001We're going to begin by calling this public hearing to order. So I'm going to ask our board members to call to order. Matthew Patinsky. Karen Warner. Amy Carney. Mike Sharkey. Donna Lewis. So we'll ask Shannon to come on up and share with us where we are in the 24-25 expenditure. We'll turn the mic on. Members of the board, Dr. Menzel and guests, we are here tonight to do budget revision for 24-25 budget. We did the proposed and adopt budget back in June of last year. We were not required to do a revision in December, and so this is our final revision for the year where we are just coming back and lining things up with... where the budget really fell, where our ADM was really at, our student weights, and carry forward. Not a whole
002lot changed with this budget. Our weighted count decreased by 47.16. That's actually going to get, it's going to become less of a decrease. We learned earlier this week that score students had not been counted yet in, they're working with the county, but there's a glitch with that. And some of our students had not been counted in our ADMs. This is actually going to be a little bit better number for us. But with that, knowing that that's gonna change a little bit, our weighted student count was pretty close to what we projected. So we're happy about that. So just a decrease of 47. That changed our maintenance and operation budget by $342,581, so very small change there. Thankfully, we like to increase the M&O budget, not decrease it. Within capital, within the state allocation and our
003override dollars, we did carry forward $2.5 million more in that. We had some projects that didn't finish up by June 30th. Those monies rolled over, and so our carry forward was a little bit higher than what we originally estimated. Same thing with our state and federal grants. Again, when we did this in the spring, we don't know exactly how much we're gonna roll over in some of these cases, so that impacted it, and same with classroom site fund. Very small changes within this budget. Within the M&O, if you're thinking, well, wait a second, if we decreased in count, how did we increase within the M&O budget? So the weight count impacted us by about $211,000. M&O override went up a little bit, and then budget balance carried forward. We did not carry over as much
004as we anticipated. That made a big impact for us. But the state had approved some one-time funds that were not in there. The budget wasn't approved until after we had done our proposed budget. The state budget wasn't and you can't change between proposed and adopted you can't increase So there were some one-time dollars that we received for that about eight hundred and ninety five thousand So all of that mixed together increased our M&O budget by three hundred and forty two thousand Really not a whole lot of change between the budget this just lines up where our expenses are really falling Or where we anticipate them ending at throughout this fiscal year, but very small changes overall budget wise So with that I'll open it up for questions Thank You Shannon are there any questions or
005comments? All right seeing none Are there any from the public questions or comments on the budget revision Okay, seeing none, we'll go to number three, approval of the revised fiscal year expenditure budget. I'll make a move that we approve the revised fiscal year 24-25 expenditure budget. I'll second the motion. All those in favor? Aye. All right, it is unanimous. It passes 5-0. We are going to adjourn. The public hearing, and now I will call to order our regular open meeting. I'd like to ask for us to stand, please, for the Pledge of Allegiance. Ready, begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Once again, roll call, please. Matthew Patinsky.
006Karen Warner. Amy Carney Mike Sharkey and Donna Lewis We're gonna move for approval of the agenda, but we have a request to pull consent item 2 P T U V and W is that it from our board for pulling? Okay, I'd like to add the pulling and the moving of item s also under consent to move after public comments these are Hires that I think we want to show some respect for relative to the length of our meeting So we'll do that if if that's all right with everybody all right. I move to approve the agenda as amended second all those in favor And that passes five to zero Okay. Would you be so kind to read our meeting decorum? Citizens attending and or participating in Scottsdale Unified School District meetings, either in person, virtually,
007or telephonically, are required to observe the same rules of order and decorum applicable to members of the governing board and staff. Unauthorized remarks or demonstrations from members of the audience, yells, outbursts, and or other disruptions are not permitted. Thank you, Mr.. Sharkey all right. We are now ready for student and staff recognitions and celebrations Dr.. Mansell well good evening Dr.. Lewis vice president Sharkey members of the governing board our susd families friends school leaders teachers and staff Welcome to the final regular meeting of the susd governing board while school is still in session It's a privilege tonight to introduce you to and recognize the accomplishments of just some of the Scottsdale Unified School District's excelling students. They've embraced outstanding instruction from their teachers, not just this school year, but in the case of our seniors
008who will graduate next week throughout their educational journey with us. I'd like to ask our Assistant Superintendent of Elementary Instruction, Margaret Cerna, to lead off tonight's lineup. Thank you, Dr.. Menzel you caught me in the middle of a bite of cookie, okay? Um first of all thank you Dr.. Menzel and good evening president Lewis vice president Sharkey governing board members students parents friends and community at this time I'd like to invite sky Kavine and her teachers up from Yavapai You look beautiful come here Do you know that I know your teacher? She's my daughter-in-law. Okay, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Yavapai Elementary School student and budding artist, Sky Kavine. Her teachers, Catherine Lindsay and Alicia Cerner-Reed, if they are here, and Principal Kelly Perry. If you attended our Art Fest event in
009March, you may have seen this beautiful Arizona themed creation that Sky submitted to the annual Arizona Historical Society Postcard Design Contest for third graders to celebrate the state's birthday. It's really terrific and captures so much of what Arizona is known for. Non-stop landscapes, a beautiful sunset, and our official state plant, the saguaro cactus. Not only did it win the superintendent's blue ribbon at the art fest, but Skye's entry also has been chosen as one of the Historical Society's 2025 winners. Aside from this recognition, we're thinking Skye is pretty popular with her classmates right now because one of the things she won was a pizza party for her class. Even better, Skye's postcard design will be turned into a real postcard that will be for sale in the Arizona Historical Society gift shops. Congratulations, Skye. Here
010is a coin to recognize your accomplishment. and to recognize your achievement. And now I'm off to the Arizona Historical Society's gift shop to go buy my postcards. Congratulations. Bye. Say hi, Postcard. We're going to go out and take a picture. Congratulations, Skye. With artwork like that, we expect to see many more fantastic creations in the future. So now we're going to accelerate the time machine to this year's junior class, and that's when preparing for college studies starts getting serious. Last month, all of our SUSD 11th graders took the full ACT test for the first time, and at least in the case of the students whose names you see on the screen, the last time. These 12 students received perfect scores of 36 on their ACTs. Quite an amazing accomplishment. Let's give them a round of
011applause. You may want to remember their names. I suspect we'll be celebrating them again next year as they graduate as part of the class of 2026. As for this year's graduating class, the class of 25, our next screen, these three students have been announced as National Merit Scholarship winners, and we expect to learn of more winners in June and July. Meredith is one of just 830 seniors across the United States to receive a corporate-sponsored scholarship this year. Ashley and Gray are two out of 2,500 scholarship designees. These seniors rode to winning these prestigious scholarships began in the fall of their junior year when they took the PSAT National Merit Scholarship qualifying test. Their scores were among the highest in Arizona and represent less than 1% of the nation's class of 2025. Last September, they were
012named semifinalists and offered the opportunity to continue in the competition. In January, they became finalists. When the 2025 program closes in July, just under 7,000 high school seniors nationwide will have earned the title of Merit Scholar and receive a total of nearly 26 million in college scholarships. I am proud to report that at least three SDS students will be among them. Our SUSD class of 2025 is another amazing one. Every year's class seems to top the previous in one way or another. So it is with great pride that we congratulate the amazing graduating seniors who have been working so hard during their high school years to earn Arizona Department of Education diploma seals. As we continue to grow this program in our world languages, social studies, and fine arts areas, we're proud to recognize the
013229 recipients of the ADE Seal of Biliteracy. That's nearly doubled in the last four years. 115 recipients of the ADE Seal of Arts Proficiency, 81 recipients of the State Seal of Personal Finance, and a new category this year, two recipients of the State Seal of Civic Literacy. These students have taken their learning above and beyond what is expected of them to reach new heights in areas of particular interest to them and in which they may very well pursue college degrees and careers. Congratulations, Class of 2025, and deepest appreciation for your teachers and mentors who helped you earn these state steels that will be affixed to the diplomas you receive next week at graduation. Can we give a round of applause for our state steel winners? And just like the commercial, but wait, there's more. Dr.
014Dodds-Karen, our Director of Teaching and Learning, will come to the podium to tell us a bit more about a few more outstanding SUSD students. Thank you, Dr. Menzel. Good evening, President Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, members of our board, friends and colleagues. The end of each school year provides us with the opportunity to take in the breadth and the scope of what our students have been doing since the first bell of the new year rang back in August. The achievements are some are just beginning to be noted and others continue to grow. Such is the case with our first student who we will celebrate tonight, Chaparral High School junior Karina Kopekar. Is Karina here, Mr. Panty? Oh, she's wonderful. Come on up, Karina. I'd like to invite Karina to the podium, along with Principal Chaparral teachers
015or administrators who want to help to celebrate. Karina, you're welcome to join us as well. The outstanding Phoenix Youth Leader of the Year program recognizes and honors exceptional achievements by young people and enhances the perception of youth and raises community awareness of their positive contributions. Each year, 16 high school students are chosen as Phoenix City Council District winners, and Karina represents District 6. from the district winners two overall winners are announced each receiving an additional cash award and Karina is one of them It is Karina's unique blend of academics community service and public advocacy that brings her this award She has founded an organization when she was a freshman It's called my tasty table and it is to help families facing food insecurity understand how to eat healthily on a small budget She is also
016committed to collecting and disseminating books to disadvantaged children and children who are hospitalized through the group Loving Libraries. Her collection and distribution so far of 4,000 books around Arizona has brought her leadership opportunities at both the state and national level. I know it's kind of embarrassing when you hear all of this, isn't it? You should be proud. Okay. She loves working with kids from diverse backgrounds and has become an excellent public speaker in these roles and in leadership roles with Chaparral's mock trial and theater student clubs. She's just getting started. She is a junior. She has one more year to go as a Chaparral Firebird, and we can't wait to see what's next. Congratulations, Karina, for making us so proud. And this is a challenge coin for your excellence in SUSC. Thank you so much.
017We're proud of you. Yep, let it go. And you are going to take a photo, but Mr. Pantier can't leave just yet. So you can head off over to Emilio. I'm going to keep Mr. Pantier here because I'd like to welcome, if she's here, Lexi Gregory from Desert Mountain High School. Wonderful. Hi, Lexi. And I'd like to welcome Blake Bennett from Chaparral High School. And Mr. Andrews, if you can join as well. Joining Lexi and Blake are their principals, Mr. Pantier and Mr. Andrews. Every year, members of Congress receive applications from graduating seniors who have decided to pursue a university education by attending one of the nation's five military academies. The admissions process for the five U.S. service academies is extensive and very competitive. Roughly 12,000 students apply each year. The average acceptance rate is
018less than 20%. We are proud to announce that there are three members, two of whom are here this evening, Lexi Gregory of Desert Mountain High School, Blake Bennett of Chaparral High School, and Joshua Pettigrew from Saguaro High School. He's unable to be here tonight. Lexi, Blake, and Joshua know that they want to continue their learning, but they also want to give back. As part of their acceptance into their respective academies, Lexi to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Blake to the U.S. Naval Academy in West Point, New York. Excuse me, U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Excuse me, wrong branch. And Joshua to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. They have committed to five years of military service after college. Lexi has only been with us for two years, but
019in that time it has become clear in her choice of classes and activities. She is taking advanced placement classes and she is a student athlete. Blake has been an SUSD student since first grade. His leadership skills began emerging while he attended Sequoia Elementary. I believe you have a principal and a teacher here as well. He continued on at Kokopaw Middle School and then now at Chaparral, where he is also an AP scholar and a wrestler. He earned his Eagle Scout rank with a 62 volunteer 200 hour plus community service project while he was back at Sequoia. Joshua will graduate from Saguaro's Math and Science Academy. He has just completed nine advanced STEM courses and hundreds of hours in robotics. Josh is a talented musician and athlete. We applaud our students for their commitment to service
020wherever it takes them and we wish them the best. Congratulations, we are proud of you. Thank you Lexi and Blake for being willing to serve our country and best wishes on your next steps of your journey Now we turn to some school community celebrations And I'd like to invite to the podium assistant superintendent for educational services Leah Mitchell to tell us about them Thank you so much, Dr. Menzel. Good evening, President Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, and governing board members. You've been hearing about our terrific students for the past few minutes, but it's worth noting that supportive school communities, school administrations, educators, and staff who create the atmosphere in which our students achieve great things, it's all these people that contribute to that. I'm going to tell you about two of them in particular. Echo Canyon
021School and Saguaro High School. So would Echo Canyon Principal Kat Hughes, Assistant Principal Erin Cadera, and their proud team of Jaguars please join me at the podium. Oh I love it. Fantastic. All right, we have known for some time that Echo Canyon School is committed to its community of families and instilling thoughtful environmental learning into its programs. Its gardens are the setting for so many wonderful learning opportunities for students and involvement in the community with its ongoing Chef in the Garden program. It is the SUSD hub of the Blue Watermelon Project, which is spreading to other schools. Last year at about this time, it was the first SUSD school to earn Blue Zone certification as Scottsdale seeks to become a Blue Zones city. So it only follows that we celebrate Echo Canyon tonight as the
022recipient of a City of Scottsdale Sustainability Award. Recycling garden waste has been a longtime practice at the school. This year, it has created a new program, the Food Waste Futures. fellowship to identify and reduce school food waste since the installation of Mill bins at the beginning of the school year echo canyons preschool and pre-k classroom has saved a hundred and seventy pounds of food from landfills And its fourth and fifth grades have saved a hundred and twenty four pounds of food from landfills At the end of lunch, there is no food left on the cafeteria share table. It has either been eaten or collected for the mill bins, whose end product goes right back into the school's gardens, making them sustainable, pesticide-free producers of delicious and healthy fruits and vegetables. The entire school's student population
023is involved and invested in the school waste program's success, as you can see by their attendance this evening. So exciting to have you guys here. Principal Hughes and Echo Canyon, thank you for continuing to lead the way in our community with mindful and impactful work that continues to elevate SUSD in our community. Your ability to connect with students and their families to create long-term habits can positively impact Scottsdale for many years. Congratulations. All right, next up, another great celebration, Saguaro High School Principal Ochsinger, administrators, teachers, and staff, you guys are up next. All right, last week we learned that our Sabercat Nation had won the Arizona Republic and AZ Central's Best Public High School in the East Valley in their annual Best of the Desert competition. Yeah, let's give them a round of applause. These
024annual awards recognize top organizations and businesses in the Valley of the Sun in more than 180 categories Navajo took the title in the kids and education category SUSD's Suaro. Yeah, let's hear for Navajo SUSD's Saguaro High School was a finalist in that same public school category. Nominations were made in December. Both Saguaro and Navajo, one of last year's award winners, were named finalists and after online voting closed in February, winners were announced last Thursday. While it is well known in the SUSD community that Saguaro High School is an outstanding institution, educating at least two generations so far of Scottsdale students, now everyone in the Valley is taking measure of Saguaro and has the opportunity to explore the many diverse learning opportunities it offers nearly 1,300 students. From the Scottsdale Math and Science Academy to award-winning
025fine arts, robotics, athletics, and nationally recognized teachers, Saguaro High School produces thoughtful, global-centric, innovative students who, when they graduate, are ready to take on the world and contribute to making it better. And one of the best measures of a school is that its graduates come back to visit, and Sabercats do. That's the truth. Congratulations, Principal Oxinger, teachers, staff on this recognition, and thank you so much for everything you do for your community, your students, and for being best in the Valley. Congratulations, Saguaro. We know that you have a special thing going on on your campus. So nice to be recognized for that, and we also want to celebrate Echo Canyon and their award for sustainability. To close out tonight's celebration, I would like to invite Josh Friedman, our Safety and Security Director, to come to
026the podium. Josh. Thank you, Dr.. Menzel and good evening governing board members Among the many members of the Scottsdale Unified School District's 29 school campuses are our school resource officers our SROs are our eyes ears and watchful protectors We trust them to look after our students and staff and be our guides in keeping our campuses and the occupants safe in susd We are indeed fortunate to have trained professional SROs at our high schools and middle schools. Their leader is a consummate law enforcement professional, Sergeant Kevin Bingham, who was a previous SRO before becoming this supervisor. Sergeant Bingham, will you please join me at the podium? Sergeant Bingham I, Supervisor of the Year, so I'm going to Disneyland to celebrate just like the Super Bowl MVPs do. Just because his exemplary supervisor abilities, he's basically been
027in my corner ever since I started SRO. Actually, he was my first sergeant on field training, and he's really just been there the whole time for me. Great boss, great supervisor. Sergeant Bingham is great for a few reasons. One, he is a great leader. Sergeant Bingham. Congratulations on Supervisor of the Year. I just want to say thank you for always taking care of us on the school resource unit, supporting us, leading us, and taking care of us. Rocket wants to say thank you for the Supervisor of the Year quality neck scratches and belly rubs. Congratulations. Sergeant Bingham, I just want to say congratulations. There's often two types of bosses and leaders, right? And I think of that picture of a group of people pulling a heavy load, and there's the boss sitting on top of
028the load yelling for them to pull harder. You, my friend, are absolutely the leader that goes into the front of the line and pulls with your people. So thank you for everything you do. You truly are the supervisor of the year. Two, he's always there for all of us for our after school activities. Hey Sarge, thank you for your leadership, your mentorship. I know everyone on the unit really appreciates everything you do for us. Thank you. Congratulations. As your angry and bitter employee, thank you for putting up with my shh. There's been times where, as an SRO, you're so like doing solo stuff. Really, you don't have another officer to come help you out, and so I always rely on him on phone calls. You are the best boss that I've ever had. You've earned
029this. Congratulations. There was an incident with a kid who brought a knife to school and after the situation was all okay, he basically was like, okay, like what if he did this? Or what if he did this? So it just made you think a lot. Three, helping us become lifelong learners, giving us the education and training that we want. Sergeant Bingham, you're a great boss. You really deserve this award and super happy for you. Four, need our unit say anymore. So we wanted to mention your Uniform Supervisor of the Year, and we at SUSD appreciate it. We were able to get Lieutenant Cody Bingham, your supervisor here, or Lieutenant Cody Dykeman and Officer David Steele. We are pleased to have this opportunity, Sergeant Bingham, to recognize you for your hard work and leadership of SUSD's
030SRO team. Your continued partnership in order to ensure our campuses are safe, our students and visitors are safe. Please accept this SUSD challenge coin and our deepest gratitude for your and your team's work with our students and our schools. Congratulations, Sergeant Bingham. I'm quite confident we have the best SRO team in the state and probably the best in the nation. Thank you for your leadership. It makes a difference for our students. We're truly grateful. That concludes our celebrations this evening. Thank you. Proud of everybody. This leads us to our special presentation on Student Advisory Board for 2425. This is a presentation on Arcadia High School, Chaparral High School, Coronado High School, Desert Mountain High School, Saguaro High School, Scottsdale Online. Hello, everyone. My name is Victoria Bishwakanti. I'm the president of the Student Advisory Board.
031I've got to figure out how to click through the slides. So tonight we're going over a brief introduction and then the wildly important goals and the progress we've made on them. So yeah, I'm the president. Our president-elect is Fiona Riley. She goes to Saguaro. She's amazing. She's going to be president next year. Arcadia Senator Avery Liu, Desert Mountain High School Harper Helfman, Saguaro, Brick Schultz, Chaparral, Claire Jo, Coronado, Nayim Pacheco. So the subcommittees work with our district leadership and are tasked with coming up with wildly important goals and that was something that was new this year. The leader of the academic excellence committee is Dr. Dodds-Kirin, the college and career readiness, Amy Downs, technology and communication, Dr. Watt and Christine Harrington, climate and culture, Ms. Cron, safety and security, Mr. Friedman and facility committee, Mr.
032Roller, which is a new committee and we're really excited. I'm excited about that one. Okay, so for Academic Excellence, their goal was to create promotional materials to highlight the day in the life of a high school student, work in partnership with Teaching and Learning and the Communication Department to create videos that shadow students and include student reviews and course offerings. So, update, they've met with a cinematographer to brainstorm logistics of creating digital content. They've developed criteria that showcases academic excellence, student success, and overall dynamic programming. And they're in progress with meeting with principals to determine video creation, which is very exciting. So next year, they hope to push out promotional material and help promote interest in academic life in SUSD. I think they also wanted to encourage students who were considering whether to go to
033SUSD or not to have an idea of what it looks like to be a Scottsdale student. College and career readiness, I'm sorry, by May of 2025, increase the number of ECAP components to be done at high schools during the school day rather than on a student's own time for resume writing, internship investigations, Scottsdale area alumni chats with recent graduates for post-secondary exploration, and student presentations to other students on what CTE programs and like EVIT are like during the day. So they've met with administrators. about finding time during the day for ECAP activities. Career Development Day is a possible solution for a two-period block, kind of like an assembly or just a block in the day, to be allowed to begin activities of interest on early release days. Students will be designing a day to invite
034career coaches from Scottsdale Civic Center Library and possibly the Rotary Club to assist students at lunchtime at school with essay writing and career matching activities in the college and career readiness platform. So overall, again, they've met with the leaders. and they're working to implement more of those programs into the school day. The climate and culture wildly important goal is that they'll create and participate in three podcasts by the end of the school year to share students' favorable experiences in SUSD, and I think they just filmed one this past Friday. But I know for sure they've published a podcast with Leon and Fiona from Saguaro, and they've gathered ideas for... further podcasts, working with creators and students to find times, overall progress, more student voices on the SUSD spotlight, which is very exciting. Okay, the widely
035important goal for technology and communication is to increase the availability of resources for students regarding how to use AI properly in a classroom environment. So I know they've made a Google Classroom, and they're trying to share resources that way. And they've also reviewed options for making learning resources and activities available and what the best ones are. So they actually shared that Google Classroom on National AI Awareness Day, which is very fitting. And they're hoping for that Google Classroom to be used and shared by more and more students, especially going into next year. Okay, so I'm on the safety and security committee and our goal is to implement new strategies to reduce vaping on campus because it's a very important and pertinent issue as well as having a quantitative decrease in vaping incidents just measured through
036the number of incident reports on vaping each year. So one thing we're doing right now is working towards creating a video that tells real stories of vaping from SUSD student perspectives. We want to get across to students the dangers vaping poses for their lungs, concerns regarding addiction, what truly is in a vape, and the lack of regulation on vapes. The message to students is that you're not an exception. You're not invincible. You're not able to escape addiction as much as one might like to. So we're working to get in touch with guidance counselors and social workers to connect students upon having a vaping incident to them rather than just... punishing them to hopefully get the help that they need. And as we've said before, it's a complex issue. We know we can't just solve it
037easily, but we're trying to work on it and make that a focus in the middle schools and high schools. And we think that by addressing it early in the middle schools, it can help prevent the issue from just getting out of control. Finally, facilities committee. So survey high school students regarding facilities improvement that can be used in consideration for a future bond. In addition, establish criteria to implement art in school bathrooms in order to reduce vandalism on school property, which is a real fun idea that we had during a meeting and then it quickly became a committee. So they're working on a survey for high school students. process of establishing criteria for bathroom enhancement and working on implementation of art over the summer to reduce vandalism. I think there had been some thought of either
038having a contest or having honor societies like National Art Honors like create art and then so it's SUSD student art being displayed in the bathrooms. Okay thank you for your time it's been a wonderful year of SAB and we're having our final meeting tomorrow. Thank you. So appreciate your leadership systemically on top of your studies. That was amazing. All right, Dr. Menzel, superintendent's comments, please. Thank you, Victoria. Extra proud because she shared this with no one. I mean, they knew that it was here, but she came tonight while everyone else is busy with the end-of-year things, and I know you have a lot to do, so truly grateful that you took the time to be here to share this update. So there are a number of things that we want to highlight since our last
039meeting. The first is that we celebrated 50 years of educational excellence at Cherokee Elementary on April 30th, and it was a fantastic event where the students put on an amazing performance celebrating education at Cherokee over the decades, and it was truly a special treat to be there. We also celebrated last week Sequoia Elementary becoming our fifth Blue Zone certified school. Congratulations, Veronica, to you and your team. And we've learned recently that SUSD, for the fifth consecutive year, has been named a Best Community for Music Education by the NAM Foundation. So we're truly grateful for all the work of our educators that continue to make these things possible. So let's give them a round of applause. On Monday, we hosted two different legislators for visits to our schools. Representative Nancy Gutierrez came to Cherokee to revisit
040her old stopping ground. She did her student teaching and first two years of teaching at Cherokee. Looks much different now. Thank you, Principal Chantler, for giving her a tour of your amazing facility. And later that morning, Representative Connolly, who is here with us, I see her in the back, came and visited Coronado. We always appreciate the chance to... highlight the great work happening at Scottsdale Unified School District for our elected officials and want to thank them for taking the time out of their schedules to join us. Last night we had the third and final district athletic banquet and it was a joy to celebrate the accomplishments of our student athletes and also to recognize the 72 years of service by Nathan Slater, 31 years, and Barb Collage, 41 years, serving SUSD. And both of them
041are legacy students. They came up entirely through our system, graduated. Nathan's a Don and Barb is a Sabercat. They graduated from our system and then provided amazing support throughout their careers. And so it was just a joy to celebrate them. This is a busy week and a busy end of the school year. Tomorrow night at Saguaro High School, the Scottsdale Math and Science Academy will conduct its honor ceremony. Thursday evening, Scottsdale Online Learning will hold its graduation ceremony. On Friday, we have two events. The first is Desert Mountain High School's award ceremony for the International Baccalaureate graduates, and we'll also be having our second Native American student convocation held at Saguaro High School. There are so many other celebrations going on that I can't mention them all, but the biggest of them is next Thursday
042on the 22nd, when all five of our high schools will be celebrating the graduating seniors from the class of 2025. For those who are going to be there in person, hopefully the temperatures are comfortable, but we will also offer live stream opportunities for those who can't make it. We want to wish our... Class of 2025, well, and hope that all of you who are celebrating with our graduates have an amazing time. It's a daunting calendar to end the school year, but worth the pomp and circumstance, and we're happy to see all of the great things happening in Scottsdale. Oh, what a wonderful time of year and tiring for everybody, but also just joyous. Thank you, Dr. Menzel. We'll move to public comments. In compliance with open meeting law, the governing board may not discuss or
043take action tonight on any matters raised during public comments that are not on the agenda. However, the governing board members may respond to direct criticism, ask staff to review a matter, or that a matter be placed on a future agenda. Public comments will be conducted in accordance with policy BEDH. As a reminder, each speaker will have two minutes. The screen will indicate the time. Please be prepared to close your comments and relinquish the floor at the conclusion of your time. The board asks that each speaker please introduce yourself by stating your name and whether you live within our school district for clarity of the record. We thank you for your time. and attendance here this evening and your cooperation in following meeting decorum and protocols. I will read the name of the speaker. When you
044hear your name, could you please come up to the podium? I will read the name of the next speaker to be ready on deck. Once you start speaking, your time will start. We have 18 speakers tonight, so we'll try to keep our pace efficient in terms of two minutes. So Mike Bengert will be first, followed by Suzanne Winder. My name is Mike Bangor. I live in the district. National Geographic World History Voyages of Exploration textbook advocates every left-wing progressive idea as history without context or mentioning any opposing view. The book does not teach history. Instead, it teaches students to become activists in support of radical and controversial ideas. An example is in the teacher's edition of the textbook, which says to have students plan a movement. The teacher is to direct students to plan a
045protest, social media campaign, or other movement in support of current civil rights issue. Suggestions include transgender rights, religious freedom, and criminal rights. The teacher's edition also tells students to develop a plan for an NGO, tells the students to act and contact an NGO to participate in its activities. They present income inequality, food insecurity, women's rights, and desperate availability of healthcare as history rather than what they are, left-wing, progressive social issues that in their view require protests and political actions to correct. The book doesn't present current events in a fair and balanced approach. SUSD says they are creating critical thinkers, yet by only presenting one side of an issue, there isn't an opportunity for any critical thinking to take place. The whole discussion of the book about climate change... Yeah, mine's working now. It did flash,
046though, when his went off. The green button? Testing? Okay, we're back on. How about you? All right. Will you put his time back at one minute, ten seconds, please? About right here. Okay. One minute, ten seconds, please. Wherever that is. I'll time it. Go ahead. Okay. The book doesn't present current issues in a fair and balanced approach. SUSC says they are creating critical thinkers yet by only presenting one side of an issue. There isn't an opportunity for any critical thinking to take place. The whole discussion in the book about climate change presents it as settled fact when that is far from the case. The book asks why democracy has become so fragile, citing the 2008 recession as a turning point in losing faith in democracy. It says some believe economic success is not contingent on
047democracy, citing China as proof. But what do others say? This shows a lack of complete understanding of how democratic freedoms are the cornerstone of everyone having an opportunity for economic success and not just a few leaders. How does any of this foster critical thinking? It doesn't. This book and the rest of the curriculum being proposed do not belong in SUSD and should be rejected by the government. Board. Thank you. Susan Winder and Jill Hill, if you'll be ready. My name is Susan Winder and I do not live in the district I live in Paradise Valley, but my grandson goes to Chaparral and my granddaughter graduated from Chaparral. Good evening Dr. Menzel and board members. I agree with everything the gentleman said but I'm going to take a little different approach. I just want to share
048a few comments regarding the social studies curriculum you are considering. You have a study committee looking at why SUSD is losing enrollment. When parents were asked why they had left SUSD one of the answers was curriculum. So if you want more of what you've got continue to do what you do if you adopt this curriculum you will cause Enrollment to leave susd. I promise you we voted for you. You didn't vote for us You work for us. We do not work for you. These are our kids. They are not yours Most parents are not going to support this curriculum. If you don't believe me, then hire a company to do a survey of parents. I say hire a company because I don't trust you to do your own. Why would any school district adopt a
049curriculum that caused this amount of disagreement with it that includes total disapproval of the police? It is because you want to show the power. It isn't because you want the best for the students. Finally, with all due respect, Dr. Menzel is one of the most charming people I have ever met, but, and it is a big but, his thinking and beliefs are outrageous and create conflict within the school system. If you want to save SUSD, hire a new superintendent. Thank you. Jill Hill, followed by Allison Klatnia. Well, we'll go with Jim. Jim, I'm sorry. I have L's, but it's M. I see it. Thank you, Jim. That's okay. Jim Hill. Hi, my name is Jim Hill. I do live within the district boundaries. I'm a retired Scottsdale police detective. I'm the president of the Maricopa
050County College's Police Officers Association, and I'm a doctoral candidate in education. I was sent screenshots of the proposed social studies text, and I was appalled. This is nothing but anti-police propaganda was being proposed. It's poorly sourced, not researched well, and if I turn something in like this or a student turned it in to me, I would fail them because it's innuendo and half-truths. If they're proposing that this is some kind of historical document, it was five years ago that they may have had the cusp of truth to it. But now that we've actually investigated it, we know it's all lies. They reference cases like George Floyd and Michael Brown. They go so far as to even say, hands up, don't shoot, which is one of the most destructive lies ever perpetrated on the American public
051because it wasn't true. The DOJ proved it wasn't true. It calls our criminal justice system racist. Well, the foundational work done on that was a Florida state professor. He had to retract six of his studies because he falsified the data. that showed this work that they were basing it on. In the meantime, there was a Harvard professor who did work that showed there was no racial bias in police shootings, and he was vilified. But there's no mention of that. They called the 2020 riots mostly peaceful. There were $1 to $2 billion in damage done. There were 25 deaths and 60,000 police officers injured from assaults. This isn't right what you're doing is you're setting up these kids to see us as the enemy if you go forward with this social studies program I'm glad you
052honored sergeant Bingham. He's a great guy because I'll tell you why when he was officer Bingham We rode together and we worked this area So if you care about the police officers like you say you do don't approve this Allison followed by Cindy Hill Good evening. My name is Allison Klotnia. I'm a 25-year resident of this district, and my husband and I raised two children in SUSD schools. I'm grateful to the governing board for the efforts and support and the welcome that they have for community feedback. Tonight, I'm calling for accountability and oversight. Oversight means monitoring academic performance, ensuring curriculum aligns with state and federal standards, and supporting our district's goals to be a top choice for families. As a community member, I reviewed the social studies curriculum options thoroughly. I found in the Sabbath
053text troubling propaganda, half-truths, and omissions. Key issues included negative portrayal of law enforcement misrepresenting George Floyd's case by omitting his criminal history, the lethal drugs in his system likely contributing to his death. Glorification of the BLM movement, falsely claiming black men are more likely to die at the hands of racist police despite data showing differently. Misleading lessons suggesting sex lacks definitive science and promoting LGBTQIA safe spaces with assignments to research their cultural implications. This isn't serious education. This won't attract families to this district. I urge the board to vote no on this curriculum for the reasons shared tonight. If approved, I will file claims with the Arizona and the US Department of Education. So please, prioritize students and families. Please vote no. Thank you. Cindy Hill, followed by Priscilla Moore. Good evening. My name is
054Cindy Hill, and I am the president of many different organizations in our community. I'm a community leader, and I'm the president of Arizona Law Enforcement Outreach and Support. But most importantly, I'm a police wife, and as you have met, my husband, for 37 years. It is very important for me to be here tonight because I have stood by my husband all those years as he's put his life on the line for strangers who will never know his name. I have rushed to the hospital when he's been injured. I've helped him through countless surgeries because of his job and witnessed the lasting effects of cumulative physical and emotional trauma from his service. And now I stand beside him again here. Because this district is considering a curriculum that paints police officers as oppressors rather than recognizing
055their courage, their sacrifice, and their humanity. It focuses on controversial cases and divisive narratives while ignoring the over 60,000 officers that were assaulted during the 2020 riots. Officers who were protecting their communities, including Scottsdale. This isn't education, it's indoctrination. It tells children that the men and women who protect them are part of the problem. That's not just wrong, it's dangerous. To every parent who supports law enforcement, if this curriculum is adopted, ask yourself, is this the right environment for your child? No student should be subjected to anti-police propaganda under the guise of education. And I would just like to say, That this week is National Police Week and tonight. They're doing the candlelight memorial for our fellow officers Thank you Priscilla Moore followed by Lisa Erickson. Good evening. Oh, do I turn it on is
056it on? Good evening board members and audience I'm Priscilla Moore a Scottsdale parent too and a community member of Scottsdale Urging you to vote against adopting the Savas US history curriculum The Savas curriculum has misread its audience This program's negative tone clear bias and divisive content risk alienating our bright empathetic inspired thoughtful, clear thinking, analytical, and problem-solving student body. Most concerning is its anti-law enforcement rhetoric and subtle calls to violence like the March March music video in the Hook and Inspire online supplement, which includes a notable lyric such as, print yourself a weapon and take it to the gun range. While one board member got back to me and he countered that students would only access this through the teacher because it's in the teacher supplementary materials, why allow access to material inciting violence, gun
057violence in this case, at all? Even a hint of such content is unacceptable and likely unprotected by the First Amendment. I ask you to reject the SAVIS curriculum and choose a textbook that respects challenges and inspires our students. I'm happy to assist. Thank you. Thank you, Priscilla. Lisa Erickson, followed by Karen Martinson. Hello, I'm Lisa Erickson. We live in Paradise Valley. Our daughter, Kayla Battelle, was in Saguaro from, graduated in 2020. I'm here speaking for 116 students, alum, and parents who have asked me to read the letter of their petition that they had sent in. 116 and growing. We the undersigned members of the SUSD community write to express our strong support for the proposed social sciences curriculum. This curriculum is a product of a rigorous review by the Social Science Curriculum Adoption Committee composed
058of dedicated educators and community representatives who volunteered many hours to ensure a thorough and impartial evaluation. The committee used approved rubrics and adhered to state standards to carefully select the materials that encourage critical thinking by presenting a variety of perspectives on history. In recent weeks, concerns have been raised by a vocal minority of individuals who oppose this curriculum. These objections misrepresent the content and intent of the proposed materials. Such opposition risks depriving our students of a well-rounded, factually accurate education that fosters critical thinking and a deeper understanding of the world. We urge the SUSD board to resist pressure from those seeking to impose fear-based narratives on our district. Now more than ever it is vital to provide students with a comprehensive education rooted in trust and fairness. The adoption of this curriculum is a critical
059step in ensuring that all SUSD students receive the education they deserve. Thank you for your commitment to our students and our community. We hope you will consider this letter and the accompanying signatures as a clear demonstration of widespread support for the proposed curriculum. This document was put together by a student. Everyone who has signed is either a student or an alum or a parent of a student. Thank you. Karen Martinson, followed by Stephen Banas. Hi, thank you so much. I am an SUSD parent. My son attends Saguaro High School. Oh, sorry. Okay. My son attends Saguaro High School. I'm an SUSD parent. Again, like everyone here, I oppose the curriculum that you are planning to adopt tonight or considering adopting for a number of reasons. We've heard people talk about Black Lives Matter. I don't
060want my son learning about that. It was... Nothing nonviolent about it. It's a lot of destruction. It's anti-law enforcement. I don't want that in the school system as well. But some of the other reasons that I don't want the curriculum is because it blurs the truth. It mixes truth with lies. And it doesn't help our students grow at all. In fact, what it does is it conditions them. It conditions them to think one way and to... have a certain conclusion because these opinions are heavily pushed in a curriculum if you read through it. It kind of reminds me of something called the Willie Lynch syndrome or mentality. So this was something that was used historically years ago to control a group of people by forcing them against each other by making them hate themselves. I
061believe curriculum like this is designed to do the same thing. It's not going to help our students in class. In fact, it's going to make them all very uncomfortable and pull them apart. The other problem that I find with this is that... Later in life, when you develop that type of Willie Lynch mentality, you see enemies in everyone who don't even exist. And so that makes you have a colored lens throughout your life, which means now you don't see yourself a certain way, you don't see everyone a certain way, and you limit your potential. Our students deserve so much more than that. They deserve a curriculum that's going to help them think and become leaders. innovators of tomorrow, not politicized soldiers. Thank you, Karen. Stephen Banas, followed by Graham Harcreek. Hello, board members. My name
062is Stephen Banas. I am a parent of two students here in SUSD. I hope you'll keep students at the center of your decisions as you make considering the social studies curriculum. The committee developed its recommendations through an inclusive and thoughtful process. Our students deserve a curriculum chosen through a fair system that is not swayed by personal or political beliefs. The curriculum should be adopted as was recommended by the committee. I think that it will be best for our students to give them the education they deserve here in Scottsdale. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. Graham Arnick, followed by Ryssel Langbecker. Good evening, Dr. Menzel and the board. I live in the boundaries of SUSD. I'm a native of Scottsdale and a graduate of Barrett at ASU, class of 2023. I'm here in opposition to the proposed
063American history curriculum. I agree with the comments made, so I'll focus on other points. Nationwide civic education is decreasing. In 2022, 31% of eighth graders nationwide had below basic knowledge of civics, which is unacceptable. This textbook focuses more on preferred narratives, demonizing patriotism and police while promoting climate change and LGBTQIA plus communities, both of which, the latter, have exacerbated mental health problems of young people. These ideas failed by popular vote last November. We must ensure our students understand the foundations of our incredible republic. This curriculum would accelerate the exodus of students from the SUSD schools. About 45% of Scottsdale students currently circumvent public education, opting to use ESA vouchers according to the Common Sense Institute study released this year. I'm a product of private schools, Brophy, Class of 2018, and I'm grateful that I am.
064Finally, this textbook is a waste of money to the tune of $65,000. Thoughtful teachers, a school board worth its salt, could utilize rich primary sources from our 250-year history to create engrossing curriculum instead of watering down or creating an overt political hit job of our history. I'd be happy to lend my honors thesis, which I sent to Mike Sharkey. Entirely free of charge it contains the best publicly available hits of our founding documents and primary sources including democracy in America by Alexis Tocqueville declaration of independence and Foundational speeches from presidents and more if you vote down this textbook I'd be willing to revamp my entire syllabus free of charge for entire school year saving taxpayers six Sorry sixty five thousand dollars. Thank you for your consideration Thank You Graham very so long Becker Lang Becker
065Hello, good afternoon. My name is Risa Linebecker. I am parents of a, my daughter is in a Chaparral High School. She is graduating this year. But I have been, I'm going to focus on another side, what the majority of people have said. I am against this Sabbath book too. I've been in a committee twice. So I've been doing this process twice. My problem with this book is very biased. And I like a lot one of my daughter's teachers who is from government and microeconomy say, my students will never know in what political side of the aisle I am. And that's the way they should be. And this book is not showing that. This book is completely on one side. And it should be a way to debate. It should be a way to the students
066to figure out the facts, not us to give it to them. Okay? The book should be just a pattern. And the pattern always should be in the middle of the road. Every coin has two sides. And they have two sides because that's a probability. That's simple. Okay? So I think we should try to make our schools more... is students to trying to make them think. I don't want my kid, you see my skin color, you see my way to talk, I am didn't born here, I didn't went to school here. But I think we are trying to make them to think just like us, the adult, and not like them to take their own decisions. So I please vote no in these books. Thank you. Thank you, Rizal. Sharon Wathers. Followed by Jill Dunican. Good
067evening, governing board. I'd like to thank Dr. Kimberly Dodds-Karen and her team for welcoming me four times to review the curriculum and attending two meetings of the social sciences curriculum adoption committee. My name is Sharon Walter. As he said, I graduated from Chaparral in 1986. In my junior year, I became an American citizen. My daughter also graduated from Chaparral in 2021. I'm very loyal to this country for providing my family with safe haven after fleeing political unrest. Our family has thrived here in part due to my excellent education that I got in SUSD. I come to you today looking for parents, concerned community. members, teachers, administration to be allies in supporting a return to reason for the building up of future Scottsdale citizens. Our high school students deserve textbooks that promote civil discourse on opposing
068issues. This is founded in tackling the debate between relativism and objective truth. This is founded, those create the chasm in the debate on most issues covered in the recommended textbooks. This was not what I saw in reviewing the final textbook recommendations per my public review feedback that's available to you and the community. Consequently, I do not support the textbook finalists. With the last social sciences textbook update in 2006, my inquiry into poor... the poor state of our social sciences curriculum began in 2019. It reached a crescendo in March 19, 2021 in response from the social studies department chair and senior government teacher. The response was a concern that my daughter was using online textbooks from another school district and objectionable supplemental curriculum. She said, quote, Hi, Sharon. Our book is so old that it's not
069available in an online version. So sorry. Thank you so much for your comment and your participation. Jill Dunican followed by Jan Volkiel. Good evening. I'm a parent with two students in Scottsdale Unified, and I urge you to vote no on the social sciences curriculum. A world-class education must be rooted in truth. Our children deserve lessons that prepare them for success, not curriculum that pushes ideological narratives as fact. The proposed curriculum teaches that children can change their sex or that they can be neither male nor female, that police are inherently harmful, and that America is systemically racist. These distortions will divide students, erode trust in our institutions, and undermine our shared values. Superintendent Menzel signed the U.S. Department of Education's No DEI Pledge, yet this curriculum is filled with DEI-driven themes. Approving it jeopardizes federal funding
070and contradicts our district's stated commitments. The current AP Psychology curriculum, which includes gender identity lessons, is currently under district review. Spending taxpayer dollars on new gender identity lessons before this review is complete is irresponsible. For the future of our students and for the integrity of education, I urge you to vote no, and I ask this board to form a new committee with notification to all parents for an opportunity to participate. I believe it was stated that some board members did not even know this committee was being formed. So let's be honest, open, and transparent and give the community an opportunity to participate. Thank you. Thank you, Jill. Jan Volkel, followed by Peter Cerciara. Good evening. My name is Jan Volkl. I am the parent of two Chaparral graduates and I live in the district. I
071had different comments prepared, but after listening, I'm going to get straight to the point. I urge you to adopt this curriculum. I spent hours looking through the curriculum as best I could for the on-level U.S. history curriculum textbook. And in the few hours that I could get through, because it's more than a thousand pages, I look to see is there balance. I look to see are we covering important historical events, people, processes in these textbooks. And is it messy? Yes. Is it uncomfortable? Yes. You may not like the fact that George Floyd is brought up, but Derek Chauvin is serving time for murder. So if you have a problem with that being discussed and if that is somehow anti-police, then I don't know what to tell you. We need to tell the truth about events
072that inform what happens in our politics, in our religious life, in our civic life, and we need to say the truth out loud, be honest about it, and if we personally have a problem with it, that... is just what it is. We can't possibly have a curriculum where everyone personally feels that it's in line with their own values, beliefs, whatever. So as I look through, I found that it met the state standards. I found that the teachers have the ability to assign projects, additional reading, for example, on climate change. look at what is the cost benefit analysis of green energy? What's the cost benefit analysis of fossil fuels? There are opportunities to look at both sides. So I think people are being disingenuous tonight and I urge you to adopt this curriculum. Thank you. Thank
073you, Jan. Peter Sorciera and Emmy Cardella. Followed by. Thank you. My name is Pete Cerchiara. I'm a district resident for 32 plus years. My children have gone to both private and public schools here. I'm disappointed that after all of that positive information that we received earlier tonight from all the teams, all the students, and the leaders here, that I have to address this direction and negative approach to the curriculum work that has been done by the team. I'm going to read you a letter I sent to you people. And that'll be my statement. Dear board members, as parents of two children who have completed both public and private education in Scottsdale and Phoenix, we believe it is essential for the school and the board administration to follow the time-honored curriculum adoption process. The district and
074the curriculum committee have done their work with care, and now it is the board's responsibility to approve the work of the curriculum committee. Providing a comprehensive curriculum does not cherry-pick historical events is vital to what we call education. Intentionally eliminating parts of our history is not teaching history, but crafting fictional stories that mislead our children and prevent our children from learning from the mistakes of the past. Our students deserve a quality curriculum that includes the rich, essential facts in the reality of our true history and avoids future embarrassment of our children when they find out they are uneducated. Thank you. Thank you. Emmy Cardella, followed by Francesca Ritz. Good evening, Governing Board, Dr. Menzel, and Ms. Gladys. Earlier this month, I attended the study session that you all held on enrollment, and it was wonderful.
075Thank you for doing that. I'm very encouraged by the new board members taking up this issue. It's been apparent for the past decade the trajectory we're on and that we have facing us over the next decade. just declining school-aid children. We've seen the districts around us have to make very tough decisions. Our neighbor Paradise Valley's closed several schools. Mesa has done it as well. So I'm glad that you're taking this on. It was encouraging to hear Dennis Raylor discuss shuttering portions of schools versus closing down schools entirely. So I hope that those options continue to be explored. And I would just really encourage you to focus on quantitative data. There was great data presented and a lot of discussion about other data that the district can gather. There was also a lot of anecdotes thrown
076out throughout though. And while those are great and helpful to kind of humanize the data, that is not a way to make decisions. I mean, we even saw it the. the board retreat when Dr. Patinsky made the comment that his feedback he's gotten from parents has been completely opposed to what Board Member Warner's experience has been. And so you just are not gonna get all the information as one single individual, because we all live in our silos, so we really need to focus on the hard numbers. And I liked... Board Member Sharkey's point as well that we need to make sure we're getting the positive information as well because that's gonna really inform our decisions. The one other thing I wanted to mention that was. very exciting in that I loved hearing Christine Harrington talk
077about the school tours and the work that she has done. Really everything she talks about, I get excited at the work that they're doing. Her discussion of how they've promoted it on the websites and that's really driven the number of families coming to visit. The training that they've done with principals and staff in order to conduct those tours and the follow up they're doing with families. All of it's really just basic marketing that any business would do, but in my more than 40 years of following SUSD, that's never been done. So thank you. Thank you. Francesca Wertz, followed by Janie White. Sorry I didn't write anything down, but I have four boys, all in the SUSD school district like right now. And I have one senior who's graduating from Chaparral, and I don't think I've
078ever seen him read a book in four years. I have a freshman that I pulled out of SUSD. He's now attending a private school. And my two eighth graders will also be leaving SUSD for a private school. I came today because I actually have a real example of something that happened in my 13-year-old's classroom just a few weeks ago regarding all of this, I guess, kind of ties together. They were studying the civil rights movement. And the teacher compared the LGBTQ movement to the civil rights movement, which I thought was a little odd. And also her opinion, right? So my students came home to share this with me and I was very disturbed. So I felt that I should share that with you. Also, over the years of my being a parent here, probably 12,
07913 years now. I've repeatedly asked for support when it comes to reading and writing. My 13-year-olds write like chicken scratch. They don't read at grade level. Now you can say, okay, that's my fault, but you guys have my kids for six hours a day. These are basic things, reading, writing, math. I've went so far as reached out to you, Dr. Menzel, on two occasions for your help, and it was completely ignored or, I don't know, I never heard back. So these are real examples that I have that I'm bringing to you that really need to be addressed. And it's just the basic stuff I'm asking for, reading, writing, arithmetic. Everything else, maybe we can supplement in other ways, but just please get back to the basics. Thank you. Thank you. And our final comment, Janie
080White. My name is Janie White. I'm a community member and don't adopt these books. So what everybody said that was negative on these, I totally agree. Lots of great examples were given. So I just have a couple things. I looked at them just briefly. All I had to see was a Black Lives Matter thing, a couple other things. I was like, you can't show these to any kids. That's it. That's done. But the lady before me made a great point of what a teacher said in the classroom that upset her. So now I found out or was told by an employee that... At first, I don't even know how this committee got started or when or anything. I was never notified, but I was told there's seven teachers on the committee and one community member.
081So seven teachers. What if they were all like that? pushing LGBT, comparing it to this, getting their opinions in. They shouldn't be on the committee. They're not experts at this stuff. So they shouldn't be on the committee. So there's a couple other things. The books are filled with CE and BCE, which is not our calendar. So I don't know why they're doing that. Lots of globalism, encouraging kids to be global citizens. A lot of environmental climate stuff. That's a disputed science. So there's a lot of people that don't believe in that. The NGOs encourages a lot of that. So we know what NGOs are now. They're money laundering vehicles. So, you know, that's bad. It's kind of like... Horrible indoctrination. Also, Castro's a good guy. Mao's a good guy. They talked about communism as like
082it's a good thing. And the word indoctrinated was highlighted and it calls it, it's just rigidly trained. So the books are just filled with bad stuff. It's horrible. The March, March video, I was like horrified if kids ever see that. So you guys should save yourselves. Don't adopt it. Thank you. Many thanks to our community for speaking out any comments or responses that are appropriate at this time Okay, we'll be speaking on this issue later at this juncture It's time for item s that we move to follow this item and that is personnel action s to 11 s So dr. Menzel or are we gonna bring up? Okay, all right I move that we accept the consent agenda item 11S, the personnel action item, as presented. I'll second the motion. All those in favor? Aye.
083Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye The new director of community education and early childhood services Nick Noonan new director of teaching and learning dr. Tamara Chagatzinsky and we have three assistant principals who are all susd teachers moving up Nikki Hamilton who is at Cherokee and going to be
084the assistant principal there Nikki Another Cherokee teacher dr. Emily Houston the be kind teacher of the year will be going to hope And finally, Larissa Beckstead, who has been interim assistant principal or acting assistant principal at Copper Ridge. She was here earlier today. Here you go. Congratulations, Larissa. Thank you. Oh, where's Shawnee? Oh, Shawnee, I can't see you. So the new principal of Cheyenne. That is a really difficult place to see. All right. Thank you and congratulations to all. We will now go to information discussion items 10A, Kairos Health Arizona Annual Report for the Benefits Insurance Plan. Oh, do I have it in here? Thank you. Hold on. Hold on. My bad. We're not at Kairos yet. We have the association reports yet. I'm trying to move it. You all can leave. That's good. My
085apologies. Go ahead. So this will be the final update by the four associations here in Scottsdale. I believe T.J. Buckley is going to start us off for SCA, and they've kind of created the lineup of who's going first and last, but T.J. will get started. My apologies, T.J. All good, all good, good, good evening. President Doctor Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, governing board members, Superintendent Doctor Menzel, Gladys and guests. It is my honor to give you an update on the Scottsdale Education Association and certified staff of our district. The 2024-25 school year has been one of action and change within our association. We've grown our membership by over 20% through heightened visibility, increased communication and frequent collective actions. We are consistently working with a variety of groups to better the working conditions of SUSD. We have
086visited all sites within SUSD, with many sites being visited multiple times throughout the year. Our site representatives are the lifeblood of our association. They communicate near daily to find answers for our members and increase their representation on a variety of issues. We have consistently communicated new options challenges and successes from our IBM process with our members our actions have increased But so has participation our members no longer pay in and leave it to a few people to work on improvements Whether it was canvassing standouts walk-ins in support of public education Signing petitions for insurance benefits and professional development our member voice has never been stronger We've worked with community groups to strengthen relationships throughout Scottsdale and SUSD SCA will continue to be more visible and communicate more thoroughly and build more relationships as we move
087forward into what will be a great 2025-26 school year. However, progress does not come without a few bumps along the way. Last month, the SEA Executive Board voted to pause negotiations with SUSD. We did so to ensure the IBM process was being respected and implemented. The pause was not to gain any ground on any individual issue and did not affect the current year's agreement in any way. We continued to work with the district to represent all of our members on current issues. Through the mediation of Alexis Wilson, we were able to reach assurances of the process with the district. We believe that SEA and the SUSD Governing Board have similar interests in this matter. We hope to strengthen the connection with the process and strengthen the relationship with the governing board through board involvement in
088IBM at the start of the 2025-26 school year. As an association, we'd like to be involved in a meeting where we can discuss our interests and hopes for upcoming year of IBM with all other associations, district administration, and the governing board. I have always had open and honest conversations with all of you on any topics involving SUSD employees. I look forward to increasing that communication in a more direct way around negotiations. In that regard, I urge you to not unilaterally change any aspect of any employee group's agreement. Any unilateral change is an insult to all employee agreements in a negotiations process, which directly violates the SUSD Governing Board's H policy, of which SEA is a strong defender. We have met. every unilateral change to certified working conditions and pay with swift and strong action and
089will continue to do so in an effort to demonstrate the need to respect the process and build trust within this district, which has not just been an interest of certified staff, but a need of this entire community for several years. We are all imperfect and thus so are our systems. But let's continue progress and improve all processes with respect to all voices in our community so that we may better embody the one team mantra we have as a district. Thank you for your support this year. I look forward to the progress we will continue to make in the 2025-26 school year. Good evening, Board President, Dr. Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, members of the Governing Board. Dr. Menzel, Ms. Wagner, colleagues and guests, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this evening. I would
090like to begin by acknowledging that this has not been my best year, and I have fallen short of my goals on many levels. I have lost momentum, and at times I have questioned my role as a leader. One thing that I have learned is that you do not have to have it all figured out to move forward, and you are allowed to make mistakes. When those mistakes happen, you just need to take the time to remember why it is that you started. It is during that time you realize there is power in stepping back and resetting your expectations. Revisit your why. I start by reconnecting to my purpose, and I ask myself, why am I here? Why am I doing what I am doing? For me, it is a no-brainer. The answer that I always
091come back to is that of connections. Connections are the invisible threads that weave our personal and professional lives. They are the bridges that link us to opportunities, ideas, and each other. To me, there is nothing more important than developing the connections that foster collaboration and build trust. When we connect with others, we open the door to diverse perspectives and skill sets. This leads to creative solutions and breakthroughs that we could never achieve on our own. In our interconnected world, the ability to work together effectively is more important than ever. Building trust is the cornerstone of any meaningful relationship. Through consistent and genuine engagement, we establish trust, which in turn strengthens these relationships. I take pride in the fact that I have built this sense of trust, and as a classified liaison, it is an honor
092to sit at the table with such a strong leadership team. This trust facilitates open communication, reduces friction, and helps us to navigate challenges more effectively. When we experience times of uncertainty, we take comfort in knowing that we are not alone and we can rely on the support and encouragement we need to keep going. These are the leaders who will help us weather the storm. As I reflect on my year as the SSPA president, I am proud of the work that we have done. I know that there is still work. ahead of us, but I am honored that I get to do what I do for every one of our classified staff. Let's cherish and nurture our connections. Let's be proactive in building new relationships and strengthening existing ones. By doing so, we not only enhance
093our lives, but also contribute to the collective strength of our community. Thank you. Good evening board president. Dr. Lewis vice president Sharkey members of the board Superintendent dr. Menzel mrs. Wagner and honored guests I'm Sean Crozier addressing you tonight for my final time as president of the Scottsdale district administrators association as This inaugural year draws to a close. I'm proud to reflect on our associations remarkable journey We set out to create a unified voice for district administrators and support exempt employees who form the operational backbone of our educational community. And I'm pleased to say that we have established that voice effectively. Our most significant achievement was the creation of and board approval of the district administrators handbook. This document establishes clear guidelines that will serve our district for years to come and demonstrates what we
094can do and accomplish through collaborative work and mutual respect. The interest-based negotiation process has been instrumental in fostering productive dialogue among all employee groups. Through IBN, we've worked, we've built strong working relationships with our colleagues in SEA, SSPA, and SAA, enabling us to address challenges while keeping students' needs at the forefront. As we move forward, we must remember that the strength of any process lies in its foundational principles. The IBM framework thrives when approached with transparency, honesty, and commitment to collaborative problem solving. These values maintain the integrity of the process and ensure decisions reflect our entire educational community's best interests. It is our hope that as we evolve as a district, we preserve the collaborative spirit that has defined our work. The most enduring solutions emerge from an inclusive conversations and with meaningful input from
095all stakeholders. When decisions are made within established processes that honor this principle, we build trust and strengthen our organizational culture. Looking ahead, I'm confident SDAA will continue to flourish under new leadership. The incoming president and board will bring fresh perspectives while building upon our foundations and advocating for those who enable our schools, teachers, and students to thrive. I want to express my gratitude to SDA members for their trust and support and to the governing board and cabinet for your partnership and leadership. Together, we've shown that uniting around shared values and commitment to educational excellence leads to extraordinary accomplishments. Thank you for your continued support of our district's missions. I promise we didn't all get together and write these speeches, but they're very similar. Good evening, board members, Dr. Menzel-Glattis, and my fellow building and district
096leader colleagues and friends. I am Shelly Hummond. In my day job, I am the proud principal of Pueblo, but tonight I stand before you as the outgoing president of the Scottsdale Administrators Association. I am filled with pride and gratitude as I reflect on what has truly been a remarkable year. of strong and steady leadership displayed by our principals and assistant principals who I represent. This year, our school leaders faced challenges with resilience, led with heart, and achieved with purpose. From implementing innovative instructional strategies to strengthening school culture and creating and monitoring our wildly important goals, or WIGs as you know them, you all demonstrated what it meant to lead with integrity and vision. We celebrated several outstanding achievements in many of our schools, from Blue Zone certifications to sustainable school recognitions to fine arts and
097sporting achievements, robotic achievements including major championships, academic achievements way too long to list, and of course, A-plus earnings and renewals, just to name a few. These things are a direct reflection of you, the building leaders, teachers and staff working collectively and sharing a commitment to excellence. These celebrations and recognitions would not be achieved without the unified and unwavering belief by all school personnel in the potential of every single student. Principals and assistant principals, you have supported teachers, engaged families and ensured that our schools remain safe, inclusive and inspiring places to learn and grow. Having been in Scottsdale my entire life and career, kindergarten me at Navajo, nor saguaro me senior year, too many years ago to say, would not have imagined this me standing before you following my two-year term as the leader of the
098organization that serves our building leaders. In this capacity and others, I have been privileged to work with leaders across the state and throughout the nation, and I know that something that really, really stands out most about SUSD is the way our leaders support each other. This year, we leaned into collaboration, sharing best practices, mentoring new administrators, and reminding one another that leadership does not have to be a solitary journey. Together we built a stronger more connected community of educators We know that one of the items before you this evening is the AP ratios that were agreed upon over a year ago during the IBN process as an Association we agree with our sister associations that we should respect the IBN process of course Ideally, we would love to see more than one full-time administrator at
099each building However as leaders who are responsible for making sound fiscal decisions with our own site budget we do recognize the dilemma the board is tasked with tonight. We foresee tough discussions and potential major changes on the horizon, and we will always support the vision and mission of the district as site leaders. Having witnessed the collaboration over a two-year span, I could not be more proud of the work that our associations together, SAA, SEA, SSPA, and SDA have done to come together. We listened to one another, we respected each other's viewpoints, which were often varied, and we still came to consensus surrounded by the ultimate collective goal we have, which is a world-class experience and excellence for kids in all of our schools each and every day. I am hopeful for the same unity and
100collaboration with you, the board members. Dr. Lewis, Mrs. Carney, Mrs. Warner, Dr. Patinsky, and Mr. Sharkey, our site leaders are more than willing and ready to stand with you as colleagues in leadership as we navigate uncertainty in public education and collaborate in support of the progress of our amazing students and district moving forward. As I pass the torch to my friend Dr. Dansky, I want to thank each of you, my fellow administrators, for your trust, for your partnership, and your relentless dedication to the students and staff of Scottsdale Unified. The future is very bright because of your leadership, and I am very excited to see where SAA and our collective work will take us next. Thank you for a very unforgettable year. Wow. Thank you all so much. Comments or discussion? All right. Beautiful to
101hear the harmony and the health in discovering your varied perspectives as you come to full agreement. It means a lot to us as a board. All right, we are now ready for Kairos Health Arizona Annual Report for the Benefit Insurance Plan. I was just getting excited. Everybody gets excited when we talk about insurance. Madam President, members of the governing board, Superintendent Menzel, and guests. First of all, I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to come and present. My goal here tonight is to help you understand a little bit more about the claims and the operations between Scottsdale and Kairos for the benefits offered to Scottsdale employees. Let me start again. My name is Jennifer Sherman. I am Director of Account Services for Kairos. I've had the pleasure of being with Kairos so
102far for four years. And within those four years, I've had the pleasure of working with Shannon Crozier quite a bit and Dr. Menzel throughout the years, quarterly reports and monthly financial statements to work together to try and provide the best benefits for the staff at Scottsdale Unified School District. I bring with me tonight a portion of the team that helps support Scottsdale, including Liz Vest. Leslie, who is the day-to-day account manager for Scottsdale Unified. I have Jeremy Larson, who is our lead accountant, who provides the monthly financial reporting and also participates in the quarterly claims reports as well. And then finally, Elizabeth Glazeman, our director of business development. Okay, so a little bit of history about Kairos and Scottsdale together. Scottsdale joined Kairos in July of 2017 after leaving Valley Schools benefit pool. So we've
103been together for a number of years, going on eight years now. In May of 2019, Scottsdale chose to establish an insurance trust. The reason that that came up and that's important to us is because we do get to provide quarterly claims reporting. to the Insurance Trust Committee since 2019. There's several bullets on financials, but if you skip down to July of 2024, another reason this became important is because for the first year in many years, Scottsdale needed to share a cost increase to the employees due to budget concerns, and I'll share a little bit more in the financial information to explain what had happened with those claims to cause that decision. But during that timeframe, along with that decision came a question of Kairos as to what can we do to try and minimize claims
104to bring them down. So a couple of things we jumped in immediately. I say we. Liz Vestley began an educational tour and visited about 30 different sites within Scottsdale to offer some training about how to use your benefits more effectively to be a savvy consumer, if you will. As a member of Scottsdale, you do have the ability to use the UnitedHealthcare Choice Plus network of doctors, but know that experiencing care in one environment versus another environment sometimes will drive costs a little bit higher. So that was part of the reason for doing some of those educational seminars. We also modified plan designs, so increased co-pays, some deductibles, and max out-of-pockets to help... keep some of those costs down for the district as a whole to keep offering good benefits. And then finally, we were given
105approval to engage our nurse navigator team. So aside from our chronic disease management programs that are already embedded in a traditional health insurance environment, we also have hired our own nurse navigators, we call them. Truly, they are advocates. So we know that if we can have... members that are experiencing high-cost medical claims infusions if we can interact with them with the nurses we have a great opportunity to maybe direct them to Better quality of care and lower cost care for some of those services, which also helps benefit the district And then finally, the last bullet on this page speaks to our Kairos investment program. It's not really a timeline thing, but I was told to shorten our presentation, so I was trying to hit some key bullet points. But just know every time that Shannon
106sends us a disbursement to pay for claims, while that money is being allocated towards claims, it is earning investment income. So to date, Scottsdale has earned about $676,000 in interest on that income. When we look at this page my goal here was take to take a big picture so as I mentioned before Scottsdale is a self-insured member within Kairos Basically what that means is we are deconstructing the health insurance environment And we're pulling together the pieces that we feel that we need to have the best benefit program It offers a lot of flexibility to be a self-insured member, but it also requires some responsibility and there's some additional risk. So there's another way that you can gain your insurance and that's referred to as fully insured. If you were fully insured, I liken it to
107renting a house versus buying a house. Fully insured, you have minimal risk, you pay a flat fee, you don't have the maintenance, you don't have a lot of the risk that you have when you buy a home. You also don't have the long-term. asset from buying a home. So when we look at this page, if you look at all of the colors on the screen, fully insured would make that all just one big blob. You really don't have to think about the admin costs, the service fees, the stop loss. What we've done with Scottsdale as a self-insured is we've taken a look at all of those categories and we try to negotiate the best deal for all of those categories. So from left to right you can see that green color is focusing in on
108claims cost So claims cost is truly when a member of Scottsdale or a participant Experiences care that could be a doctor's office hospitalization Pharmaceutical drug picked up that is encompassed in that green claims cost category Then to the right you'll see the ancillary costs those stay relatively stable But that's things like dental insurance premiums vision life disability and those types of premiums Then just to the middle category you see service expenses I'll break this down a little bit more for you and more specifics But the other category I wanted to call to your attention is stop-loss because stop-loss is similar to that green category And then it's directly related to the claims cost. So stop-loss is more like a reinsurance It's an additional layer of insurance to keep us from experiencing high-cost claims. I'll talk
109more about it in a minute And then we have the admin costs. Are we allowed to ask questions along the way? Sure. Yeah, thanks. Yes, just the increase in claims costs is marked, you know, certainly, you know, until it levels out a little bit. Is it possible to distinguish between a greater consumption as opposed to just that consumption is higher cost? In other words, our employees and families may actually be bending the curve, doing a better job with health care, but prices just keep going up versus we are consuming more. Absolutely. So we do have access to our own claims data warehouse. I know I have a quiet voice. We do have access to our own data warehouse, so we are able to determine, let's say, the number of claims versus the total dollar spend
110or the average. We can average things out into PEPM, so per employee per month. We can look at the average claim cost. per claim. So we have a number of tools that we can pull to be able to share that information. It's a little bit in the weeds for tonight, but yes, if we were afforded the opportunity to come back and do maybe a study session and we had some questions where we could really dive into those factors, we would be happy to do that. Thank you. Sure. Yeah, hi. Hi. On the administrative costs, the pattern looks like it's variable relative to the total cost of claims. Is that true, or what's driving the variance in administrative costs? Can I hold on that for a second, and I'll show you in slides? I know there's
111a slide later on. In slides, yes. But please remind me if I don't answer that question for you. Okay. So if we take a look now, we've looked at that lovely bar graph with the colors, big picture. Now what we're looking at is the actual different categories. So we have medical and prescription claims costs. You can see we just took a four-year snapshot to make it a little bit more palatable to digest. But in July of 2020 you can see that our claims cost for medical and pharmacy was at about fourteen point five million For the year the next year you can see we had about a twelve point five percent increase So we had about sixteen point three million in claims and you can see the trajectory We finally peaked up at seventeen point
112nine million. Let's hope that we peaked there and we're going to continue to come back down but then In 2022-23, some interesting things happened, and we're going to talk about it on some other slides. But when we got to that year, we knew that Scottsdale would be looking at having to increase employee premiums. And so we really wanted to see everything that we could do. So that was the time frame that we engaged Liz Vesely doing the roadshow, talking to people about how to use health insurance. We engaged our nurse navigators and a number of other tactics to try and help people find the best quality care for the best cost. So we do believe that those efforts help stabilize premiums and bring them down just a tiny bit, about 0.4% in 23-24. Any questions
113on this page so far? Nope? Okay. Okay, so stop-loss cost. Again, these two slides, medical and pharmacy and stop-loss are... Directly attributable to claims if you were to look I know Scottsdale is doing an RFP this year But if you were to go to some other insurance carrier and set up a self-insured plan You take your medical and pharmacy claims with you as do you take stop-loss? There are some levers you can pull with stop-loss where you could set a different threshold to date Scottsdale has a $300,000 threshold For reinsurance if you will so what that means is if you have a member on the plan that experiences a medical event that is greater than $300,000, that additional insurance layer comes in and protects Scottsdale from anything over $300,000 per each person. So one of
114the questions that we had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Menzel and Shannon, one of the questions was, well, wait a second, how much of the stop loss are we really using? So you can see starting in July of 2020, we were paying about $963,000 in stop loss premium. So it is not inexpensive, but it truly is important to help shield the district from high cost claimants. So nine hundred and sixty two thousand dollars in premiums. However at that time we had three members that Experienced the use of the stop-loss and the stop-loss paid out an additional four hundred and twenty six thousand dollars that year So just three members that was a decent year the following year. You can see the premiums dropped a little bit to nine hundred and twenty three thousand dollars
115We had four members hit stop-loss and stop-loss paid out an additional $406,000 for that year. Now in the next year, $967,000, we actually had a really bad claims year and this led to some of the cost sharing for the employees. But we actually had 10 members hit stop-loss that year and the stop-loss carrier paid out an additional $1.1 million in additional coverage. for those claimants. So not a good year. It does happen statistically usually every five to seven years for groups. And it definitely feels as though Scottsdale had those years. We talked a lot about it in all of the meetings that we had. But we're hopeful that we're a little bit on the downturn. And then finally, you'll see the stop loss. Because it is reinsurance, they do have the right to sometimes laser
116out people. That means they'll target a condition and say, we can laser out that condition or we're not going to cover claims for that person anymore. Kairos negotiates that we have no lasers. So Scottsdale has the protection of the stop loss with no lasers. However, there is an increase in cost to the protection. We also then had seven members hit stop loss that year with about $980,000 additional in paid out claims for stop loss. I do just want to call out that the stop loss itself, while it does look like a big number, it's about 1.3, it equates to about 5% of the total spend of the benefits cost. So when we look at stop loss and then benefits, the health insurance itself equates to about 82% of the total benefits cost, whereas stop loss
117is about 5%. We're at about 87% of total benefits cost. And then I'll continue to share more. Mr. Sharkey. So on the stop-loss, I mean this is like if you get in a car accident your premiums go up the next year. There's a three years you're penalized until it comes back down. Does this have any sort of lag if we reduce the number of claimants who hit stop-loss will the premium drop the year after or is there a lag? Good question on that and I'll just say car accident might not be a fair. thing to use because there should be separation with an auto insurance and all of that stuff. But yes, if we had somebody that was experiencing say cancer and they had a very high cost claim, which we have several that are
118happening right now, then potentially there could be a downturn in the premiums once we start to see the experience get better, if that makes sense. So it lags by a year? It's basically retroactive to the previous year? Yes. I'll defer to Jeremy to see if you have an answer on that. I love this. If you don't mind, stand here and I can answer some questions. But yeah, usually it takes about a year because when you have somebody that goes to the doctor. Can you go to the mic? Yes, yes. When you have someone that goes to a facility, let's say with cancer, it usually takes about six to eight months for that claim to actually get paid out. And so it's usually about a year lag where you'll see a benefit if those high cost
119claimants go down. Thanks. Also, I realize we're talking about the health of members of our community. I don't want to minimize anything and make them numbers, but I really appreciate the presentation, but still want to acknowledge that we're talking about the health of the people in our community here. Completely understand. That unfortunately is one of the hardest part of our job We work in an industry that is admittedly very broken in our country And so we are trying our best to fight the battles that we can fight and find little successes where we can so yes insurance is Critically important for employees and for people in our country. Otherwise, we know that people Declare bankruptcy lose houses and those kinds of things so we understand the importance Service and administration costs. So I think these
120were two areas that had a lot of questions and raised eyebrows So I apologize for putting them on the same slide again. We were trying to condense for time But they did seem to fit together on the slide nicely. So on the top quadrant you'll see in black That is our service category. So one of the questions that came up was what is service? What's encompassed in service and services truly just claims admin fees. So that is things like medical prescription dental claims administration. It's also government compliance. So the most recently painful one is NQTL analysis that we've had to do for all of the plans, which has been very time consuming and involved a lot of legal support. We also manage COBRA administration, FSA and HSA administration, wellness fairs that encompasses things like biometric
121screenings, MomMobile, flu shots. We also pay for the ACA fees. Compassed in that service category now again service category you can see as you're looking at it It started out pretty robust at just over a million dollars in 2020, but there's a rather large dip there that dip came about when we changed our Administrator so we moved away from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona and moved to UMR with a unit United Healthcare Network of providers so you can see those savings there where we went down to eight hundred thousand and then we've seen steady increases So we're at eight hundred and thirty three the next year and then $874,000. All totaled though, service represents about 4% of the total benefit spend. In the bottom section of the page, you'll see the admin costs. So
122again, At the beginning of our chart, you'll see that the admin costs were actually very low. So Kairos was actually offering what we would call sort of an introductory rate, a lower admin rate when Scottsdale joined the pool. But as our services and offerings grew, we realized that we needed to increase the admin fees. So you can see that jumped to $467,000, and there remains relatively the same. That equates to about 2% to 3% of total benefit spend. And this is the one area that Kairos really does receive for the services that we provide. So everything else is paying claims, you know, paying stop loss fees. It's claims administration fees for the services. But admin is the fees that we bring in. And the next couple slides we'll talk about what we do for receiving
123those fees. Dr. Patinsky? Is there a relationship between what drives those two? Because the... Extend to which one goes down the other goes up. It's roughly flat in total so is our not to sound a conspiratorial but Our service expenses increased to offset the loss at administrative costs or is it just a coincidence that they're flat I can take that if you don't mind It's purely a coincidence I run the numbers and one of the benefits with Kairos is we're always trying to do RFP is try to get as competitive as possible. And we moved from Blue Cross Blue Shield to UMR back in 2021, which we're able to see that decrease in costs. In terms of the administrative expenses, it's based on enrollment. So you did see some increase in enrollment. However, the per
124employee per month cost did increase. And that's because we wanted to make it equitable across Kairos as a whole. We have about 21,000 participant lives in Kairos as a whole. And Scottsdale back in 2020 was paying a discounted rate compared to everyone else. And so we wanted to equalize that playing field. Mr. Sharkey. So on both those, I assume there's both fixed and variable portions. You mentioned some of the service fees. But I think you just said for admin costs, it's based on number of enrollments. Are any of them variable based on cost of claims? There is, in terms of the service expenses, there's a couple. And part of that bucket correlated to the cost of claims. And so, for example, with our PBM, we pay fees based on number of scripts processed. And PBM,
125that's a pharmacy benefit manager. And so most of it is per employee per month based. However, there are some slight situations where it is based on claims. It's correlated closely to claims. Thanks. I do just want to highlight the service fees are not something that stay within Kairos. They go directly back out to pay fees for those services. And one more thing on that, I will say that less than $0.07 per dollar goes to the service and admin cost, so pretty low cost overall. We are focused on complete transparency. So Kairos was actually built upon As I mentioned a broken system trying to create a way to Like I said find small wins where we can tackle that system and start to change the trajectory of health care claims Within that, we felt that there
126was a lack of transparency in the industry. So a lot of vendors out there will perform services, but they collect a flat fee, don't necessarily tell you all of the services that they're providing, maybe don't even provide complete transparency on all of the ways that they're receiving their money. Along those lines, you'll see on the left-hand side of the screen, this is just a couple slides that are encapsulated from our quarterly reporting package. So this is provided every time at the Insurance Trust Committee, and we do go through how the claims are... performing. We also have room for discussion on any questions that are asked, any opportunities for improvements, any feedback, and we do always take that to heart and try to make changes when possible. On the right-hand side of the screen, you'll see
127a complete general ledger. I say complete, the screenshot doesn't show it, but you do receive that monthly. I say you, but the financial team at Scottsdale receives a complete general ledger as well as a full financial package every month. Detailing all of these costs the service and admin costs are items 610 and 620 on the general ledger so if you have not yet seen that we'd be happy to prepare that for you and Share it so that you can see how these costs break down and finally what is Kairos doing about the claims? performance right now within Scottsdale So first and foremost, we mentioned PBM. So that's the pharmacy benefit manager. That's Maxor. We recently went out to bid and renegotiated our contract with Maxor. Frankly, we received several responses that were much more competitive,
128which enabled us to go back to Maxor and say we are leaving because we have the opportunity to save upwards of about $6 million for Kairos as a whole. 800 of that, 800,000 of that was related directly to Scottsdale. Maxor was able to... Go ahead and amend their contract and we were able to share that amended savings to Scottsdale that began as of October 2024 so not within the plan year But again as of October 2024 we saw the opportunity and took advantage of it and implemented it immediately We have heard from members that they are already seeing some of their prescription drugs costs go down We also implemented an infusion program that helps with site of care redirection. We have talked about this a lot at the quarterly meetings. We've identified approximately six members
129that are receiving high-cost infusions at a high-cost facility. A lot of people don't understand that if you choose to have an infusion at one place, specifically a hospital, they tend to mark up the cost of those medications for delivering it and then also just... the privilege of being on site and having it infused at that time. We know through our infusion service that we're able to redirect people. We identified about $474,000 in savings. To date, this program is voluntary. So we have reached out to members to ask if they would be interested in moving because of the savings. And to date, nobody has wanted to take advantage of that. We also just implemented a virtual physical therapy program as of February of 2025. The exciting part about this is it provides no-cost solutions to participants
130within the Scottsdale School District. So if you're enrolled on the health insurance plan, you now have access to free, unlimited virtual physical therapy via a Zoom-type. So very convenient and no cost. They propose to say that they will save about $420,000 in the first year on overspend in PT and scans and surgeries. We also have a center of excellence again low or no cost procedures. So think about hip and joint replacements are available at low or no cost. It depends on the plan you're enrolled in. The IRS has feelings about you meeting your deductible on a high deductible health plan so that's where there would be a low cost. We also have implemented a new substance use program which would also be low or no cost for people. I won't hit on all of them,
131but we've also been working with negotiating direct contracts for things like specific imaging, women's health, and cancer. More information to come on that. We're also talking with a near-site clinic that would be very beneficial to the employees of Scottsdale Unified School District. So we would look forward to bringing that forward for you as well. And finally, if you look at the nurse navigator, I mentioned them before. Again, they're true advocates. They actually work within Kairos. They know our benefits. They know Scottsdale employees' benefits very specifically. So there's none of that calling the call center feel. These people know who our members are and what benefits they have. But you can see the call volume year over year, and you can see the jump when we started to implement, and we had... sort of approval to
132reach out to employees when we saw things like inpatient hospitalization or new chronic conditions noted. I have a question. Ms. Warner? Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to go back up to the PBM. Sure. Could you explain for the people watching what a PBM is and the purpose of it? Sure. PBM stands for pharmacy benefit manager and it's basically a way to process pharmaceutical drugs for members of a self-insured plan. So our PBM is Maxor and anybody that is receiving a medication that's outside of a hospital system would be that claim would be processed through Maxor the PBM. So Maxor is a separate company? It is. Okay so I love that you guys have been able to negotiate an $800,000 savings. That's significant. My concern is with this particular company that you're staying with, how long
133had our staff been overpaying for their pharmaceuticals leading up to October of 2024? I'm not sure if it's an overpay, and I think that's part of their procurement process. I would say any vendor or any PBM or health insurance carrier, you're going to find that the fees behind the scenes change. The cost of drugs changes. So I'm not sure that I would say that they were overpaying, but when we did do the RFP, we were able to see that we could now negotiate a better deal. At the time that we moved with them, they were the best deal. So I think factors have changed behind the scenes. Okay, and do you have transparency with Max or to see what their fees are on top of the medication itself? I will have to take that as
134a takeaway. So I know we negotiated based on best unit cost per med, and we do have transparency on the rebates that are received, and they are on the general ledger. So if Scott still does receive those rebates, they immediately come back to them. But I can take the question away and see if there's a deeper answer that I can provide for you. Yeah, you can just send an email to the board. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, and finally one of the things that we are very proud of I mentioned that we have the admin services These are the one fees that we receive and we keep but for the services that we provide So on this slide, you'll see that we do annual audits We also go through procurement not annually But
135every couple of years depending on the line of coverage or feedback that we're receiving from membership And then also negotiate Contracts so from time to time we'll identify that maybe the dental benefits could be a little bit richer So we will negotiate with the dental carrier on that behalf when you take a look at this slide I won't go through all of the lines But you'll see the grand total at the bottom is about four point nine million dollars in savings specific to Scottsdale since 2017 because of our efforts and that is directly related to those admin fees and what we're using them for Any questions on that yes ma'am No? Okay. I will just close by saying that Kairos is also planning to do an RFP this summer, and we hope to have results
136by late summer that we can also share with Scottsdale Unified School District. Other comments for discussion? Thank you so very much. Thank you. At this time. We will move to the fiscal year 25-26 maintenance operation budget discussion. Dr. Menzel. Well, thank you, President Lewis, members of the governing board, as Shannon comes to the podium. Thank you, Kairos, for the presentation. We have an update on the planning process for the next fiscal year. Shannon knows that we have a lot left on the agenda, so we're going to move through it quickly, but we'll be happy to engage in any questions or conversations that you have. Great, thank you. Board President Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, members of the board, Dr. Menzel and guests. We have looked at a lot of these slides before, so I'll kind of
137just touch on what's changed since the last time we met and go through those. The one thing we changed on this slide is there was a question about possible funding through Prop 123. We took that out, so we are anticipating right now about a reduction of $2.7 million. We don't know what the budget is gonna look like exactly yet, but we're hopeful that that's the case, and it will be a reduction of our budget of $2.7 million. based off of weight count changes and a couple other little big change in carry forward. This just looks at where are we at. So we lose the $2.7 million in revenue. We've done a $1.5 million salary increase to all employees. We are also contributing $1 million towards insurance next year from M&O. We have gone through department
138budgets. We spent an entire day as a cabinet looking at all of those budgets and trying to find savings. I'll go into some of those in just a minute. We are looking at a transfer of $4.2 million from DAW. We might want to look at that a little bit more and see if we need to up that just a little bit. And then savings within closing positions, changing positions around FTE changes, leaves us at this point about $145,000 short of what I would call a balanced budget or where we want to be to make sure that our expenses and revenues match up. This slide, we've looked at it a couple times. There's only a few changes to it. Last time, we had talked about possibly reducing the audit committee budget. We have not done that,
139so that was taken out. We had anticipated the RFP for medical insurance being about $150,000 just because that's what it was two years ago when we did it. We have gotten quotes back and we know that we can do that for less than what we had originally budgeted, so that is a very positive thing. So we've adjusted that. We've had some happenings within grants. So we've got a little bit of a change there, specifically within our IDEA grant being reduced. We do anticipate those costs having to be shifted over, unfortunately, to M&O because we know there are things that we have to do. So with all of that, and then there is an item tonight. I'm not sure what happens with that, but there is an item tonight to combine two positions. So I have
140that savings factored in. So with all of those changes, we're at 1.4. I did, originally we had had, and I noticed this earlier, originally in here I had had the AP ratio change. I've pulled that savings out. And so not sure what happens with that. I know it's a discussion item later on tonight But with those changes like I said we're still a little shy of where we want to be For our budget, and so that's also an item to think about within the department budgets maybe oh Too far, okay. The big budget of Eshmets. So as I said, we spent a very long, difficult day looking at where could we make reductions within budgets, within the department budgets. Most budgets in the departments were reduced anywhere from 1% to 47%. To put that in
141perspective to dollar-wise, somewhere between $500 and $28,000. So we feel like we made some really good... efforts towards reducing or savings within department budgets. Some of those significant changes I've listed here, some of those we're adding, some of them are subtracting. So athletics, we know that they need some equipment taken care of, so we added about $55,000 for that. We have a new phone system that we have to put in, which is good, but there's a hefty cost with that, so that added to our department budgets. We have not been fully funding property casualty insurance for the district. We've been using our self-insurance trust balances. That is about to run out. Even with putting $700,000 towards that, it is still not enough to cover that full bill, so we'll still be using the trust dollars
142to help offset that, something we'll have to rectify here very soon with budgets. But we also had some savings. Within finance, we always put a dollar amount in for elections. So like for this, fiscal year, we had 105,000 in for election. We kind of keep that because some year there are elections, other years there aren't. So we kind of keep that in there. When we started out the year with what do we need for budget, we actually had put in another four, we had bumped that up to 425,000 with the idea that we know that there's a bond that we will need to be talking about soon. We had originally thought that that would be ready for this year and something we'd be talking about and bringing to the board. That's not happening, and of
143course, that's a pretty expensive expense. So you see that twice in there. Once is really because the savings is the $105,000 that we always budget for, that we're budgeting zero for next year. But like I said, we had originally put in there for a possible bond. We've taken that out, and we'll have to think about that in the future, but we know in the future it will also be less than that. Human resources, we've been doing a compensation study as well as implementing Danielson for evaluations. That's going down in costs. Facilities, unfortunately, and transportation are seeing a lot of additional costs. It really just comes down to... Things are just more expensive, but some of our buildings are older, some of our buses are older, and so they're just needing more repairs, unfortunately. I know
144earlier this year, Dennis was like, we need to change the filters. I need $75,000 more to just be able to change all of the air filters. So we have not increased those budgets in a while. It's probably still not even enough, but we've factored that in for this year. Factored in for transportation, again, knowing our buses are needing some more repairs. And then utilities went up 108,000. We actually found out from APS not too long ago that that was going to be about a 4% increase, 4.2% increase. So we keep working to bring down the cost of utilities, but it's hard when the utility company ups the... prices on us. So all of that together comes out to a net increase of $584,000. Considering some really high ticket items in there, like the increase to
145property casualty, the phone system, those things, I feel good that we did a really good job of trying to find savings under every nook and cranny that we could to be able to just really find the dollars and make sure we're getting as much into the classroom as possible. So with that I will open it up for discussion board members any comments or discussion at this point Thank you very much No, we welcome questions anytime as we continue this process We'll have more discussions in June final adoption at the end of June But we're continuing to make progress And I just appreciate the work of Shannon and the team to continue to find cost savings to get us to a point of balance Thank you. Thank you Item 10D is proposed issues for consideration for
146the 26 ASBA political agenda. It's apparently in board docs for your review. It's a three-page document. Amy, I don't, I mean, sorry, Ms. Carney, I don't know if you were at the table for the development of any of that last year. It's been an ongoing development. So if you weren't, that's okay. No? Okay. So if you have anything you want me to take with me as I sit at the table coming up, I will, and you can certainly. Call or text or we can share this another time any comments Hearing none. I'll move forward Yes, I'm sorry Dr. Patinsky so the one issue that I'd love the ASBA to address As a district that may have to make difficult decisions around school closures I believe that the state law currently and someone can correct me
147if I'm wrong is that If we were to close the school, First Dibs goes to charter schools or other schools to get access to that property, is that correct? I'm not recalling that as a first dibs documents out. Yeah, and there's a period of time So it's the district has time so if you were to close a building next year You don't have to put it on the market for anything but when you do you can't discriminate against potential charters from renting or utilizing the space and We report surplus property so that after a period I think it's three years if Dennis was here he could confirm after three years I think that's when what you're referring to comes into play But in the initial go-to-market, they don't necessarily have preferential treatment in the market.
148No, no, we just can't discriminate against them. Thank you. Anything to add? Okay. Thank you, Dr. Menzel. Thank you, Dr. Patinski. We are now on 10. I have it as E. First read for code of conduct update. So Shannon Cron is going to walk us through this quickly. Just by way of a reminder, we did not finalize the code of conduct changes for the 24-25 year. So some of the changes you're seeing in this were recommendations from the 23-24 year coming into this year. Then others are recommendations for the upcoming school year. This is a first read. And so I'll let Shannon walk through what the committee's been discussing. All right, thank you. Good evening, President Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, members of the Governing Board, Dr. Menzel Gladys, and community. I'm Shannon Cron, Director of
149Support Services, and I'm here tonight on behalf of the Code of Conduct Committee to share our recommended updates. The purpose of the committee is to ensure that the SUSD Uniform Code of Conduct is aligned with federal, state, and local law, while also promoting the consistency in implementation and data tracking. Our guiding principles are rooted in creating a safe and supportive learning environment, setting clear expectations, and ensuring continuous improvement across schools. Our committee members include administrators from a range of schools and departments. They bring frontline perspectives as they are responsible for supporting behaviors and implementing and enforcing the code. I also want to acknowledge Stacey Grieberson, Kelly Hansen, Nick Buzan, and Dr. Bono for their collaboration with the committee. I'm grateful for the time and dedication that each of these individuals have spent doing this important
150work. I just want to take a quick moment to share with all of you that we continue to ground our recommendations in a multi-tiered systems of support. This means that we recognize that students come to school with a wide range of lived experiences and expectations. Behaviors that are considered completely normal and appropriate in the context of their home We're in the community may not always align with school expectations This is why we define and teach behavioral expectations so that we can create a common language and that students staff are Have common understanding of what is expected on campus Overall, behavioral infractions have been decreasing. This data tells us that that more preventative and supportive approach is working and that school-wide systems contribute to a more stable and predictable learning environment. So you can see that
151this school year we have 3,295 behavioral intervention, or office discipline referrals to date. Here, you can see that the most common infractions across all grade levels are relatively consistent. We see a lot of that low-level behaviors like defiance, minor aggression, and disruption. These are the type of issues that Tier 1 and Tier 2 behavior support systems are designed to address. Our goal is to respond effectively and change the behavior. So, for example, you can see that those tobacco violations, there's 158 this year. Last year at this time, we had 201 violations. This is an area that we have seen increase over the last few years. So this year that we have spent a lot of time really kind of... Going out into the community we've had 18 community presentations and school-wide presentations to date to
152increase the awareness both with our students and our families around the dangers of vaping We also work very closely with not my kid so that if a student does get caught using tobacco on campus we can make that referral so that families and students are able to attend classes together to really understand the dangers of vaping, how to have open communication, set boundaries within the home system. So we really try to work with both families and students in order to change behavior so that our students are engaging in positive behaviors when they're at school. Here, I just want to take a little bit of time to talk about dress code violations. So this is a topic that creates a lot of conversation and often criticism because there are very strong perspectives. However, as you can
153see that over the past 10 years, despite changes in style, turnover in staff, students, parents, our dress code referrals have remained pretty consistent. Last year, we had a spike with 74 referrals. That was an increase of... actually ID violations. So we implemented an ID requirement and students were not wearing their ID. These spikes in the graph, again, 2022, those were due to mask violations. We know again that this is an area of concern and so we wanted to gather more feedback from our parent community to see if there was overall support. We put together a survey and we recognize again that this is not a, you know. ideal survey, but just to have a better understanding of if there's a general support for the current dress code. We asked whether or not participants agreed with
154each section, so what students must wear to school, what they may wear to school, and what students cannot wear to school. We had 707 responses and 297 comments. As you can see, 90.2% of participants agreed with students must wear, 77.3% agree with what students may wear, and 96.6% agree with what students cannot wear. We want to share this data with you. I have shared the survey with all of the governing board members so that you are able to look at the questions, who responded, and then also read the comments. We're happy to expand data collection after you have a chance to really kind of dive into some of the comments and have a better understanding. We're also willing to host. focus groups to collect more meaningful feedback from our parent community. However, the Code of
155Conducts Committee is going to respectfully ask that the Board make a recommendation in regard to revisions for the dress code. I would encourage us. You and I corresponded on this and you know I received I wouldn't say a ton of emails certainly not compared to the curriculum But for non curriculum issues, it was a reasonable number of emails I personally had the same reaction when I completed it that The logic of taking many different elements of a dress code Putting them all into one question where you then have to agree or disagree to the whole group when often what people want to weigh on especially when it comes to adjusting policy is Changes within that made it very frustrating because I wanted to communicate more but didn't have that ability So I personally as a
156board member wouldn't Really relied too much on what we collected in the survey just because of the amount of feedback that's least I've received That it didn't really allow families to give a voice to the more specific changes that they'd like to see Right and I am open to that feedback our committee is open to that feedback and like I said we definitely want to work with you to Have a conversation around expanded data collection what that looks like or if you're interested in hosting some of those listening sessions or focus groups with us But we want you to have a better understanding of kind of some of those concerns and maybe what the community is saying and then also make that final recommendation to the committee Alright, here are some of the other recommended
157updates. So most of it is just those minor language edits to add clarity to the current code of conduct. We've added a House Bill 2514, which is a requirement to annually notify parents of our parental involvement policy. We've updated the language around House Bill 2131, which is discipline criteria specific to kindergarten through fourth grade students. One of the things that our administrators have really expressed is the difficulty when it comes to assigning consequences to our kindergarten through fifth grade students. Our consequence matrix right now is grades kindergarten through fifth grade and then six through eight and nine through 12. So behavior in kindergarten looks very different than it does in fifth grade. So our recommendation is to divide that matrix up so we have a K-2 section as well as a 3-5 section. We'd like
158to include a statement that all students enrolled in SUSD do receive an email account. We've included a link to our AI guidelines under the technology agreement and added inappropriate use of AI under academic dishonesty. We've added a statement to include referral to MTSS tiered interventions under a minimum consequence. We've included threat assessment as a response for level two infractions. So we really want to have a better understanding if there's that intent to hurt or harm. We've included that second step permission form under the student release section. And that was part of those recommendations from last year, which I'm happy to share more about if needed. We worked with Christine Bono, who has shared that they are seeing a lot of the same behaviors that we're seeing in our early elementary students with our preschool and
159pre-K students. So we've included a statement in the code of conduct, just acknowledging that obviously we want to teach behavioral expectations to our little students, but that we do need them to follow the code of conduct as well. We've added participation requirements outlined in the SUSD athletic code of conduct, again, just to increase visibility. And we are asking that we consider a vaping prevention as a tier one to increase, to continue to increase awareness and decrease the use of substances. So that is something that will also be coming from the wellness committee. And with that, I would just like to share that again, the committee has done this work in good faith with strong commitment to increasing consistency and support for all of our students and I'm happy to take any kind of questions that
160you may have. Ms. Warner, or Ms. Carney, sorry, you're first. Go ahead. Okay, thank you for the presentation, the update. I know we've been waiting on this for about a year now. I wanna touch on four items. in the code of conduct and the first being the second step permission under the student release section. I feel that that needs to be removed and given separately only to the parents of students at the schools where this will be presented. I think it will be confusing otherwise to be blanketed, given it to all parents when it's only going to be at seven schools max and to certain students. So, you know, similar to the sex ed committee, right? Or curriculum, something like that. I don't think it should be included. Okay, absolutely. I can take that back.
161So we need to figure out maybe a different route to get that to parents whose students actually will be using the second step curriculum next year in middle schools. And then to touch on the code of conduct, I think we should state that on October 18th, 2022, the dress code in the code of conduct was changed without any public acknowledgement. There was never a red line version for the public to view like we all have here today. One board member did use their undue influence to have the word naval removed from the private body parts line, enabling our students to now show their midriffs at school. So if our goal is to ensure that SOSD is the top district of choice, then having a lax dress code where students can come to school wearing bra
162tops I don't think is meeting this goal. We must do better. And as a board member, I've also received many emails in my past two years from parents and community members very concerned with this as well. And we see that in the survey results, right? In regard to that survey, I read through the comments and many staff and parents voiced that nowhere in this survey is the issue of exposed navels even brought up. The other staff and parents said dress code needs to be tightened up, midriffs need to be addressed. Now students are tucking shirts under the bras and revealing so much skin. It's unsightly and not professional and academic. So we're being asked to tighten up the dress code or go to universal uniforms, which I don't think people probably want. So I think
163it's very important that we read through all of that feedback. I'm also very concerned because I never received this survey as a parent. I don't know. So if you could tell us why it didn't go out to all parents in the district. Why did you selectively pick which parents it would go to I just don't know yeah, I'm happy to address that so the committee wanted to specifically ask parents just to gather more parent feedback around whether or not There was general support when we send stuff out from a district it often gets overlooked and so Parents tend to pay the most attention to information that comes directly from their teacher they pass tend to pay more attention if it's coming from a parent organization such as SPC or their PTO, PTA, APT. So that
164is where we tried to gather that initial information to bring back to the board and ask for your guidance in regard to expanded data collection focus group and again share with you that we're really looking for the governing board to make that recommendation. We know that this is a difficult conversation we've been having this conversation for years and SUSD our data has shown that despite you know change in policy or a change in you know administrators parents teachers we haven't seen a lot of change when it comes to those referrals so we're really looking for your guidance okay because I know as a parent I pay attention to every Email that comes through and like I said, I never I never received it And so I don't know what parent groups or what PTOs or
165what it needs to go to every parent and we don't choose If you think they read a district email or not, right? I think that if we must I think this is almost silly that we're wasting so much time on this But if I think that all parents deserve to have their feedback heard. Did we send it to all staff or did we selectively choose staff? No, it was put in admin inbox, teacher talk and classified corner. And I am willing to take your feedback again back to the committee and revise that survey with your input. And if you want us to put it out through parent square, I'm happy to work with our communications department and that is something that we can do. That would be our recommendation is to put it out through
166parent square The most important part is to be clear on what information we want to inform the final decision for the governing board If we make a survey too complex too long fewer people will respond So if we have a handful of questions, maybe not more than five that are really important to inform the final decision here I think that's something that we can launch pretty quickly That sounds great Then I'd like to touch on food delivery on I think it's page 65 And we recently received communication stating that the coke bomb nurse was sending out email stating that all food dropped for students Must be in a non-labeled container such as brown paper bag or lunch sack We cannot accept food in labeled bags yet according to the code of conduct parents are permitted
167to bring lunch to their child Correct. Could you speak to that please? Sure, so I'm unsure of what the situation is at Cocoa Pop But I'm happy to look into that and bring that information back But I would advise that all of our schools are following the code of conduct and is that that is something that we need to Review and bring back for a second read. I'm happy to do that Yeah, I think that we do need to review that, that we just need to adhere to the code of conduct and not be asking parents to do things that are upsetting them. So my last thing I wanted to ask was on page 81, under services, it says the Scottsdale Unified School District reserves the right to monitor use of district computers and network
168resources. Can you tell us how you're currently monitoring student and staff computers? So with that I might actually ask Michelle Watt to speak on behalf of how IT is monitoring the use of student technology. Happy to do so. So our systems, our student devices have web filters on them and they do track where students go online. Also you know, data, documents, and things that they do in their Google Drives, administratively we have access to. And our process is that if a school needs information about that beyond what a teacher can already see through some of the tools they have to manage the use of technology in the classroom while the student's in their class, then an administrator creates a work order or reaches out to the IT team and we deliver the web history or...
169folder contents that are requested to that administrator. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah. I'm going to go back to the dress code policy. So when you go to a campus now, you often see entire naked torsos of our students. And while that may be cute to our students, I get it. It's a style. It's not cute to the future employers. And I tore a lot of... workforce facilities in the valley and they're continuously having to pull their brand new staff aside to give them a t-shirt to cover up and we're literally training our students to do that and I think we're so far beyond navels and midriffs when we're walking into campuses and seeing entire torsos naked. And I am sure it is a distraction and I'm shocked that it's okay with
170the leadership and what happened over the last couple of years prior to the new board members joining us and I'm gonna ask because I am a mom of an athlete and sometimes they can be very goofy So if the football team decided they were going to wear pasties to school covering their chest Would that be acceptable because based upon what we're seeing and what is in the proposed? Code of conduct, you know, is that okay? So again, we follow the code of conduct. And I guess if a football player did decide that they were going to, you know, cover their. They could. We would hope that they would wear a shirt and our administrators would deal with that. Again, this was not the code that was brought to the committee or the committee did bring
171to the governing board, which is why, again, we are asking for a recommendation be made by the governing board. So I want to add, I understand that our site level leadership, it is uncomfortable and difficult. to dress code a student. I completely get it and I understand. And sometimes it is easier to look the other way or ignore it and I get it. But the fact that we have gone from talking about a midriff and a navel to entire torsos and you just agreed, like they really could do that as a joke or whatever they would do and they could sit in class and it is a distraction. So I think that And then based upon the information I sent to you and Dr. Menzel related to the tone and the perception when only select
172parents received the survey, it was not good and it wasn't a good look on us and they felt like you were just trying to control the sample. And so I'm going to echo what Board Member Carney said and that this survey needs to go out to the entire. Parent body or a parent and guardian body and be specific. We're talking about torsos We're not even talking about navels anymore. Thank you. I never thought I'd be talking about torsos or needles But just as you get a sense of the board I I want to build on governing board member Warner and Carney's comments and sort of associate myself as well not not necessarily about how the survey was administered I kind of understand how we got ourselves into that I wish families did not judge the
173educational quality of our district based on what our students look like in terms of dress but the reality is as a parent You can't sit in the classroom. You don't know in second grade what the third grade teacher is going to be, the fourth grade. We use these indirect, very subjective measures to get a sense, is this a place that I want my child to learn in? And I do think, as a parent who does middle school and high school drop-offs and pickups, many families... looking at how our students dress would say this is not the kind of orderly learning environment where we treat education as a professional enterprise and socialize our students to that expectation. And so as we all focus on enrollment, and again, I don't want to fall victim to, we each
174have our own anecdotal reasons for enrollment, but I do think from families that I've spoken to, one of the easy things they pick up on is, I would never send my kid to high school X. Do you see? what those students are wearing. And again, that's not the educational quality, that's not the school climate, but it's the easy thing that a family member can pick up on. So I do think it's an important topic for a bunch of reasons. Absolutely, and we agree that it is an important topic, and that is why we are asking for your help. We know that we are going to have to partner with families. because ultimately parents are buying clothes and are sending their students to school and it's our job to enforce that dress code as it is
175written, but we really are going to need your support when it comes to partnering with families and changing that culture. Mr. Sharkey. I want to talk about something more salacious than Navel's AI. I like the addition there. I like the website we have with the use of AI. I like that the Student Advisory Board is focusing on that. This is something that is only going to be more and more prevalent, both for students and how they do work and for teachers and how they create curriculum and assignments. I want to make sure there's enough wiggle room. So like in the academic dishonesty, it says taking papers or portions from other student publications or AI. I would hope it would say or AI parenthetically within the guidelines, you know, or, you know, within the guidelines of
176the AI policy. Because if, you know, student uses it for an early draft and leaves the little, you know, thank you chat GPT at the bottom and they get a zero. That's I think there's wiggle room there. So just want to make sure that the wording isn't so strict that it's one strike and you're out because there's going to be learnings on both sides. Absolutely. Thanks, thank you. I have one more question Dr. Watt back to board member Carney's questions regarding the tracking information on the Student devices. Do you have the same tracking on? District admins devices teachers the board members and so on that you just described The client that's used on the student devices to provide filter access, whether they're at school or at home, is only deployed on student devices. So we
177do not have the same tools for researching web history on those devices. Thank you. So I would like to just wrap up page 74 of the Code of Conduct. Students must wear... Clothing that covers private body parts and it lists those body parts. That was the one that was changed two years ago to remove the navel from that list with non-see-through material. Bullet number two says tops. Bullet number three says bottoms. Bullet number four says shoes must have hard soles. So no, they could not wear pasties and not have a bare torso because that would be a violation because it requires tops. So that would be a violation of the dress code. There is no question that there are... When you draw a line, there's gonna be something that causes an exception to that line.
178So if you have a shirt, depending on your body type, that when you raise your hand, it exposes your navel, you could get dress coded by one teacher, not dress coded by another. I'm not saying which way the board should vote. I'm saying that no matter what you do, there's still this question about the enforcement process. But in terms of what our current policy says, no, you have to wear a shirt. It has to cover your private body parts, and so I just want to be clear on that because you cannot come to school with a naked torso Thank you for clarifying mr. Sharkey on that point does Se a or teachers have a position because enforcement is the big issue like it's gonna cause them Effort in time is there they the position on
179some things that we know So they do and I don't want to speak on behalf of all of our teachers But a lot of our teachers are very uncomfortable dress coding students in our current climate they're concerned about the Lash from parents and they're concerned about their positions so that does add an element of you know difficulty right and They also are happy that students are in class because attendance tends to be a concern so they're happy that they're there They want them you know ready to learn they want to provide instruction They don't want students missing you know instruction because they're down in the office waiting for their parents to bring them a new shirt So there that's something that I definitely you know want our board members to take a closer look at
180as well as you know Kind of the difficulty with enforcement and really, you know have some of those, you know deep conversations with our staff around What does that look like? What does that feel like? Thank you for sharing that I'll just make the comment I I understand that position, but I think that's divesting power in the wrong direction and I think as educators and if it is our responsibility to Control the room fully respecting that that is hard to do difficult uncomfortable I am NOT a teacher in a classroom, so I very much respect that but I feel like that's kind of pushing the line to a side that is not in the direction we should be going. Right. And I think a lot of that is just reinforcing that sense of safety that,
181you know, they are doing the right thing. So I think that that again comes with, you know, working very closely with our administrators and our teachers. Sorry. Yeah. So sorry when it comes to teachers. So teachers are obviously like we want to do our jobs and we're going to do our jobs to the best of our ability. I actually had the pleasure of being in a meeting with Dr. Menzel. when he did a listening tour at my school. And one of the questions that we had was, and when it comes to enforcing just everything, do we want to know that we have the backing of our leadership and of our board? So kind of to turn, you know, we want to do that. And, you know, is it the most comfortable thing in the world?
182No, because of the current environment. But we would always kind of look at you guys and say, If we have your backing in enforcing that, that makes our jobs a lot easier. Thank you, TJ. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. All right, you've gotten a variety of feedback, and I know the task is a little bit obscure, but thank you for going back and taking a look at some of the things that you've heard tonight. Absolutely. Appreciate the presentation. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer any further questions and look forward to meeting with you again. Thank you. All right, we move on to F, first read for Governing Board Policy KB, parental involvement in education. And Mr. Buzan. Thank you, Board President Lewis, Board Vice President Sharkey, members of the board, Dr. Menzel, and
183Ms. Wagner. There were three pieces of legislation that the governor signed that won't go into effect until later this year, September or October. The School Administrators Association and school attorneys are speaking about them now because they need to go into handbooks in preparation for enrollment. KB, parental involvement in education, is a policy that is here for first read that one of those bills affects. Something that was included in the code of conduct that was not discussed fully was the directory information piece. There's a couple of changes that need to be made in that that I may suggest changing between tonight's first read and the next second read. We need to further vet that out at cabinet. But with KB, this is the most simple part of the bill. The parental rights handbook and the statute
184on that, Just made two quick changes. Hopefully this is the black line. At one point it was optional to provide parents the information of this policy in electronic form. Now it's a, I don't know if this is the right document. I don't think this is the right document, but basically now it's required to either provide an electronic form or print form and also notify parents annually of the parental rights handbook. My suggestion was to put it in the code of conduct. That's where all students receive it and it's upon enrollment and parents see it then so we comply with the statute. So this is just a compliance policy change and this is the first read of that. So any questions? Ms. Carney. Thank you for this. I just wouldn't just note that I had communicated
185with you that I didn't feel that this was appropriate for the code of conduct since it's the student code of conduct. I understand we want to hit the parents with everything at once, but I'm wondering if there's a better place, if we can have a parent page somewhere or something where parents know they can go and get all this information. I think it's very important that they understand the rights. and know where all these procedures are. So I don't know if there's a way we can look into doing something like that, where it's very easy for parents to find this, go to it, and email it once a year to them instead of putting it in the student code of conduct. But I also wanted to just note that in this policy, since we're talking
186about this policy, maybe we want to consider while we're updating it to look at, it says the district plan under this policy. may include parent participation in various school, district, and board committees that are continuing and are established from time to time to deal with specific issues such as curriculum committees and textbook adoption committees. And I know it says may, so we don't have to do that. We didn't do it. And I just really think we need to consider updating this policy to make sure that parents are involved so we don't run into situations like we have here tonight. Thank you. Since it sounds like it's just one word switch, I would just ask you to make a motion on that at the second read. Unless you want to provide it in writing. There's a
187lot that comes under that, so I don't know if we want to do shall on all of that, but I think it's something that maybe I'll look at and at least say that the district plan under this policy shall include parents on committees. Okay. Thank you. I just want to point out that board member Carney's request has already been granted on our website. We now have a family section that has the parental rights handbook, but it will be a landing spot for all of those other things as well. So as we were reviewing it when we had updated the website, we had this in the previous website and it wasn't there today. It was added. So it will be a single spot where families can find that information easily. We know that that's really important.
188So it's already started. Okay, so on that note will we be able to remove it from the code of conduct and Send an email once a year or put it in you know put A link in that code of conduct to where to that page? So what we'll want to do is to talk about the process by which we can ensure compliance with the statutory requirements in the most straightforward manner for our families. So whether it's a reference in the code of conduct or whether it's something we send out at the beginning of every year through ParentSquare, I think there are ways that we can do it. We just haven't had that conversation. So we'll look at what might be the most effective way to do it. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah, the statute says
189that. Annual notification and the policy must be provided. And so since we provide the student code of conduct annually at enrollment, that's why I included the entire policy in there. I just know how overwhelming that can be already with everything we have as a parent and you have to go through and do so much that I'm just. I'm just considering if we could make it, you know, streamline it a little more, make it a little easier because it is important. We're going to have to talk to the legislature on that one. Oh, yeah, I know where to find someone. Thanks. I know where to find one. Is that what you just said? Oh, that's great. All right. Thank you, Mr. Pazan. Thank you, board members. That brings us to consent agenda. I make a motion
190that we accept consent agenda items all A through double C minus. P T U V W and S since we already approved it so I would like to make a consent agenda item to approve all but those just listed need a second I'll second Discussion like are we ready to okay all those in favor aye aye Okay, it passes five to zero all right with that. We will pull specifically item P approve the purchase of multiple commodities and services using a state Arizona cooperative contract Miss Carney, would you like to address your poll? Yes, thank you president Lewis I pulled 11P, approved the purchase of multiple commodities and services, state of Arizona co-op contract in regard to Dell Corporation for $4,750,000. I had asked for Ms. Crozier to send us the purchase orders and quotes
191for our district devices, which she did provide all of us. And I noticed on the quotes that we have... something called absolute control and I did ask questions on what that is and How much did we pay for that this past school year, but I did not get that information. So I'm wanting to know if we Have that information or if you can tell us what that is. Thank you miss Carney. I'm actually gonna have Dr. Well help with that when we have part of the answer But I think we're still looking for how much that is. Thank you Yes, thank you. So that is a product that we've been purchasing licenses for with our new mobile assets for the last almost two years. And the cost is itemized on some of our Windows device
192purchases, but not itemized on our Chromebook purchases. So that's why there's a challenge in finding out how much. we spent this fiscal year on that product, but we can continue researching that with our partners at Dell. And Absolute is used for tracking of these mobile devices when they are reported, lost, or stolen. So there's some reporting that we can get that's useful as far as how recently they were turned on, what kind of hardware specification they have, and we can use that to create some reports in mass as we manage the life cycle of over 20,000 of these student devices that are mobile. But then also when a student leaves and doesn't return a device, then we can actually be looking at, okay, is this device still accessing the internet? And if so, do we
193have an idea of where it is? The team actually uses this regularly to try and reach out and recover lost devices. They let me know this week that they reached out to a family. in Ohio to say, hey, can you send our device back? If our efforts are unsuccessful, then Absolute can work directly with law enforcement, and there are some additional things that law enforcement may be able to access. Of course, it depends on the status of the device, things that we wouldn't be able to try and recover those assets. Okay, so Absolute Control is a... is a tracking system and it's on student devices. There are a couple different products that Absolute creates. One of them I think is Absolute Resilience and one of them is Absolute Control. The difference and the reason we
194buy Absolute Control for the Windows devices is that it does allow us to remotely wipe the device. With our Chromebooks, there's not data that's being stored on the device. It's all stored in the cloud and we have administrative control and access to that. But a Windows device, if it were to fall into the wrong hands, potentially there's... the risk of having local data on it that potentially could be accessed. And so this allows us to remotely wipe any data and further protect the data that we have that is sensitive on our systems. Okay, so when was Absolute implemented onto computers? How long has it been on? We started purchasing that sometime last fiscal year. Okay. Is it on my device? Is it on our device? I believe it has been deployed to staff devices as
195well. Those are the most expensive of our mobile assets. Okay. I'm just very concerned about this. I looked into this after seeing it. And if we have tracking devices on student and staff computers, we need to be getting consent. So did we get consent from parents or why do we not need that? We do have technology policies and code of conduct in the code of conduct as well as in our governing board policies. And we have a responsibility to manage and protect the, as you pointed out from this agenda item, significant annual investment that we make in these products. So that's part of the reasoning behind this product specifically. I'll just chime in. I work for the CIO at Arizona State University. Those assets belong to the institution, not the individual. Understand consent is an
196issue with it, but because the asset belongs to the institution, that's common practice. And we have, I run the data team. I can find devices and who's logging on the internet and where they are. So it's not uncommon to have that on there. The question is, who's behind the scenes? Is somebody watching dots on a map tracking an individual? Usually the answer is no. It's when needed. It's not there. There's not somebody actively monitoring individuals. Can they? Yes, if there is a nefarious person behind the controls working for the district, may have the ability to, but it's almost always that I know of the person that's there trying to react to something that happened, not proactively looking. Thank you for that and it is true that working in information technology we hold ourselves to high
197ethical standards because we do have access to a lot of different data that is personal and confidential educational records and such so there are also in our systems logs so if we did need if we did suspect we had You know an inside threat we are able to look back and see what people have accessed and if that isn't in line with their job responsibilities Okay, so Absolute does have logs and audits of what's being on. I appreciate that, but I think it's highly concerning that this was never brought forward to tell staff or students or ourselves that this was implemented onto our computers. And I would move that we approve this item minus the Absolute control and resilience moving forward. Just want to add a comment. It's not your computer. I know when you
198say there are, I take it home. But I recognize this is not my computer. Out of the technology side, those who understand, very much understand that most people don't understand that. So I appreciate your concern there. But just again, these are the district's assets that we own. Right. And I don't think parents are aware that their student is being tracked through a device that is on their computers. And that is my concern. And I think it's very important that we bring this forward. So just please, with the wording, they're not being tracked. There is the capability to track them right that is very different from being tried I don't want to have the wording that paid in the board meeting. I heard their kids being tracked absolutely not true So I just want to really
199care about the word and it's a capability analogous to find my iPhone. I mean am I? Understanding it correctly is for a layperson with the simplest way to be To understand it is every iPhone has find my iPhone. And then if you lose your iPhone, you can find your iPhone. And if you can't find it, you can wipe it. Correct. Okay. Thank you. Ms. Warner. Thank you, President Lewis. So I get the. that it is the district's device. I think we all agree on that. But the fact that somebody can look, the fact that it's not disclosed and told to parents that specifically that if you go on vacation to California and your kid is taking their device with them, somebody can actually log in and say that that device is in California. Well, I'm
200sure it's not problematic I do believe parents at least some parents are gonna find it problematic that somebody can just open up You know, whatever absolute software and look at where their kids are at. I mean, it's a little bit creepy also so could we disclose to parents just that we have the software on there so they can just accept or deny and You know, let's just be transparent with our families That was a question. Oh, thank you. So, yes, absolutely. Transparency is very important to us. That's why we do have our data privacy agreements listed on our website. And we are adding and eliminating programs regularly. Thank you. And I do appreciate your IT expertise. But respectfully, parents are not going to the website to read, you know. the data private privacies and so
201on. This is a true consent like you would consent to having your kid's picture taken. And I think that in full transparency, we should do that. So we can definitely investigate that. Can I ask what channel do you think is best to disclose that? We disclose, we do parent signatures at the beginning of every school year. And when the issue is, when the device is issued, that's a great time to have a clear statement that, yes, the district can track the computer's location. This isn't complicated. And if it's, like you said, it's not nefarious, it really is just for protection, then there's no problem disclosing that to parents clearly so they can just sign off on it instead of tucked into a data privacy agreement somewhere that they're never going to read. I guess the
202concern that I would have just playing this forward is our curriculum and our teachers need our kids to have devices that's part of the learning environment. We as a district, at least I as a board member, would never approve purchasing computers that didn't have something as, in my perspective, basic as the ability to. Find a lost device and wipe it. I think that's a huge security risk. I can't I mean imagine our cyber insurance There's any number of unintended consequences where I can't imagine a world in which in practice We don't have to from a financial perspective or at least you know would want to from a reasonable perspective So I don't know what it means to then say to a family Only take this device that we're making available because it's part of learning
203If you're willing or don't take the device if you're unwilling for us to be able to identify it if it's lost or wipe it. I think we could be creating a whole series of unintended consequences. President Lewis, so actually I disagree with that. If there is a, and you seemed willing to, the opportunity of disclosing this, it's not a don't take it if you don't agree. It's more just the awareness. And I think appreciate people, even like us, we had no idea that you could look up to see where we are. Just people appreciate transparency and just being honest. I have no problem with the technology. It's just the lack of transparency and parents not knowing is my issue with it. And I'd like to just see parents have a small little blurb that, yes,
204we can go in and wipe the computer or find out where it is if it becomes lost or stolen. I don't think that's asking too much. That I agree with. I think families should understand when their kids have a device. Generally what you know what's associated with that and presumably that's part of our technology policy So I guess the question is is it part of our technology? Policy that families have access to and can see because again if we just extrapolate this out They could see my kids medical records if they want to I mean there's any number of things that People with certain access controls can do It's a question of whether we have the robust systems to ensure that that isn't happening. Is that communicated in our general technology policy? I don't. I'd
205have to look for that specific thing. I can tell you that often when things come up, like we were talking earlier about AI, when we find new challenges that we say we need to make sure people know how to appropriately use this or that new thing, we do find that our policies are broad enough to apply to those. But I'll have to look and see in this situation. Yeah, but that I completely agree with what you just described. Port member word 100% on transparency but it just caution and use the word honesty because that implies there is a dishonest intent and That's very different transparency 100% but honesty this is how seeds start of mistrust and I just Maybe it's because the technology side of me, but I just want to be very cautious about
206our wording. So mr. Sharkey respectfully My word bridge is not on the agenda tonight Respectfully, so thank you and your comments are inappropriate Okay, so I would like to approve this with the intent and the agreement that the district will notify the parent that the District has the capability to locate and wipe the device if needed I'd like to amend that motion because we also need to include staff, all employees. This is also on all employees' computers, and they need to have knowledge of it as well. So I'd like to amend the motion to include employees and staff along with board members. I would second that. If everybody's in agreement. All right, we have a motion on the table to pass item P with the concept that it is communicated to staff and parents about
207the ability of the district to follow the device and wipe it clean. There's been a second, so I'm going to ask a question, not about the motion to the motioners. Yes, yes, okay Do we have mechanisms to do this that are relatively straightforward? For notification? Yeah. Yes. For the different stakeholders, because we want to clarify there's more than one stakeholder. Yeah, I think annually where we typically notify around technology policies and practices is in, there's employee records around technology that's signed off on every year and our student code of conduct. Thank you. I'd also like to point out that staff are trained. like the board was on public records. They know that everything that goes on their computer is a public record. They know that it's the district property. I mean, I would ask human
208resources to speak to this, because it just boggles my mind that y'all don't understand that this is common knowledge, that it's district property. And we're going to track it down if you leave without it, you steal it, you lose it, what have you. It's really perplexing. All right, I'm going to call the question. All those in favor of the motion as presented and amended, say aye. Aye. It's unanimous 5-0. Thank you very much for the time. We are now on item 11T, approval of new job description for chief communications and information officer. Ms. Carney? I'm sorry. Yes. Thank you, Board President Lewis. I asked to pull item 11T. I don't think I was the only board member asking to pull this, but I'll start the conversation on the new job description for Chief Communications and
209Information Officer, the CCIO. And because I'm pulling this, I also needed to pull 11V and W, which are applicable to this position. I understand that you have created this position for Ms. Harrington, our current Director of Communications and Marketing, but it's highly concerning considering a strong tech background is critical for this position. Reading through the current job descriptions for the current Chief Systems Officer states, much education. experience and even more concerning is the knowledge portion knowledge of school information systems database concepts online application systems development deployment maintenance working knowledge of LEN WAN all this stuff has been removed on this new position job description so I'm wondering why are these things that are on the chief systems officer job description no longer needed or necessary in this new position. So let's provide some context with
210respect to the conversation for the past few months the governing board has made it very clear that they want us to look for cost savings at the district level particularly district administration We've committed to the governing board that when we have vacancies will review those vacancies to determine whether there are opportunities to Reconfigure the way the work is done within central office to be able to reduce the number of central office administrators that we have When we hired Christine Bono to be the assistant superintendent for elementary education, we collapsed the sole position under community ed early learning in order to save an FTE. When Michelle Watt indicated that she was not going to be returning as our CSO, she suggested one potential opportunity for us was to look at this. Opportunity to combine these two
211positions and so I have confidence that in her review of what she does day in and day out as our chief systems officer and knowing the work that Christine Harrington does as our chief information officer that she contemplated the very question that you're asking So those two work together on a new job description cabinet discussed the arrangement to determine do we have the right skill set in order to move our district forward knowing the importance of that IT infrastructure like that's dr Watt to talk about the team that she has put together in the IT area and the capacity of that team to do this work along with Why you even suggested the idea at the first in the first place? Thank you for the opportunity. Yes, so two of the things that informed the
212current job description even more than the previous job descriptions because we all know that a job description exists and Sits on a shelf and sometimes our duties stray from that so recently this last fall every every employee or employee group across the district did a position description questionnaire, PDQ. So looking over what I put as my daily work and how much time I spent on each of those things, that was part of what informed this recommendation. The other thing that informed the job description is our national professional association for K-12 IT leaders, the Consortium for School Networking. They have a framework of essential skills. for a K-12 CTO is what they call it, but the IT leader in a school district. And there are three pillars within that. that also drive the certification for individuals
213in that position. One is leadership, leadership skills, strategy, vision, communication. The other is knowledge of the educational environment. It's very important to understand who we serve and how we operate in order to be successful. And the third pillar is, as you mentioned, an understanding of technology and the tools and things that we manage. When you have a smaller school district that person may also be the one configuring servers and evaluating the hardware specifications to make a choice around a student device that's going to be used for the next four years by a student. In Scottsdale Unified School District we have leaders who have teams that are doing a lot of that hands-on detailed work. It is to our advantage that the leader in this position is not the one who is doing some, responsible for
214doing some of that technical work, and so that's why it was not as reflected in my PDQ, but knowledge of those things is important. And that professional organization that I mentioned, they regularly support leaders coming into the leading an IT department who have maybe strengths in two of those areas and not a third. It's not unusual for a K-12 IT leader to come up through say instructional technology or from a principal role. And so they do have that learning curve of needing to do some self study, understand some fundamental things like you mentioned LAN and WAN, they need to understand what a LAN and a WAN is. And so it will be the responsibility of the leader in that. position to recognize and address where there may be gaps in any one of those three
215areas. So unlike dress codes this is actually something I know a little bit about. I've spent 25-30 years in education technology. I want to start by saying I really wish we didn't have to do this in a sense. I really do think that technology is so central and so strategic to the operational efficiencies of the district from a budget perspective as well as obviously you know driving learning outcomes and ever more so with AI and in VR and and so on so I really do wish we had a dedicated technology leader in the cabinet that said I'm comfortable with it for three reasons first I have been to many, many school districts and universities for that matter, and it is, as you described, very common, or at least not uncommon, to have technology led by
216a former teacher, by someone in communications, by folks who don't necessarily have a technical role, but still understand. the applications of technology within an educational organization, partly for the reasons that you also described, which is that more technical skill set really is at the next level, and it's at questions of budgeting and resources and policy that the cabinet leadership focuses on. Second, I think we've... Hired a superintendent and if the superintendent thinks that we can deliver on what the district needs with this configuration I don't see it as the board's responsibility to kind of step in and override that and then third This is what we've been asking for we have been asking to see the district be more aggressive in Consolidating administrative roles and find budget savings and so here we're doing that And
217I feel like we will be sending mixed signals relative to whether we want the cost savings to come from the classroom or whether we want the cost savings to come from the district office if we then question what is a... a proposal to reduce it from the district office. So for those three reasons. While I don't love it, and hopefully in a year or two we'll be in a different place, although I don't want to suggest that we would take the responsibilities away, that came out wrong, I understand it and I support it. When school sites have issues with technology, whether it's a teacher with a student device in a classroom, who do they call? The help desk. Okay, so do we have and who is on the help desk? Three of our IT specialists.
218And are the sites assigned tech coaches? They are not. They're not? Okay. So I know that we have been trying to cut. From a lot of different places so that we can take care of our classrooms our teachers or staff I mean even our principals and assistant principals, and I do know that we have an opening In our general counsel is made a decision not to come back next year That is a position that does not need to be filled we are operating just fine with The trust the prepaid legal that we had been operating under previously hold on I'm not done. I'm gonna careful on point of order Go ahead. So, well, it was brought up that this was for cost-cutting reasons. Typically I would be in favor of consolidating but in this particular
219case with IT it's very technical and When you ask dr. What a question she does not get stumped She doesn't have to ask anybody else and I don't believe that The person that they want to put in this position has that while she's doing great in her role I don't believe this is this would be healthy for our relationship because there are no guardrails if it doesn't work out So eliminating a position And if this is not successful in the next six months or in the next year, then we are at a little bit of a quandary with that. We were notified of this on April 18th in a weekly update email we get on Saturdays, followed by an email on May 10th by... Dr.. Cruz so their concerns and there can also concerns by
220staff that have reached out or throughout the district and While you know most people have to interview for positions This one was created by the person taking it over and that's just really bad for morale particularly when there are individuals within our staff currently who are dying to get a new contract for next year and They're not so With that I'm not going to be supporting this today, and it's absolutely not personal at all I think that this is just not the right area to be cutting when we can look at so many other areas that are Not agendized tonight, and I'm happy to share those Thank you. Any other comments? All right, I'll make a motion then that we approve Item T, approval of the new job description for Chief Communications and Information Officer.
221I need a second. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? No. All right, it passes 3-2. Let's look at Item U, approval of revised job description for Communications Manager. Ms. Carney? Well, like I said, I just needed to pull that because it is applicable to the vote that just happened, and I was a no on that, so it's not applicable. So if you want to make a motion on that. Alright, if that's alright, I'll call the motion for item you approval of revised job description for communication manager I'd like to call for it to be approved second. All right. It's been second. I did all in favor say aye aye Opposed no no it passes three to two All right item W approval of revisions to a did I miss V my apologies approval of
2222526 supplemental salary schedules miss Carney Thank you. I asked to pull 11B, approval of 2025-26 supplemental salary schedule so we could understand a little more on this removal of transportation longevity stipend, which was mistakenly left on the schedule last year and has now been removed. It was originally added during classified salary schedule adjustments. We just got an email from a 20-year school bus driver asking. us to look into this and to oppose this change and so therefore I'm Bringing this forward so we can learn more about what's happened or where we're at with this and why we are removing this Transportation longevity stipend from someone who has driven school bus for us for the past 20 years And when we're trying to you know find people to drive our buses. I'm just concerned with this
223Board member Carney A couple years ago, we took a deep dive into classified salary schedules that happened in the 22-23 school year. At that time... We focused on how to address compression and deal with longevity issues where years where folks Didn't receive raises there was a concern that we know you come in Into the district and your place at a rate that is pretty similar to somebody who may have had five six seven years of service So at that time frame we had dollars available to be able to address that to create a salary schedule that replaced all of those classified folks. So outside of transportation, I mean encompassed transportation, but really looked at how do we address that to also get out of the business of trying to do stipends for every area. And
224recognizing that that's an area where I know bus drivers are really hard to find, we've tried to adjust that compensation to be more competitive and I think we are pretty competitive, but we recognize that that's also not something that we could do for all employees. When we adjusted that salary schedule, the intent at that time was to then basically put that longevity as part of how do we acknowledge and get rid of that compression and address the years of service that drivers have. We did not pay that stipend then in 20, last year, 23, 24, yeah, 23, 24. We no longer did that. Apparently that was left on as a clerical error on the salary schedule or the stipend schedule. The intent was the same for this year. We realized it was there and so
225it was removed. Again, the intent had always been that we were adjusting those salaries and we have adjusted bus driver salaries to be more competitive and so it was, the idea is that we fixed the problem that we were trying to solve with the longevity stipend. Okay, so a question on that. So as a board, we... We thought we approved these longevity stipends, but they weren't given to the bus drivers, correct? As a board, we approved that, but they didn't get the money. In 22-23, we did give that. It was not given last year. Even though the board approved it? Yeah, it was a clerical error. I don't know that we recognized that it was there, and so it wasn't our intent to do that. And now trying to fix what had been the intent
226originally. I think that's an issue because the board did approve those longevity stipends and I think it needs to be addressed. Thank you. Thank you. It's problematic with the transportation that they don't make a lot of money. There are hourly rates and then to have something like this cut that was board approved and just to take that away from them. You know, I wish everybody could get paid at the top of the pay scale everybody who's here tonight It's 930 and you guys should be making more money But these people are these individuals make very little and to take this away from them is it's absolutely appalling and we have to take a look at other places to To cut from then the people that are direly need of these funds. So I'm not going
227to support this today any other comments Alright, I'll call the motion to approve the 2526 supplemental salary schedule as presented. I need a second. I'll second. Alright, all those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? No. And it passes 3-2. Okay, we are at W. We had two board members pull. Approval of revisions to approve 2526 salary schedules. This is about the revision specifically. Ms. Warner or Ms. Carney, whoever would like to start. Thank you, President Loz. So on here, I'm going to specifically point to the 12-month administrative position classifications and salary range, G through N. And when I did the math on the pay grade increases, and we can just skip down to N, but they're all the bottom. ratio has only been increased by 0.5%, but the tops, so the max of the people that
228are at the max of the pay level is going up 2.4%. And so why is it going from the people who are at the bottom of the pay scale for that particular category is only going up a half, but if you're at the top of it, it's 2.4%. Thank you. Member Warner, thank you for the question. As the board approves our increases to the salary schedule, we typically, so the board approved a 1%. Our practice with payroll and human resources has been that we increase the bottom a half a percent just so that there is not, it helps to alleviate compression. And then everybody gets a 1% to stay within that range. Some of the other some of the ranges you'll see are a little bit wider than others One of our audit findings from
229the Scottsdale City of Scottsdale audit with the Audit Committee recommended that there Were some salaries that were not represented on the salary schedule we would bring those as salary differentials in the past years So our goal this year was to ensure that all of our ranges encompass every single Employee and their governing board approved salary so that as you are approving this salary schedule you are indeed approving all salary schedules for Are all salaries for all employees? We don't intend to bring salary differentials forward in the future. I hope that makes sense. So it just still seems odd. And to the people that are watching and the people that work here, if you are on the low end of the scale of the... little boxes the categories your it's a half but going up to
230the the top end of it is 2.4 we actually category H it went up from 0.8% on the low end all the way up to 3.6 on the high end of the scale and It just seems like that's not quite right and I'm gonna move on to one more thing so we we've just talked about the CCIO position and some changes made to the other positions and on here is also still the chief systems officer with a range of 122, 144. So why hasn't this been eliminated with the approval of the CCI position? It just seems like, you know, if... In a couple months, you can just bring in another chief systems officer and fill that perceived savings. Member Warner, thank you very much. It is our goal not to assume what the governing board
231will approve. So based on a decision this evening, we would bring that back next meeting, and we would take that off. Well, actually, I think that this could be approved without it today. It could be amended. That would be fantastic. All right, any other comments, questions? Go ahead, Mr. Sharkey. Do we have an idea what the financial impact is here? I'm not sure what the suggestion is. I understand the compression discussion. I'm just trying to understand what the financial impact is. Is there any way to quantify what we're talking about here? If we're saying to adjust the lower end raises to a more equitable point, I'm just trying to size this thing. Thank you, Member Sharkey. So let me be clear. When somebody is at the very bottom of the scale, that is somebody brand
232new to our system, and they have no experience for the position they are coming in at. So all of our employees did receive a 1% increase to their salary for 25-26, and that is represented throughout our system, correct? But the way our salary schedule represents, we don't have a step schedule. So it's very hard for people to find their spot, right? So it is represented and it has been the practice just to increase the bottom of the cell. 0.5% if that's a practice you'd like us to look at in the future, we certainly can. But that's just to alleviate some compression. For our given employees that are already in our system. So forgive me if I'm not understanding is the the question that the Ranges the adjustment of the ranges is not credible or the
233amount of the raise given to individuals I'm not understanding if we're talking about raises or pay ranges Anyone who can answer I believe the question was about the what's on the range and and the inference was that it impacted the raise which it didn't so so the range the longer you're here the the higher your compensation and so you're going to see a spread between the range and and Dr. Cruz is correct that that decision was made a number of years ago before I got here the first eight steps of the teacher compensation schedule were eliminated That created major salary compression. So someone could have been here nine years and be making almost the same as a brand new teacher in our district. So recognizing that that was an unintended consequence of the district's desire
234at the time to raise the starting salary for incoming teachers, we said we need to put something in place that ensured that we didn't get that same level compression when we had pay raises in the future. And so the range itself... the very first step only goes up a half percent. Everything else and every employee is guaranteed the percent raise the board gives, whether it's one or two or three. It's just that in order to avoid salary compression, that starting, no experience, first year person in our system is gonna be a half percent lower than what the general raise was given to individuals. And if I might just address the top of the range, we don't arbitrarily just increase the top of the range. However, we have made the commitment that all salaries will be
235encompassed in the correct range. So if an employee was given a 1% raise, that takes us above the range. We increase the range to encompass that salary. So as we are then reflecting all salaries on a governing board approved salary schedule, I'm not bringing it as a separate salary differential. We felt that that was disingenuous. And and did not follow the direction of our Scottsdale City of Scottsdale audit fine Miss Warner I will point out that the The executive director minimum went up by 1%, and the maximum, or the high end of the race, also went up by 1%. But the levels below the executive director, the bottom was only 0.5% versus the executive director, which was 1%. Ms. Warner, I'm happy to check into that. However, given your decision this evening, We have to
236look at the executive director. I believe that we will not have an executive director position next year and that would need to be removed. So I will double check that for sure. So what we're being asked to approve today has two errors on it, the executive director position and the chief systems officer, so that should be removed. And if that is the case, I would motion to approve this without the executive director level and the chief systems officer on the salary range document. And if somebody wants to second that. I second. Any other comments? Okay, with the amended, go ahead. I just want to make a comment because The new communications manager position is listed on here, and that's why I'm going to not be able to vote for it because I did not approve
237that position, so therefore I can't approve this. Thank you. All right. All those in favor, aye. Aye. And those opposed? No. Then it passes 4-1. All right, I am going to execute a brief recess given the longevity of our meeting and the next part being so hardy. So we will take a seven minute break. We will meet back at 16 till 10. Calling back to order our regular meeting at 944 p.m. We are right on schedule. We are now to item 12 action items. First is the approval of the SUSD's gifted education scope and sequence. I'd like to invite Sarah Tolione to the podium. This is a required approval and she is going to be very fast but happy to answer any questions that you have. Sarah. No pressure. All right, well, good evening. Governing
238Board President Dr. Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, members of the board, Dr. Menzel, and Gladys, thank you for the opportunity to present to you the updated version of the SUSD gifted scope and sequence. Yay as I shared with you guys in detail last week just to provide a brief overview for people watching the gifted Advisory Committee worked over the course of a year and a half to evaluate provide input and create targeted action plans to elevate the practices the services and the programming opportunities Aimed to meet the diverse learners in our school district from pre-k through 12th grade the work of this group which included administrators teachers and parents and a shout out to my gifted team real quick it's the work is reflected in this updated scope and sequence before you this evening for approval
239I just wanted to point out some things that you may see as changed and that is a reorganized and reformatted version for use for ease of use and reference. You'll also notice expanded details which provide a more comprehensive description of the services and programming opportunities available. Pointing out some key updates and changes just wanted to bring your attention to the gifted identification process but to kind of frame that we're very appreciative of a de's continued funding of the second grade universal screener And we definitely leverage that as one of the three required Opportunities that we provide our community for gifted testing each year But we do want to ensure that we're aligning with best practices and assessment and ensure fiscal responsibility so we have updated the testing language to Require gifted department approval for a
240student to be tested more than three times by the district This one's exciting Because it focuses on the gifted services at the secondary level which is definitely An area and an opportunity for us to elevate excellence, so we do have elevated Consultations services and supports for our middle school and high school gifted students and though we do currently provide those Guidance and services we really wanted to codify them in this document to create a system of explicit expectations And a collaborative approach so being really intentional about this and layering this consultative service around critical transitional years Elementary to middle middle to high and so forth really will ensure that we're providing services and course selections and progressions that are reflecting the needs of the individual students their talents and their interests because we have so
241many opportunities here in Scottsdale to choose from so Told you I'd be fast. The updated scope and sequence before you does reflect two years of collaborative work to enhance the services for gifted learners in SUSD. It aligns with NAGC programming standards, ADE requirements, and SUSD's commitment to elevating excellence. So we're seeking your approval tonight so that we may submit this document to the Arizona Department of Education as required. by Arizona statute and as part of our cycle five monitoring. And with that, I'll take any questions. Thank you. Questions from the board? It's more of a comment, and I know we want to move on to the main event. I just want to emphasize that comment about, I didn't mean it the way it came out, actually. It's late. That comment about transition services we learned
242two things many things but at least two things at the study session One is when there's a building transition. That's when we are at risk of losing students and families elementary to middle middle to high school to Academic rigor and academic quality is a key factor for folks staying with or choosing So the more that we can create a true system, so if I'm a fifth grade parent I'm hearing from my teacher. They're on track to be recommended. I know it's different in honors relative to gifted, but the more we're really explicit and we're building in, and these are the classes that you can look forward to, and if a family has concerns that they were looking for a higher level, there's time to work through that. Again, I know I'm conflating gifted and honors
243to a certain extent, but at the end of the day, I think the better we can execute that. Here's what we think is the right curriculum for your learner, and here's how we can ensure that they have the most rigorous learning possible. I think the more we'll be taking data-based approaches to driving enrollment improvements. Absolutely agree with that, and I'm super excited to collaborate across departments to ensure that that's happening. So thank you. Any other comments or questions? All right. I make a motion that we approve the SUSD gifted education scope and sequence as presented. Second the motion. All those in favor? Aye. It passes 5-0. Awesome. Thank you. You want to go home? I want to stay for the main event. Oh, yeah. That's... Great. That brings us to Item 12B, the second read
244and approval of the social science curriculum adoption. Dr. Menzel, do you want to introduce yourself? Yes, I... I'm going to welcome Dr. Dodds, Karen, and Dylan to the podium. You have seen the PowerPoint presentation. They're going to walk through it. They're going to do this in some level of detail given the amount of public input we received, both in terms of the emails that the governing board has in their inbox as well as public comment this evening. We want to make sure that the board is fully aware of the process that's been followed, and so I'm looking forward to having the team present. Good evening, President Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, members of our board, Dr. Menzel-Glattis, those in the room this evening or maybe online still. I'm joined again tonight with Dylan, our social studies
245coach, as we present to you the work of our social science curriculum adoption committee for our second read. And this is for world history, world geography, American and Arizona history, AP world history, modern. AP Human Geography, and AP United States History. I do want to recognize some people who are still sitting in the audience. We do have members of our committee here. We have some super awesome expert teachers here. Ashley Crose, Chris Hack, Ariana Fidinac. I say your name wrong all the time and I apologize for that. Brittany Case is here, an assistant principal, Chad Johnson, and then also kind of like the girl behind Oz, Dee Dee Johnston, our materials specialist for the warehouse for all things curriculum. Dee Dee's here. So I want to just thank the members of our committee who are
246here this evening. Thank you. This evening we are going to elaborate on the work of this committee. Specifically, we're going to talk about state statute and policies guiding our committee work, the structures for our meetings, the rationale for our recommendations, and we would like to provide a few examples to address public feedback that was shared with us during our first read on April 29th, as well as information that we've received leading up to today. Ultimately, we will share the recommendations of... our committee for your consideration. This slide, I realize, has a lot of information on here, but I want you to understand that there are a variety of statutes and district policies that guide the work of curriculum adoption committees. Hosted in a district location, our meetings adhere to open meeting law, which means we
247post our meeting agendas 24 hours in advance. We post our PowerPoints and our supporting documents to our committee website that also is that mirror to that textbook adoption site. During our meetings, which are open to the public, and I know that earlier today Mrs. Walther mentioned attending our meetings and we appreciated you being there and the feedback you provided. We take meeting minutes, which we also post on our websites. In alignment with board policy IGA, which states that one half of the committee is to be comprised of teachers, our committee was comprised of five teachers, one high school administrator, and one community member. While we did not have parents who applied to serve, in accordance with statute and board policy IJJ, materials have been on public display since February 19th. As of yesterday, 37 people
248have signed into Oak for our public review, and at the time of our first read, 65 people had provided feedback that had been collected on our public review feedback form. Since our first read, we have received seven more submissions to our public review feedback form. As of 3 p.m. yesterday, May 12th, we have received 72 pieces of feedback. And all the feedback comes from 12 visitors who have come to the public display space at Oak, of which four visitors were parents, eight visitors were members of our community. 11 teachers also provided feedback for the material that is incorporated in that feedback and that was on display at their campuses utilizing our same Google form. We do want to thank those 33 people who took time to review the curriculum and give that feedback to us.
249Finally, our review and our consensus process for textbook selection is guided by policy IJJR. Each of the criteria are listed on the slide that you see here. And this is really central to the work of our committee. Specifically, I want to reference item F, resources shall be recommended for their strengths rather than rejected for their weaknesses and shall be judged as a whole. That was integral to the conversations and ultimately the consensus making process. Tonight we want to acquaint you with what we in our field refer to as the instructional core, things associated with content, particularly the Arizona State Standards that drive our instruction. We have for you, if you are interested, copies of what are the... State guidance who we call them placemats because they kind of look like a placemat But they dictate
250to us from the Arizona Department of Education The standards and the priority standards and the skills that students are expected to learn Dylan will elaborate on that in a few minutes We also want to remind you all that we utilize the course exam descriptions This is from the College Board all of the work that we do for any advanced placement course does need to be aligned with the CEDs established by the College Board For our students. As you may recall, when we talked about our rubrics and the things that were important to our committee, it was having a lot of resources available for kids. And so things that are accessible to students, there's a lot of visuals, there's infographics, there's maps, there's graphic organizers, there's a host of primary sources, study guides, ways for students
251to practice and learn key vocabulary. And then for teachers, guided, of course, by our Arizona standards for our profession, as well as the Danielson framework for teaching, the teacher's guide. as well includes pedagogy and strategies to meet the needs of the learners in their classroom. And then throughout all of our curricular resources that we're recommending, there's opportunities for kids to engage in learning where they draw inferences, they compare and contrast, use a variety of factual recall as well as critical and creative thinking. Dylan's going to walk you through kind of the placemats, if you will, for our standards, and then we'll talk a little bit about a few of the resources and then ultimately the rationale and recommendations. Thanks. So this slide is included to acquaint you, the governing board, and the public with our
252Arizona State social science standards. The state actually developed new standards in 2018, and some key changes include an inquiry approach to learning, the inclusion of anchor standards, and a focus on disciplinary skills. This slide includes links to the traditional social science standards along with links and images of guidance documents or what we're referring to as the standard placemats for United States and Arizona history along with world history and geography. Key features of the United States and Arizona history standards placemat include looking at the image on the left or for the governing board. when you're referring to the physical document. The compelling question is in the center and it guides the course for the US history. And it asks, how has the historical journey of the United States contributed to the complex and ever evolving identity
253of the nation? The priority standards are located below the compelling question in the center of the placemats. There are nine priority standards for the United States and Arizona history. They are the most important standards and should be mastered by the end of the course. A sample of the American and Arizona history priority standards include HSH 2.3. This is a history standard, and it asks students to evaluate the short and long-term impacts of conflicts and their resolutions. HSC 2.3, a civic standard. It asks students to evaluate the evolution of ideals and rights established in historical documents, legislations, executive actions, and court cases. HSE 1.1, it's an economic standard, and it asks students to evaluate how and why people make choices to improve their economic well-being. And we have HSG 3.5, a geography standard, and it asks
254students to evaluate the impact of social, political, and economic decisions that have caused conflict or promoted cooperation throughout time. Disciplinary skills and processes related to the course are included on the left side of the placemat, and some examples include analyze continuity and change over time, evaluate the significance of past events, relate past events to the present, and evaluate multiple perspectives. Essential content knowledge is included on the right side of the placemat, and a sample of this information includes revolution in a new nation, Great Depression, rights and protest movements. The bottom portion of the placemat includes two sections dedicated to academic and content specific vocabulary. This language is intended to explicitly state the ways of thinking and academic knowledge of the content. The world history and geography placemat is set up the same way that I
255just explained for the American history placemat. The back of the standards placemats for both courses is the same. It includes a section in the middle dedicated to the social studies and English language arts connections. This identifies opportunities for the alignment of topics, concepts, and skill development between social studies and English language arts. The left side includes skills and instructional strategies, and a sample of these includes question formulation technique, Socratic seminar, see, think, wonder, connect, extend, and challenge. If you look on the upper right, you'll notice course and exam descriptions. This is for AP courses. The CED is unique to advanced placement courses and are the course exam descriptions established by the College Board. When selecting material for advanced placement courses, it's imperative that curriculum is approved by the College Board, aligns with the CED, and
256supports students in preparing for the AP exam for the course. This slide illustrates common themes and criteria considered during the committee's consensus-making process. Always central to the work of this committee was alignment with the AP course descriptions and College Board approved material, state standards, a comprehensive suite of resources to meet the needs of all learners, digital integration with our learning management system, and professional development to support our teachers. Based on feedback from our first read on April 29th, there was concern about a hook and inspire related to March March by the chicks. This slide illustrates the teacher's edition from the recommended U.S. History interactive text by Savas. The light gray margins on the perimeter of the page represents the information that's included in the teacher's guide. Hook and inspire is a teacher's choice intended to
257help build interest in the upcoming lesson. in this example for the origin of the American Revolution. The title of the section is Connection to Today, and teachers are able to access resources online. We've included a screenshot of the digital teacher's guide for the Hook and Inspire, and you can see that on the right side. Organized to support guiding questions, teachers may choose to select from a variety of media resources, including videos. There are five for teachers to choose from, including... Why learn about civil resistance by Hardy Merriman? Selma how to survive a plague Occupy Wall Street and March March by the chicks There's also three media examples including a poem an article and pictures and four websites These are all optional resources for teacher consideration As curriculum maps are developed for this course, these resources
258will be reviewed to be included in the maps. This image on the left illustrates the student version of the textbook for the same lesson you just previewed. The image on the right is an example of the digital textbook for which this lesson includes features such as an essential question, connections to today, a timeline, options for text-to-speech, meaning the content can be read aloud to the student. and a digital notebook for students to write down main ideas as they read or listen to the reading. Another concern from the first read of our board proposal was the inclusion of protest movements and the U.S. History Interactive Text by Sivas. This lesson is part of the American Presidents in the 21st Century. This one is specifically about the Obama administration. And this lesson is part of information specifically
259aligned to the Obama administration. And it aligns with several aspects of standards set out by the Arizona Department of Education. It includes standards such as change and continuity over time. It asks students to assess similarities and differences between historical periods and between the past and the present. to evaluate the significance of past events as they relate to their own lives and world, to use compelling questions generated about individuals and groups to assess how the significance of their actions changes over time and is shaped by historical context. to use disciplinary and interdisciplinary lenses to understand the characteristics and causes of local, regional, and global problems, instances of such problems in multiple contexts, and challenges and opportunities faced by those trying to address these problems over time and place. Ask students to examine how historically marginalized groups
260have affected change on political and social institutions. to examine how access to information and technology has been used to influence society, to examine how a diverse society can be a force for unity and or disunity. Here's information in the text from the section entitled The Black Lives Matter Movement on page 1024. During the trial for Trayvon Martin's murder, the hashtag, hashtag Black Lives Matter, parentheses BLM in parentheses, began to appear in social media. This hashtag focused attention on the threat posed to black people by racism and the idea that black people's lives did not matter. Although it was not yet a fully formed movement with a specific agreed upon agenda, Americans backing BLM argued that police were more likely to target black males. stopping them on the street and pulling them over when they were
261driving. Too often, they argued, these events led to unjustified arrests and even police shootings. As the BLM movement gained strength and attracted followers, it used some of the same methods of peaceful protest and nonviolent civil disobedience employed by Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement. They organized marches in attention to their cause. Supporters of the police rejected the criticisms by BLM activists. They argued that unjustified police violence towards black people was rare and they criticized lawless behavior that sometimes accompanied BLM protests. This slide again shows the valuable resources available to students. For this lesson in the textbook, students are asked to make comparisons between the Black Lives Matter movement and civil rights movement. Students are given a space to type notes as they read information. This aligns with the standards I just shared
262on the previous slide. This slide illustrates the recommended curriculum for AP U.S. History. One of the reasons the committee recommended fabric of a nation as the AP US history textbook is due to the intentional approach the author's take to embedding advanced placement skills into the material Often the supplemental materials are available for the teacher to add to the reading when they deem it appropriate or necessary this textbook intentionally folds the skills into the reading and Help students prepare for success when taking the end of course exam This slide illustrates information we were able to gather for courses corresponding to our recommendations this evening and districts throughout our state that are also utilizing these resources as recommended by our committee. You'll see it's organized by World History, World Geography, American and Arizona History, AP World History
263Modern, AP Human Geography, and AP United States History. To support our committee recommendation, we are requesting $674,542.13. This would be to purchase the teacher and student materials inclusive of professional development and AP course exam preparation materials. This slide illustrates the curriculum that we are recommending for. and it includes for world history, world geography. This is a course for ninth or 10th grade students, the World History Voyages of Exploration text, published by Cengage. American and Arizona History, a course for 11th grade students, U.S. History Interactive, published by SAVIS. For AP World History Modern, this is an advanced placement course for 9th or 10th grade students. The Earth and Its Peoples, a global history published by Cengage. And for AP Human Geography, an advanced placement elective course for 9th grade students. We are requesting Human Geography, a
264spatial perspective published by Cengage. And for AP U.S. History, a course for 11th grade students, Fabric of a Nation, published by Bedford, Freeman, and Wirth. This slide will look familiar from our first read, and it just shows the pathway that we would intend to take pending board approval, where in the last week of school, visiting campuses, meeting with department chairs, introducing the curriculum in an informal manner. Dee Dee does all of her magic in working with Nick for contracts, ordering materials so that they can arrive in our warehouse. And then teachers who need to attend AP Summer Institute, those are offered locally in Gilbert and in Paradise Valley. We have a virtual option available for the Tucson. Summer Institute there would be pre week which is the first week back that teachers are on contract
265for formal professional development Throughout the year we would curriculum map and then along the way I'm visiting classrooms Dylan having an opportunity to work directly with our teachers and then over time continuing to analyze Achievement data and that we are able to gather specific to AP course exams and with that that concludes our second read Thank you for hitting the issues directly for us as you anticipated the comments that we received. I'd like to invite the board at this time to ask questions and make comments. Thank you for that. Trying to get a sense of timing of the course and the content. I was out with a friend last week whose son's a junior in SUSD and he said, so we have one more week of class and they're in the 1960s right now. A
266lot of the content... Not naming names not naming names A lot of the content we'd be getting comments from from the community Which is great to get that kind of feedback is in the last 10 years 15 years Can you give us an idea of how long a class is and where that information is kind of in a semester or a year's scope? Sure, and I'm also happy to invite a teacher, maybe Mr. Hack, who says he's not still in the 1960s, to share with us just kind of how they pace. This is Chris Hack. You've seen him before. He has received awards from our state for his recognition of being an outstanding teacher for not only history but also economics. All right, so for AP US history, if you look at the CED, it
267says 1491 through today, and they choose 1491 because they want it to be specifically pre-Columbus. There's not a earliest date you need. Just has to be before Columbus so we usually typically start pretty quickly going through with settling of North America's and then moving through that onto Columbus and everything else so there's not like a specific date with that one and then it goes up through they say today but that part our last unit 9 is really 1980 through somewhat contemporary things where it goes from Reagan and it really focuses a lot on the 80s into the 90s and doesn't do a ton with the 2000s. We're usually stopping early 2000s and their war on terror a little bit after that as that is comprised of about Want to say five percent of the AP
268test is unit nine I have to check the exact numbers because they redid it a couple years ago and from a timing standpoint is that One weeks of class two weeks worth of class like last module at module not the last my last module for this unit nine I did spread it out a little longer. We did about four four and a half days of our last unit I have, if you need like a breakdown of what I've used, I have a specific calendar for the entire year. Just trying to get a sense of scale of how much of the last 15 years is in relation to the entire year. About five days, and that's longer than I've done it before, usually at three. Thanks. This is Brittany Case, and she'll speak to you about
269on-level. Hi, I've been teaching on-level American history for the last five years at Chaparral. So as far as where we go, sorry, did not realize that moved. We've been able to get up to 2012 as far as like the elections go. So how we kind of come the last unit, we kind of do a civil rights cold war through modern era big. focus unit. We do keep in mind that in this time period we are also dealing with state testings and kids are getting burnt out and then they want to do projects for finals instead of exams and so we're trying to do a happy blend of both of those. So keeping in mind with that, we try to do current events throughout the school year. So I have students, I give them the opportunity
270to research anywhere from three to six articles. I encourage them to actually pick same topics from different perspectives. So they have a real in-depth of like, okay, this is this side's perspective, this is this side's perspective, and they can do a little compare and contrast. So we do do a lot more current events and especially around election time we do address what happens during the election how the election process goes and all those election results that we talked about in November but we don't get a chance to bring up again in May so as far as getting up to As far into the modern day as possible we try and get to the 2012s we do Election results we have them analyzed Presidential elections who were the main candidates? What were their major issues? That
271can be anywhere from a one to two day activity Because we also try to spend time on blending of primary source analyses to actual research on their own time. Thank you Before you go, when, ha ha, ma ha ha ha. As you think about your professional ethics and standards on the types of ways that you balance those kinds of lessons, in what way would you describe it as education versus indoctrination? I make it very clear to my students that my political side does not even enter the classroom. They can never guess where I'm trying to lead. I've always gone in and out of it as a very neutral approach. It is important to address sides. It's important to address the criticisms of movements, especially modern day movements. has to be addressed. We don't address it
272in like a, hey, you need to support one way versus the other. That's where indoctrination comes into play. But having to address the issue as a whole, and then also giving them the opportunity to research both sides, that's where it becomes a lot more educational. And by having those resources available to us, will give us that opportunity. Like our previous textbook, I don't know when was published. but if I'm not mistaken was when I was seven. So, yeah. Thank you. Ms. Carney? Can I ask a question? Will you come back up to the podium? Okay, thank you. Just while you're talking about this, I know that I counted 28 different supplemental materials, social studies supplemental materials for high school. What would you say that you currently use to supplement for current events off of that
273list? As far as current events, I actually encourage them to research different news websites on their own. I provide a bunch of different pre-approved websites anywhere from CNN to Fox and everywhere in between. I do have a list of, hey, I don't want you getting your information from ThoughtCo or from BuzzFeed because I really want it to be more news-driven when they're doing their research. But they can pick the different categories that they are interested in. in researching, so if they want to research politics, they can research politics. If they want to research more local levels or environmental disasters, things that are happening within, I give them like within a two week current time stamp. Okay, so you guys already have access to current events through the supplemental materials, correct me? Okay, thank you. Any
274other comments or questions from the board? Ms. Carney? Okay. Thank you first I want to acknowledge all of you and all the educators and everyone in the room And everyone who's not in the room who's invested their time on this curriculum committee because adopt on this adoption committee I've been a part of a couple different ones myself, so I know the investment that it takes so I thank you I think you all for that While people have voiced that we as board members should just rubber stamp the committee recommendations, I want to point out that Arizona statute clearly states that the governing board members are tasked with selecting, purchasing, and approving all textbooks. ARS 15721, you mentioned, says the governing board shall approve the course of study, the basic textbook for each course, and all
275units recommended. It says the governing board shall enforce the course of study and select all textbooks used in the common schools and purchase the textbooks from the publishers. ARS 15-722 states that the governing board shall approve for high schools the basic textbook for each course and may purchase the textbooks from the publishers if approved by the governing board. So there's nothing that I just said that states that elected governing board members must approve curriculum that are brought forward by a committee or superintendent. Well, that's absolutely the goal. It is also our individual duty to ensure that we're making wise decisions on everything that comes in front of us, including this social sciences curriculum. And I'm a little concerned on how board members can make an informed vote tonight on. This when they never took the
276time to even try to review it The reality is that families have concerns over ideological influences in education Which has already driven many families away from our schools and will continue to do so with the implementation of activist curricula like this I do want to reiterate this that the committee application did not go out to our parents our community Dr. Menzel mentioned it at one board meeting only, which is why our past board member, Sanowski's husband, is the only one who applied. I feel like if this committee hadn't been formed in darkness and we had more parents and community members involved, I believe we would not be in the situation that we are unfortunately in tonight. The board had no involvement in selecting or approving this committee, its members, or its process. Therefore, the board
277must address amending policy CE so that we can avoid a situation like this happening again for our entire community when it comes to curriculum adoption. Thank you. Ms. Werner? So I want to recognize Officer Hill who's in the room. He did send the board an email with his thoughts on the curriculum, and he did express those today. And I also want to recognize our SROs and law enforcement across Arizona to this National Police Week, and I want to recognize our fallen heroes who are being recognized at the vigil tonight. I did go review the curriculum. I'm concerned when we received letters from law enforcement and Officer Hill spoke earlier and so I won't read his email, but I'm going to take a snippet from Sheriff Sheridan, Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, who emailed us. And he
278states over the past five years, there's been a sharp rise of anti-police rhetoric across our country, as well as here in Arizona. Young people in particular are encouraged to focus on single events and told to believe that they represent a larger pattern of abuse. The truth is that law enforcement is a calling that is answered by those who wish to serve their community selflessly and at great risk. It is with this in mind that I bring to your attention the troubling aspects to some of the language used by the history curriculum being considered by a CSB board. No profession gets it right every time, and law enforcement is certainly no exception to this rule. And while I welcome any debate about what law enforcement can and should do better, the samples of SAVA's materials related
279to law enforcement under consideration by a CSB that I have seen are neither fair nor balanced. Phrases like ending police violence create a negative caricature of law enforcement that is out of step with the truth and is harmful to our young people. The function... Properly to function properly a law enforcement must be build a partnership with the citizens They serve when young people are taught to fear the police it arose the trust required to build a truly effective public safety partnership between public safety professionals and the various citizens they serve and I do want to recognize the teachers in the room and the teacher here in our district I know that you do a good job and it's really sad that this is the curriculum that you are presented with my kids had My daughter
280went to Chaparral. My boys graduated from Suarez. They had Mr. Crows and they have nothing but great reviews of him. Which leads me to the last letter I do want to read to you, and this is from Jeff Hawkins, the Arizona Troopers Association. So these are the people that are on the front lines every day throughout our state. Dear members of the Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board, on behalf of the Arizona State Troopers Association, which represents the dedicated minimum of the Department of Public Safety, we're writing to express our deep concerns regarding the proposed U.S. history curriculum currently under consideration by this board. This curriculum has presented... Aspire and it fails to offer a fair and balanced portrayal of law enforcement and the critical public safety rule officers play in communities. Instead, it promotes
281a narrative that unfairly cast all members of law enforcement in a negative light, particularly in reference to recent events since the COVID-19 pandemic. Such portrayals not only distorts the fact, but also undermines the respect and trust that our officers work tirelessly to maintain with the public. It especially. Disheartening that this biased curriculum is being considered during National Police Week, a time established during President John F. Kennedy's administration to honor law enforcement officers who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty. This timing is not only disrespectful to those who serve, but also sends a troubling message to the families of fallen officers. Law enforcement agencies across Arizona and the nation are already facing unprecedented challenges in recruiting and retaining quality officers. The adoption of educational materials that mainstream one-sided inaccurate and biased viewpoints
282about law enforcement professions exasperate these challenges and further discourages young people from pursuing careers in public safety. Additionally, we urge you to consider the impact this curriculum will have on children of law enforcement officers who attend Scottsdale schools. These students already face social stigma, bullying, and intimidation because of their parents' chosen profession. A curriculum that reinforces negative stereotypes and misrepresentations of law enforcement only serves to deepen these issues and foster a divisive school environment. To be clear, we are not opposed to teaching students about complex and sensitive events from multiple perspectives. In fact, we support curriculum that encourages critical thinking, presents all viewpoints, and fosters robust and respectful classroom discussions. Unfortunately, the proposed curriculum fails to achieve these important goals. Instead, it promotes a singular bias perspective that does a disservice to students, teachers, and
283the broader community. For these reasons, we strongly urge the Board to reject the proposed U.S. History curriculum. We ask that you instead seek out educational materials that are factually accurate, balanced, and inclusive of all viewpoints, materials that encourages thoughtful discussion and provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the world around them. The families of Scottsdale, including those who serve in law enforcement, deserve better. We hope that you will make the right decision and uphold the values of fairness, accuracy, respect, and in our schools. Thank you for your consideration and assigned Jeffrey Hawkins, president of the Arizona Troopers Association. And I'm going to stand with our law enforcement today. Thank you. Thank you for your work and I want to apologize for calling it the main event because it's a very serious topic what we teach
284our children and I haven't been on the board for very long but without question this is engendered the greatest amount of feedback we've received some of which we saw here but I wanted to share a little bit about the emails that we've received. We received over a hundred emails coming in on almost 150 coming into the meeting. And overall, about 68% of them were supportive of us approving the curriculum, whereas about 32% of them opposed. And I'm someone who doesn't necessarily believe that email is the same thing as data, but I think it's a good sense, especially as we think about the feedback that we got here in the room, the feedback that we also received by email. Interestingly, about 45% of those emails reference specifically being a parent or an alum or a recent
285parent. And if you look at those emails specifically, over 80% of them express support for approving the curriculum because they want their children to have the highest quality resources. They want their children challenged, even if they don't necessarily agree with everything in a particular text. And they want to support teachers and teacher expertise when it comes to delivering on state standards. And about 19% of them was opposed. If you looked at emails that came from community members or folks who didn't really specify what their relationship, that was 58% in support and 42% opposed. And that doesn't include the one email that was referenced that itself had a petition of over 100 individuals who were not reflected in the emails. that I counted that are in support of us approving this curriculum. So I think it's
286important to kind of share that general feedback that we've received so that whichever side we end up coming in on, we recognize that different members of our community just feel differently about this issue and there's not sort of one absolute truth on that fact. That, you know, I appreciate my colleague mentioning some of the other emails that we've received, including from law enforcement. I am not mentioning the emails that... threatened us. So for example, one email said, I will notify the Scottsdale Police Department, ensuring they are aware of which board members voted to allocate taxpayer dollars towards a curriculum that promotes anti-law enforcement narratives. Now, my uncle was on the job for 25 years. His partner was shot. I've been raised to care deeply about the badge, not just the officers who serve, but their
287families. And so I personally find it offensive and actually offensive, the most offensive thing that you could say about our police, that they would somehow view governing board members elected by their community, exercising their judgment as something that police would, I guess, retaliate against at a traffic stop. We got a lot of the feedback, I think, in the balance that came here in terms of the substance. I do want to say for every comment about this is why I don't send my kids to Scottsdale schools, there were as many comments of... This is the reason I send my kids to Scottsdale schools. I doubt that BASIS teaches climate change is not a scientific consensus. I doubt Brophy does. I think some of these issues, again, I understand people may feel differently, but we also have
288to recognize that we're serving a diverse curriculum. The one thing that everybody agreed with is that we should keep politics out of our curriculum. So, for example, This curriculum is about pushing a political agenda, not about teaching history. Stop indoctrinating our students and start educating them. Teach facts, not feelings. This is not education. It's activism wrapped in a textbook. matched with, please do not succumb to the pressure of bullies. They can't go elsewhere if they don't like it or they can. Curriculum should be about facts, not political opinions. Our students deserve a curriculum chosen through a fair system, not swayed by personal or political beliefs of the few loud who seek to change history. Curriculum should reflect evidence and inquiry, not fear-driven ideology. So everybody agrees that politics should not be part of the curriculum.
289They just have a very different way of interpreting. I believe that. And because I believe that, yes, I do believe we have a responsibility to review the curriculum and approve them. And if there was something about the process that wasn't followed, if there was something about the budget relative to, you know, past adoptions. Any of these kinds of things, I would think differently, but we followed all board policy and state law. We had certified educators. Dr. Menzel, on December 10th, 2024, I went back to watch the meeting, very clearly stated, we're currently recruiting committee members for AP World History, AP US History, US History. The application closes on December 18th. Materials were on display for nearly three months. with both online and in-person opportunities to review. And this is a curriculum that is a commercial
290offering adopted throughout the United States and including in districts here in Arizona. So to me, following the admonition, the recommendation of everybody involved, which is to keep politics out of a curriculum, whether... You know, whatever my judgment is, I don't believe it is appropriate for me to override the hard work of the committee. And so I support approving the recommendations. I just wanted to share a little bit why. Thank you, Mr. Sharkey. Thank you. Firstly, I did review the content. I didn't sign on that sheet. I got it electronically. I have it up here. And so I got it. So just letting you know, I did just the sadist book, not the other ones. I agree with Board Member Carney that we are not a rubber stamp board that just says what the committee does,
291we approve. That would be divesting of our duties. I would say that when we do make the choice to go against the committee, we should use that judiciously because I don't want to create an environment where all committees think, well, why am I even doing this? The board's going to decide the way they want to vote. So I'm glad you brought that up because I really agree that, yes, that is our job, but we've got to be judicious about how we do it. I would look at three things to help us come to that decision, and Dr. Patinsky hit on most of these. One is the process. Did we follow it? Because if we didn't, that's absolutely a reason why we should have a say. Two is the content itself, and we could go down
292that path and talk about content. The biggest takeaway I'll put on the content side is context. When the chief of staff of Sheriff Sheridan sent the letter in, they used a phrase in quotes. He said, he referenced the quote, ending police violence. That phrase does not appear in the SAVA's text. the phrase police violence does appear when they talk about Colin Kaepernick taking a knee and he says he condemned what he saw as police violence and sought attention for discrimination against black Americans by refusing to stand. So I wrote back, and by the way, I responded to every email. I only got 95, so I don't know if you got in. I got the same numbers you did. I responded back and asked him to give me a specifics of where that is, but using
293the quote. ending police violence in his letter, that phrase does not appear in this text. So first thing is, was the policy process followed? Second is the content with appropriate context. And third is community feedback. And again, I did the same counts on the emails that came to Gov Board. If they came to individuals, I obviously didn't see that. It actually had very similar ratios of support for all of them. If it was just they were self-identified as parents. and including the petition of 116 people as a separate one, all those weigh in favor of supporting the curriculum. So I would just say I would like some sort of structure because I don't want to take it lightly if we do make a decision to override the committee. Thank you. The last thing I want
294anyone to do or feel is alienation in terms of our men and women who serve in our law enforcement. So the clarity that came across in the presentation today helped me a lot with context, the way the teachers described. the objectivity with which it's presented. I did make, over the years I have watched the tug of wars between whole language and phonics and between the mimosa and the Saxon math. One was more algorithmic and one was more, too many word problems. Human growth and development. These many tug of wars that we have that there is a golden mean and I heard it tonight. I did call the Peoria School Board, a colleague in the Peoria School Board who is awfully scrutinous about curriculum adoption and was impressed that they worked through their 5.0 adoption of
295the SACUS, SAVUS, excuse me, I keep trying to put a C in it, SAVUS adoption. by customizing and monitoring. So they did kind of find some pieces that they trusted their staff to work on for customization and monitoring. So I would invite us to look at that in somewhat of an awareness of Peoria's comfort to the point of a 5-0. And I appreciate and will uphold our adherence to policy CE and I want to thank all the committee members for their What must be stressful Commentary because social studies just gets it as much as any of those other curricular areas I listed so Miss Werner So every committee for the last several years have had a sing at least one parent on that so when I understand that Dr. Menzel mentioned this at a school
296board meeting. I know that before I got involved and ran for school board, I had never watched one. So most parents don't. And so how would they find out about there's going to be a curriculum pity? People are not going to just randomly go on the website to look, hey, are there any committees that I can sign up for? And I asked you this last time at the study session as well. I was like, why are we not emailing this to all the parents? Because it is challenging to get parents to do this. It is a time commitment, and parents are busy. But when you send it out to 19,000 families, you're going to get some parents, and that was missed here. Until you know he said something on the dais. I also checked with
297one of our former board members They really had no idea that this committee was being put together, and I know that if you had Emailed it to us. We also would have posted it and been able to get some parents on the committee Thank you, Board Member Warner. That definitely is a process improvement that we have committed to. I will tell you, we are faced with challenges for seeking participation on our curriculum adoption committees. Earlier this year, we brought forward to you a curriculum adoption for AP and IB biology and chemistry. We specifically solicited through the IB parent group. for participation and we were unable to get participation. And so I think that there are a variety of factors that influence decisions that people are making to serve on committees, one of which likely is
298time. And I am proud, however, of the Open meeting law that some folks do certainly take advantage of being present for our meetings as well as coming in for our public review To see the material I do think that has been a process improvement as well given the feedback we've received from you as a governing board about the magnitude of product that is on display and I mean when you look even just at this textbook, there's over a thousand pages This textbook it takes a long time to go through Navigating the digital resources is also challenging So I think that we by all means will make better efforts to communicate with our governing board to push information out in Parent square we've utilized our employee newsletters as a vehicle and so that will be our
299commitment as well any other comments All right, I'll make a motion. Go ahead, Mr. Sharkey. Just sort of reiterate the criteria. Was the process followed? Yes, but absolutely can be improved. And I'm glad we brought that up. So I think that's a yes. The content, I loved hearing from the teachers and how they use this content because that, to me, is where the rubber meets the road, is the discussions, the assignments in the classroom, not just what's in the text. And so I was really happy to hear from the teachers there. And then the feedback, no matter how you slice it, with the emails we got back, those are all in support. So from my side, all of those say that, yes, I would support it. Ms. Carney? I just would like to question, what
300process was followed? When you say the process was followed, what process was followed? Policy CE. I can elaborate on the curriculum adoption process. When we seek member participation on our timeline, we opened up committee recruitment on December 6th. It was posted on both websites, the committee hub website as well as the textbook curriculum adoption website. As was mentioned, Dr. Menzel made a superintendent comment. Dylan included in our employee newsletters. We have flyers that we push out to our schools as well. Our committee members who applied and were all accepted were notified on December 19th. Our first meeting took place on January. Thank you, 8th, January 8th. And our next meeting was January 15th. We sent out vendor letters on January 23rd. That is a participation process that we utilize. our partner DD, to help us
301solicit products. Our public review opened on February 19th, which is also when our committee began reviewing materials. At that time, they utilized their rubrics. We scored everything using the same consistent rubric for all of our committee members. Our public review then led, excuse me, the committee review then led to a vendor presentation day where our top products. Vendors were brought in, representatives presented to us about their products, we could ask all sorts of questions about the products, and then the committee came to consensus on April 2nd. We then brought you a first read on April 29th. All along the way, we have honored open meeting law. We create meeting agendas that we post 24 hours in advance on both websites. We take meeting minutes. Draft minutes are approved at the next governing... next committee meeting
302just like you as a governing board do we approve our meeting minutes all materials that we utilize as a committee are also posted for the public something that we were able to do this time that is a little infrequent in the past is we were able to review committee feedback that we received from our public so that the committee every meeting and they can attest They can attest that indeed they looked at every piece of information that was shared by anybody who submitted onto that Google form so that they could then go back and look at the curriculum themselves and see something maybe that they hadn't noticed in the same viewpoint that somebody else had. That led to our consensus process that ultimately brought forward the recommendation to you. So we were very, very intentional
303in adhering to the processes established for our curriculum adoption. All right, with that, I will make a motion to approve the social studies, social science curriculum adoption as presented. I'll second. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. And all those opposed? No. And it passes three to two. All right. Item 12C, AP ratio related to the 24-25 SAA agreement. This agenda item was requested by Board Member Carney, so I will turn it over to her to... Start the conversation. Thank you, Dr. Menzel This is something that the board has wanted to discuss the APU ratio related to the 2024-25 SAA agreement I'd like to make a motion to suspend implementation of the negotiated AP ratios related to the 2024-25 SAA agreement as we've received another email today even from a loyal hard-working employee at Tonalia asking
304begging that we fully staff their much-needed AP and I stand with our employees and I ask for us to suspend the implementation of this and make a motion to suspend it. I have a second though. There's way more discussion that needs to happen with us. Are we ready for a vote? You want discussion? Okay. I just am trying to understand what we're acting on. I mean, I know we're... We have a budget process, and one of the things proposed as a way of reducing costs and meeting the deficits that we heard about earlier was this change in ratios, but I didn't think it had actually been put into effect. I'm trying to say what we're undoing if we have so it would be it would be going into the 2526 school year So the language
305of the 2425 agreement indicates that the ratios would be implemented in the 2526 school year So from a budgetary perspective, it's the planning for next year. That's also a human perspective So we've been able to find placements for all of the assistant principals if we were to implement what was in the agreement If the board chooses to suspend the agreement as board member Carney has proposed, that then would require us to fill all those positions with full time instead of the splits that have been currently planned for. And it comes at about a $300,000 cost. We're prepared to implement whatever the governing board decides, but those are really the two options. Either honor the timeline that's in the 24-25 agreement. or suspended for a year while we look at all of the other cost implications
306gives us a little bit more time to have some of those larger conversations with respect to the facilities that are open, right size staffing, right size of buildings, all the rest. Thank you. Ms. Ward. Thank you, President Loz. So there are still parents and staff that are reaching out. regularly that they want to retain the assistant principals and TJ I appreciate everything you're doing I've had great meetings with you Dr. Ganske and Ms. Hammond I respect the work but I also have to respect the parents and the staff that this is affecting and I wholeheartedly support the having the APs full-time ATs at out of all of our campuses I think that if we were not to have that and I know you've juggle things around, but if we only have a .5 assistant principal
307of some of our schools, it is going to cost us enrollment, and our goal is to increase enrollment. It is to be the school of choice. So I would be open to not suspending this if we're going to move forward with spending the $300,000 and keeping our full-time APs. Mr. Sharkey? I very much want to keep them as well. And I've read all the emails. The thing that I need to work with is the IBM side. So again, this is something that was negotiated in fairness with groups that did not include us, as it shouldn't. We shouldn't be involved in operational negotiations. I don't know the impact and would love to have more color on. The what precedent we're setting what boundaries were crossing if we come over the top as the board and say
308I know you agreed to this in IBM But now we're gonna override that and again I'm conflicted because I want the full-time a piece as well and I'm like we'll figure out find money I'm on that side, but understand again the precedent of impacting the negotiating process after the fact to me has downstream consequences. So I can answer that. So we are given, and you'll notice this as a board member as you go along, you'll be given information. Information will be tucked into a guide or some document that'll be 50 pages long, which is what happened with our process here. It was inside of a guide that we were given last June. And at the time when you're voting on something, you don't know what the impact is later. And it's tucked away. And so...
309when it comes forward to us and now it's been through the IBM process and it is really it's It's not fun and I understand that it's got to be difficult for the people who participate in the process but there's a system that's been set up that is not very transparent for board members particularly when you're new because it's almost like a reverse scavenger hunt and is you're getting information from all different pieces and if you watch any of our board meetings from last year and there was a lot of non-information that was provided prior to board meetings well it was given at different times in different contexts and then you know you put it all together and now it's coming. for a vote. It's the same thing that's happening here. And so I am so
310appreciative that TJ mentioned that there's shining light and allows them into learning more about the IBM process and how they get there. And I think that it is a great partnership while we're not negotiating for them, but being a part of and seeing what goes into it because we could have avoided this altogether. Because I would not have voted to approve that guide last year if I knew that it would become this year that we would be removing assistant principals for our campuses and so if I had known that if we had had this dialogue back then then We could have made different decisions back then as far as when what they were bringing to the board so I think it is, I appreciate the dialogue and being able to willing to work with us
311so that we're not sitting in these situations where I cannot ignore the parents and the staff that are reaching out that want to keep our full-time APs. So if everybody's on board with doing that and working out the details, it looks like we have the funding. We're not going for a... bond this year, so the money is there. And I would rather spend that on assistant principals than having it set somewhere else. So in lieu of suspending it, I would wholeheartedly agree that we could vote to keep them. And you'll see as you go along, the process is interesting. So I don't feel like we're on. Jumping over something I think there was something that we were new to at the time or unaware of and then it had a square behind the eyes when
312this came forward that they wanted to That you know there was talks of removing the assistant principals and I very much appreciate the minutiae comment totally understand There's lots of things in there You know for futures like having a greatest hits like hey, here's what was agreed to and kind of like, you know Here's the greatest hits the main change we do that with policies right? Here's the whole red line, but here's kind of the main changes. Is there any way to get input now from? So here's the challenge. So, and there are multiple parts. The ratios were a part of a multi-year conversation. Because and we mentioned this at prior meetings when you have large buildings 900 a thousand kids that have a principal and an assistant principal full-time and you have small buildings
313fewer than 400 kids with the principal and an assistant principal something about the workload related to what you have to do in managing a thousand kids versus I don't think anyone's challenging that I think we understand the the Genesis but the whole ratios were were designed so that the people who had more kids got more. So if we're gonna, if we're, from a financial perspective, if we suspend the ratios to ensure that you can maintain the full-time AP no matter the size of the building, you're suspending the additional support for those larger schools. It's the balancing act, right? So the 300,000 here is simply about those. right-sizing of the others and and you can the board can do that well we found a way that we can make that work there is a process concern
314which is why I suggested suspending rather than unilaterally changing and saying we're gonna we're gonna put the assistant principals in full-time because that would be direct contravening of the IBN process. Suspending because of the variables that were not at play when this language was approved. So there was not the conversation about we may need to close schools in a very serious way given the enrollment discussion we had looking at what's in the buildings. I mean we were starting those conversations but they were not on the table at the time this was agreed to. If you suspend it with that larger understanding, I don't think you violate the spirit of IBN, but you are dancing on the edge of that. And then if we do suspend, what would the next step be? Is there something between
315the next month or two? So the next step is it doesn't go into effect in. 25 26 Unless the entire agreement is changed it would go into effect 26 27 this language wasn't as far as I understand not modified in the current bargaining agreement with saa so then the Expectation would be that it would go into effect 26 27 there are a lot of other things that are going to change between now and then including the next round of ibm where the board this board will be a part of that process in August of next year Meeting with our associations and management to identify interest So the process itself will be more inclusive with the group of people who are making those decisions now. So it buys time Thank you No, any other comments? All
316right We have a motion on the table with a second and it is to suspend the SAA agreement for 2425 all those in favor of suspending. Oh, go ahead so the With suspending the agreement, there are more things inside of that agreement that S.A. probably would want. It should be suspend the ratios. That should be very specific to the ratios. Did you say the ratios? I did. Okay, perfect. Can we interpret the motion to mean that? Just the ratios. Just the ratios. Assistant principal ratios. Okay, so the assistant principal ratios are to, there is a motion on the table to suspend the assistant principal ratio agreement. All right, ready for the vote? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay, it passes 5-0. Thank you. We are now on 12D, approval of supplemental materials for the
31725-26 school year. You're still here. Go ahead. All right. We believe you. Good evening President Lewis, Vice President Sharkey, members of our board, Dr. Menzel-Glattis, members of the public present or in the cloud. Tonight I just want to share with you the process that we follow for supplemental materials. It's an annual presentation for you as a governing board. I will quickly touch on the different types of curriculum that we define in SUSD and I'll share with you the recommendations that we have for a few new supplemental materials. Similar to what you saw in our last presentation, very common in our work within teaching and learning are state statute and governing board policies as you see illustrated here on this slide. In our school district, you know, we have our special vernacular. And so I want
318to make sure that you are aware that we define adopted text and material as our district adopted curriculum that we would expect to see 80% of the time teachers are using for that tier one instruction. We also have supplemental books and novels. Those are review processes that we utilize with new curricular resources. These are board approved and are accessible for teachers to use in the classroom. We have supplemental materials that I will share with you in just a moment. And these are district approved materials to support, augment, if you will, our core curriculum. At times there might be a fiscal responsibility that we have as a district for the supplemental material. And these are resources that are used at multiple sites. Different, though, would be an ancillary material. This is something that a teacher is
319choosing. Perhaps I'm a... I WENT TO THE GRAND CANYON. I GOT A REALLY COOL BROCHURE ON THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF ROCKS. AND I'M GOING TO BRING THAT BACK AND I MIGHT USE THAT IN MY CLASSROOM. THAT WOULD BE CONSIDERED AN ANCILLARY. NOT SOMETHING THAT THE DISTRICT IS PURCHASING, BUT IT WOULD BE SOMETHING TO SUPPORT THE CURRICULUM THE TEACHER IS TEACHING. As I just mentioned what adopted materials are, you are familiar with our curriculum adoption sites at this point hopefully. We also have available for all of our teachers an access through Homeroom. And on our Homeroom site there are curriculum sites organized by every content area. Elementary and middle and high school have ELA, math, science, social studies, fine arts, PE, technology, websites. and that is a hub for teachers to know about the curriculum accessible
320to them. Our supplemental materials, as I mentioned, are novels or supplemental materials. We have a specific spot on our curriculum website for supplemental materials. These are posted for the public every day of the school year when the governing board approves, hopefully tonight, our recommendations. We will update that link. for the public as well, but it is a live site on our curriculum page specific to supplemental materials. Anybody is welcome to come at any time to review an instructional material. There's a Google form there. They can fill it out to come in and look at any of our core curriculum or supplemental materials. Linked for you are... organized in tabs by content area or by department are all of the supplementals that are used for elementary English, language arts, elementary math, science, social studies, CTE, world
321languages, PE, fine arts, et cetera. Last year we worked really hard with all of our various departments, special education, ELD. gifted to make sure that everything was updated and if we had duplicates that might have been on a gifted tab that was also on a math tab we made it consistent. This year we have one red strike through on our list for you and that is the removal of an existing nurse nursing curriculum because we are recommending a new nursing curriculum for our CTE program. Tonight we are proposing that you would consider extending our contract with IXL for grades 6-12. Last year as a governing board, we brought forward to you a K-5 for three years, and we also brought forward IXL. 612 for one year we have found there to be value in its
322use and we are seeing students answering a lot of questions and achieving smart scores of 80 which is the target we're seeing a lot of growth we think it will have a direct impact to help support our wildly important goal for increasing mathematics achievement we also have been working hard with our team within the gifted department Our science coach Johanna Kaiser has been working. As we expand and create the Scottsdale Math and Science Academy at Mojave Middle School, there is a request for us to include an alternative version of our existing FOSS kit. This allows for a compacted curriculum that would align with that accelerated pathway for the Math and Science Academy at Mojave Middle School that will open next year. Something that we put on here more as an information for you, at Sequoia
323Elementary School, they have a specials rotation that is a site-based funded specials rotation for Spanish. And Principal Leeper utilizes a curriculum, sonrisas. It wasn't on our list before, and we just thought it would be important for you as a governing board to know that as part of their special of a Spanish rotation, the sonrisas curriculum is being utilized. And then lastly for CTE, I mentioned we had a strike through on our spreadsheet. CTE with our director of college and career, Amy Downs, they are requesting that the board would approve Mosby's textbook for nursing assistants. This is an updated version and per mandates that they need to follow, the textbook needs to be published within five years. It's the same book that they've had previously. This is the new edition. So we are requesting those four
324resources and the corresponding costs. And with that, I'll take any questions or comments. Mr. Sharkey. Thank you. I just want to put my support behind the IXL. I talked with Dr. Bachman and Dr. Anna and initial. review shows that the data we get on a weekly progress basis from IXL is indicative and predictive of students success or lack of success in those classes which gives us an ability to intervene. So I know there's a concept of kind of over computering our students and I'm cognizant of that but the fact that that gives us in early indicators and like you said Dr. Dodds-Kirin it helps us towards our wigs and the academic side big supporter of that. Thank you. And I would add, if you were to approve this, the continuation, the flow would allow us,
325IXL has a really neat component for summer, and they have a summer boost with skill plans that families can access wherever they might be traveling, so that that dip that we often see in the summertime, if kids log on and they continue to work with their smart score of 80, we hopefully won't see that. Any other comments? All right. I make a motion that we approve the supplemental materials for 2526 as presented. I'll second the motion. All those in favor? Aye. 5-0. Thank you. E, discuss and formalize the governing board listening sessions by learning community for 2025-26. I would like to move that we table this conversation for another time since we have such depth and continued late hours. So I move that we table it. Second. I would like to amend that motion. I'd
326like to table it indefinitely because this is not what I had in mind when I brought this to the retreat. I don't think this... Is the right direction. I think we want to make sure we have something more organic That staff feels comfortable doing so I'd like to motion to table this indefinitely so so moved Second agreed with the second. Okay all those in favor. Aye Passes 5-0 F approval of the revision of 2526 governing board meeting calendar There was just one change to the January date from the original proposed calendar And that I think is appropriate from the cadence perspective and we recommend approval. Questions? Ms. Carney? I just have a comment. I think we just need to be very careful with individually trying to change board meetings around our schedules because we all
327have very busy schedules. And tonight is Senator Werner's 30th wedding anniversary and she's here. So it's like... I am going to go with this, but I just think we need to be very careful. We all have very busy lives, and we can't continue to move it around because we're not able to be there. Agreed. All right. I move for the approval. I need a second. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. 5-0. G, the second read and approval of the Governing Board Policy JLIF regarding sex offender notification. Any follow-up questions Mike Sharkey, mr. Sharkey? Nope. Any other questions? All right I make a motion for approval for the second read and adoption of the governing board policy JL if as presented second the motion All those in favor? Aye. Aye. 5-0. Thank you. We now
328have two votes to entertain. We have an executive session proposal for the governing board may convene, and we are proposing to convene under ARS 38431.03A3 and A4 for the purpose of obtaining legal advice and providing direction to the attorney for the public body regarding its position regarding pending litigation. in the Veronica Hale versus Scottsdale Unified School District. Any second? I will second that motion and my request is that we clear the room so we can stay here. Agreed. Thank you. Ready for a vote. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. And before we do. The governing board may convene an executive session pursuant to ARS 38431.03 A3 and A4 for the purpose of receiving legal advice and providing direction to the attorney for the public body regarding claims asserted by Jay Ratte.
329I need a motion. I motion to approve the executive session for... Item 13 B. Okay, moved by Ms. Warner. Second. Seconded by Ms. Carney. All right, let's do a vote. Are we ready? All right, all those in favor? Aye. Okay, all those against? Nay. Nay. Sorry, I'm thinking. Wow, that's cold. Yeah, thinking at 12. It's cold to think. No, it's cold to vote now. Is it too late to make a comment about my thinking? No. Have we started the vote? So I am the previous governing board reviewed Mr. Rattay's claims an executive session August 2023 and I listened to that executive session on May 5th And I've also reviewed a numerous documents provided by him the reason I'm hesitating is because I do think there is a Respect that a board should have to prior
330boards if they consider a matter and ultimately resolve that matter. In this case, I think it was 5-0 as I listened to it. To bring it back up again, I think creates the risk that individuals just wait out boards, basically, and say, if I don't like the answer, then I'll wait out a new board. And I think that creates a real risk for the district, financially and legally. absent new information that were to come in. At the same time, I do have deep empathy for Mr. Rattay, and there may be things that I'm not aware of that will come up in our executive session that might represent new information. So I would like to vote yes and address it in executive session as well, but also be on record that I do think we have
331to be careful. Re reviewing previously reviewed agenda Not agenda the motion passes three to two, but miss Carney did you want to make a comment? You want to wait till executive session? I'm sorry, mr. Warner No, okay with it passes three to two we will meet an executive session over both So the question that I would have from a practical standpoint and I'd look to counsel we have Mr. Hall is here for both, but Mr. Rattay here would have to wait if we do them in the order listed. Is there a problem with having Mr. Rattay first so that he doesn't have to wait until after we get done discussing the other? No, no problem. Then I would recommend we do that out of respect for his time. And we're going to ask our public
332to dismiss themselves. You may rejoin us after executive session if you'd like. All right, I am adjourning the executive session and reconvening the regular meeting at 1222 a.m. There is item 16, there will be no action for the board. So we will move to item 17, governing board reports. Dr. Patensky? I have no reports. Ms. Warner? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. Ms. Carney? I have a lot to report, but it's so late. I'm good. Yeah. I just want to congratulate all our graduates and wish everybody a wonderful summer as we move into the summer months. And now I'll move this into future items. Dr. Potensky, anybody want to chime in? None. Okay. None, none. Go ahead. As stated earlier in the meeting I would like to amend policy CE and have a discussion on
333that. Okay. Does Gladys listen to these or you'll get that to her? Okay, good. She listens but the request would be that you propose what amendment you want to CE. So she should sit, so Amy should, Ms. Carney should send a written. proposal for your modification to policy CE. I would like to look into the financial literacy curriculum. I would like to look into our music, our award-winning music curriculum and see when the last time was we had an updated music curriculum. And I would also like to add to our policy on our agenda the length of a meeting and how we might modify that. All right, I would like to make a motion that we adjourn. I second that. All those in favor? Aye. 5-0 at 1224 a.m.