001Good evening. I'd like to call this meeting to order roll call please President Michael Flores here vice president Linda Heath here governing member Chris Gillespie Governing member George Arradondo here governing member Victoria Quintero here we have quorum welcome happy summer if we can all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance Moving on to the approval of the agenda I make a motion to approve the agenda. Second. Motions are made by Vice President Heath, seconded by Board Member Quintero. All those in favor? Yes. Yes. Motion passes by all. Moving on to public participation. There is one. Moving on to the consent agenda. Mr. President, I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented. Second. Motions are made by Board Member Arredondo, seconded by Board Member Quintero. All those in favor? Yes. Yes. All right, moving on
002to the instruction discussion and first reading of the instructional time model ITM. So when we look at different instructional time models, what that means is we have currently in the district, we have in-person approved and we have online approved for Coolidge Virtual Academy. What we would like to implement is the opportunity to do a hybrid option for all of our schools to where if there is a medical need or mental health need or anything significant that we could provide some sort of flexibility for a student that they would be in person 60%. they could be online 40% of their time. We'd like to approve that for all of our campuses. We'd also like to approve a full distance learning option for all of our campuses to be used intermittently, not fully online. But our online
003program only goes down to sixth grade. And so if by chance I've got a fourth or a fifth grader that. maybe has an issue or something that we could place them online as well. We have curriculum that does allow us to do that. And so when you read through that, I don't know if there's any discussion or any questions about it, we're just asking that we provide just additional flexibility for our students and our sites. And there's no, it's just a discussion. So just if you have questions and then I'll bring it to you next month for approval. You said this goes down to the fourth, third, fourth grade? Or how far down does it go again? So fully distance learning, we could go down, I believe, to fourth grade. The hybrid option we could
004do across the board depending on need. And this is just strictly for the not traditional classrooms? It is for, yeah, it would be for traditional classrooms. So the 60-40 option would be that, like, maybe a student would take their core classes in person. and we could offer an additional like online option or some sort of distance learning option for an elective or something like that, but they would get the core instruction, but they wouldn't have to fulfill the full seat time in person is what we're saying. And I don't know if this is the right phrasing, but is this keeps us competitive with other schools or does keep us flexible with the students? Both. I think the more... or the longer time passes, the more flexibility we're gonna have to offer. What it does is
005it allows us with, especially like for CAP. with our evening session to allow kids to come in twice a week, not all four days. And so if they're in that evening session, they would have in-person learning twice, two evenings a week, and then two evenings a week they would be on their own. Could they come all four days? Yes, they could. But for our purposes, we're only saying you have to come at least two. So it gives them more options and gives us more options. Correct. So, for instance, if a child is ill for a month or so, they could do this if they were able to. Right. The issue that we run into is that, let's say we have a student with an illness like that, for them to be considered homebound, it has
006to be for six weeks or more. So if it's any time within that other time period, we don't have a lot of options other than just to send homework and that kind of thing. This would allow some instruction. They check in. It would allow some flexibility there. So when you say two classes that come in, is it classes or just time periods? It's time periods, not classes per se. So they would come in to... My reservation, I guess what I'm getting at, if... if they're coming in for history and science for lack of better just for discussion purposes then that's great if it's coming well apart for half day or one time for history one time for math one type of science does that that disturbs the classroom right so right so the height so
007if it's on a traditional campus they would have a set schedule for The CAP evening session, they have a certain number of classes that they are assigned to all the time and so they would come in and what that instructor would do, they would look and see where is that student struggling, are they on track with their courses, where can I provide some additional support, that kind of thing. So their classes are solely online anyway, they're just coming in in person for additional support. And their classes are personalized to them. They are. They're prescriptive, yes. Yeah, I was just concerned if a traditional student came in for that particular class, that they're not tracking with that cohort versus wherever they're at. Right. So let's say we did like a 60-40 option at Coolidge High School.
008They might come in person for four classes. They're the same four classes every single day. That's what I want to make sure. Yes, they're the same ones. And then they would have two additional classes online. Thank you. Any other questions, comments? All right, moving on to business. Discussion and possible action to approve the 2027 proposed budget. Here we go. Star of the show. Okay, so this is our proposed budget for 2027. It's step one in the budget process, so we will adopt the same budget next month in July. The law states that our adopted budget cannot exceed this proposed budget. So even though they are finalizing the budget now to include some additional monies, we will not be able to include those additional monies in our July budget. We will have to wait until September
009to do that. I put together a PowerPoint. This is mainly for the folks that aren't here tonight that we can share out to staff and have available so everybody can kind of just see the budget process. I'll go through that just quickly. The timeline, you know, throughout this entire 2026 year, we're tracking ADM, looking for, you know, trends. What does that look like going into the next school year? By the time March rolls around we have issued contracts and we've determined our FTEs for the next school year. Throughout February and June we monitor what's going on at the state level, what laws are going through, what does the money seem to be looking like. This year it was May 26th before they issued the preliminary forms. So they are just preliminary. We will have to
010revise at some point. And then sometime in June, they will adjourn and give us our final budget. The good thing for us is by the time we do revise our budget, whether it's September, October, we've only spent a third, a fourth of our budget, and we would never get up to the limit to where we would be in any sort of predicament as far as exceeding our budget limit as it sits. Some notable changes for the budget process this year title one continues to go down It dropped another hundred thousand compared to last year We are doing some research to see you know, is that something that's just standard across, Arizona and you know, we've heard You know one thing was said that in Arizona all in all is there household income has risen so
011that would make Title I allocation to Arizona smaller, thus smaller to the school districts. But we also want to look at the free and reduced forms that we... no longer have to require of our students to fill out. So we're community eligibility for our food service program. Therefore, the forms are not required to get a free meal. So there's not really an incentive to fill them out. And so we want to make sure that's not affecting our Title I numbers. We did put our best effort forward in 2026 to get all of those forms, but I think we ended at about 1,700 kids eligible out of our 2,900-ish. 2026 included one time funding for district additional assistance and free and reduced lunch eligibility. Since this presentation we have learned that those funding streams are included
012in 2027. So that's really good news. The loss of the school safety grant, we didn't lose it totally, but we did lose it for some schools. We applied for all, Heartland Ranch and Coolidge Alternative Program are the only ones that received that. So there's some funding there that we have to absorb. The next slide, I kind of just go through some budget requirements as we begin to allocate money once our budget limit is set. Working through our ADM. our estimated expenses. For special education, we have to maintain a per pupil spending per each special education student. And so that's one of the first things I check when I'm going through the budget process to make sure we have enough allocated to special education to meet that threshold. And through our staffing model and through what
013we had set aside for contracted services we did meet that threshold going through 2027. The next thing we look at is CTE funding. There's also a threshold for that. We have to make sure that we are spending a proportionate amount of our M&O budget compared to state and federal funding that we get for CTE programs as well. So that's a calculation that has to be done. In 2026, we spent roughly $785,000 of our local money on CTE programs, and that's right at the threshold. so that's something we have to maintain into 2027 so that's taken into account as the 2027 budget is being built as well so we start we start to calculate using the forms we subtract our salaries and benefits that are contracts that have been issued in march and april we subtract
014out utilities and liability insurance that we have based on prior year estimates insurance, fuel, our contracted ESS services that include speech, OT, the therapies, and we're left with just a little bit of money after that. So again, we make sure that CTE is not supplanting. We make sure we meet the requirements for special education thresholds. At the bottom of page five, you can see that, and this was without the one-time funding because we weren't sure of that at the time, but we're left with just about 1% of our money to kind of do something fun with. So that's kind of just the process in how we get to the number that we arrived to for 2027. The next slide just shows. the ADM calculations that were done over the past couple of years and as
015we continue to watch the trends, it does fluctuate from year to year. In 2025, we did see an increase of about 85 kids, so that did kind of skew. It was like a one-time peak. I'm not really sure what it was about 2025, but. Change from the prior year, 2026, compared to 2025, we were down about 2% ADM. If we compare that to 2024 to kind of level out that spike in 25, we're only down 1%. Statewide, the state is down about, where are we? 1.2% since 2025, so we're very similar to what the overall state has seen with public education. That is cited as a decline in general demographics and the ESA voucher program. So ESA vouchers are really hurting us. It definitely, if you look, the numbers there in red, you can see
016first grade, second grade, third grade. That's where the majority of our decline in ADM has come from. For us, we've actually seen an increase in ADM in the higher grade levels that have offset that, but you can definitely see that trend in both of those categories, right? Is it general demographics, meaning just lower birth rate, less kids in those age groups altogether? And then those are the grade levels that are more likely to take advantage of the non-special education ESA vouchers where they could be homeschooled. So these differences, you said 1% overall for the two years, that's not factoring in for inflation. It's just what we used to get versus what we get now. These are student enrollment numbers. Okay, but these are enrollment numbers? I thought these was ADM is what? Average daily membership.
017These are the kids that are involved, yeah. But, you know, we've had inflation in our... in our population here, you know, so it's not relative in terms of what we see at the school district, you know, per se. The grades primarily affected grades first through third. So we'll continue to watch that and just see what the FTEs look like at those grade levels. And, you know, we'll have another year of data for 2027 to kind of see if that trend. The laws can always change with the ESA vouchers, so it's something that we kind of just have to roll with in terms of if the use is high or if the use of the ESA vouchers drops back down. And I don't think quarter four data is out yet for ESA vouchers. I know the
018last time we looked, there were approximately 380. for somewhere around there, students that live within the district that participate in that program. Well, at least we're not like the Valley, having to close schools and whatnot. Yeah, the next page kind of just all of all things taken into account the changes that we've made to staffing. It is based on ADM, but also on, you know, the school safety grant and other things. Over time, the business office has reduced by two staff. The end of our ESSER funding and a lot of that influx of cash from COVID has really taken a burden off our office in terms of reporting. things that went along with those funds. In the district office, curriculum office, we have decreased and kind of farmed out the responsibilities of the EL coordinator.
019West School we have reduced by two teachers. We have also reduced by two paras the ISS and media aid and that is in an effort to keep their counselor since they no longer have the school safety grant. Heartland reduced by a teacher. CAP reduced by a teacher. At Coolidge High School, the CTE department in sports medicine, it wasn't quite a full teaching FTE. It was a full FTE for the district, but they provided sports med. We did backfill with a trainer, but he's not teaching any courses. And they reduced by a master teacher to fund their counselor that they no longer get funded. They were one of the last with a master teacher anyways, right, Coolidge High School. And then Coolidge Junior High reduced by one FTE for their Cub Academy that they had on
020campus. So overall, as the budget sits now, it does require about a million dollars carry forward from the prior year to balance the budget. Of course, these one-time monies will come in and help that. We do have 615,000 approximately from the district additional assistance calculation that is going into M&O to help balance that side of the budget as well. The one-time money is needed to allow for carry forward into 2028. So as it sits without that one-time money, we were kind of budgeted down to the dollar. With the one-time funding, it does. we are able to earmark money for carry forward and set it aside. In our district additional assistance, we are unable to budget any dollars for major improvements such as large bus purchases or any capital improvement that's gonna be over $100,000. That
021would be something that we would not be able to budget within state dollars. I know that was a lot and quickly and. Not very uplifting, but I'd be happy to answer any questions. It's better than a lot of districts. It is, yes. And most of our, you know, the reduction in staff, it happens, you know, via attrition. We're not having to pull back contracts from anybody that was offered a contract previously. Right. So, of course, that's going to mean larger class sizes. Not necessarily because there's been a reduction in ADM as well. So it's all relative. We have not increased classroom sizes. And that was strategic in the... The positions that were not filled, we looked at those grade levels, and that's where the principals made those decisions. So, no, it should not impact. And
022in certain grade levels, like West School rolled a fourth grade to fifth grade? Yes. So they'll do that. Because they had a larger class in fourth grade, so they took a fourth grade teacher, rolled them up to fifth. Second grade was really low, so they reduced third grade by one. That makes sense. Mr. President, I've got a couple of questions. On your notable changes slide, you talk about the loss of school safety funding for three counselors. That's loss of... Did they reallocate money for that for like resource officers? Is that what happened here? That was their priority this year was school resource officers across the state. We did not apply for that grant for school resource officers. We asked for counselors for each of our sites. And so because other districts were asking for SROs,
023they received priority of that funding. But don't we have a... We do have an SRO that is provided by the city, yes. Yes. Okay. On the budget requirements, for the ESS. That $10,000 per student is that state funds or is that just generally out of our budget as well? Yeah, it's out of M&O. So that is a threshold that is set and basically year over year you have to maintain or increase per pupil. So if we have less ESS students, we could obviously drop our budgeted monies for that department. but at this point our threshold is set right about 10,400. So every new ESS student we get, there needs to be another $10,400 allocated out of our M&O budget to ESS specifically. The CTE funds. that is based on the students, not on the programs
024that we have, the different CTE programs? Right, and it's actually based on the district-wide students, which is an interesting calculation because... CTE is only grades 9 through 12. The formula that they use for supplanting divides your expenditures by your total population. So I believe in our case, the year that we started CTE programs was 2002, and we must have just started with a bang, and we had a lot. And so once you start a threshold... you can no longer decrease it. You have to maintain that threshold of your local spending. Even if our student population falls below that threshold? That's correct. Yeah, we have to maintain that threshold for CTE. And it's per pupil. So if your pupils fall, then you can spend less. But the other thing that happens is if you get more
025federal money, so if Cavett were to say, lucky you, we're going to double your funding. we have to spend a proportionate amount based on that formula out of M&O to keep up with that. So it can be a good thing to get more federal or non-M&O dollars that are targeted for CTE, but our budget has to do their part as well. So it's a double-edged sword. And so the amount total spent could be less, but the amount per pupil has to maintain the threshold. Thank you. ready for a motion i make a motion it's just discussion right oh no no the budget has to be approved right it has to yeah discussion was the instruction oh okay okay i'm sorry i make a motion to approve the um let's see the 2027 proposed budget again
026motions are made by vice president heath seconded by board member quindado all those in favor yes Moving on to item six, human resources. Discussion and possible action to approve the resignation of Anna Stevenson and to waive the $2,000 contract liquidation. So you guys are in receipt of Ms. Stevenson's resignation letter. Ms. Stevenson is in our audience today. And so she is asking for your approval to release her of her contract and then waive those liquidated damages. Does she wish to speak? She didn't put anything in for her. Oh, that's right. Okay. Generally, when we do this, it's for someone who has a pressing emergency of some kind. So that's how we've done it in the past. Does anyone else have any comments about it? The only other comment is, or at least someone understand that
027position. It's not filled or cannot be filled until it's vacated? Is that? Correct, yeah. So it's posted and we are actively seeking to fill that, but as of today, it is not filled. And that's your, the liquidated damages, that is what that is used for, for recruitment. And there's no guarantees that it'd be filled before? That is correct. We are actively seeking though. No comment. Does anyone else have a comment? No. I mean, if it was failed, there'd be a lot of, obviously, we would be able to work with her. But until it's failed, we can't really, at least that's my view. That's how we've done it. Yes. I make a motion to approve the resignation of Anna Stevenson, but not to waive the $2,000 contract liquidation. Motion's been made. Second. Motion has been made
028by Vice President Heath and seconded by Board Member Arredondo. All those in favor? Yes. All right, moving on to Item 7.1, Governing Board and or Superintendent's Report. Okay, just a few things. As Alyssa talked about tonight, the state has a budget proposal out there now that we're hoping will be approved. It is... Well, it's not an increase per se in the budget for us. We are the only department that has not been decreased in budget. So K-12 ed is the only one that did not receive a budget decrease. And so we are grateful for that. You know, they did put in. 200 million into school facilities another they kept the the two one time monies the free and reduced lunch and the district additional assistance and then we did receive the 2 percent inflation increase
029which we all have already passed on to our our staff. So kind of good news I would say you know we want to say that you know it's. positive in that regard. We have received our preliminary scores for state testing. We've seen some slight increases in some grade levels and not in some others, in which as we look at the data leads us to kind of our conclusion that it relies itself a lot on the people. And so we're excited because we will be implementing a new math resource that will be consistent K-8. We're hoping that the consistency of that makes it so that there isn't such a reliance on the individual person, right? That it is consistent across the board. And we'll be looking at the re-implementation or implementation with fidelity of an ELA
030curriculum that or resource that we have used as part of our curriculum and making sure that our teachers are using it and so that is going to be a big focus for us this year. We're continuing to focus on that early literacy and phonics and then from the teacher's side really focusing on planning and then and what students are doing in the classroom. We as a leadership team, we met the first week that we were on Christmas, Christmas, oh my gosh, summer, or I don't know where my brain is, summer break. And that's all district leadership, principals, assistant principals. And I sent you guys the overall staff survey report. And we looked at that and then it was broken down by individual sites for them to look at. And obviously we looked at trends across
031the board and really trying to focus in on our priorities for not just for this year, but as we develop a new strategic plan for then the next five years. There were concerns about communication, student behavior and compensation. And so we know that those three will be priorities for us to tackle in the next couple of years. We've just since that developed a walkthrough form that is strictly for classroom management and student behavior. And so our leadership teams can go in and they're just looking at what that student behavior is and how staff are responding that student behavior. And then how do we help that individual or either the student or the teacher to manage in their classroom. And so we'll be looking for trends across the board there. Don, I have a question. Do
032we have any sort of program that like K-3 or K-6 uses for discipline across the... So we haven't had anything as far as like for a discipline program. We have used with our teachers. It is not a program that we fully implement. We do use those as strategies for teachers that might be struggling in classroom management, but we also really wanna look at how we are. from a leadership perspective how we're dealing with student behavior and then how we're communicating it back to the teacher and and what that should look like and so we're trying to do a better job and trying to find a process that makes sense for all parties involved other than that there's just a lot going on summer school is going on we're feeding about 300 students for breakfast every
033day and another 400 450 for lunch every day which is great Kids are coming to summer school for intervention and enrichment. And, yeah, I mean, it's a short summer. Next week's the last week of summer school. So, already. So, we'll have staff back the second week of July. We will have an all-staff luncheon and... vendor fair that's provided by the chamber on July 16th, but we'll also do like kind of an all staff like an assembly type on the 16th as well and That'll be at 9 o'clock that morning would love for you all to attend if you would like to Yes at the pack. What was that the July 16th of Thursday? do the new teachers begin working and how long is their training they start the very first of that week so they
034have that whole first week the first two days are just new teachers and then returning teachers come the following two days and new for us this year is we'll be starting midweek we're starting on a wednesday And so we don't have as long with our people. We'll only have seven days versus nine days. But that also allows for, we're moving those two days to right after Christmas break so that there's some time for training and stuff as we come back from that semester break. And of course, we're checking in on the new teachers to make sure things are going well. Yeah. Do they have a specific program for that where they come like once a month or once a week? Curriculum is in the process of developing something for new teachers specifically, but once a
035month they'll be at different sites offering PD that teachers can attend after school and obviously we'll invite people as needed. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Anything new with the field house? Do we know when that? Alyssa, how much do we want? Might as well let them know. I feel confident about it. I mean, it just seems this year was one of the first years that the state of Arizona kind of relinquished the fire marshal duties to the municipalities. And I think there's still some difference in what the state's fire marshal has jurisdiction over and what the local fire marshal has jurisdiction over. So I think there's. There's some technicalities in that the state fire marshal has inspected the field house fire system and it works. It is technically not connected to a full water source,
036but it works and it has been tested. I believe the process then is that inspection goes to the city of Coolidge and that is taken into account when they do their final inspection to give you an occupancy certificate. I think there's not necessarily anything in plain English that says if the system has been tested and works but isn't connected to a source of water, and so there's some kind of gray area there. So I believe the city of Coolidge is willing to work with us and without being... like on the record has said our plan is good right we're do fire watch all is good we've submitted what we need to to the arizona water company they just want to make sure that the state fire marshal is in agreement with that and so they
037verbally said they're in agreement with it but now we just need to technically get them to agree to that perhaps directly to the city of coolidge versus through a middleman So I'm confident. I feel confident about it. I think we just need to get the correct parties to speak to each other. So we're trying to facilitate all of that and stay on top of it. But it will be connected to a source of water. Yes, it will. Yes. No, it's there. The pipes are there. We just have to have the okay from. It's three feet away. We don't own the infrastructure on Kenworthy. We just need to tap into it, and that process is just lengthy. to get their permission to do so from Arizona Water Company. But all of the calculations and the flow
038tests and the pressure tests and all of those things have been done to say that there, yes, in that water source there is enough water and there's enough pressure to have six sprinklers on at the same time as perhaps like another fire hydrant running. So all of those calculations have been done and everything is good. There's just a checklist that has to be done. So my hypothesis is we'll get it all sorted out and the next day Arizona Water Company will go, we're done and you can hook it up. But maybe not. Yeah, when I visited with the superintendent earlier this week, talked about some items that were brought up on the bond proposal, just making sure that we look at those elements, compare what's probably we should fund under the existing bonds. just to
039evaluate those to see what's, maybe we can move something from the proposed one to the current one. I'm not gonna get into identifying things here, but. No, but I think we can talk about it. We talked about safety, right? And metal detection systems and things like that. And so looking at, we do have those in the bond proposal for next time. We are looking at, I think there is another grant out there that we are looking at, but it is something that we could look at with what is left over in the current bond. So, but yeah, we'll kind of look at that and try to figure out and maybe we get a couple to pilot first at a couple of sites, you know, like CAP would be an easy one. They're a smaller population
040and kind of see what that looks like as that process. Or do we use it for big events on a campus, things like that. So yeah, we are definitely looking into that. I make a motion to adjourn. Motion to be made. Seconded, all those in favor? Yes. Have a good night.