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 Victoria Quintero. Governing Member George Arradondo. Here. We have quorum. We can all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. All right, moving on to the approval of the agenda. I make a motion to approve the agenda. Second. Motion's been made by Vice President Heath and seconded by Board Member... Arredondo, all those in favor? Yes. Yes. Yes, motion passes by all. Moving on to public participation. There's no public participation. All right. Moving on to the governing board organization discussion and possible approval of the draft 2025-2026 governing board meeting schedule. Any comments from the community, or is that normally the? It's been published. We haven't heard anything at all. It
002basically reflects what it's been the past couple of years. Mr. President, I move that we approve the 2025-2026 Governing Board Meeting Schedule as presented. Motion's been made by Board Member Arredondo. I'll second that. Seconded by Vice President Heath. All those in favor? Yes. Yes, motion passes by all. Moving on to the Consent Agenda. I make a motion to approve the Consent Agenda unless someone has questions. I second that motion. Motion's been made by Vice President Heath and seconded by Board Member Arredondo. All those in favor? Yes. Yes, motion passes by all. Moving on to instruction, the approval of course name change. So we just have a couple of course name changes. And Melanie, correct me if I'm wrong, just to align with Cavett and CAC, is that correct? So it just aligns our course names
003with their course names as those courses transfer in. Good, makes sense. Any other questions? Mr. President, I move that we approve the course name change as presented. I'll second that. Motion's been made by Board Member Garidondo, seconded by Vice President Heath. All those in favor? Yes. Yes, motion passes by all. Moving on to Human Resources, the discussion of possible approval of the certified and classified renewal list for 2025-2026. So this is being presented. The list of employees that you see are being offered a contract for the 25-26 school year with a 2% increase. I think we've been talking about that for some time now. If by chance the... state legislature approves a greater inflation increase or Prop 123 passes, we will make those adjustments as necessary. Ben, do you have anything else to add to
004that? anybody that obviously wasn't offered or if they decided to resign we still can get some of those because so because people people not sign those contracts, but getting this approved tonight allows us to issue those as early as 1159 Peter 1201 a.m. On Monday morning, so yeah, so the new state law says that we cannot issue a contract prior to March 15th Ms. Hodge, I was reading the paper that our average is, we're not at top, we're not at the bottom, we're kind of in the middle. Correct. How does this put this with... So as we looked at ours, there's a lot of factors that go into when they look at the average teacher salary within a district. And so when you have your high school districts tend to be paid at a lot
005higher than the elementary districts. We also had a very large influx of either brand new teachers this year. or teachers that were working on certification. So they came in at the very lowest, which skews your data just a little bit. And the other piece is that if you have teachers that leave mid-year, that enters in as one FTE when they look at your salary. So let's say they left three months into the school year, they might have only been paid. $12,000 or something right and so but that still goes in as one side so that you have an outlier in there that skews that a little bit as well This will put us I believe right at about the $60,000 mark as far as an average So we're not going to be, I mean, it's
006going to keep us up on the upper threshold versus falling behind. We're not going to be way up there, right, but we're going to be kind of mid, which is if you look at all of the ones that are the unified districts, we're all pretty close. Those high school districts tend to be a bit higher, and then your elementary districts tend to be at the bottom. Thank you. We've come a long way, haven't we? Oh, gosh. When we started. My Lord. 84 years ago. When I started teaching. Oh, my goodness. Was it 35,000? Oh, wow. No. When I started teaching, it was like 19 or 20,000. But you guys were on the board, I think. It was. It was like in the mid-30s, somewhere around there. Yes. Unbelievable. So this is wonderful. Yes. I just
007want to make sure we're working towards that upper tier. We are. I know the budget's an issue, but... And we're continuing to look at our administrative costs versus our classroom expenditures. And I believe that same article talked about that we were one of the only districts that actually increased our classroom expenditures and we reduced our administrative costs. I think you'll see that again when the next Auditor General comes out for this school year that we have actually reduced those even further and placed more money into the classrooms. And the article you're talking about was in the Arizona Republic. It was, yes. I read that also. And how are we compared to the gophers? We're right. I think they're like at, what, 59,000, 60,000, I want to say. Yeah, we're a couple of grand below that.
008Below that, yes. Okay, we're getting there. We are. Any other questions, comments? No. Mr. President, I move that we approve the certified and classified renewal list for 2025-2026. I'll second that. Motion's been made by board member Arredondo, seconded by vice president Heath. All those in favor? Yes. Yes, motion passes by all. Moving on to the approval to allow students who live within the boundaries of the Coolidge Unified School District and attend an online school outside of the district to participate in athletics for the 2025-2026 school year. So this is kind of a new thing. It is... It is generally understood that if you live within the district boundaries and the school you attend does not offer athletics, that you are allowed to participate in the public school athletics or extracurriculars if there is room for
009you to participate. First come, first serve with the students that actually attend the district, and then if there are openings, people outside the district could actually do that. So AIA has recommended, because there are a lot of online entities and with the influx of charter schools and things like that, that we actually put something that has been approved by you saying that if a student lives within our district boundaries. and they attend an online school that we do not currently run, that they could still be allowed to participate in athletics if we have room for them to participate. They would still have to adhere to possibly like a pay-to-play or something like that, depending on whether or not they utilize the empowerment scholarship or not. Okay? So it's something that we've always done. It's just
010making it formalized. Yeah, Mr. President. Yeah, I think this is great. Getting kids involved in anything is important, number one. And number two is making sure there's equity between our students and those that come in. And if we have that mechanism, that's convenient. Correct, yes. So as far as an eligibility standpoint, those students would have to submit grades as our students here have to submit the grading criteria as well. I make a motion to allow students who live within the boundaries of the Coolidge Unified School District and attend an online school outside of the district to participate in athletics for the 2025-2026 school year. A second. Motion's been made by Vice President. He's seconded by Board Member Quintero. All those in favor? Yes. Yes, motion passes by all. Moving on to the Governing Board and
011or Superintendent's report and updates. Well, we've made it to spring break. It feels like we just started, like we were just at fall break. You know, it goes so fast. But on the horizon we have state testing and I know our sites are gearing up for that. We will be continuing with our incentive program for students that get a proficiency in any of those state tests like just like we did last year. So we'll be publicizing that to our students. The other thing is and I don't know if you saw but the federal government has now started working on shutting down. supposedly the Department of Education, by laying off about 50% of the workforce. And so I just want to make sure that everybody understands that we are still obligated to provide free and appropriate
012education to every single student that enters our doors, right? So anything with special education, English language learners, any of our migrant homeless students, all of our traditional students, those services are not going away. The way they're funded, we don't know what that might look like next year, but we are still obligated to provide all of those services, regardless of what is happening at the federal level. So just to put people's minds at ease that those things are not going away. A question on the funding part. That's gonna be the next cycle. We won't know ramifications of that at this time. Correct, yeah. And in fact, the federal government has put that off. We generally will know by the end of March, especially with those title grants, we generally will know what they are. We will
013not know at this time what those are going to be because they're gonna be allocated obviously to the state and then the state will then allocate those out. That's all I have. Did anyone else say anything else about eighth grade promotion? Because I was not here last. Not a word. Not one single comment. No parents. In that same venue, though, I would like to make sure we have an idea. Things are going to be different for the. high school graduation. So that information being laid out or informed people? Yeah, we actually have a planning meeting coming up the first full week of April to work with our people. And once we have a solid plan, we will get that out as soon as we possibly can and make sure that everyone is notified well in
014advance as to what that will look like for high school graduation. Well, it should be really beneficial because we're giving them a lot more seating. Absolutely. But you know how it is with any type of change, right? So we want to make sure that we give people a lot of forewarning prior to. Yes. And allow them to give us some feedback on how we can implement that at the best we can. Mr. President, I just want to let Ms. Hodge know, appreciate all the update that she's been providing us throughout between meetings and sessions, the things that are going on in the community and how you're informing them. I appreciate all that. Yes, I agree. Agreed. Thank you. I know you probably feel bombarded sometimes and I don't ever expect a response. I just want
015to make sure that you all stay updated just in case you're asked. But we're reading them and we appreciate it. I know, I'm glad. The last thing that we want to do is to be blindsided. Absolutely. Not know something. Excellent. Good. And we know because we've been there and done that. We have, yes. It's really fun. You're doing a fantastic job. It's always nice, especially when I don't find you in my spam folder, but we're going to fix that. But yeah, thank you for all the updates. You're welcome. Thank you. Well, if there's nothing else, I make a motion to adjourn. Motion is made. I second it. Motion is made and seconded. All those in favor? Yes. Have a good evening, everyone. That has to be a record, folks. That is a record.