin with um so i'll just keep it at that regarding this data um okay go ahead the one thing i would say that 2021 uh this year this year's hiring season we are doing much better far better than we've done in in the history of the school in terms of hiring people of color and um i i think i feel like that's going to continue to improve because we're actually trying to do more recruitment recruiting so interesting to a couple of shops where we had openings i i spoke to some of the staff members in that shop and i said a lot of them in fact i said can you reach out to students who have graduated in the last 10 years because 90 of our kids were kids of color so i think we need to start looking at someone with for years and years have hired many many of our graduates in the particularly in our vocational area so if we could continue that practice we should be bringing in more and more students of color because um and we and we've been successful this year in a few cases in doing that bring uh uh and in fact so we're looking for a third a third plumbing teacher this year and so far we've hired one grad two graduates and one of color and i said let's try to get another one let's try to get another graduate can talk to the kids that are that we hired maybe there's a third one out there that we can try to try to recruit because we we're there's nobody that applies we haven't got that third candidate yet so we are trying to reach out in the places we know that could have an impact i mean thank you for uh mentioning the strategies that you're looking into implementing um i'm wondering are you able to provide that in a report form as to the current strategies because i know in our last meeting we've discussed it and a lot of the information just gets lost in translation and if i'm not mistaken considering that a lot of the the items that we're discussing right now it's items that the city councillors are requesting as well so i think it would be beneficial for us to at least have a report indicating the strategies that we currently have in place discussing what are we doing in regards to the retention rate um and in regards to the strategies that we are currently implementing and will be implementing um regarding recruitment so i think that's two separate data it's the retention and the recruitment process um i i'm i'm trying to grasp and have an understanding um superintendent because i know you've mentioned it a couple times that um we're having a hard time recruiting staff of color and i'm just the reason why i'm so confused is because i don't see that as an issue with our neighboring schools in regards to hiring administrators of color and staff of color so i'm just trying to understand why is it that we're struggling in obtaining qualified candidates well typically um we typically have less candidates in all areas than our sending communities whatever doesn't matter what position we post we're going to end up with a lot less candidates than they will they tend to get more candidates than us so that's going to impact somewhat you know the people of color and i think vocational education has been uh weak in that area that has not been proactive enough in that area and i think that's been a problem so we've gotta um assume it would be a strategy that we would have to come up with yeah so it's something that we need to be uh to be more proactive and everyone across the state is dealing with the same thing and particularly in the vocational community we're i think in we've probably been most guilty and not doing enough in this area um and so we we're finding even at the mo the level of mother who is the association that of administrators for vocational education in massachusetts is doing some workshops in uh in the end of the month on this in this particular area as well so everybody is recognizing that we need to do more work [Music] for lots of reason if nothing else to show that that we respect people of color being part of our institution at all levels and so just trying to figure out and it and it's not just recruiting it's like how do we help people of color that our teachers become administrators and help them learn what it is they need to do to we need to be more proactive proactive in educating uh our teachers uh about how to to move up to that those levels and and i think we need to do some work around that our teachers and other teachers we know on the vocational side of the house um with more young people coming into the career area that that it shouldn't eventually make a difference but we understand that we're not there that we need to do more work and yeah and i i will send you um uh what we've what we have in place for strategies for recruitment and retention um i'll put something together and email it yeah i'd like to see what we currently have and what are you thinking of putting into place considering that um based on the data it is clear that we still need to improve on certain things and just looking at the date of the last five years and how many staff of color are in administrative positions it's just clear that we definitely need to look into that a little further yes okay i will definitely send some get something out to you to the committee yeah uh thanks leo through you and first of all i want to commend whoever put this together because this is information that you can actually look at and dissect and go through um so i mean this is the stuff that when we looking at and we present them we could look at in a second say okay this is where we need to work on if and i know we put an instructional coach together correct um so that's going to help with teachers and have that mentorship where they could find somebody directly and have that connection um instead of just showing up once and they see them one time and they don't seem again but and this is why it keeps looking this is where longevity starts i mean tom has been here what 80 years maryland falls behind in 60.
moving to section 12.0 business and finance ms jamal for item 12.1 thank you on board i would like to introduce you all to catherine jacob of rbccm of capital markets who will outline the bond cell hi thank you for having me i'm catherine jacobson from rbc the district's bond underwriter good evening president greer members of the board thank you for having me here tonight i'm happy to report back that the district has had a very successful bond sale a few weeks ago that wrapped up its measure k bond authorization that voters approved back in 2014 if you recall the the measure was for 92 million just a few weeks ago we sold the final 14 million in bonds the the district really nailed the timing of the bond sale if you've been tracking the financial markets this year it's been extremely volatile and the district actually was able to lock in rates at a dip in the market that resulted in your taxpayers paying a bargain cost of just 3.63 on the day we sold bonds we had 73 million dollars in orders from investors which is five times the amount of bonds you were selling and it was able to save the district an additional hundred and uh thirty thousand dollars i believe uh in interest cost and some really nice investor names pimco allstate franklin um and if you've been looking recently just the past few weeks rates have spiked it back up so uh you at least half a percent from when you locked in rates so really good timing and a really great way to wrap up the funding for measure k i'm happy to answer any questions any comments by board members thank you so much moving to section 13.0 curriculum and instruction 13.1 approval of the agreement between azusa unified and the city of azuza may have a motion second moved by board member arianes and seconded by board member rodriguez pena any discussion yeah i have a question i think it's great that we are partnering more and more with the city of azuza and um you know there's many things that they can help us and we could help them because we all serve the same students in our community and i want to thank the azusa remember chris gonzalez yeah i had a question um and just i mean it's probably a simple answer so i think the agreement is for up to 150 000 and then the actual estimate that i read like the actual like when you look at the exhibit it says they estimate it's going to cost total um i don't know i guess there is one i didn't i did bad math okay so i'm super excited that um we are going to have an opportunity to have kids especially participate in the aquatics program right i think that's really wonderful um and i want us to think about because i think it could actually in there that everyone ignores is actual requirement that students learn how to swim right so i want us to think about like how do we embed this kind of opportunity maybe throughout the year so that every child in our district has an opportunity to swim you know whether we pick a certain grade or do something where so that we can and when we right now we have these expanded learning opportunity funds for the foreseeable future we can think about how do we embed that through a partnership if the city's willing embed that with the city um to um to do this i also wanted to say i hope that we start thinking about our swim team at gladstone right which is now going to be shifting over to azusa and thinking about like how do we use that beautiful pool there i know i think you guys are probably talking about it but so so i'm super excited um i think there's a lot of opportunity like yolanda said to expand you know i'm just thinking about like our after school sports programs you know i have my son enrolled in it i learned how to play sports through just a parks and rec you know thinking about um how do we how do we make this accessible and it's something that doesn't necessarily compete with think together right so thinking about like how do we layer things on but just super excited about about this opportunity that it's happening do we do we still partner with the cbd grant after school uh tutoring thank you for that question uh we actually reallocated the cdbg funding um it's still related to to youth that participate in our programs but it's actually more for supportive services for kids that have additional needs um so that's really how we're using it now we're trying to um take recreation and sports activities and broaden uh the kinds of services that we offer when engaged with students and we see a need for other kinds of services such mental health services management or families so we're actually taking those funds and using them in that way so we are taking a deeper look a deeper dive into the structure of our department in particular community resources to see how we can better serve uh youth now i i just see like two three-hour conversations looking forward good word when you said d for dive robotics thank you any further discussion board president greer any comment right so the item has been moved and seconded let's move to our vote the item passes 5-0 moving to section 14.0 human resources 14.1 public hearing of the california school employees association sunshine proposal for the 22-23 fiscal year negotiations with isuzu unified may i have a motion make a motion to approve 14.1 moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member arianas the public hearing is now open are there any members of the public either in person or in zoom attendance that wish to make comments during this public hearing anyone on zoom we have no one on the team thank you and so the public hearing opened at 8 02 pm the public hearing will now close at 8 02 pm moving to item 14.2 public hearing vote on it just action on it uh i think the action was told in the public hearing yeah oh there was no vote to open oh i think you i'm sorry yes let's rewind 30 seconds so we had a first and a second to open public hearing uh let's have a vote before we open the public so the motion passed to open the public hearing somehow it's still 802 pm are there any members of the public uh in person or online all right we're frozen in time uh do i now do i need a motion to close or can we close all right so now we'll now close the public hearing at 803 pm so that we all lived through that minute together uh moving to item 14.2 public hearing of the azusa educators association the aea sunshine proposal for the 2223 fiscal year negotiations with azusa unified may have a motion to open the public hearing second moved by board member arianes and seconded by board member rodriguez pena any discussion seeing none let's vote the public hearing has been approved 5-0 at 803 pm the public hearing is now open any members of the public in person or online lika is everyone online we have no hands raised onto thank you and now we'll go ahead and close this public hearing for 14.2 at 804 pm i'll get really good by the end of this 14.3 public hearing of the azusa unified sunshine proposal for the 2223 fiscal year negotiations with california school employees association csea may have a motion to approve the public hearing 14.3 second moved by board member arianes and seconded by board member rodriguez pena being no discussion let's vote and the motion passes 5-0 to open the public hearing at 804 are there members of the public in person or on zoom attendance for this item we have no hands raised on zoom thank you and no one in person we now conclude the public hearing for 14.3 at 8 05 pm 14.4 approval of the azusa unified school district sunshine proposal for the 22-23 fiscal year negotiations with the california school employees association may have a motion to approve 14.4 second moved by board member rodriguez i'm sorry moved by board member arianas and seconded by board member rodriguez pena any discussion being none let's move to a vote and the item passes unanimously 14.5 public hearing of the azusa unified sunshine proposal for the 2223 fiscal year negotiations with azusa educators association may have a motion to open the public hearing like a motion to approve 14.5 is there a second a second moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member cruz gonzalez any discussion we'll move to a vote to open the public hearing for 14.5 and the item passes five zero the public hearing for 14.5 is now open at 806 pm calling one's calling twice for members of the public in person or online lika do we have anyone online we have no hands raised on zoom thank you the public hearing for 14.5 is now closed at 806 pm we'll get there guys 14.6 approval of the azusa unified sunshine proposal for the 22-23 fiscal year negotiations with azusa educators association aea may have a motion to approve 14.6 seconds moved by board member arianis and seconded by board member rodriguez pena any discussion being none let's move to a vote and the item passes unanimously item 14.7 approval of the 2022 through collective bargaining agreement between the azusa unified school district and azusa educators association c-t-a-n-e-a all under the aea heading may have a motion motion to approve 14.7 moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member arianes is there any discussion being nine will move to a vote and the item passes unanimously moving on to the final item on our agenda adjournment 15.1 may have a motion to adjourn right promotion to approve 15.1 moved by board member rodriguez pena and seconded by board member arianes any discussion hearing none let's move to a vote the motion to adjourn passes unanimously this meeting is adjourned at 808 pm thank you azusa and have a great night
so in the current year going into fiscal year 2023 we have allocated out the last six marquees that are in need of replacement and will be caught all caught up in that in that project do we have a plan for going forward to when we have to do it again so at this point we believe in talking to jason that we're probably not going to have to replace a marquee for the next four or five years so we will wait until that time before we begin allocating out understood capital again and then at that point in time there should just be one one or two and then these marquees are expected to last in excess of 20 years so we're in pretty good shape all right thank you so other fund budgets this is at a very high level mostly we wanted to just remind you of our federal funds we still have sr3 monies available epu that is the education plus up grant that was provided by the governor of arizona and then the 100th day grant was associated with those districts in 2021 that achieved 100 days of instruction and then other other fun budgets that you'll find in the budget forms are estimated at this time of course spend is still occurring we still have the 60-day encumbrance period between july 1st and about august 26th so we'll know more when we prepare for the annual financial report which will be presented to you in early october so this was another reminder of the retention recruitment stipend that you all approved at the end of march this is a fifteen hundred dollar uh stipend that will be fully funded out of the education plus up funds and the esser funds and if there are if there is not enough available then the mno budget balance uh carry forward may um be utilized for a small amount but mostly the s or three monies as well as education plus up funds will be used for these stipends risks and opportunities so again there is no budget yet we are expecting to have a budget by the end of june and again this is everything is based upon the governor's budget assumes a loss of 400 students we could see a greater loss we're doing everything we can to to avoid that and work on that working on getting enrollments and withdrawals done so that we have the information earlier and earlier as we prepare for each new fiscal year also this budget does not consider the minimum wage hike required in january so we know we've seen inflationary increases over eight percent we do not know what that amount will be so we did not include any costs in this budget but it's estimated at eight point three percent which will result in a minimum wage of 13.86 cents per hour the total cost for the second half of fiscal 2023 will be about 1.3 million dollars and that portion is just the portion that would be borne by maintenance and operations that's already taken out the community schools portion as well as the nutrition services portion and that includes the payroll benefits as well and now the proposed budget opportunities ms humphreys you mentioned the work that's being done at the legislature today house bill 286 2866 which is the proposed k-12 state budget so for gilbert public schools we went ahead and did that today put the new amounts into our budget documents and we are estimating that the increase could be as much as 12 million dollars for gilbert public schools if the if the legislature adopts house bill 2866 um you can see some of the details there where the base level amount increased by six and a half percent over about a 4.46 increase over our proposed budget um that we presented two weeks ago the add-on group a weight increased to 0.293 it was at .091 so that results in about i think it's about nine eight or nine hundred dollars more per student in that group a weight that group a add-on weight which is our specific learning disabilities our speech language students the lowest special needs category and then in addition the amount per mile was increased by 7.2 percent to 2.83 cents per mile we've talked about the difference between the transportation support level and the transportation revenue control limit so we will not receive any additional funding because of that transportation support level increase however it again narrows that gap between the transportation revenue control limit and the transportation support level meaning that it will realize we will our taxpayers will realize tax savings on the primary tax rate unrestricted capital also part of the proposal was to increase the district additional assistance by 7.2 percent with put rolling through all of those calculations we could see as much as another 1.1 million dollars in unrestricted capital student loss which we've seen the last three years could be less than 400 students so we're we are very optimistic that that could very well occur and then the budget balance carry forward as always we always work very hard to maximize that as much as possible we really believe that that 29.8 million dollars or so is the um lowest possible amount the most conservative amount on the budget balance carry forward so um finally i wanted to talk about assessed values and our estimated tax rates so this has been the the full cash value and the limited cash value trend for gilbert public schools since 2012.
can i give a motion second okay um any serious questions for sean uh would you please pull the board so i did i said gorson all right moonzy weisberg ben joseph hi frost no hi sean you're at seven to nothing all right all right and then um the next item is uh the treasurer's bond um this is always a house favorite right this is um the amount that's determined um uh by sean it's ultimately based on the afr and audited financial reports right and this year it's 31 million six hundred hundred thousand dollars um and as we always say that uh although we're recommending this tonight for um board's approval sean we also know where you live so we will get it one way or another can you have a motion please [Laughter] so i do have a question for you sure um what is the 31 million based on it's usually based on fund balance a percentage of your fund balance so the reason i'm asking is now that we've done a change in accounting method is it's going to drop in the cost drought correct so it could drop it was a question that i had asked for our insurer moving forward but because we don't have audited financial statements that show the um the change in the accounting program they haven't done it but my my assumption is that it might not change too much because at the end of the day and all based on even though we're on a modified accrual basis this is actually based on a june 30 cash balance and it says not to exceed the correct gotcha so that's really the maximum that they've calculated yeah okay thank you um any other questions would you pull the board please oh sure courson hi bonsai weisberg ben yosef hi frost hi no hi so hi that's seven to nothing okay in the next slide for two years the next item is approval of the 2022 2023 administrative and non-union salary pools um so tonight we are recommending uh that the board approved the 2023 administrative salaries and salary pool at six million eight hundred forty thousand six hundred forty one dollars and the end staff sellers and seller pool at three million six thirty six four forty seven okay i have a motion uh any questions for showing on the salary pools do we have a moment to question the uh consent on the uh director's contracts or is that already done we didn't have a vote on it yet no yeah okay it's that's right now right no no no it's two oh this is five minutes from now okay this is just a pull of money david oh i know but we passed up on that one it's higher on the uh yeah it was part of consent yeah i know we haven't voted on consent yet no right i have a question thank you yeah okay um noted for later um hearing no other questions would you pull the board please sure moon's eye weissworth hi ben joseph hi frost no hi so hi corson oh so into nothing you want a surprise okay and the next item is the approval of our um uh agreement with our support staff for the 2022 to 2027 school year uh and we had a really wonderful um spring working with uh matt and his team of the executive board of support staff and um although there were plenty of opportunities for um some disagreement and kind of moving back and forth um at the end it was a very collaborative process and i think that truly um the the end result is a win-win agreement for both the support staff for the board in the district um but then at the end of the day most importantly for our kids so matt thank you for all of your leadership in that regard and so tonight we are recommending to the board that you approve the board and support staff agreement as presented for the 2022-2027 school years you have a motion second we have a first and second any questions for sean or eric it must have been a good contract because he's sitting there without socks [Music] actually amy and i were at uh um one of the last meetings and i just want to echo eric's comments because i thought it went really well and the dialogue was there in open communication and it was a good process i do want to thank the support staff and man um any if there's no other questions uh would you please pull the board certainly weisberg all right ben joseph mike frost hi no hi so i of course i did nothing all right moving on uh we do have a couple last minute things um the every year um we take a look at our music instrument inventory um see what's at our end of useful life um what needs to be replenished um so we uh you know did that again this year at the end of the day um there was not a single bidder for all of the equipment um that we were looking or seeking to go uh to buy um so we are awarding um the music instrument bids to grand rapids violins music and arts and washington music centers at a cost not to exceed 36 000 in total for all of the instruments can i have a motion so second and sean just to be clear this is right in line with kind of where we're at each summer actually actually this is last little bit less yeah this is less we've been um right around fifty thousand dollars yeah john and his team have been doing a good job of maintaining the equipment as it goes to extend the useful life and if you keep in mind that we have you know well over 300 400 500 kids in our programs the fact that we're spending this much amount of money every year is actually pretty good that just shows you how well we're keeping care care of the equipment well 400 in the marching band alone right correct right we're not buying our uniforms any other any other questions oh would you pull the board no oh sure ben joseph frost hi no hi so hi courson moons i weisberg all right so nothing ronnie and grace i normally don't have this many items i promise you but july arjuna happens to be one because there's a lot of annual things uh the next one is one of those it's the county indemnification agreement um so in rare instances the county does in fact issue a occupancy permit and this agreement indemnifies the county firm any errors or emissions that might have occurred with them issuing a permit prior to collection of any impact fees there are very few residents in the in our boundaries that are not governed by a town where we where new homes are being built and we wouldn't receive those impact fees anyway um so tonight we are recommending that the board of education approve the indemnification agreement with lake county as presented you have a motion so moved second um have have we ever paid under any of them no we've never we've never had a situation where um we've actually had to collect the impact fees from the county we've always been the builder always comes to us and we've never had any kind of errors or omissions and then all of the villages around us um they either collect it from up for us and we receive it from them or they come directly to us we issue a receipt and then the village will issue the permit okay any other questions would you pull the board please press hi no hi hi corson moon's another good practice is to um take a look at the institutions that we do our banking with um and uh typically we um uh look at those those banks and and remove them and we actually have um two that we no longer deal with a bank financial linkage has dropped our relationship um and then um uh first midwest uh bank um is actually now going to be old national bank um they there's a merger between first midwest no national so old national will now be one of our banks moving forward so tonight we are recommending that the board of education approve the designation of depositories resolution as presented can you hear the motion a second um so it's in regular version two all right go ahead uh go go ahead why are we moving banks and what and what who is uh bank financial so bank financial is an old bank that we had um some business with it was very small was actually a cd that was the remaining part we had moved our checking accounts from them many many years ago but we're still all the same they used to be right next to marriott lincolnshire oh a little building and so we had a uh we had a remaining cd with um expired and we just changed it to another bank so what did you change you changed the uh the uh who's holding the cd yeah we were yeah we actually cashed the cd into okay what about deposits so deposits are um with mostly with and now old national which used to be um in television yeah different from evansville and then of course um pma which i'm asking is for safety yeah how much do we have everything is collateralized so that we all of our dollars are protected um we don't have to observe the limit that is fdic insured because we have collateralization from pma that helps protect our money and we have sweep accounts collateral means we actually have an insure we have an insurance basically we buy our oh um we buy our own insurance with um pma that allows us to so you've got an insurance company insuring your deposit instead of the government correct never heard of that so and we have sweet because when you say collateralize are they actually posting collat are there team bills that are posted as collateral or is it just an insurance policy it's just insurance policy well you don't need insurance on a t-bill no no no not on a t-bill but a lot of people collateralize by posting t-bills yeah it's like on repos and stuff like that yeah i'm just curious are we covered yes okay and by who uh pma and there they actually have several all right yeah how much money do you keep there at pma pick a bank um it really depends it really depends on um it depends on the month obviously because as we receive deposits but you know we're we don't keep too much in any in the bank itself because we sweep in and out but probably i don't know two million dollars i think is one of them so you do need insurance yeah it's more than correct and what does first midwest have to do um they handle all of our general checking and payroll and they are now old national so we just have to update to recognize the change in the version um we still have a local branch so if you recall we used to work with um mark peterson you know who was at bridgeview right and then first midwest bought out bridgeview and now old national has put out first midwest or merged with our first midwest so in keeping lines with all of it it's well i hope they come to our golf outing they will that's very spark they actually did most recently so i know all those years and we still have the same um you know our concern is always to make sure that we are still getting the same customer service and not paying any of the fees associated with you know having as large of an account as we have with an institution how is concerned about the bank going from yeah they got on i was part of that game yeah i know you were okay okay would you pull the board certainly no hi hi carson moon weisberg uh hi ben yosef hi frost trust so part of a change in um the procedures to apply for state and federal grants is to have the board approve our consolidated district plan and the consolidated district plan basically is a series of questions that talks about all the requirements necessary to have a federal grant we do in fact apply for title one and title two title three actually apply for all these excuse me um and these are all federal revenues that come to the district um so tonight we are asking the board of education to again prove the district applying for these grants and submitting the district's consolidated plan as well so it's noted as being in the consent agenda but do we have to approve it separately no no yep and then lastly um the as we do typically when we don't have a july board meeting we just put out there uh a authorization to spend money for july expenditures as we would normally do in the course of july that we will be bring back to the board for official approval in august so we'll be asking the board to provide authorization um to the assistant superintendent for business to pay monthly operationally related um paid payments in july of 2022.
let's just make a day of july [Laughter] i will see if they are available at that time all right perfect do we want to consider possibly adding a second meeting at i mean either for july or august i would i'm here i am open to that i mean just i i just know we have a lot of stuff on our plate and the summer it's a little less pressure so perhaps if we you know if there's some stuff that we want to get to consider it i mean i'm not saying that we have to decide right at that now but are we happy with the idea i think there's a logic at the july meeting of doing a work session for the interview and then having a follow-up work session in august to discuss our final selections because i also know that we had the meeting before this where we were talking about other stuff that we wanted to discuss too so that's why i'm saying we may want to throw a different one in there and we normally do a training during the summer anyway so perhaps that's the training but yeah but i would argue too uh august does work better because then i'm back at work and july is going to be a little muddy yeah i'm fine with august yeah i think august is right august for the decision no so we'll make the decision oh a different workshop seriously yeah so we're going to try to do this in july we're going to do our workshop decide on and do our interviews for july is interviews and got it yeah got it i think to do our due diligence we have to make this decision asap oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and then you can approve the contract in august but we can start doing some of the groundwork with whoever you sit you know whoever would collect whoever you thought all right any other questions on that topic all right then we're gonna move to uh superintendent comments i um wow yeah uh kathy scafidi doesn't like spotlight but thank you for putting all this together and every couple weeks and everything you do in between for them i know that they we all very much appreciate what you do for the board meetings and cindy we love you but you got big shoes to go yeah that's it for me all right start down with aaron um i just would like to add to our state champion some unsung heroes and it's the parents oh god yeah i mean chris greg several all the rest of us up here those parents are out there driving their kids to all of these practices at all hours of the day all kinds of temperatures and weather and i just would like to express a little appreciation for their efforts because we couldn't do it without them so as as maybe silly as that seem i really do appreciate all of their efforts and making our students successful and that's all i have tonight thank you aaron rj i like to appreciate aaron's appreciation of you all very nice view so thank you um i think this is really neat i was so excited about this so thank you to the state track team for stay track team the state champs for thinking of us for this because i know i had little to nothing to do with that but that's that's really neat and i don't know graduation was amazing so i hope all the graduates are enjoying their summer so far it sounds like they're all a lot of them already doing things and working or going to school i can't believe they're going to summer or camps and things already so that's amazing and i'm really looking forward to the next couple of meetings that we're having because we're really starting to dig in and get some stuff done so it's exciting yeah it is that's all thanks correct um obviously congrats to you know everybody that was involved in the state championship parents and everybody else i mean one takeaway i had is just like you know i'm not involved in track or running unless something's chasing me and that doesn't happen nearly enough so it is you know you always think about it from my perspective it's like an individualized effort right you know i'm running for this medal or whatever else it really was refreshing and interesting for me to hear about how really everybody put themselves aside over the team yeah you know and and kudos to the coaches and everybody involved that worked whatever math and metric they had to understand that certain sacrifices might move them ahead than others you know to and to educate the uh team which they probably already knew that this is their goal and this is how you achieve that goal you know you win the war not the battle kind of thing that's why you have a math teacher being the director yeah i got gotcha um and then you know just as as was said earlier you know it summer might seem like time off there's a lot of teachers doing work to help students do things and and you know literally they're trying something new on the marching band this year and starting it again because just about half the band are incoming freshmen oh wow this year for the marching band that's cool so it's great it's fantastic so to everybody and all the teachers that are working with kids on things over the summer thank you you know for all the parents that are driving them back and forth to those things thank you so um and i just want to say i appreciate the discussion for the work session we had earlier fantastic it was very discussion oriented and it was refreshing to see so thank you all right thanks ken thank you kathy thank you ted i'll be brief but echo what everybody said uh the meeting we had before this meeting was exceptional i'm excited about the progress we're gonna make having the track team here was again i did get goosebumps and just i think we can learn a lot from those kids uh as a community so we're proud of that and i agree this is unexpected but very cool and i'm also very excited about the work we're doing i feel like we're really moving forward here it's uh for a while there i felt we're moving slow now we're really making giant steps forward so that's very exciting so i'm looking forward to the decisions ahead and then again kathy i know it's been brief i've worked with you but i really appreciate it so thank you for all you did and cindy we're looking forward to getting to know you and working with you so thank you i will keep it short and sweet thank you everybody i am just very happy to be a batavian and that we're all working together even though we have struggles i feel like we're a team so thank you can i have one more thing after you've done todd i want to tell you how excited i am about your new opportunity to coach here because to me it takes two things that are so very important to not only me personally but the rest of the board as well as our community and brings them together in such an important impactful way and i want to thank you for putting batavia on the map and your leadership in in those efforts so um i didn't want to forget and please don't take my looping back as anything like that but i'm i'm thrilled for you thank you for representing us in that way and going last there's never anything good i can add so i'm just going to say uh that is everything that we had on our agenda for tonight so i would entertain a motion to adjourn so moved second we find meta second my mind sir long day okay you
but it's longevity that that shows and if we appreciate our staff then at all levels then we know where we where we're heading um and we're top of tier school we need to keep our top tier teachers here not having them go somewhere else for less money leo thank you the uh just to comment on on that document you're looking at frank uh i would commend our principal oversaw the development of that document working with different committees to come up with the school improvement plan and then putting it in a high quality presentation that's easy to follow and read so that's who i would like to recognize for that work i'm aware okay very good the deci diversity program update john oh this is this is that program that frank had uh asked what are some of the things that we learned or covered from here so i i took the table of content content that uh that outlines all the different topics that we uh covered in uh in the coursework um and i one of the things that we're the uh committee that we're putting where we have staff of color were coming together as a committee uh was one of those ideas that came out of this this particular program uh a lot of and there was a lot of what we learned a lot about is um data that we should collect and what kind of data we should collect in order to uh better understand where the gaps and what the work needs to be before before we start putting a plan together that put to develop and provide our committees that we're putting together with as much data as pos possible and also they went over a lot of the different pipelines that we should be looking at in order to either participate or join some associations and some different groups that would be useful some other suggests some other suggestions you know everything from looking at our all of our hiring practice documentations our ads and information put out to the newspaper or other resources we use for uh recruitment um are one of the big things that i think which we are going to be working on this summer is our um our um um web page um is something that we're doing a lot of work and we're going to be doing a lot of work on but that's a critical document to take a look at for biases and other things that may be someone from the outside looking at looking at it realize you know doesn't speak well for our school is a welcoming environment so we need to take a better look at that to see how that may be impacting people who may want to come and apply for our to our school and then also in our interview process when we uh what are some of the kinds of questions and kinds of concerns that people may have when they they're not we're not only interviewing them but they're also interviewing us we've got to understand that better so that we are asking the kinds of questions that allows them to feel that we want them here and that we think they're important and that they that we value who they are uh so those are just some of the things that uh that were learned from this particular program now i will add when i give you the report i can add other things that we learned from it that we plan on implementing next year as well okay no are you up no no do you have a question uh no i do i'm john thank you for putting this together and providing a table of contents i mean i see the pipeline of development um and this goes and coincides with everything else of how we develop an ingrown um pool of candidates um and i think we already started putting that together with the intel retail um reaching out to the power educated training program out of lawrence the working families initiative i think those are small starts in the right direction so thank you for putting this together and remind you and i do want to recommend also commend your staff for not only putting the school improvement plan together but for the work you do sometimes it's not always a critique is always how we could make it better hey anything further thank you you're welcome hey leo you're welcome so school year 2223 job posting updates john this is where we were looking at in the future starting next year not having the committee vote on postings and in in presenting what i did some research on the different schools uh all the vocation schools in our area and a couple of our our comprehensive schools as well but none of the schools have the school committee approved postings okay so that's your recommendation and then and then the uh rationale for that why you know why why i would recommend that we no longer uh request voting on the postings uh well first i bullet about seven or eight things here i can go through them or if you'd like me to go through them um okay it is responsibility what i post uh put bullets on is responsible the superintendent principal to establish job descriptions credentials required and to hire staff for each position it is timelier to fill vacant positions already in the budget so one of the things sometimes we get someone that resigns and it may be difficult to get that position so the faster we can get it out there the better so it would be more timely a superintendent is spending i spend many many hours preparing for postings for school committee member along with trying to prepare what i might think is the concerns that might be within the postings of jobs that were already approved we can provide the committee list of postings to pack it without presenting at the meeting to save time easier for developing and planning budget knowing it has to be reviewed by being reviewed by the committee so knowing that a particular jobs are going to be already been approved and as part of the budget makes it easier and easier for the committee to review in the budget less controversy at committee meetings i think saves meeting time for more important issues during the meeting and at times it's urgent to replace the staff member that that may resign so that just some of them things that i feel would bene would be useful in terms of helpful in terms of uh postings to yes not um i would ask committee consider that we no longer vote on postings if they're in the budget if there are if new positions or any changes from a grant to a into the operational budget uh we would continue to ask the committee to vote on those yes i totally understand why we do not have to vote on them because they've already been approved in the budget and as mr lavoy said only new positions would be brought forward first as a vote on the position and then obviously on the the posting but i would if if this were to pass i would like either the motion to say or as something that would happen that we still receive in our packet all of the postings that might have happened in the two weeks since we've met and then i would also like a listing of all any and all positions filled with the name the position don't need the salary or anything because it's in the budget but i would like to see those two things as a regular basis any postings that have happened or are looking to happen within the next until the next meeting and then follow that up with any and all positions filled and i have no problem with not voting on that yes absolutely further comments questions yes uh friends so there's controversy at school committee meetings i'm not sure what controversies outside of uh posting descriptions there is say a small time in um in meetings i mean i believe we this is part of the stuff that comes in the end um so just be clear in the budget every position is is already approved in the budget unless there's a brand new position that's going to require money that's not in our budget it makes no sense because every position is in the budget even new positions so i don't see where this actually going to save more time so there are times when there are times when their a position is not in the budget and then something comes up and we need to where we would feel like it would be important to have the position i bring it to the committee for a vote that can have that that happens several times when i talk about just to give you an example of controversy we've had situations where um i've had to come back three or four times on a on a position to try to get it approved even though it's in the budget because of something that a committee member may not like and so it gets voted down whether it be you know the description or the credentials or something like that but it's in essence the truth of the matter it is the responsibility of superintendent and principal to establish those things but then we get into a big debate as what should be in those things and what shouldn't be in those things so then it gets put off for weeks and sometimes it has had an impact on hiring desperately needing somebody not getting getting it done in a timely way so i mean it's not happen it doesn't happen all the time it happens it has happened i i should say and um i just think it would cause less controversy about those kinds of issues and so that would um and we and sometimes when we do the postings it can take a long time to get through the postings um you know it can be we spent anywhere from half hour to an hour at times on a post on the postings um at times so that's i mean uh i'm you know happy to do whatever the committee's suggests but i just wanted to be sincere and honest about what i think the rationale was no and and i thank you for your rationale um and and i can really understand but at the same time this is where we start checking those facts and checks on everything different things when poses are being posted we look at who how many people have applied because one of the biggest complaints i get is i'm not gonna apply because that job was already taken before it was even posted so that's a huge complaint thing for me so this is things that i'm looking at because i look in school springs and anywhere else to see where where we will put a supply put opposed to the job and how long it's been up there so just to spend and spend more on that on that comment controversy at committee meeting it it does happen a lot um it does happen because the posting of the listing in the description it's not there's no matching um they come incomplete we don't have enough information so yes there is controversy yes this information missing so you definitely we need to get to the point where we feel comfortable that every posting that comes true it's consistent it has the all the key ingredients that it's needed to hire a person that anybody you know can apply for it and have the equal opportunity to get in and the controversy happened because that's not there so this so just not bringing job posting and approving it here it's just it's not going to work because we know that there are too many inconsistent in when posting happen and to francisco comment yeah people are not applying because many times these postings which are supposed to be consistent they are coming with a name on them and what i mean is there's already a person attached to that posting so there's there are differences for posting even though they should all be the same that is where the controversy comes and as long as we have controversy that means we don't have a well hiring process hiring process yeah that's why we have to have the posting here and go through them unfortunately again i'm not saying we're not going to get there this is the same as hiring people of color we had to have a strategy we already talked about that and what are we doing to improve this we need to have a process or strategy or how we're going to improve the job posting and then we can say no they don't need to come to the to the committee maybe the other school let's see what the these schools are doing that they don't need the committee to go up approve the posting and that maybe we can start there but i definitely don't agree with this just with the bullet some of this bullet the reason for us not to not to be approving the job posting thank you thank you in terms of controversy certainly postings can cause controversy when we don't agree what should be in the postings a lot of times somebody may think something should be in the posting but it's not necessary or something that depends on the jobs because every job can what how the posting is designed or the description is designed can be different from one kind of a job to another so it can make it difficult to try to understand why one looks different than the other but in most schools the committee doesn't even see what the posting looked like um you know they have it's and you know as i put on the first bullet there it's the responsibility superintendent and the principal to develop that job description and credentials required to hire the staff for each position you know so we may disagree on what that job description may look like and that's where we get into controversy but that's all i want to say to that in terms of people that are applying people don't apply because they think the job is already taken on rare occasions somebody within the building may be interested in a job and the word gets out that that person may be targeted for the job but boy that's a rare rare occasion when that happens um and sometimes it happens because of someone that's worked hard and is looking to move up the ladder uh and you know they may have um you know put in for the job so people think a lot of times that they're going to get the job but even at that that's just so unusual when that happens i can think of you know very few times that that's ever actually happened uh that that's been the case so we we try to be very um you know fair and with all our hires in terms of who we hire for different positions right thank you leo for you um and and i so as you're looking at teachers administrators there's a radio criteria set by the department of ed um and i sat with you and we have this conversation of you providing that information what the criterias are for certain things but to educators in the licensure process and everything else that already eliminates most of the what you will say will be conservatives because everybody knows that these are not things that we can change um so i think if you're educating and providing the information being needed i'm in a timely manner then it just eliminates that process so and it's just an observation that we've had this conversation brilliant times anything anyone anyone else anything further hey all those in favor all those opposed would you call the role please uh when you have a moment please mr cyrillo miss marmal no mr rossi miss fitzgerald yes miss dizza no mr hayden yes mr lamontagne yes it was 3-3 correct the motion does okay uh principles oh no i'm sorry school improvement plan john [Music] is going to do a report on the school improvement plan that we require a vote of the school committee yep yes on that document we shouldn't go through the school improvement the committee has to vote on it i promise you i'm not going to go through the whole document so thank you as part of my principal's report tonight i am proud to present our school year 2223 school improvement plan the actual improvement plan is only the first couple pages i want to first i would like to just acknowledge joshualette he's a grade 10 ela teacher he's here this evening he is doing some hours for his administrative license and as part of it he stepped up and kind of volunteered wanted to learn more about the process and really helped this document to become even more transparent as well as comprehensive so i want to thank him for his efforts i also want to acknowledge our instructional technologist miss jacqueline hunter she also worked closely with josh and i would say that sometimes we call it sue speak when i say well how about this this and that they really made it happen this document has gone through a process just as a reminder you know we we start with the the surveys that we send out we also take a look at that and then we bring it through three groups of people prior to coming to this committee the first group is our faculty council which is our instructional leadership team they take a look at the data and they make it make recommendations on what they see as goals we also the first approving body is also our school council which that body is made up of students family caregiver members as well as faculty they take a look at it this year we also sent out the whole thing to the staff with a google form for them to also comment on and provide input so some of the highlighted changes that i just want to go through is one of a few improvements that i see is we added some acronyms and key terms and part of that is sometimes in education we assume that when we say the sip and this and that that everyone understands and part of this will be a public-facing document so we wanted to make sure that some of the key terms that are used in here is are explained also what we also included this year is kind of our rationale in terms of aligning goals we want to make sure that we're taking goals and we're we're looking at what our goals were for 21 22 and aligning them for the next school year and giving the rationale on why we want to keep them or change them the other great improvement is to take this data that we always talk about using and actually have a data visualization so you can actually see the data points that we're using to say hey this is an area of opportunity an area of growth that we're using in order to use this so also one of the things i want to point out which i think is great is instead of starting over with four new goals we're really looking at this year as like a design and a creation phase where these goals really kind of started except the sel goal which is ongoing next year we're really looking at taking those goals refining them and implementing them and then making adjustments thinking about goals someone said today in our admin meeting really what kind of goal do you actually finish complete all in one year a lot of the times it takes it takes multiple years to get some of these larger scale things that we want to accomplish so you'll see in most of our goals our goals for this year are really just the next phase for next year so you've heard us talk about the multi-tiered system of support and this year we're going to this year we were just kind of exploring and learning next year we're going to fully develop and start the implementation process of the multi-tiered support system we're going to be looking at classroom based and school-wide curriculum instruction and assessment some of the other things that you've heard the superintendent and i speak about this year instructional coaching getting the win block doing a lot of those things are all things that we're actually going to now now start to do last year our goal was to look into and make a recommendation for a new master schedule but now we have to actually implement our new master schedule which is going to be um you know next year is going to be you know it's going to be our whole year to try to try that out see what works make adjustments in terms our social emotional learning goal which we have had a five-year seo plan but next year you can see that we are really kind of really targeting what we're targeting next year is work we are our social emotional learning goal is to focus on belonging diversity equity and inclusion in instructional practices that includes curriculum instruction and assessment it also includes interactions between students adults and all professional learning communities so we're really going to be working on what is what does it mean to belong we're going to be looking at that data what did our students report do they feel belonged they feel safe but what does that mean and also in our full community what does what do we mean when we talk about belonging diversity equity inclusion so it's really our social emotional learning target goal and finally this year we talked a little bit and started some work on getting back to assessments we did some professional development and some work but next year we're going to work on designing a school-wide assessment calendar that has benchmark assessments as well as even department assessments and all of those assessments the purpose of them is to support strategic planning and school-wide expectations and support so we need to work alongside our staff in what a student assessment a high-quality student assessment looks like and also what are we doing with the data as superintendent olympus said we have now a data assessment specialist but we want to get back into the practice and support in looking at data and making data decisions including at the administrative level as well as our teachers right at their teacher level they are always looking at data both formatively and summatively so without going into the whole school improvement plan because you do have a copy of it what you'll see in that whole document is it's the school improvement plan it's all of our data it is the side-by-side comparison from last year to this year and the data that we used it as well as the comprehensive results you know now it's just it's it's it's in paper and we have these full goals but we also know that there's a lot of data inside that booklet individual data points that may not be part of our plan but they're part of all of the efforts that we want to do and do our work on so i will entertain any questions you have regarding our school improvement plan the process or our goals yes i i understand the timeline being a year and then looking on many of these incorporating for the 23-24 and i also see that obviously you're on every one of these as the um person over seeing it but i guess my question is at what points do you check is it at school council meetings that you see okay we're online we're doing okay so this doesn't just go up on a bookshelf someplace that it's a true working document so how do you assess that you're on tap to make this all happen that's a great question and i'm um i might be on there as like a goal leader but each one of these goals is going to have separate goal leaders that are going to teams of people that are really working on them and one way we assess this year is with those different groups i brought it to them like so for example in our faculty council we broke up into small groups and each small group had a goal and i had them assess how are they doing like you tell you tell me or you tell us the administrative team how you think we're doing on that and we assessed it red green or yellow so a lot of things that were not done yet so we had that mid-year and then once we had that mid-year we shared that out with the staff so they could see where we're at and that also gave us a renewed focus on like okay what's left to kind of do that just one more thing frank said it very well this is something to be so proud of the inclusion of things that we looked for especially the data that supports this it's just be so proud even if it's just for a little bit i know you don't like to take accolades but this is fabulous thank you just to get clarity on the checks and balances of the school improvement plan so the school improvement plan and this process we started almost 10 more than 10 years ago and we've consistently done it year after year but it started with collection of data through the conditions for school effectiveness and now we also include the panorama survey as well as susan said step one before we develop the school improvement plan but of course we're building it from last year's plan knowing that it's a progressive process our particular school improvement plan and and how critical the work is that's going into this particular school improvement plan but the con this the data is reviewed by many you know the staff by administrative team and by the school council by working with susan's leadership to come up with the gaps of what needs to be improved and learned and grow within our school and then from there the plan is developed and then goes back for more review by the same committees and then one of the checks embedded i think one of the most important checks and balances to know whether we're moving or not is our the third important piece of the school improvement plan is and when we talk about implementation that it's a living document is when we evaluate teachers we evaluate these criterias that are in the school improvement plan and we evaluate the data to see if it's happening in the classroom and that the work is being done in the classroom and then we give teachers feedback on so we specifically look so we identify one of the processes we identify in the beginning of the year is what are we going to focus on some of our evaluation these are some of the criteria's we're going to focus on so when we go and evaluate teachers and administrators we specifically look for these particular improvements that we're looking for happening day in and day out so that'll be the real test as to whether it's working as well thank you mr linski you said uh mr led his work on this plan would it be proper for me to ask him a question mr lamontagne sure you said he worked on the plan he's here to speak uh joshua i know you can handle your classroom i've seen you teach i'm sure you can handle us i'm gonna ask you a question and just a quick answer what is the downside for this schedule for vocational and what is the downside for academics it is can you repeat your questions yeah as a teacher what is the downside for the academic side and as an instructor what's the downside of the schedule for vocational what should we be watching for what are the negatives last year's this current year schedule or next year well we're in the first year of our schedule so we really need to make sure that the five-day rotation works in terms of engagement for students i think that's what you're asking me so we'll be looking at our data specifically if you look at the school improvement plan you can see that a lot of our goals align with multi-tiered systems of support and we're really looking to open up the avenue or the door for students to be able to access the support that they need and if they can't access the support then the schedule isn't working thank you leo tell me your experience working on the document first of all i want to commend everybody involved because this is what we look for when we're looking at actually implementing policies that's going to be effective for everybody involved for the statistics for the staff the students the families um so what was your experience like are you asking in terms of how it performed my practice or personally yes um as an educator it's important to look at multiple years of data in order to accurately assess whether or not certain instructional practices are working for students and so to be able to look at our last three five or even 10 years of not just qualitative data but quantitative data it allows us to get a holistic view of the entire school and what's happening for our students in areas that we really need to improve in when we look at the data we realize that our students really need to be supported in terms of what do they need at the moment right okay so ms silinski talked about implementing the win block implementing seminars reinventing the schedule so that all of our students feel supported our students can't achieve unless they're all supported by a schedule that works for all of them not just some of them so to be able to look at that data and say something's not right yet really opens up that door to as missilinski said looking at the next few years of the implementation of the schedule as well as how our current school improvement goals are being met through the data that mr lavoy also talked about and personally personally um for me it's helping to grow my practice tremendously i don't some of you may know i'm a graduate of this school i'm a product of greater lawrence technical school i'm a culinary graduate i am proud to say that i chose to change my career path and it wasn't because i wasn't interested in culinary i love cooking but the impact that teachers had on me at this school made me realize that i wanted to make that same impact on students and for me it was about making that impact through building in those foundational skills of reading and writing for all students especially our english learners and our special education students thank you um and that's exactly when we talk about the impact of teachers on students thank you i don't know if anybody else might have a question for you but i really want to commend you and thank you for that that is exactly what we're talking about when we talk about teacher retention because they inspire the next generation you come here you could you start it in something and then move on to something else um and and john and sue and you're right it is a living document it has a constant control it's not changing all four criteria every year to suit something it's about steady moving the pace forward with the same game plan that's how championships are built thank you very much for everything you've done thank you um the effectiveness survey at those for oh what's happening is that for students for teachers for administrators can you say what survey oh the conditions for effective that's for staff that's where students have the panorama survey the panorama survey is the one that is for students staff and family the conditional school federal is for staff okay so my my next question is i'm not sure what the percentage mean can you explain that a little bit because again like i'm looking at one i was looking at a few pages but it doesn't matter either well if you look at the results right um it has the year and if and then it has how many participants and it has a percentage but the percentage doesn't make sense to me because i would i will see that if 109 let's say 109 participant in 2020 2021 that makes 60 but then the 96 cannot make 63 so i'm not relating the percentage to the participant can you explain what the percentage coming from please yeah i think i can try so um so the it gives you the total number of respondents and then the first under question one it gives you whether or not participants identified as a career area teacher academic teacher an administrator or support staff and that totals the same 91 and those percentages are of the 91 as an example so the percent the percentage the total number of respondents um for that year yes are you talking about the percentages um on question one okay so the ones that are highlighted the green yellow red those are the percentages and in the key is up top like what's highlighted red the percentages of oh okay sorry um okay so if okay um thank you for that clarification so the average of providing a sustaining um that's the the percentage that's what we look for in terms of the percent that is the green and the yellow yeah so if you look at the it's that's the that's the ones that we have that are providing or sustaining that's the percent that we're looking for that should be higher so for example the yep so any page if nope if you look at say page 50 i just pulled one open the the average of whatever is yellow and green so we're looking at the higher number um but we're looking that's what we're looking to get if that helps that the average we just show you the average of providing and sustaining which is the but you have the whole thing like if you look at um every single one gives you the the full breakdown okay i can try and yeah i can try and clarify additionally okay you're welcome all right john osu the assessments that is being done is that to evaluate where the students are for mcas because i know you know this year is where mcas is going to count correct for graduation rates for the for class of 2025.
so you can see in the 2016 school year that the the full cash value that's in this yellow bar increased by 20 that year i was not here i don't know what happened that year but that was an amazing increase um and then that was the year we passed our we actually got our override back um it's not this is assessed value so it's not about the override this was truly what was going on in the the community at that point in time and then it came down a little bit and then now it's on it it increased again and it's leveling off but even at the current year based upon the information that we've received from the assessor's office the 2023 limited assessed value is 2.5 million dollars which represents a 5.8 increase because that's the limited cash value but our full cash value in gilbert increased by 6.4 percent so it's just data i'm kind of easy to see the uh it's really reflective of the economy here in the town of gilbert in and around gilbert public schools and then this is the resulting tax rate so you can see the tax rates in 2022 that were approved by the county superintendent's office the estimated proposed tax tax rates that we presented to you two weeks ago showed a decrease of 12 cents about per hundred dollars of assessed value we have since revised that because we have more information we've looked at how much cash is on hand for the secondary tax rate we've also considered the new salt river project in lieu of contributions and the biggest uh contributor of the continued decrease was the cash on hand so you can see that we're now conservatively projecting a decrease in the tax rate overall of just under 21 cents and i believe this to be the most conservative i think when we bring to you the first revised budget it will be even better than that and this is also reflective of the fact that the difference between the transportation revenue control limit and the tsl the support level has narrowed so we're levying less for that as well so any questions on that okay great um the addendum is next which just shows the details of all those compensation increases that we've already shared with you and that leads me to any questions that you all may have dr santa cruz did you have something nope i think i had just one thing i appreciate that we are conservative in trying to plan a budget especially when we don't know exactly what funding we're going to have yet or what how many students will have that it's based on next year and all of these things and that we've seen all kinds of ups and downs last couple years where we've been in the middle of the year a couple times last two years wondering if we would have enough to even keep going what we had but i also am wondering with um possible being conservative and then seeing that we might have more funding possibly plus our budget balance carryforward is very healthy what kinds of things can we do to help our current students our current teachers and really maximize that with you know how can we make the most of the dollars that we have and make sure that we're using them for our students and teachers so we're working on that every day but um dr mccoy do you have anything that you'd like to add there i would just add we would sit down again if once we had a number if there is a number to go over and we just put down our list of priorities as always when it comes to staff salaries is always something to be able to be competitive with and if we were able to boost our starting pay above fifty thousand dollars or at fifty thousand dollars that's something to look at we have certain employee groups that we have to take a stronger look at to make sure that their salaries are where they need to be in competitive and then for our students again it is looking at what types of of support they need whether it's academic support whether it's social emotional support whether it's class size those types of things if we need to hire more people which is difficult as all of you know those are the types of things that we would look at and we take any input from you that are any suggestions that you would have as well thanks i appreciate you sharing those priorities i also was just thinking too it might be also a way to if with a minimum wage by law being required to raise that a substantial amount we might need to do some compression just to keep on top of that decompression so we might need to be able to use that to stay on top of that the best we can thank you so just to detail on that that 1.3 million dollars did include that everyone everyone who's hourly would receive that dollar six increase yeah we we did consider that so that oh thank you we're working really hard at trying to avoid that compression the minimum it wasn't just okay to make sure that they're moving in that same same dollar amount thank you any other thoughts board members yes dr sanchez president wood yes miss betts i'm still intrigued by the budget balance carry forward and fact that we are still spending and we're still paying our bills as it were and we see that going through august is that correct that's that's correct august 26 i think represents the eight week period okay do you see that time frame between now and then having a significant impact on that budget balance it may result in somewhere between one to three million dollars more in budget balance carry forward it's really hard to say i think the thing that we're struggling with right now and i appreciate your question and your comments mrs wood we've been having a hard time spending our money because of the supply chain issues and so we're going to have a lot of purchase orders that are open today that are going to have to roll over into next year as an example we ordered the six the six activity buses we ordered those in october of 2021 and we're not expecting to get those until at the earliest january of 23 so the lead times have been really incredible so but continue trying to work to get money out to our schools as quickly as possible i i think that that's important and it speaks to a concern that is going to be with us for a little while the supply chain issues and the gathering of material purchase of material for the various projects may cause us to delay spending and look make it look as though we have more money than we actually do have because it's already encumbered but perhaps not reflected in the documents that's correct that's correct i i have a question in the republic today or yesterday was talking about municipalities are struggling and states are struggling with their um projects because of the increase of cost how is that affecting us with our different facility needs and so forth yeah we had our first master capital planning committee meeting last night and our consultant from orchard um he indicated that they are looking at construction cost increases of over 30 percent so largely that will impact our bond but we're not seeing 30 percent increases across the board in the restricted capital but for bond projects we've seen definitely increases we have not quantified it though um but that's something that we'll take a look at in the current year okay thank you i appreciate that information yes uh we had an issue this year with the aggregate spending levels yes sir um to my knowledge the legislature still has that requirement and effect that's correct are we facing potentially the same issue this coming year um we're preparing for that as well and if you recall that was over a 30 million dollar reduction in our budget to occur in the current year so it's hard to know what the right amount of money is to have around but but we we in the leadership team are constantly talking about it how do we get it out what's the what's the right philosophy strategy so well thank you i think if i could just ask one more thing uh as far as many of those federal funds were targeting um challenges with covid and specifically i think you know trying to address learning loss i just could we talk about real quickly just a few of the things that we use those for would that be appropriate here just as we're i know flexible site subs was part of something that we did that i think was really important to make sure that our schools could stay open that there were substitutes when our stuff without alex our our site base our flex subs have been valuable uh in terms of when we decided to run that same model for next year our principals applauded and that has been significant in terms of just people waking up and going to work and making sure that there's somebody there to make sure the kids are covered and so we will continue that model for next year and and kovid need for subs it might be a great model just to continue forward moving forward because we spend plenty of money on subs a year and acquiring those folks and keeping them within our service will help us out in the long run you know we looked on other avenues to be able to alleviate some of the stress and some of the anxiety and although it's not federal funds we've had the you know we've had the social workers we've had the mental health counselors on our campuses and that was something that we obtained through an override which was very valuable and who would have known that that was something that was really needed at a time when nobody expected it also go ahead oh i was just thinking of this targeted summer yes our boot camps that we have we started last year and state grants yeah and utilizing that through ducey's uh summer school grants as well we applied for those and essentially we created the program they just kind of helped pay for it and so that's been valuable for us as well going around to these summer school camps and our regular summer schools you see a lot of kids catching up in a lot of different ways and parents flocking to these programs with their children just the mere fact that these kids need to be in school and we had times throughout the last couple years where that was difficult and going through and walking through those clubs excuse me through those classrooms you will see um a lot of valuable education going on and so we've utilized that money for um making sure our kids are progressing yeah i think one-time stipends for staff who have been here one-time stipends like what uh ms betts presented in the budget um making sure that uh and and going forward in terms of retaining staff into the next school year uh ensuring that our staff understands how they're valued not just as as an educator but economically as well and that's why if we have more money to spend later on i still think it's something we need to focus on because i will tell you other districts will focus on it and we can't let that gap widen so we have to be careful there i appreciate that thank you dr sakers as to your comment miss betts hard to know how much money to to keep around uh as one board member i have appreciated the judicious and conservative approach that you have you and your department along with dr mccord have solidified and it has helped one to keep us solvent as well as to project a budget if i'm quoting you correctly that will be sustainable for at least the next three to five years so the approach that you're taking as one board member is very much appreciated it's not just me it's the entire leadership team just so you know well that goes without saying i know you're you're driving that bus working very diligently with dr mccord and so your department and all of the leadership team thank you appreciate it i would like to share one thing mrs wood so i had an opportunity this summer uh dealing with the transportation issue to have a conversation with one of our instructional coaches here in gilbert public schools and we were transporting or asked to transport three students from their home to settlers point every day for an hour and a half or two hours a day monday through thursday just three students and so i'm contacting the instructional coach and i said what is this and she said let's move on when reading and so we transport the children curb to curb to make sure they get to school so i just asked her how successful is this program she said it's very fun to watch because after about the first week you can see where the students that are not reading by the time that they're finishing their third grade year all of a sudden they just get it and then they can read and then they can move on to fourth grade so it's just a simple example of how that direct teaching that we have opportunities to do can make a significant difference on the lives of three students anyway that attend gilbert public schools thank you miss fitz thank you all miss you jetty did you have anything that you wanted to add before we go forward i would just like to second what dr santa cruz said he said only one board members but as i'm going to give him a second board member because i agree with everything he said thank you thank you that concludes then our 2.01 fy 2023 proposed budget presentation and thank you again miss betts for that we now move to 2.02 request to speak regarding the fy 2023 proposed budget and i didn't receive any requests for that so we'll move now to 2.03 the adjournment of the public hearing and later in the meeting we will actually um vote on adopting that so that sounds good okay thank you we will now move to three to reconvene our regular board meeting and three point zero one i have a i will ask for a motion to reconvene the regular board meeting i'll make a motion to reconvene the meeting thank you mr parker is there a second second thank you miss humphries it's been moved and seconded that we reconvene our regular board meeting all those in favor please vote by saying aye aye and those opposed with an a thank you we will now move to 4.01 the approval of the agenda if i may have a motion samu thank you dr santa cruz is there a second second thank you mr parker it's been moved and seconded that we approve the agenda all those in favor of approving the agenda please vote by saying aye aye any opposed with nay it's it's been approved 5-0 thank you we will now move to the superintendent's report and i'll turn the time over to dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members uh this will be a brief one our last meeting of the 22 or 21-22 fiscal year uh again good evening to everyone i'd like to take a moment and give a shout out to our director of safety and security mr al kane al was just named the winner of the 2022 k-12 campus safety director of the year by campus safety publications al has an extensive resume related to safety and security he's a retired police officer from chicago and spent time with the security division of maricopa county community colleges as well as grand canyon university when you speak with al is obvious he's committed to the safety and well-being of our students staff and community congratulations to al and thank you for your kindness and your dedication to gilbert public schools last wednesday we held a in parent informational meeting at legacy sports at the bell bank park sport complex for those interested in being part of our k performance academy over 100 people showed up to hear the presentation and interest in the program is growing if you're interested in this program please jump on our website at www.gilbertpublicschools.net information should be right in front of you click on it and you can see the programs that are being offered and lastly just a reminder school starts five weeks from today i know some people out there like are you kidding me it is we start our modified school calendar for the 22-23 school year and our first day of school this year will be tuesday july 26th so soak up every moment of your summer and we will be back at it before you know it mrs woods thank you and that concludes my report for this evening thank you dr mccord that will take us to agenda item six requests to speak to the governing board if i can ask for the admonition to be played please make an open call to the public during a public meeting subject to reasonable time place and manner restrictions to allow individuals to address the public body on an issue within the jurisdiction of the public body at the conclusion of the open call to the public individual board members may respond to criticism made by those who have addressed the board may ask the staff to review a matter or may ask a matter be to be put on a future agenda however members of the board shall not discuss or take legal action on matters raised during the open call to the public unless the matters are properly noticed for discussion and legal action during the open call the board requests that speakers refrain from voicing complaints against school personnel or any person connected with the district as it may impact due process rights policy k-e k-e-b and k-e-d are provided by the board for disposition of legitimate complaints including those involving individuals forms required for use of these policies can be obtained from the gilbert public schools website thank you tonight we have one person here who has requested to speak mr brendan waller thank you if you'll come to the podium you have three minutes to give us your thoughts thank you okay is this on kind of okay can you hear me okay uh thank you for taking a minute to listen to me uh mr mccord i voted for you so i appreciate the job that all of you have done uh i know that the board uh position is fairly thankless so i'm actually here not to complain about anything but to thank you you guys do a great job i've had two kids go through gilbert public schools and graduate one of them's in the army's over in germany right now graduated from highland high school back in 20 and then i have one more that's at pioneer and i do appreciate your your work it is a i know that um being in this position can be something that's uh borderline thankless and in some cases it can be a lot of accusations that come at you guys for a variety of different things i've seen school boards across the united states make the news for inappropriate things and i thank you that you're not in the news for that so and i also thank you for uh being a good steward with our money that was one of the things i was coming here for and you just happen to have a a whole uh overview on what the budget is uh i did notice there's a surplus i i do want to encourage you to please give that back to the teachers i would even take it one step further to try and get it on the ballot to maybe get a an increase of some sort um even if it's you know five ten cents per uh per dollar or something like that on the assessments i think most people would be glad to pay that teaching is a very important part of child's a child's upbringing and especially if you have um very uh well-rounded teachers like i've seen already in the gilbert public schools work hard to keep them you know gas and groceries are more expensive these days and so we've got to do whatever we can to keep them i don't have a whole lot more time but i will say this i'll be interested to hear what you're going to do with house bill 2008 civics is an important thing i was in the army myself for a total of 10 years i do own a company here in in gilbert we do contract security for uh government 99 percent of what we do is in in government for city all the way up to state and federal uh all up and down california arizona texas and washington state so the reason i say that is because i have a vested interest here we have our headquarters here i live here i'm the owner of the company so i do understand a lot of the things that you're talk talking about for for budgets and things like that because i'm the ceo so anyway i'll sit down i appreciate once again thank you all of you i know that you five are on the hot seat if anything happens so once again thank you very much and i'll sit down and just interested to have see if any of you have any input on house bill 2008 thank you mr weller we can address that at a future meeting mr wall that what that's not on tonight's agenda but i'm sure it'll come up in future agendas so because the legislative the session's still going and we try to address it all at once once it's all done thank you sir thank you very much we appreciate that and our public our public support we appreciate that we'll now move to reports and 7.01 we will have our monthly budget report respect you haven't heard enough about money tonight yeah well that was for the future yeah now it's today account for what we've done this month so is mr mcintosh saying he would like to do the report tonight oh okay hello again thank you mrs wood yes this is our year to date report as of may 31st 2022 as i indicated earlier on the proposed budget we do have june july and august activity still going on so but this represents what's happened as of today so the summaries are for on the operating funds the federal funds enterprise funds bond funds and the debt service fund so no to the maintenance and operations you can see the available balance of about 26.5 million dollars note that we did estimate that our budget balance carry forward will be over 29 million so we did make some assumptions as to how many of those purchase orders will end up being unencumbered to come to our proposed budget budget balance carry forward and then note the unrestricted capital outlay um as well that 26.5 million dollars does represent that 20 million dollar uh transfer from mno into undistricted capital and note that the 15 point almost 16 million dollars here that's expended and cumbered that's one of the areas in which we we will see a large drop in actual spend because we're struggling to get materials in that we've ordered so i wanted to bring that to your attention as we go through the rest of the year any questions on any of that okay great so federal funds details these two highlighted funds are brand new there's a the idea high cost since i've been in gilbert we have not received any monies from the high cost fund allocation we were eligible for about eight thousand dollars we haven't received it yet which is why you're still seeing the zeros there but you will ref we will reflect some activity for the june report in addition the asean track summer camps you can see a lot of zeros there right now remember this is through may 31st summer school starts after may 31st so you will again see a lot of activity in that line when we report to you in june nutrition services wanted to share the information regarding our enterprise funds so note the year-to-date expended encumbered nutrition services as well has had supply chain issues however during the may time frame end of may time frame they begin putting in a lot of purchase orders to make sure they're ready for this for summer school and all their summer feeding programs as well as in preparation for um for the new school year so the available balance has dropped month over month between april and may again we do expect that some of that 17.7 million dollars that's encumbered and expended will be released in an over-encumbrance when we complete the fiscal year um i wanted to share may 31st year-to-date in technology in particular so note that last month we showed a remaining balance of somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars we had an account coding issue in which much of the audio visual refresh was actually inadvertently charged to this fund fund 631 which is our 2015 authority fund that was caught and so now those expenditures have been moved into the appropriate fund for that audio visual refresh so you will see the commensurate decrease then or increase in encumbrance or decrease in remaining balance under the technology of that six million dollars so just wanted to bring that to your attention and then this is a summary of both of them together so you can see the the um this is where we have actually the year to date and the encumbrances so comparing probably would have been helpful for me to show you last month in comparison to this one so you could readily see it but you'll see it in these in these year-to-date in the encumbrances you'll see the change in the encumbrances in addition the 630 bond fund these encumbrances many of them are new due to your recent actions associated with all these summer bond projects that are well on their way at this point okay and then the debt service fund this is the one i wanted to share because of our conversation regarding the debt service regarding the tax rate etc for gilbert public schools note that right now we have a year-to-date balance of 24.9 million dollars so remember that our last payment for the current fiscal year our last debt service payment is due july 1.
that's a consent agenda as well and the final two item final two items for the consent are um the uh recommendation for um keeping confidentiality for executive session minutes and executive session audio recordings so that's all part of the consent as well and that takes us dave to the consent agenda if you have any questions um before you yes oh yeah um these are all they're all completed they're all they're all done they're all done okay there's a little flurry for the month of may okay um so can i have a motion to approve the consent agenda excuse me can i have a motion yeah a motion to approve the consent agenda and after which david you can answer your question once we have a motion second okay uh any questions on the consent agenda yeah on this approval of administrative contracts up there and then consent what about the skyallis truck well that's up to you can we give him that thought that's up to you oh okay let's take him it just got hot in here huh i have to tell you if you turn like 20 shades he was shopping on amazon for the last 20 minutes yeah maybe we should move this part along okay no further questions on the consent would you please pull the board aye grayson hi moonsail weisberg ben yosef hi frost no hi we're approved okay and that brings us to um superintendent's information report um just want to um remind everybody of the dates of our um retreat since we will not be seeing you in july for the board meeting we will be having our board retreat on the 29th and 30th so more information to come on that um july of july july 29th and 30th um so we're looking forward to that again more information to come um and uh other than that uh and we know where yet you can check them out the barrier yeah and other than that we just want to reiterate how excited we are for grace and ronnie and uh we will be setting up um a series of meetings over the course of the next couple months at your convenience to kind of go through different you know onboarding and training opportunities um they'll have a chance to meet with myself and sean um and brittany maybe kim mark troy and i um and we'll try to give you a crash course and everything board of education and stevenson high school a lot of fun so yeah we're really excited to have you thank you very much congratulations and that is all i have for this summer can i have a moment unless there's anybody else who has items or just my spot this is your spot yes this is if you have something to say yep my turn yeah uh i want to i don't know how to say it but this is time for me to retire from the board as well and i would like to just make a couple of comments if i can number one to the new board i would like you to know that i've had i've been fortunate enough to have a lot of plenty of board experience this is the sharpest group of people i've ever worked with and they are really really good and you're doing something that you're gonna get direct feedback in terms of doing good stuff for kids it's such a wonderful place and it's all really positive stuff and i want to wish you well i i i know uh i know you'll do good and i want to thank the edmonton even you mark uh i want to thank you for taking such great care of our children this is really a big deal and i personally want to say thank you and uh that's it thanks for allowing me to serve on this board well i'll thank the public but uh that's all i got thank you very much if if i can say on behalf of the board how much we have enjoyed having you on the board how much you've added to the board we are going to miss you immensely you've brought um i will i will always remember uh and i'll share this with the new board members so they hear it whenever there's been a tough issue or a question about how to address something dave would always say the same thing he would say let's decide what's right for the kids and that's going to drive our decision and he that was his mantra and you brought a way of a perspective of looking at things a professionalism of practicality and empathy uh i've been on the board for 22 years uh it's without equal and um it will be sorely missed we really appreciate everything thanks a lot and i love you all thank you except you mark well let me just say before we let you go sorry one more comment that um i think mark would agree with this um that on behalf of the administrative team and the faculty and the support staff and i think certainly the kids you know your your impact will be you know felt long beyond you know i would like to say one more thing though yeah uh just just for the new guys here i love couching stuff and humor it really doesn't diminish the weight of the message but having a laugh during the day makes me feel good so i didn't want you to think that all this stuff i don't take seriously i really do but i like to laugh and i think it's a good part of life to laugh a little bit except mark thank you david we love you thank you so on that note i will entertain a motion to adjourn sure dave