09-19-2025 Kyrene Governing Board Retreat

001All right. Good afternoon, everyone. It is 4.35 p.m. We're going to call to order our board retreat. Our board retreat is called to order, and this is September 9th, 2025. The one and only item on our agenda, item 2.1, is the long-range planning discussion. So, board members, as you know, at our meeting on Tuesday of this week, we heard from the Long-Range Planning Committee that it was the first opportunity that this board has had. to ask questions and discussion. And the purpose of this retreat is for us to have a more in-depth discussion amongst ourselves, also to ask questions of district about anything that was presented to us in that presentation for follow-up. In terms of goals for this meeting, I think part of it is for us to get a better understanding of what

002the recommendation is and make sure we're feeling like our questions are answered. To the extent that we have any guidance for our district leadership team, we can give that to them at the end of this session. But this is not the one and only chance, of course, for us to provide guidance because we still have seven public hearings for community feedback. So this is not our first bite or last bite at the apple. This is just an opportunity for us to provide our initial feedback and discussion. So I think in terms of what our agenda is. It's a loose agenda to discuss this. I want this to be organic and make sure everybody feels comfortable. I think in terms of the substance of the proposal, just so we have a little bit of structure, I

003think we're going to plan to talk a little bit about the financial impacts of the proposal, making sure we all understand the numbers and the implications, etc. Another thing we're going to talk about is the choice schools, because I know that was a portion of discussion that came up on Tuesday. And then, of course, an opportunity for questions and guidance. Before we jump into the substance of the proposal, I wanted to at least get our initial feedback and probably, you know, kind of validate some of the community feedback that we've gotten along the way. This here is for us to discuss, but I want to just make sure our community who's listening here knows that we are reading every single one of your emails. We are reading every single one of the public comments that

004comes through. We are listening with full intent and sincerity on every statement that comes to our board meetings. We appreciate it. One of the things that we've heard from people is just a question a little bit more about the process and the communication and kind of how we came to be where we're at. And I understand because I'm a parent in this district. Many of us are parents in this district. This is a huge process, and we want to make sure everybody feels like they're a part of this decision-making process and that the communication is not a one-way street, right? So I wanted to maybe turn it over to Ms. Helm, our Director of Communications, just to give us a little bit of kind of background. on some of the community engagement we've done so

005far. And then I think this board can probably give her a little bit of encouragement and direction on the community engagement we'd like to see going forward. Because remember, we're not even close to the end of this process. This was our first presentation from the committee. We've got lots of work to do. And to the extent we want to give her any guidance or direction on how we can better or find additional ways to partner with our community, now's a great time to do it. So I'll turn it over to Ms. Helm. Thanks. I like communication going first. We usually get to go last. So I appreciate that. So communication and community engagement, so two-way communication, so critical in a process like this. So up to this point, I don't want to talk forever, but

006I think, obviously, I know the district's been talking about declining enrollment for years and years, since before my time in Kyrene. But the first time the idea of the long-range facilities plan was introduced was in the rollout of the strategic plan in 2023. But we didn't directly communicate with the community about the formation of a committee until the first one was almost a year ago, November 2024. That's also when we saw the first media articles that mentioned the possibility of school closures connected to the committee. So that message from November 2024 and everything since then is available on our website. I won't list all of them, but those are all available, along with links to your meetings where there were relevant conversations and, of course, all the agendas and minutes and the videos of the

007committee. Also, over the past year, to reach our broader community, we've leveraged media a lot. There has been a lot of news coverage, and so we really appreciate those relationships to get out into the broader community. Right now, our communications team is all in on our website as our central hub of information, and people are absolutely using the website. We actually launched the website back alongside the committee. We kind of thought we would see an uptick in engagement on the website after the July communication. That was when the superintendent first communicated that the committee had asked the demographer to look at a plan that closed. somewhere between seven and nine schools. And there was some additional coverage with that, but we really didn't see the uptick then. We saw it about a month later in

008August, understandably, I think, because that's when schools were named. My team shared today that over the past year, we've had 2,300 visits to the webpage. That was up through August. In the five days after the August meeting, we had 5,500. So certainly we have everyone's attention now, and that is great. So what we are focused on now is... leveraging that website to make sure our community knows everything there is to know about the engagement process, when your meetings are, meetings or retreats, when the hearings are, and all the different avenues that they can engage in. And of course, if there are any updates from the district, sending those out as well. I'm sure there will be one following this meeting. And I have a couple updates as well to add to that. So prior to

009even the strategic plan rolling out, these conversations started in the advisory committee. So as you all know, I have superintendent advisory committees. Those would be our PTO representatives. I've been sharing this information for at least three, maybe four years now. My superintendent community council, which is made up of... parents, made up of staff members, made up of possibly community members that are no longer parents but were previous parents, also sharing that information. And then even with our students, to some degree, in my student senate, having these conversations about what was coming. So that rolled out that way, the advisory committees. And then in addition, when it comes to our own internal staff, we hosted from last... Was it starting in March around there? We did about two months, maybe six to eight weeks, and we

010visited every single campus and we required every single staff member to be in attendance in person with us if they could be. If not, we actually filmed one. So we did every single campus plus the district office, four or five, to get transportation drivers, everybody, and shared this information as to what was coming. And this was all prior to the committee. being formed. And so we rolled that out as well so that all staff members were aware of exactly what was coming. And the board actually had an opportunity to see the presentation that we did with all of our staff late in the... or towards the end of the school year last year. You guys were, the new board members were already on. We shared that presentation because we wanted you to see the exact

011same information that was being shared publicly. That same information is what was used also in most of our advisory. So the Business Alliance, Superintendent Advisory Council, PTO Roundtables, and our Student Senate, which is pretty far reaching as well. And I know as part of our engagement with the communities, again, it's not just about. us talking to them, right? It's about us hearing from them and having a dialogue. This is not a process that just ends on a board vote, right? Because there's a lot of, regardless of what happens when the board makes a decision, we know there's going to be transition. How do we plan on engaging with our communities throughout that whole process so they feel like they're not just a passive observer in this whole thing? Yeah, my team's already kind of talking

012about that. So when we transition from the committee phase to the community engagement phase, we kind of revamped the website, archived the committee information so it's there, but then we put on everything that's related to engagement. I would envision once the board reaches a decision, we would see a similar transition, and then that would become the central hub of now what are we building, what's next, how does the community get involved in the next phase of the process. It's still community engagement. It's just less community engagement about the decision you're facing and more community engagement about the what happens after that. And I'll just add, we've also talked about the need to have, if you will, implementation committees. A lot of that will then start to involve more staff like your school leaders. And so,

013again, discussions. We've actually also been working with some other districts to get feedback that have been through similar circumstances where they've closed schools or merged schools, whether it's merging one into two or two into, you know, or three into one, whatever that looks like. And so we're having conversations and getting some feedback on. some best practices around what that will look like with our school leaders, depending on their unique situations, because many of our school leaders will be facing a different scenario. And so we'll have implementation committees that they'll be working with families and students and staff to help build what that looks like. Thank you. I have... Where I personally feel a little bit of a lack, and it may be because I'm relatively new on the board, is with my communication with parents,

014the board's communication with parents. And I would love to have some kind of process by which... We could be, or, you know, the board could be more directly involved with talking to either PTO presidents or going to PTO meetings, or I don't know how to facilitate that. And that's what I would like some help on. Does that make sense? Finding ways for direct engagement. Yes, between the board and the... Our constituents, the people who vote for us. Much of that obviously will come out in the public hearing. As far as hearing, that is very one way, though. You will be hearing from them. You are in a, and I'll lean into Mr. Lowe a little bit. There is a little bit of a balance before you've actually voted that you have to. be careful in

015that two-way engagement, I think, as far as discussing where you're at on a topic. Am I saying that quite correctly? But I do think there is some level of just being cautious. Yeah, I think we need to be aware under open meeting laws, we've told the board many times, you are one member of the board. It is only as the board ad agendas notice meetings that you have the power to take action. So anytime the board members as an individual is out talking to the community, it just needs to be very clear that you are not speaking on behalf of the board as a whole. It does limit how we can do that two-way communication a little bit. You can collect as much feedback as you'd like. That part is not an issue. It's just

016the back and forth. Just being careful as to what's going to come before the board for a decision as far as not violating any open meeting law. I think every board member should feel free to be able to engage with their community and their constituents. And yes, and I am appreciative of that fact. Maybe what I'm asking for, I don't know, like, I don't know much about the superintendent's counsel, what you just talked about, the parent counsel. Is there some way that we would... Be cognizant of what you're doing in that. So this year's paused because of the work. So that had been the previous years leading up to this to share information. So the superintendent council, historically, it's transitioned over the years since COVID. It used to be a parent council separate than a

017student council separate than a. community council and a staff council. The student council, I do keep separate as its own still, which is also paused this year. But the other, we've actually merged into one big council. And part of that came out of feedback because as we were building the strategic plan, there was a lot of feedback that... we merged them together to have conversations. And they said, we prefer to be together because sometimes it's nice for a staff member to hear from a parent and a parent to hear from a staff member like, oh, you know, in the parent council, they said, this is a great idea. And it is a great idea, only it's not operational for a teacher to actually implement. And so that feedback from both sides was really powerful. So

018they were part of leading up to the formation of the committee, understanding all of that work. We did pause that because of the amount of work that. the Long Range Plan Committee needed to, you know, that we needed to as a team invest in. So we, and I anticipate this will resume after this school year, we would start the councils again. You have a PTO council, correct? We do still have PTO roundtables. We are, and our hiring business alliance meets maybe once or twice, sometimes three times a year. So that one's a little bit different, but our PTO roundtables, we've had one meeting. They do a joint meeting. A lot of times our PTOs want to be connected with the businesses so that they can look for partnerships. So we have had one of those

019and we'll have one in the spring. Yes. So we typically have four, one per quarter for the roundtable. Last year, we did our first where we brought them together with the Business Alliance and that was super popular. So we kicked off the year doing it. With everything that's going on right now, we did cancel the second quarter, both the roundtable and the Business Alliance, because this is taking up so much time and there's so much getting together. But those groups are coming back together in February and then we'll have one more roundtable in the spring with just the parents. Would it be possible to, as we're going through this process, and once we identify the schools that will be impacted, and by that I mean not just schools identified for closure repurpose, but also schools

020that might have incoming students coming in, because it's all going to be, it's all, most of our schools, most of our schools, yeah, to reach out and start putting in those. those collaborative conversations together. And I don't know that it needs to be a presentation as an agenda so much as having these people together and starting to. Yeah. And our school leaders have actually just, we had this conversation yesterday with them. I think they'd like to see that come together as well. Like they need to be there, part of their PTOs, part of like which schools are coming together. Of course, you know, it's hard to. get too far ahead of that because the board's not making a decision until December. So there's a little bit of one of the reasons we haven't started that

021work is until we actually know what the plan is. You know, it doesn't make sense to start having the communities talk about how they're going to come together if that doesn't ultimately end up being the communities that are put together. I think you've done a great job with communication. I know there's a tension between trying to provide as much detail as possible, but also affirming to our community that there's no decision that's been made. And sometimes it sounds internally inconsistent because we're saying nothing has been decided, and truly nothing has been decided. But at the same time, if we said nothing's been decided and we're not going to provide you with any details, that doesn't provide much comfort to our families. So I think you've done a good job of saying here's a lot of

022detailed FAQs. And by the way, this is all assuming that the board adopts the recommendation by the committee, which, by the way, it might not. Right. So but I think you've done a good job of trying to find that balance. And I think I just want to make sure our community hears that just because you're providing detailed guidance doesn't mean that this is a set in stone path. Right. And we're trying to stay out of the real. details, right? Like, I mean, you know, I'll give an example. We, we get, we're getting some questions like, can you tell me where my bus stop's going to be? Well, I can't tell you that yet, right? That's just too premature for me to be able to share where a bus stop actually would be. Um, but, but

023what I can share is, you know, feeder patterns, what that might look like, the implementation timeline, what we looked at if the plan was, you know, adopted as it was recommended, some of those higher level, um, questions we can put into the FAQ, but some of the more details I'm not able to do yet. But one of the other things I was thinking about from a board perspective, so you know, I'm sending a significant amount of communication coming from the district with Aaron's assistance and the team. We're trying to give updates pretty regularly to the community, whether it's in my newsletter, whether it's... Separate letter that comes out after a big meeting, such as after the July long range plan, after the August giving an update, I anticipate we'll have something ready to go Monday

024or Tuesday after all of this past week. One of the board's opportunities is the board does do a newsletter quarterly. And so one of the things the board can do now, there might be some repetition and I think that's OK, but the board could follow up from the board's communication in that newsletter with any communication that you think would be appropriate to share with the community. So in addition to all of the district and the superintendent messages going out, I also do some internal staff messages sometimes. But your newsletter goes to both internal and external. And so we could definitely include, and I think we've talked about including that in the newsletter. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Thank you. That's good information. One piece that I've really appreciated throughout this

025process that you've done, Erin, after I realized people were leaving feedback on the website is making sure that in two week intervals that we are getting the feedback in the comments that are coming in through the website. So we are truly getting things that are coming from the website coming into the inbox. So we really are seeing everything. And that's very, very important to me. So I just want to. Thank you for that. I know it's a big lift, but I appreciate you accommodating that request. And I think we shared this in a previous meeting, but I do think it's important to note, right, there's lots of opportunities for feedback, whether it's at the public hearing in person, whether it's in a board meeting where we're having public comment. Obviously, that's recorded in the minutes

026and recorded in the formal meeting. We also have an opportunity for. Feedback to be collected during public comment through electronics. So if somebody doesn't want to come in person, they submit it electronically. It gets attached to the minutes for that meeting. Then the feedback that Aaron's team's been collecting has either been through the Let's Talk, basically, and categorizing that and sending it out and sorting it for the board to keep track. keeping it in time intervals so that you have that. In addition, you all know that you have the governing board inbox. We collect that feedback as well, which you all see. What I do want to share is, you know, when this first, when we first started getting a little bit of feedback, we were, had the capacity to be able to provide some

027more detailed responses. We have since, you know, obviously with the amount of feedback that's coming in and we're getting a lot of repetitious feedback, we are unable to respond to every single email, but what we want everyone to know is that regardless of whether we are responding right away, there is now an auto reply on there that lets them know that whether we respond or not, the board is getting all of that feedback. And if it's something that comes out of there that Aaron thinks is risen to the level of the FAQ, we try to stick it in the FAQ as quickly as possible and put that answer in there. So we're trying to be as responsive as we can, but there's also a limit to. being able to provide a written response to every

028email that comes in. I just wanted to acknowledge, too, we do know there are some frequently asked questions, but we just don't know the answer yet, too. So those don't show up on the website yet, but I'm sure that everything is in progress that's not yet answered. Are we ready to pivot a little bit from that? Pivot away. I'd like to have a brief conversation about how we got here as a district, if that's okay. How have we counteracted the... The lot, the enrollment losses and, you know, things that we have done being a new board member. Maybe I haven't seen every single meeting, but I would just like just high level bullet points. Last meeting. So why we are here, where we are, what we have done to try to boost enrollment, all the

029efforts that the district has made. That's a big ask all in one, but. Do you want to go through the financial impact first and then talk about that and see if some of that gets answered as we talk about the loss of revenue due to declining enrollment? Or do you want me just to give? Yeah, I was going to pull out also we have a slide that we shared in the last board meeting that I think talked about the $24 million that's already been reduced. So I'm going to pull that out. That's fine as long as that is addressed under that topic. I'm fine with that. And when Ms. Helm comes back, I think she should also be able to talk to you about some of the marketing efforts that have been done. Because I

030know we heard that a few times in the public comment. And I mean, I agree. We should celebrate all of our schools. Absolutely. I can tell you haven't been on this board for as long as I have. We are not in this spot due to a lack of marketing. That's not to say that we don't have opportunities to celebrate our schools better in different more ways, but I don't think that's how we're going to get out of this spot. And I think she can talk a little bit about some of the work that we've done. And it's interesting because for folks that come from different states, you don't necessarily see public school districts marketing like we do. And we actually have a lot of marketing because Arizona is a choice state. And like it or

031not, we need to attract and retain our students. And I think when I hear from families that are saying, you know, part of the reason we might be losing students is because. you know, we're not marketing to them. I don't know if it's that we're not marketing them. I think part of it is we need to figure out why they're leaving and identifying the needs. That's part of what I think the gifted Academy you're talking about is. And one of the things I know that's on the agenda is you talk about probably over a thousand kids that live in our boundaries that don't go to Kyrene, but that go to some of the charter and private schools that are perceived to have better gifted offerings. And you can market the heck of that if we,

032if we do that. But, I think it's a good question, though, how we got here. I mean, how we got here and could it have been avoided? Right. I mean, I think the demographer and again, we didn't bring all of the demographic data again. But, you know, the demographer has shared again, you've seen a slowly, steady decline in enrollment, not just in Kyrene, right across the state, across the country. And some of that is accounted for by purely lower birth rates. an aging population. So that's very specific to Kyrene or some of your neighborhoods that are like Kyrene, where you become landlocked and there's no room for growth other than we have that one little development that's going to be coming. We have nowhere to grow and people don't leave their homes. So the demographer

033had some really nice slides early on. in the long range planning committee that he shared, and I know it's been shared with the board over the years, that what you can see is the number of school age children in our district has drastically reduced over the years. And the age of the population that lives in our district has increased, which just A, means there's less kids to serve. And then you look at our service rate, which also has been steadily declining as you look at when charters were first implemented. ESA vouchers were first implemented as well. There have been some what we would call almost triggers that have definitely seemed to have an impact. COVID, for whatever reason, we're not, you know, it's, I don't know that anybody's done a study on this out there

034yet. COVID tended to hit districts like ours a little bit harder. So PV, Cave Creek. Kyrene's Litchfields saw a much steeper decline in enrollment during COVID and didn't recover as quickly as many of our other neighboring districts. So our kids didn't bounce back quite as quickly from an enrollment standpoint. So I guess my question is more towards why now? So if we've been seeing this studying decline, what has the district done to keep us from getting to this point? I just want to make sure that we have. tried. So we can talk and I know Mr. Herman probably can jump in on this a little bit and then we'll go over and then we'll also give Ms. Helm a chance to share the marketing now. That's fine. We'll just jump around in the presentation. But,

035you know, he shared a slide in the last meeting that since 2017-18, we have reduced our budget by $24 million. So we have been declining right over the years. The decline's been. at least a decade, if not longer. And so what you do, it goes back to those levers we talk about pulling. You know, when the decline is not as significant, most of it can right-size itself by you just adjust your staffing. So every year, and some districts weren't doing this. So I'm just going to give an example of our neighboring district who recently pulled together a committee and was having these same types of conversations. What they uncovered was They hadn't pulled as many levers as we've already pulled. Kyrene's been really efficient. It's one of the reasons we've been able to maintain a

036balanced budget of pulling these levers and being very strategic every year. So even leading up to COVID, we were doing that. So every year, our staffing is very tight. We have our ranges. We staff, we move people up to the 10th day if we're over, if we're under, and we've been able to do that through attrition. So if you have less kids right in the system, you need less teachers. So we've reduced teaching. We've also reduced, if you think of the timeless model that Chris has shown in many budget meetings. And so we first look at instructional staff and we reduce and we always do the reductions in a way that we've maintained 75% going into classroom spending. Then we look at support staff that serve students and we look at instructional supports that serve

037students and we make whatever anticipated reductions we need to make. So it has meant, I'll give you some examples, and I may not have the exact year, so I'm kind of looking at Beth a little bit. There used to be a point that we had about 11 gifted resource teachers that could go out across the whole district and service children. We are now down to five, 4.6, 4.2. So we've had to make some reductions there. We've had to reduce the number of interventionists that help provide intervention to students. You know that we reduced the certified librarians. We've reduced multiple district level positions over the years. We've looked at things such as our medical costs and programs and tried to reduce those as much as we could. We've had to look at going to contracted services

038in some places or reducing those. We've cut. employee overtime or any additional hours in many cases. These are just some of the little things. We've reduced our supplies. We've reduced our custodial costs and our grounds by going to contracted services. So we eliminated all those positions within the district. We had to change our tiers and our bus schedules over the years in order to be able to afford some things. So we wanted stuff. It's not like we always take away. We really wanted counselors at that point. And we had to look at changing our bus schedule to be able to do that. We've had to keep condensing our transportation boundaries or looking at ways to adjust there. We've impacted the schools. budget allocations, they get a school budget and that's always based on enrollment. So

039it declines anyway, but we've also had to look at declining their numbers. And then we've also looked at, you know, things like this. I mean, it seems so little, but it's like things like our, you know, insurance deductibles, all those types of things. So we've gotten, I say we, Mr. Herman and his team have done a really good job of really sharpening the pencil there and looking for all of those ways and bringing those examples. And so when you start to look at all of those things, that's 24 million just since 2017, 18, which is a lot of money. We, the reason now I will tell you COVID held this up a little bit. conversation is probably, again, we were never in a crisis situation. When I did some homework on what districts have been

040through, and I actually sat through a session last year, and I came back and said, thank God that's not us right now. Districts that literally walked in, and in one year, they had to close five schools, and it was like an emergency because their enrollment had just plummeted. And we've been watching this. We've been very careful. COVID, we obviously had some one-time money that came in during that time. And of course, things were not quite balanced. Like we weren't sure what the influx of enrollment would be. Would we gain that enrollment back? Was it going to stay away? So we were also trying to see what would happen after we came out of COVID. There was also a lot of trauma to the system after COVID. That's the reality. And starting this process right on

041the heels of that. would have been very difficult for a lot of reasons for staff, for the community, for everybody. So we felt like we had positioned ourselves in a way with either the one-time money, but you got to be careful with one-time money because again, it's one time. It doesn't go into your ongoing operating expenses, so you can't, but it can help bridge a little. We've done a really good job of not having to tap into our reserves. And I know that's been really important for our voters and our you know, district as well to have that cushion. And then we've, you know, used our one-time money very effectively to be able to get us to a place that we're not, it has to be done like yesterday, but it does need to be

042done by tomorrow, if that makes sense. So, so we are at a pivotal point that the longer we push this off, the more detrimental it will become to the programs and the services that we offer our students. So I hope that explains. Absolutely. I just think also it's important to clarify all that and all the steps the district has taken that got us to this part. Yeah. And I just want to offer a couple more things on that topic. As far as enrollment goes, I've been here for nine years, and I think it's even before. started. Kyrene has always had a lot of open enrollment as a district. In fact, we have some of the highest open enrollment numbers in the entire state. I think we're somewhere, every year we're somewhere between 20 and 23

043percent of our total enrollment is from out of our district, and that is an extremely high number. So when people, I think, hear us talk about declining enrollment, they automatically assume that people are leaving or going someplace else. We actually have a very high percentage of students that come in from other districts and other areas. And I think Ms. Helm can talk a little bit about this too. And that's a lot of our marketing, reaching those people, right? The other thing is when you look at how many students might leave our district, right, especially on the boundaries with Tempe or Chandler. versus the number of students that might come here from those same districts, we get more kids that come to Kyrie than go to other districts. And that's been the case for a long

044time. We looked at that about a year ago, and it's not even close. So, again, the perception that people are choosing, there are lots of choices. I mean, President Walsh, you said we live in a state that encourages that, right? But when you look at how our competition and where kids go, where the kids come from, they are coming to Kyrie more than they are going someplace else. And I think this is a good lead into the marketing because obviously there's no question that our programs and the services we offer in Kyrene, a lot of it's by word of mouth and a lot of it is we're known for excellence and we have a reputation in the state for excellence. And Erin and her team have done a really nice job of marketing that. And

045so I'm going to have. Josh, jump us ahead in the presentation because we've moved those slides to the end so you don't have to sit there and watch me click through it all. So he's going to pull up the marketing and we'll kind of show you some of the marketing before we get into the financial piece. Can I just ask a question that's sort of related? When kids come from out of district, do we have to provide transportation for them? We do not have to. The district, we believe. It's done some little digging. We've been doing digging this last week to understand the exact year. The district made a decision, we believe it was around 2004 from what we could uncover, that they were going to send buses to Maricopa and to... Roosevelt area. And

046so there are two locations. There are some limitations to sending buses. We can't send buses over to Queen Creek. The statute, and I may lean into Mr. Allel on this, the statute is that you cannot pass through another district to go pick up children. So we can't cross. We could go into Chandler. We never have, nor have they come to us, but they could also come to us. We've never gone to our sister Tempe Elementary to pick up children, but we have four many years gone into those two areas. What I'll tell you is our busing has actually reduced pretty significantly. And we're going to talk about that on October 14th. We used to bus. just under a thousand, maybe between 800 and a thousand students. And I think we're down to about 300 total

047that ride the bus. It doesn't mean we don't take as many kids from those areas. We still take a lot, not as many as we used to, but they drive in. So they aren't, they're not choosing transportation. And we don't have enough bus drivers to service our own inbound kids. So we can't bus our way out of this either. Yeah. We can't bus our way out of this either. Absolutely not. That's why I asked. Yeah. No. Busing our way out of this is not the answer. And nor would we, you know, again, when they made that decision in 2004, if you know much about Maricopa, Maricopa's landscape is very different in 2004 than it was today. They're getting ready to build a new high school. So it's, you know, they are starting to get services

048and schools. Back when we were busing, they maybe had two, maybe three schools then. So they're growing. And, you know, they're one of those communities like Queen Creek that's seeing an influx of people and growth and able to build schools. you know, and they're not landlocked right now. And people can afford to live there. And people can afford to live there. And so when you think about that, so we have picked up some of that 23, 25% of open enrollment is coming from that. But a big chunk of it's actually coming from people just choosing to come to Kyrene from wherever Tempe, you know. Chandler's, Gilbert even, Queen Creek, whatever that might be, Mesa. I think we get a pretty good influx from Mesa. And you'll see, I know we're going to talk very specifically

049about dual language later, but you'll see that's probably the biggest draw for our out-of-district enrollment is our dual language families. Did that answer? Yes. All right. I'm going to hand it off to Erin for just a little bit to talk a little bit about marketing and just to kind of give the board, especially our newer board members that maybe haven't been around as long, some insight into the things that we've done. Do you want this or do you want me to do it? Yeah. Yeah. That'd be good. Thank you. And I would love to come back to the board at some point and do like a full on presentation on marketing because I'm just going to go through a couple of slides really quick. So I don't derail your whole conversation. But I wanted to

050first show this slide. It's a repeat. We brought this to you in April. We also used it with the Long Range Planning Committee and with those staff meetings in the spring that superintendent talked about. This was just intended to be a super, super high level view of. Hey, we market. We do print and digital and broadcast and outdoor and many of the same things that a private sector company does, except on a teeny, teeny, tiny budget. I'm not going to crack the Raffi joke for my friends who are waiting, but we don't have that budget. But we are really strategic with the budget we do have. That means we do a lot of targeting, especially with our digital advertising, so that we are reaching the most effective audiences. But what I added in tonight that

051I wanted to show is just what some of that looks like, in case you're not in our target marketing group. This is sort of what our general enrollment and brand awareness campaign has looked like just from the past year. I won't go through all the bullets, but those are all the strategies we use for. this campaign. On the bottom right, you can see that's our Zillow ads. That was our new thing we layered in this year. We are always looking for new ideas. My assistant director brought that forward and we're really happy about that. This is some of our print materials, the newcomer magazines that we advertise in, as well as some of our digital materials. Then it gets a little bit more granular. We do a really specific kindergarten push in the spring. We

052add in a couple of new things. We do some TV advertising for this. And we also do targeted outreach to our early learning groups. And this is really about going after. that service rate because yes, we are proud that we bring in more kids than we lose to every other district. However, we have seen that service rate decline. So for the past couple of years, we've been really strategic about trying to reach families with kids in that five and under range because they haven't made a choice yet. And that is our greatest opportunity is to bring them in because we don't lose a lot of kids, you know, who leave Kyrene necessarily for charters or private schools. But I think we are struggling to get them in the door to begin with. So that has

053been our focus the last couple of years. And this slide, I'm sorry, it's a bit overwhelming, but my team was really excited about putting this together because we're really proud of this work. The map on the upper left are all of the early learning centers that we have personally connected with and who we've developed partnerships with. So we take them materials that are targeted to. You've made a great choice for preschool. What's your next choice for kinder? What's your next choice in your kid's journey for first grade? And so the materials on the far right are actually what we take to those places. We also do, obviously, a lot of the campaigns stuff from the general and kindergarten enrollment strategies here as well. But we're highlighting just what's unique to this campaign. And that also

054includes our community events. We go to Transportation Day, the Easter Parade. Thank you to our board members who have walked with us in that parade. Those are really targeted to those families with younger children as well. So all of that is part of that early learning outreach initiative. We do do a preschool specific campaign as well. Some of what you see on here is actually we did some that were really targeted after we moved preschool enrollment up to January to align with K-8 enrollment. We lost our opportunity to do targeted preschool marketing and actually a couple of our preschool enrollments we saw didn't fill up immediately within five minutes of the window opening, which is what we usually see. So we did some additional paid advertising. We leveraged Nextdoor for that. We have an agency

055model for Nextdoor, which means we don't have to be a business on Nextdoor. We can actually communicate similar to the way city or police or fire agencies use Nextdoor. The map on this page shows that we did geofencing. So when we did this digital marking, you can see that map looks a lot like the one where all those early learning centers are. So we utilize that for our preschool marketing as well. This is just some of what we do specifically for programs. We do have a special brochure that is just choice opportunities. So instead of leading with here's a school and what it offers, it's here's the opportunities we offer and the schools where you can find them. We have a corresponding web page for that as well. We do social media and paid advertising

056specifically for fine arts. We're in all of the playbills for the children's theaters around. So we're really big on that. On the right, I'm sorry, the print is small. This is just from the past few years, all of the earned media. We have really great relationships with our local news and they pick up almost every story that we put out to them. We're really proud of that. But this highlights a lot of the school programs and celebrations just from the past couple of years that we've managed to get coverage in the news. So we're very proud of that. And then the last slide is what we give to schools. to go even further. So we really wish that we could individually market every single school, you know, 12 months out of the year, every year,

057but sometimes it takes turns for what the district office is able to do when we're promoting specific programs in schools. So we give them toolkits to help them promote their school showcase videos, their kindergarten nights, things like that. like that so that they can use those. This year, we've been really challenging them to review their tours and what tours look like and make it a little bit more competitive with what we see with some of the charters and privates for getting people access to the school more frequently and making that a little easier. And we've also challenged them to kind of have that elevator pitch ready when someone walks in the door. So we love partnering with our schools and trying to give them the tools they need to go even further than what we're

058doing. Any other questions about marketing or sort of some of the steps we've taken to get here? I do want to just reiterate the three levers. I think I mentioned lever one, right? That's one step we've taken. And that was the right sizing staffing every year. Lever two are all those things I kind of listed in the 24 million. And then lever three is just also, you know, just prioritizing and looking at our programs and things. And it's really lever three and four that we're at the point we're having to lean into now, which isn't great. So lever three, we're going to talk about later a little bit about some of those things that are at stake that we would have to start to impact programming wise. Or lever four, which is really looking at

059how do we maximize the use of our facilities, which obviously now is looking at school closure. So tonight, I know Mr. Walsh referenced the agenda a little bit already, so I won't totally read through this for you, but I did just want to talk a little bit about format, what we were thinking. We're going to go through this in little segments, but instead of waiting like a normal presentation, because this should be a back and forth discussion, we're going to pause after each section and start to have those. So if you have a question that's very specific about that topic, it would make sense. at that point. You don't have to hold it till the end. And if you're not sure if it fits in that topic and it might fit in another one, that's

060okay too. We can answer that. But we thought that might make it easier to chunk this. So this is just meant to provide structure to the conversation. Just to give us some structure. And we know one of the biggest questions that... just may not be understanding. I know the board has a deeper understanding because you've either A, been through this probably six or seven seasons, or B, you sat on the long range plan committee, so you got in depth or you possibly watched some of it, but we thought we'd start with, and so this first part's going to be mostly Mr. Herman. We'll jump in, or I have some guests here if there's any very specific questions that we need somebody else to answer, but we really wanted to talk first about What does that

061mean when we say loss of revenue due to declining enrollment? How does that equate? How do you keep hearing the $7 million problem? Again, that's a little bit rounded. You're going to see that in a minute, but it's pretty close to the $7 million. And so Mr. Herman is going to kind of take us through. that formula. Yeah, I think it'd be helpful just to understand what's the number we're trying to address and the breakdown of how we got there. Absolutely. We have had lots of discussions over the years with lots of forums about enrollment. We could have probably brought... 20 or 30 slides about this. So if you have questions, we go a little deeper. Some slides we've brought back from the committee work. So my apologies to the committee members, you know, who

062served. You may see a little bit of repetition there. But, you know, when you talk about enrollment loss, it's really, you know, it's not something new for Kyrene. It's something we've seen for many, many years. Others may not have known about it because. As our superintendent mentioned, we've done a lot of things to try to shield those schools and classrooms from feeling some of those more painful areas. But it doesn't mean it hasn't been happening. And so we work with our demographer every year on making some projections about what's going to happen with birth rates and housing and markets and things like that. I think a lot of our PTO presidents can say if they go back and look at some of the yearbooks right from their schools, most of our K-5 schools had. five

063or six sections per grade level. That was the norm. And now most of our schools have two to three sections per grade level. So you're talking about half and that's pretty much across the board. And that didn't happen overnight. But it's been happening at every school. Yeah. And likewise, you could look at our class sizes or total number of students in eighth grade, which I think we're probably around 1600, 1700. When I started, it was like 2200 kids in eighth grade. Right. And versus what's in kindergarten, which is just over a thousand. Right. So that kind of tells you over the years that declining birth rate and the number of students per household, it affects elementary schools a lot faster than it does a high school. Because next year, that 16, 1700 student population in

064eighth grade is hopefully going to go to Tempe Union. but they're going to be replaced by maybe a thousand kids, right? So that inherently is going to lose six, 700 kids, but it's not necessarily because they're going to another charter or other school. They're going to high school. If you kept every single student in Kyrene, other than you're promoting eighth graders, every single student, you'd still be losing. Even if our service rate was a hundred percent, we would be having declining enrollment and we'd be talking. Now it might not be as severe, but we would definitely be having the same conversation. There's just fewer kids. there's just less kids out there. Yep. So these are the projections that we've used for the next five years. And I just did it year by year to show

065how many students are projected to be declining for those same reasons for the next five years, with the first year being the 26-27. We'll do a deeper dive again once we get numbers for this year. We always do a refresh every year. So what we bring to the board in the spring could be a little bit different than this for the 26, 27 year. But as of now, it's as good as anything we have. But if you add that up over the next five years, it's about 1,089 students. And so. You know, all the things we talked about are part of the reasons for that. We don't see that stopping in the future either. So, again, even though we're only focused on five years, we do think that that trend would continue even beyond that

066time period. Mr. Herman, is it safe to say, I know when the demographer came and did his in-depth presentation to the governing board last year, that he does look at this a couple different worst case, best case, middle of the road. This is pretty much middle of the road, the long term. Yeah, I think, you know, you could always predicting the future is one of the hardest things for us to do. Right. And so, yes, he does try to do that to give us some ranges. And we typically try to look at what the experiences have been. It's hard post-COVID because service rates have been a little bit different than what they were pre-COVID. So we take that or he takes that into consideration. And when we put that estimate together, we sometimes have a

067range that could be a little more optimistic or a range that might be a little bit more pessimistic. And so this is middle of the road. I think this is close to the middle of the road. Yeah. Because you've probably seen some data that showed this even just a little bit worse. So if you were thinking, why did I see an even lower number? It's because we did, you know, again, we went with the middle of the road, not knowing. It's hard to project. But, you know, there is a chance. These numbers, it could be more than 1,000, almost 1,100. So this graph really takes that enrollment estimates that we just looked at and converts them into what I would say is our estimated funding loss. We talked about trying to dive a little deeper

068or dig into this. These are the numbers that we talked about. And that's based on the state's base level funding for the next five years. And those amounts that you see here are based on what is in the state's or Arizona state funding formula. It would convert those enrollment numbers that we just looked at into what's called average daily membership and then multiply that by the base level funding from the state. So that's what you see here is our best estimate of what the state funding would be over the five-year period. Again, it's really hard to predict the future, but I think we've used pretty sound methodologies based on recent history and recent inflation rates for that. All of these numbers would be impacted on our maintenance and operations funding. So we've talked about M&O

069funding. That is by far the biggest share of where our funding comes from, and it's all driven by enrollment. So these would be the changes that we would be looking at each year. And so if you added them together. over that five-year period, it would be about $6.7 million. And so when we brought this to the committee, for the sake of simplicity, we just rounded it to $7 million because it was a little easier to talk about a $7 million number rather than getting into decimals. But that's what we talked about, or that's what we presented to the committee, and that's how we came up with that estimated loss over five years. Now, I do want to flip to this slide. I wish those numbers would have been a little bigger. My apologies. This is

070the cumulative effect from enrollment funding. And so on that previous slide, we talked about the expected decreases in funding each year. From a financial impact perspective, that enrollment loss would be recurring, right, and would be in addition to what was experienced versus the previous year. So in other words, in 2026-27, you see almost $1.9 million of expected funding loss. If you remember from the previous slide, in 27-28, there's another $1.5 million. in the 27-28 year would be the cumulative impact of the 1.9 the prior year plus the 1.5 added to you know the current year or the next year projected and so that's the problem with with enrollment losses it's ongoing it's not just for one year you can't solve the problem by just that one year budget balance it's going to happen every year

071and it's and it's a it compounds is really what i'm trying to say A question. So you're saying this is based off the middle of the road. The committee was given, you know, 7 million being middle of the road. And I know we, cause I'm seeing very clearly in my mind with the diverging past, like best case, worst case. Is there a reason we didn't give the committee like a range of money to try to save? My concern is we were being middle of the road. And if the last five years have taught us anything, sometimes I just like to prepare for a rainy day because you don't know what's going to happen. And so I worry that was do you feel like this number was too conservative? I don't. And again, you could. all

072debate what we should use for future projections. What we kind of dealt with as far as those four projections were service rates. And the service rates we've seen over the last five years, I'm trying to remember, and Dr. Rossmeier may have to jump in here, but I feel like 15%, something like that, loss in service rate post-COVID. That is not what we experienced pre-COVID as far as declining service rates. Our history has been when there's been a disruption, whether that's a voucher law passed, whether that's a charter law passed, you would see a short-term decline in service rates. And we've shared this graph before. We just don't have it in our presentation. You would see a short-term decline and then some stabilization of those service rates until the next disruption. So it's hard for us

073to know. When will that disruption slow? Because it's very unlikely that those same service level decrements will happen because you'll be in the very low percentages at some point. So that didn't feel realistic to us. And I think we had a lot of conversations with our demographer about how to be. realistic, not overly pessimistic, not overly optimistic. And so I felt like that middle of the road and what we brought is a good place for the committee or was a good place for the committee to have those discussions. And it's not as though you can predict, oh, we're going to have this additional disruption. I know with universal vouchers, voters said no. And then the legislature, they zigged when we zagged. So I understand that. So thank you for the explanation. I also think it,

074you know, There's some caution in going too deep, right? Because what it would take then to be able to go to the worst case scenario, right? We're probably looking at a lot more schools on this list. Because even with the number of schools that we brought forward, we're nowhere near utilization rates. And the demographers made it very clear, whatever utilization rate you see on any of the... the data that was shared is only going to decline because remember all the data was from 24, 25, because he uses static data. Is that the right word? Real data that we know we can account for because obviously we're in this year, so you can't use, our numbers are not done until the 40th day. So, you know, I think there was some concern about also saying, putting

075the committee in a place that, you know. 10 million would be a very even different conversation. Yep. The other thing I wanted to mention about this slide and about the funding impact is that we don't have to have all 6.7 or $7 million in year one or year two. It's by year five, right? Doesn't mean it's any easier to get to that point, but I just want to make sure the board doesn't think that that has to be a year one objective. And I think you have one more and then we were going to kind of just to show it in a different lens in relation to the timeless model. Yeah. So really, when you talk about, OK, how does that work when you balance our budget or what what are the challenges to balancing

076a budget over that same five year time period? We would really need to reduce our expenses by that same six point seven million dollars. in five years, right, at that level in order to have our revenues and expenses balanced and produce a balanced budget going forward. We have a balanced budget today and we have every single year I've been here and every year prior to me being here. So if our community is thinking we don't have a balanced budget, that's not a true statement. We've worked really hard to make sure that that does happen and that will continue to happen. But this is what we're looking at for the next five years. I've shared this slide with our long-range committee. where we talked about what that five-year amount looks like and really how we use

077our timeless spending model to break those dollar amounts into areas, right? So earlier, our superintendent talked about how we are very intentional about how and what we need to change expenses on so we keep that same high 75% level in our classrooms. I also added the 26-27 year just to give you an example of what we would possibly see next year. Right. So if you were curious about what does next year possibly look like versus the entirety of the five years, I try to put that in there as well. You know, those would be the numbers for either next year, 26-27, or over the five-year period, we would need to be looking at making some expenditure reductions. And we did talk to our community, the Long Range Planning Committee, I should say, about how difficult

078it is to reduce our expenses in that plant operations category. I spoke a little bit on Tuesday about how that category of expenses really are all of your day-to-day operational. expenses for buildings. So that's your insurance, that's your utilities, that's your grounds costs, that's your custodial costs and cleaning costs. That's really tied to a building and the people that are specifically tasked with maintaining the facilities and keeping those in the condition they need to be. About 91% of our total plant operation expenses are in those categories that I just mentioned. So unless you can make some influences to change that, and they're tied to a building, it's very hard to reduce that number. So again, over five years, we're looking at over $700,000 to keep that same proportion of spending in the classroom would need

079to come out of plan operations. And it's really hard to influence that when you have 25 buildings. And I just want to add administration always throws people off a little bit. It's not administrator, it's administration. And there is a difference. It does not mean that is all administrators in the district. That can be your front office staff. at a school building. So administration, in addition to plan operations, can get rather difficult too, right? If you continue to operate 25 schools, you have to have 25 front offices. You have to have, there's some positions that fall under administration, whether they're usually classified or an administrator, right? You obviously have to have 25 principals then that do fall in there, but do know that a big chunk of that money is about operating, administering a school. The

080one other thing that Mr. Herman mentioned that I just, we're going to talk a little bit about this in the next section, so I'm not going to jump too far ahead, but I know we're going to share some data that shows how much do you actually save if you close a school from a personnel and from a day-to-day operations. And, you know, as Mr. Herman said, we don't have to do this all in one year, but what... And it probably wouldn't happen even if you closed as many schools that were recommended by the committee. Your personnel costs are pretty much realized immediately once the school closed. It's your day-to-day operational costs that take, they lag a little. So even if the committee, the board was to adopt the plan as is. And it hit the

081$7 million or just right around the $6.7 million target. It's probably not all happening in year one anyway. So to Mr. Herman's point, it's okay that it doesn't. But just know that there will be a lag in some of the savings that are going to come that we're going to talk about in the next section, which aligns to what he just mentioned. I have a question. I don't know if this is the time for it. When I look at the word instruction and I look at student support, I'm not sure what elements of each are separate. Super easy. Not super easy, but let me explain it. So instruction is any position that is directly providing instruction to a student. Okay. Okay. Student supports are things like our counselors, our SLPs. Those are people that are

082providing student supports that aren't directly related to our curriculum and our instruction. So think of your speech language pathologist. I'm used to my school lingo. Those are your student supports. Instructional support is things like your if you have an instructional coach at your school. So it's it's those people that provide support to our instructors. I do believe some of our facilitators fall in instructional support if I'm and coordinators. So some of your curriculum people up here at the district that are providing PD to your professional development group. that's providing support to either teachers or student support groups, fall in the instructional support. So all of those three make up your classroom spending. So it's money going directly to support students or people who are supporting students. Okay, thank you. Good question. So any other... questions

083that we can help answer around. It's a little bit of the question of how we got here, right? Showing the enrollment piece, but understanding our enrollment a little bit better and how that impacts why we're at 7 million. I know there has been a little bit of confusion about the 7 million. It is 7 million. In five years, the cumulative effect is $7 million. So it's going to take five years to build that up. So you saw the slide that shows how much each year. So with the $6.7 million over five years, I got the data from Save Our Schools. I don't know if you guys have that data in regards to ESA vouchers, how it takes over $24 million from... All three districts in the area total, with Kyrene being over $12 million. And

084Kyrene accounting for over 1,200 of the vouchers. Yep. With 73% of those students not even being Kyrene students, period, they go right to private schools. How does that factor into our monies? Well, I think it speaks to what Mr. Herman was talking about around, well, from an enrollment standpoint, it speaks to when you think about our kindergartners, like you just said, many of those kids never even started in Kyrene. So they took advantage of that early on. So when you see those kindergarten numbers so much lower than our eighth grade numbers, that's where we're seeing that. And that loss in enrollment then equates to, I mean, I think you gave the example of. you know, kind of do the math, but almost 1100 students equates to about $6.7 million, right, in loss of revenue. So

085you figure, you know, if we're losing 1200 students, you're talking another $6.7 or so million dollars that never joined us from the beginning. It definitely has had an impact on the service rate, because again, that's what that impacts, right? It's not that they're leaving us, it's that they never even came to us. Can you back just one slide, Mr. Herman? It's not really a question slash a reflection. It's something I've been struggling with. So these numbers are based on the projected enrollment decline. And the projected enrollment decline that we've worked with our demographer on basically is looking at historic trends, right? We know just from looking at other school districts that have gone through school closure, that school closure can be very disruptive to enrollment. And we also expect that our ADM, our enrollment, might

086decline at least initially more dramatically than what the demographer predicted, which was just based on demographics, right? And then part of this is also, well, maybe we're thinking that some of the changes we're going to do are increasing our service rate. So when we talk about the kids who have never even come to Kyrene. By opening up a gifted academy, for example, is the thought that you're going to bring some of those kids back in. How does that all shake out? The thing that I'm struggling with here is these are just based on the projections. We can't predict the future. And again, this is me just kind of reflecting and admiring the problem. If our school closures are so disruptive that we see a huge loss in enrollment because people are leaving the district, have

087we made the problem worse in trying to solve it? And it's very hard to say because Mr. Grammer has admired that our district has really high open enrollment. And even within the district, we have a lot of kiddos that travel among the district. So by that, I mean they're hiring kids, but they're not going to their inboundary school. And I don't know what to make of that. And by that, I mean, I don't know if that means our school families have demonstrated that they'll travel and therefore we may actually have a higher retention rate. Or does it mean our school families are very discerning and they will pick the school that they want? And therefore we may actually see a higher loss of enrollment if their school is lost. It's hard to really figure that

088out. Mr. Brammer did share with us, and I can't remember if it was in the long range. plan meeting, because we asked a very similar question, if you could look at a district similar to our makeup that's been through, again, you know, the number of schools that they choose to close could be different. So there are different variables, which make this really difficult is what he has said. But I think the last example he gave in the case study that he did in the long range plan was about a five, they saw about a 5%. Now, again, is that long term? Or is it just initially the first year that you do it. And then to your point, you start to see your service rate starting to come back up and then it equalizes out

089over by the fifth year. That's what's not super clear because you can't really compare to another district 100% because the variables are so different is what he has explained to us. I'm not here to tell you I have the answer. I wish I could say there was an easy answer, but he made that pretty clear to us that there really isn't. We must have asked him, how many times have we asked him that question, Chris and Susie? Probably about 20 times. Poor guy. I keep saying, can't you just give me an answer? And he doesn't have the crystal ball either. Because that 6.7 number. It could be better if the net loss is better than we expect. It could be worse if we see more kiddos leaving. The one thing I will say, it seems

090pretty consistent from the research that we've done as far as just, you know, looking at enrollment trends and districts even across the country. The one thing I'll say is right. there is no indication we will ever be back to 20,000 students. I mean, that seems that in and of itself seems very clear that the life cycle of a school district, when you start to look at that does hit a peak. And once it starts to drop, they, you never get back. I'm not saying we won't eventually start coming back up some, and we won't start to recoup some enrollment in the years to come, you know, 30 years from now, but districts never tend to get all the way back where they were. It's it's almost unheard of. And so we're never going to be

091at 20,000 students again. It's just not going to happen. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that because I kept saying, but we'll do this and we'll try this and we'll do this. It's it's just not it's not the life cycle of a district. And, you know, the district you're watching grow right now. 10 years from now, 15 years from now, are going to be sitting at this table having the same conversations. It's just, if you study the patterns of this and really watch the way districts go through these, it's cyclical and seems to be part of the life cycle. So are we saying that there, is there never a point where it stabilizes? Well, we're hoping our service rate stabilizes. If our service rate can stabilize, I mean, again, even

092if we got our service rate at 100%. So not only stabilized, but brought it back up. There's not as many kids. So you just can't make something out of nothing, right? You can't, you can't. make these kids appear. So we'd still be dealing with this. And that, that just seems to be the likelihood right now. I do want to point out one other point to Kevin's in just a minute. So let me let you go. And then, Oh, I was just going to interject about that. One of the things that I think Dr. Ostmeyer, this is a slide that she, it's one of my favorite slides that she has. Um, we talk about stabilizing, um, service rate. What's really interesting to me is she has a slide that goes, I think it goes back to

093like the nineties, but it talks about like the history of Kyrene and our service rate. And it's really interesting. You can see these peaks where there are the, there was the introduction of charters, it drops. And then about two or three years later, we stabilize, we stabilize. And we were stable for a really long time. And then COVID came and we dropped. And right on top of that, universal vouchers because ESA was around. I mean, in its original intent, there was a small drop, but really it was still very stable. And so when we have these major disruptive events, I think for us, the challenge is we went straight from COVID straight to universal vouchers. We've, and we're just, we haven't stabilized yet. Yeah. I don't know what that means. Not to say that it's

094coming, but we don't, we don't know what that looks like. So I think, yes, we get there. But I think we are just in a real murky position where we have this oncoming problem. We're not stabilized from two major incidents that really impacted us. And what does stabilize mean, right? Is it just going back to even where we left off after COVID? I think it's just stasis. Is it bring it back up towards 100? And I think the bringing it back up, it's been pretty clear when you look at the graph that Vice President Nelson is referring to. If we were to even get back to 60s and 70s, that would be like amazing. It would almost be unheard of. I do know similar districts to our demographic makeup are sitting around similar service rates

095for the most part, I believe is a pretty safe statement to say. So it's not uncommon. And, you know, I said this the other night, our state has incentivized you not to go to your public school. And I was just about to say that, like, when we talk about stabilizing, if I can buy jewelry and lingerie with ESA money, and let's just call it what it is. It's an open secret. Many people, community members, whatever you want to call them, don't speak on the ESA vouchers because maybe they want to use it one day. They don't want to like a hypocrite. For example. I have commercials out there talking about charter schools and ESA vouchers, but I was offered five administration jobs at a charter school. I won't take those jobs because I have commercials

096talking about charter schools and ESA vouchers and I look like a hypocrite. Does he see what I'm saying? So a lot of people aren't really commenting on one of the major issues we have in this state period is the ESA voucher. When I go out of state for conferences and they see my name badge, they see I'm from Arizona, the first thing those people say to me is, you guys have a voucher problem in your state. I mean, that's just a fact of the matter. So we're really in a tough situation here. What, Governor Hobbs just three days ago had to cut $123 million for disabled families because of the funding in the state? You think that's not impacting education? So let's just keep it real. Vice President Nelson, were you going to say something?

097Oh, no. I was just going to say, yes, we, ESAs, we have, we're the wild west of education. I think that's fine. It's where we live. It's our home. But, you know, I do want to be careful. Yes, I'm not saying there isn't. abuse of that program. But I do tremendously believe there is a community of people who really did benefit from that program. And I am very aware of that group. And there are a lot of Kyrene kids. The 2018-2019 Before is Universal, you know, is very appropriate for them to take their children to a place that could provide them those in-depth services. So I know you're not. I just feel like... the very public uh meeting i just wanted to say that so you know president walsh the the problem that you sort

098of posed out there right because that's been my team's um annual budget process, right? Having this conversation, how do we address this? Because we hadn't even had lever four on the table until we formed the committee. So of course we've leaned into lever one and two. And as I said, last year, we had to really start to think about now, now we have to lean into lever three and we had to make the very difficult decision about our certified librarians. What I would say is. And again, I may not have the answer either, but I do want to pose the problem. It's a little more complex as to whether or not you just look at potential loss of enrollment from closing schools, because we keep looking at potential loss of enrollment from taking things away.

099So, right, if you go to the what's at stake and we start cutting the things that have made Kyrene excellent. Are you also creating a bigger problem that actually then in the end means you close more schools? So again, there's got to be a balance here of looking at it from both have an impact. It's, you know, if you don't close and you don't do enough, you know, my biggest, again, my job is to bring you guys the information to make the best decision you can. What I will share is that. What I have witnessed is how many districts have gone through this and had to come back to the table again with their boards. And that is extremely well, almost every district that has closed a school has done it more than once. And

100and I think that's the approach our team took and the approach that we shared with the long range plan, because we feel in the end that ends up being more disruptive. So, you know, again. If you end up losing 5% or 7% from doing this in enrollment in a one time because it's so big. And you don't have to come back. Or do you lose five or seven percent by closing, you know, three or four? Yes, it's less schools. But you're back here in three or four years doing this again. And now you've done it again. And then what happens is there's this to me, there's this feeling out there in these schools going, it's coming. It's going to hit me where, you know, I think the approach, again, being more. thoughtful about looking at

101this from a systems level, an entire district years from now, how do we, because I feel very obligated to leave this district in a better place, right, as is part of our goal sitting in these seats, how do you make sure that there's long-term success and that you're not asking boards to come back and do this every three, five years? Yeah, and this is why it's so important that as the weeks go on that we have these conversations about the programs. and the services and how we're going to keep the high quality of programming in fewer buildings. Yeah. And here's the thing. And we're going to talk about programs, I know, and we're going to talk about some what's at stake. But what I do want to say, we do have to, I want to

102put this caution out there. If we close schools and we get to this target. That is breaking even, right? So it does mean we don't have to start going to what's at stake, but it does not mean there's this influx of money and that all of a sudden you get to do all these add-ons. So I do want to caution people if they're thinking, well, they just saved $6.7 million. They have all this money. No, that was a break even to cover the enrollment loss. But we could continue to offer. The resources that we continue. So the value add is that at that point, again, there might be some small value adds. But I think the biggest value add for us is to be able to maintain our class sizes, because, again, we are one

103of the districts with one of the lowest class sizes. And to be able to maintain that is big. You know, again, some part time positions might be able to move to full time. So there are some value adds there. And if the enrollment does better than we thought, well, then, yes, the conversation I think you asked us the other night, right, then you could look at adding more programs, more things. So, Mr. Herman, how does the 6.7 number translate into the number of schools that the committee was looking at closing or repurposing? Well, I have a slide later that talks about that. We could jump into that now if you want. No, no, we can go at your pace. Just as long as we can get there. We'll get there. For sure, we'll get there.

104And then we'll be able to look at some other variable options if you wanted to say a different number, right? What would that look like? We have that at the presentation later as well. Okay, that sounds great. Thank you. Any other questions from the board before we jump into this next piece? Okay. Thank you, Mr. Ehrman. Go ahead. Okay. So we're going to change directions a little bit. Part of this conversation about what you lose in enrollment has to be linked in with what you possibly might save if you didn't operate all of your school facilities in your school buildings. And so we brought these next several slides forward in the committee conversations to talk about really what's involved with operating a school site. And so these are really... the big buckets that it takes

105to run a school. The first of these three different areas, the first one is personnel costs, right? That would include your teachers, your school administration, your student support staff, so people like your psychologists and your counselors, your speech-language pathologists and other folks like that, your front office staff, the folks that are in your building, the maintenance staff to keep that building running. That's what we would all kind of say are part of the personnel costs. Then there's also your building day-to-day operational costs. So those are things that are basically the things that keep your building running, right, or the things you have to have in place to keep your building running that aren't capital-related. So that's your utilities, your insurance grounds, and your custodial and your cleaning that happens, and your landscaping around the buildings

106and facilities. And the third piece would be your capital projects. So these are really your infrastructure projects. These are replacing roofs and HVAC systems and lighting systems and plumbing, equipment that might be on a playground. It might be furniture in the building. Your technology and curriculum are also capital items. So these all are all treated a little differently. And so we did some really deep dives. And so if we needed to... slow down. If you have questions, please let's do that because we spend a lot of time with our committee breaking this down and having some more detailed discussions. But each of these slides will break down these in a little bit more detail. More of a clarification here. checking my understanding. So when we talk about capital building costs, capital projects, that comes out

107of capital money. So that is separate from what, like that bucket where we would get that 6.7 million from. Correct. Correct. So one of the things I think that I hear quite often is, well, what is the cost if I have to reconfigure a school or something like that? It'll come out of that separate bucket of money. Correct. Because by statute, that's where it has to come from. So not necessarily impacting that. And we have that as a part of something that would come apart in our 10-year capital plan, correct? Correct. Okay. Correct. Yeah. Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't watched the committee meeting or, you know, the other slides, but the funding laws that we have is our maintenance and operations funding. The first two items, elements of personnel costs in the day-to-day, would

108fall under your maintenance and operations. Your capital infrastructure would be a completely separate source of funding. And we talked about this on Tuesday a couple times, and I can't say it enough. We cannot mix monies and funds in Arizona. It doesn't work like your checking and savings account. It doesn't work like a business has all the ability to generate funding, whether that's... whatever liquid assets and things available, it doesn't work that way in Arizona. If we could use monies from capital and maintenance operations interchangeably and mix and match, this would be a whole different conversation, but we can't. And so we have to have the ability to separate those things. And that's confusing at times because someone might say, well, you just spent $3 million to replace a roof. Why didn't you just spend that

109on more teachers? We can't. It just doesn't, we're not allowed to. It doesn't work that way in the state of Arizona. So. Let me dive a little deeper into the personnel side because we broke each one of these down a little bit more to show what would be saved, again, if you closed the school. And so when you think about the employees who are working in a school, some of that staff is really dependent on the student population. So if that school or that building was closed, that personnel would just move right with the school, right? And classroom teachers is a great example. We're going to need those teachers to move to whatever classrooms and whatever schools those students will move to. But there's also some... And there'd be no financial savings with that, right?

110That's just moving staff into a different building. The financial savings would come into play whenever you would have employees who would not be transferring to a new site, right? And so those are people who typically work at the building, at the school, and wouldn't be directly tied to a student. And so those are the personnel costs that you would save both at an elementary school. So that's about $500,000 for the positions that we believe, you know, would be dependent on the building versus the middle school, about $800,000 per year. And again, on the right talks about that funding source. So these positions would be paid for and funded by maintenance and operations. This would be the M&O savings that we would have if we had closed the school, right, whether it's an elementary or middle

111school. This would equate back to the $6.7 million, right? This is the kind of money you would have to have in your savings, right, or your equation to balance it coming from sources like this. On the day-to-day operational costs, so this slide we're showing a little bit on the breakdown of how much you would save. And I should have said on the last slide, too, these are averages, right? We did not want to bring something to the committee that was school by school that doesn't make any sense, right? So we did an average of what the position would make across all the district, right? We've done that through all of these slides. We've used an average for the day-to-day operational costs as well. And so you can see for an elementary school, that's about $300,000

112per year and about $500,000 per year for middle school. Middle school has a larger footprint. It's going to have more utility costs. It's going to have more custodial costs. It's going to have more costs for cleaning and things like that. These costs would be funded out of maintenance and operations as well. So, again, when you're talking about that $6.7 million, these are the kind of numbers that would help balance that from a cost versus revenue loss perspective. And, again, this is an average. So, you know, it's not related to any particular school. We looked at averages across the district. And so, you know, as we get more specific, if the board would want to know that, we could absolutely bring that back. But we didn't think it was appropriate at this time to, you know,

113get into any specifics about the particular sites. The other thing I want to mention about this slide, too, is on the building side, and I think our superintendent mentioned this earlier. That if you still operate a building, you will still incur these costs. So just because you're closing a school doesn't necessarily mean you're going to recoup all of these day-to-day operational costs as a savings. You really need to have... no building that we own or operate, right? There's a variety of ways you could structure that. But as long as we own and operate that building, we would still incur these costs. And to the same point that was mentioned earlier, there could be a timing issue, right? If you decide we don't want to have that building in three years, you would incur these costs

114for three years and then they would go to zero, right? So timing and whether you make a decision to own and operate that building are factors in determining how much money could be saved. Mr. M, I think at almost every one of our existing 25 schools, we have empty classrooms presently. And in some of those campuses, we've kind of sealed off. those rooms. And on a middle school campus, we might have even sealed off a whole building or a whole floor of a building. Are these savings in addition to the savings that we've already achieved there? They are, yes. So for those board members who may not be familiar with that term, we've tried to reduce costs in a building that's not 100% occupied as best we could. Don't clean a room that's never being

115used, like the day-to-day clean, so to speak, right? And if we had an opportunity to raise the temperature a few degrees in areas that would never have students or staff in it, then we would try to do things like that. But we still got to pay insurance on it. Still have to pay insurance. Still got to pay some utilities on it. Yes. So we've tried to recoup some of that savings. That's on the list that we mentioned the other night, things that we've been trying to do to minimize the impact. Okay. So that's in addition to the savings we've already done. Okay. Thank you. Correct. Correct. And this next slide really kind of breaks down a little bit more detail about the building cost, the infrastructure cost, the capital costs. And so for Kyrene, our

116capital costs are typically funded from bonds, from our capital override, or from our state funding for capital, which is called district additional assistance. And those funding sources would not be necessarily impacted in the same way from enrollment loss that... our maintenance and operations funding would be. There would be some loss there, you know, but on the average of like a half a million dollar impact, not $6.7 million, right? So we didn't focus too much on this with the committee as far as, you know. those different degrees of how much money you may or may not lose in capital because our community has been very, very supportive for our bonds and overrides and allow us to do things that we could not do without that state funding. Right. The 6.7 gap is not this. This is

117not this at all. It is an important piece of the equation to talk about, though, because, you know, you do want to be conscious of how you're spending money. Our taxpayers provide the money for bonds and overrides. And so we want to be very, very. good stewards of that money, make good decisions and not operate a building, keep a building, you know, when and where we don't have to. Right. So it's something that needs to be on the horizon, however that conversation goes. So, again, if we own and retain that building, we would still need to continue doing this. But we wanted to show kind of what the impact might be if you did not have a building in operation. It's much harder to talk about the annual. costs for capital because projects really are

118one time in nature and they can vary over the years. You know, you may do a roof project and you don't do anything on that roof for another 20 or 30 years, right? So the timing of when that happens is very difficult to say, what do you spend a year on capital? So what we did is we looked at a 10-year average per school. And I think one of the board members mentioned our capital master plan. We do a 10-year plan for all of our capital areas at our facilities. So we use that as a way to say, on average, for all of our elementary schools, we would spend about $5.6 million over that 10-year duration for capital-related items, infrastructure projects, things of those nature. And then at the middle school, for a 10-year period,

119you know, they're bigger. footprints and require more capital infrastructure, we would spend on average about $12.8 million over the entire 10-year period. I hope that makes sense. I have a question. Do we own the land under the schools? Correct. Thank you. And I think, Mr. Herman, you mentioned this, but it's, you know, if you... We could still own a building, but say we weren't the operator of that building. If we're not operating, the expense gets passed on. But as long as we're owning and operating the building. then we would have continue to operate the day-to-day operational expenses or have the day-to-day operational expenses and potentially some of this expense here as well. And maybe an example of that is the property that we've rented or leased, I should say, to ViaWest. It's a long-term lease.

120I think it got extended to 99 years. And we own the property. We retain the property. but we've leased all of the space for them to put a building and run their business. They pay all of the costs for that facility. We don't have any of the day-to-day costs. We don't have any of the maintenance and upkeep or even infrastructure costs. So there are different ways to retain the ownership, I think, is what we were trying to offer. By keeping the property or the land, I should say, you can still avoid having to do the infrastructure or the day-to-day maintenance costs. Do they have costs that they pay to us? being on the land? They pay all those directly. So do you want to talk a little bit more about that, Mr. Lowe? They're paying

121rent. We have a ground lease with them where they're paying $800,000 a year to the district, and that will increase every five years. Okay, so they're paying rent. If we This is just obviously very hypothetical. But if we needed that building back, what would happen with the lease? Can we break the lease? Do you want to explain the building that's there? Because it wasn't our building. It was just a piece of land. They built the building. It was not one of our buildings. Different than my question. That's okay. Went for other question. It was a good question, but it wasn't our building. Yeah. Yeah. So. I mean, if you want to operate a major warehouse trio of buildings, we can look into that outside of my expertise. But yeah, there are provisions in the lease

122whereby we have a right to terminate. Usually it's if they're not paying the rent and they have a right to terminate. I mean, it's a commercial lease for the land. But I think your question was kind of like if it was our building and they were renting it from us. Yeah. So any I think and we are putting the cart way before the horse on this. But if you were to close the school and you have a building that you would then look to lease to a third party to operate. We would have the discussion of what that lease looks like and what are the options to terminate the lease. That's all in that negotiation at that time. But we are so far. We are very far away from being in a position where we

123could even be because. As an initial point, even if you close any of your buildings, before we would be able to sell or lease the building, we need the permission of our voters to do that. Okay, thank you. Yeah, lots of ways to structure that. I will just, for the context, for the lease we have with BioWest offer that we decided to do what you would call a triple net lease, which basically means we don't have any responsibility to have any of the day-to-day upkeep. the maintenance, the infrastructure costs. If there are property taxes, that is all on them. So basically we collect rent. We don't pay any other bills associated with that. So you can structure, like Mr. Lowe said, a lease a lot of different ways. That's just how we structure the lease

124with FireList. And I know this isn't necessarily part of this, but it's sort of in line with your question. And Mr. Lowe, maybe you can speak to this. Again, it's a little premature, but... Should we get to the point where the board was then discussing selling or leasing, there are also similar to the discussion we're having around capital projects and some rules in Arizona. There will be rules. You're not just going to be able to go sell the land and take all that money and put it towards this. So if somebody's thinking, oh, well, let's close less because we can sell the piece of land, make all that money up and then some, and then that solves this problem. The selling of the land can't just go into maintenance and operations, unfortunately. That money, similar

125to what Mr. Herman said, is not allowed to just go to your main checkbook, right? So there are some real limitations to what that money can be used for in the state of Arizona. It's not up to us to decide. So this slide is really just a summary of what we just walked through, but we gave this to the committee to help give them kind of a one pager of things to consider and look at. So you can see, you know, down at the elementary school column, the personnel costs that we would. potentially save is a half a million dollars. The building cost that we could potentially save is $300,000 with a total of $800,000 per elementary school. And on the middle school, the same categories, 1.3 as the potential savings. And again, those are

126the areas that would relate to maintenance and operations. Those are the areas that if you're trying to equalize revenue loss and expenditure declines, those are the numbers you would be looking at. On the bottom is the capital. Again, it's important, but it just plays a different role. You could not say, you know, if you had a building, now take that $5.6 million towards the problem. As far as, you know, a way to solve that, it just doesn't work that way. But again, we wanted to make it very clear on these are all the parameters and things that we would consider. And again, it all depends on, for some of those areas, whether or not we still own and operate that building. And we were asked a little bit on Tuesday to consider if there could

127be any additional costs due to school closures. So what I've tried to do is address that both from the capital side and the M&O side as far as, you know, what we know today and what we've already been anticipating. So with the capital side, the ultimate impact on capital costs is really difficult to estimate because they really depend on the outcome of the building. And so what I mean by that, you know, Well, I guess I should say first, for the eight schools that were identified by the Long Range Planning Committee, if you looked at the 10 years of capital in our capital master plan, 10 years of projects, I should say, in our capital master plan for all of those eight schools, it equates to almost $54 billion. So that's a little bit more

128specific. Like these schools have this much allocated in our capital master plan for the next 10 years. And if the reason you're asking why it's eight, not nine, is don't forget that one of the schools was identified as being repurposed. So that building is not included in that number. And so those would be for things, if you're wondering, like, what are those projects? That's really any interior, exterior building work, you know, playgrounds, parking lots. Those are all things that would be on that list. If you wanted to estimate things like, well, what would happen, you know, to a building, like, if you were going to do things like the demolition costs, what that might be, which I think is a very good question. You know, at this time, it's hard to know, but our best

129estimate would be around $8 a square foot. So you're probably wondering, like, well, how many square feet might that equate to? So just to give you some context, for the two middle schools, their cost would be about $2.2 million, right? If you were talking about just demolition costs for the two middle schools, that's about how much that is. And for the six elementary schools that were recommended by the Long Range Committee, that's about $4 million, all that square footage and demolitions costs, right? So a total of about... $6.2 million if you were looking at demolition costs for the entirety of that. Which would basically offset the cost savings you achieve. Out of that $53.9 million that you would not have to spend because if you're demolishing it, you're not doing the roof. You're not doing

130the $53.9 million. And remember that the number you just gave, the 6.2. That's coming out of capital. Yeah, that's capital. It is not going to touch the 6.7. It does not impact that at all. So it's two completely different funding sources. So it's coming out of the $53.9. So we'd be saving $53.9 million in capital costs. And we may, if the board determined they want to just demo all eight of those sites, then out of the $53.9 million, you would need $6.2 million to demo. So it's using their capital money that was already set aside for the schools over the next 10 years to do that. So just be careful not to confuse the $6.2 million. It has nothing to do with the $6.7 million, nor could it, because it's two separate buckets. Correct. So

131if you were thinking about any other building modifications or other site work, that's really almost impossible to predict because you would really need to know specifically what you might be doing to that building. But, you know, as long as any of that work that you might be doing to the building would be less than $53.9 million over a 10-year period. then there could be some potential savings on the capital side. So that's just another variable to consider. And it's all based on timing and what the ultimate outcome might be. So, Mr. Herman, I just want to play out a scenario on the capital side. We did these schools, the eight schools. The board at some point said, yes, demo. We take $6.2 million off the $53.9 million. So I'm going to let you do the

132math behind that because I don't know. Or something. $40 something, right? That now $40 something million. Yeah, $48. $48, thank you. A little tired. What happens to that money? So where does that capital money go now? Does that just go back somewhere? Does that now get used for the 17 schools we have left and get redistributed in the capital master plan? Like what happens to that money? So it's really clear. Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, most of the money that we use for capital projects and infrastructure comes from our bonds. And we had $161 million of bonds that were authorized by our community back in November of 2023 for Kyrie to sell over a 10-year period. So we had 10 years from November 2023 to sell those bonds. We don't have $161

133million available today. You have to sell the bonds in order to have that money. We just sold about $42 million of bonds in the spring, if you remember. having fewer schools and saving money and capital could do are really two things. It allows us to stretch that bond funding a little bit longer, right, over a longer period of time. And the second piece is that's a good thing for our taxpayers because that would essentially lower the secondary property taxes that our community would have to pay. The borrowing cost for issuing bonds is borne by the community in the form of a secondary property tax, right? So the less amount of bonds you sell or the longer the period you stretch that out, the lower those tax rates could potentially be. Okay, on the M&O side,

134you know, there could be some additional costs that we know with closures and consolidations and boundaries. We know things like moving costs or there may be other costs necessary to support our personnel or staff members. Those costs, though, however, would be one time in nature. We would not consider those to be recurring, right? So they would be for a single point of time or maybe for a single year or a single activity. And so they would not need to be in our ongoing maintenance and operation budget, if that makes sense, right? That would be more of a one-time expense, a one-time area for us to support that. And so what Kyrene has done is we've carried over in budgeted money since 2023-24, since that year, to be used in support of one-time areas, mostly around

135things in our strategic plan. But today we have almost $1.5 million left of the money that we've been carrying forward for addressing any of these areas. And so should... So we need to do some of those things. You know, we have a million and a half dollars that we've already allocated for several years. We've just been waiting for when that would happen or what that might entail. So as long as it's less than that amount, it should not place any additional strain on our ongoing operations budget. And Mr. Herman, just for the sake of understanding, because I know I get asked this a lot in our councils and even by our staff a lot. Well, why didn't we just put that $1.5 million to the $1.8 that we need to reduce next year? Why would

136that not just solve that problem for next year? Yeah, so it's a great question, right? And again, you know, you really have to think about like where your expense or where your revenue loss is coming from and what that really means the following year, right? So if you are bridging your ongoing budget shortfall with one-time monies, you will eventually run out of one-time monies and then have a big gap to fill, right? And so when we talk about budgeting and Kyrene, we don't have a balanced budget because we use one-time monies to fulfill our ongoing budget responsibilities, right? So we talk a lot about ongoing revenues, ongoing expenses, maybe one-time revenues, one-time expenses, and we treat them very differently because to have a really solid financial plan, you can't... If you're mixing those two together,

137you're just building a problem, a big problem down the road. Well, that's part of what happened in that K-8 district in Phoenix, is that they're using one-time funding to cover recurring expenses, and then they had to go into receivership. Correct. And close schools like that. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So I do get asked that. That is probably one of the biggest questions I get asked is why it's a very similar question to why you wouldn't use reserves. That's really one time money. Once you if you start putting those in your ongoing expenses, you're going to wipe your reserves out pretty quickly and you will have no reserves. And I know Mr. Herman next month will be coming back for his annual bond and override presentation. And I know he talks a little bit about the importance

138of keeping our reserve balance at a certain level for. what it's intended for, an emergency, right? So you can't use that money to cover this gap either. You would run out. Absolutely. So on this slide, it may be a little bit to your question earlier, President Walsh. The next slide, I know we're going to pause after this, but the next slide shows a little bit more about some what-if scenarios. But this really just shows the potential cost reduction amounts that you could have had on the personnel side, the elementary schools, for the middle schools, or what that potential savings for the day-to-day building costs would have been for elementary and middle schools. And you can see that little asterisk shows. where the six middle or six elementary schools i should say in the two middle

139schools are indicated those were the recommendations or where the long range committee landed and so on the personnel side those add up to 4.6 million dollars and as our superintendent mentioned earlier we would realize that as soon as that transition happened right that would not have a lag that would not have a condition on whether you operated the building or not that would really be whether or not you operated a school or not versus on the day-to-day operational building cost, that's $2.8 million. And again, that's really contingent on timing or whether you continue to own and operate a building. So we wanted to show that the numbers, that the recommendations came to about $7.4 million, but also show the breakdown on how it was between elementary, middle school personnel versus day-to-day building operational costs. I

140think with that, we wanted to kind of pause and see. There was a lot of good questions, but if anyone had more questions to kind of dive more into that. And just to set you up for what's coming right after this, there will be a slide that we'll talk about that's a little more interactive, if you will, is the best word I can think of that you've set up to show if we were to change the committee's recommendation by the number, you'll be able to have that conversation. You can kind of do the math here yourselves, I'm sure, but we will have some time to dive into that. We thought. this would give you more time to ask about how we got these numbers. That's not my question. You're saving for the next section? Yeah,

141next section. Is this really a section break? It's a section break. Can we have a break? We can have a break. Do you want to ask, is there any questions before we do a break? I do want to make sure we get your questions, and then we'll definitely take a break. And if you have a babysitter that needs to stay a little bit later, I think we're probably going to go past 7 p.m. So just get another soda if you need some. Okay. Any questions right now? Just that I'm concerned about personnel costs. I just would like more information, detailed information with that. Give me an example of what you mean by that. What personnel? Yeah. Okay. Yep. We've got that. I mean, we don't have to go over that now. We can take a

142break. But yeah. You want us to answer questions when we come back from the break then? That's fine. We can do that. Yep. We have what the breakdown is and who the personnel is that falls into those categories. Yep. Okay. Thank you. All right. Take a quick break. We'll be back in five. All right. We are back. It is 634. I think we left off with a question from Member Satri on some of the personnel costs. So I'll turn it back over to you, Mr. Herman. Yeah. Before we kind of dive into more details there, I have a little bit of context that is part of the personnel questions and how these numbers kind of break down by those timeless spending model categories, because this is something that's kind of important to know, too, because

143if you do reduce those costs, like where do they make an impact is really what the question would be. So if you wanted to know how the amounts listed here for the elementary school $800,000 equate to the categories that are listed on that timeless spending model, about 33% of that savings would be in administration. Forty-eight percent, so almost half of that amount is in plant operations, and then the remaining 19% is in student instructional support. So that's where the bulk of that money saved comes into the administration category and in plant operations category. It's the same for middle schools, a little bit different percentages, but about 22% of that total, $1.3 million, would be administration. Half of it is plant operations. And the remaining 28% is student and instructional support areas. So I thought that

144was an important thing that I had forgotten to mention earlier. And I'll do a little breakdown of what some of those positions may sound like, just so you know what Mr. Herman's talking about. So again, most... So the positions that directly support students, so I'll just say teacher, for example, right, are going to move where the students are. And they're going to go, again, they're going to have to move locations, but they're going to go where the students are. So the personnel savings that you're talking about are very specific to, obviously, administration, to a lot of your front office staff and all of the things that come in your front office staff, which would be health assistance, you know. And again, I think plant operations, crossing guards, some of your duty people are actually under

145plant operations. So lunch duty, things like that actually all fall under plant operations. So some of those type positions, your building manager, your day-to-day porters, you may also see some, obviously at a middle school, you have an ABS position, which would also, it's not a administrator, it's actually a teacher. certified position, but there are some set positions that wouldn't necessarily need to go where the kids go. But what I can tell you, and part of a phased rollout of doing this as well helps to do is we have always done a really good job of being able to address downsizing because again, even without closing schools, we've been downsizing staff each year. In a situation like this, we would use attrition first. and do our very best. What that means is we get a lot

146of, you know, resignations at the end of the year for retirees, for people moving. A lot of our support staff positions aren't always filled anyway. In fact, we have a pretty significant vacancy in support positions that we haven't always had in the district pre-COVID, since COVID we had. So it could also mean Again, you're moving people where there's other positions similar to theirs because somebody retired or didn't come back for whatever reason, or you're potentially saying, we don't have that exact position. I'll just use Day Porter as an example. We don't have that Day Porter position. They're all filled, but we do have these six other positions. So we would do our very best, and Ms. Gibson and her team have been working on what that process will look like. And then we would do

147our best to do it through attrition. Could there need to be a reduction in force? Yes. I can't guarantee that there isn't. It's really hard to downsize and not have a reduction in force. However, if we can manage it through attrition and finding people places that they choose to stay. Again, a lot of people do retire every year and we reduce staff anyway. And as you mentioned, this is currently proposed to be spread out over a three-year implementation. Correct, which makes it easier to use attrition. But what I'll say is, I'm going to go back to that lever three, even if, right, let's say we didn't pull lever four and close any schools, many of these positions might also still be at risk for RIF because they are on that what's at stake list. And

148they would be positions because 85%, do I have that right, Mr. Herman? 85% of our budget is people. The only way we get that $6.7 million is to reduce some of your personnel costs. You're not getting that number without doing it. That's the biggest portion of our budget. So regardless of whether we do this through school closure and downsize, if we don't, we're still... possibly then taking some of these positions away while a building is still trying to operate. So again, from a, which is more difficult, you know, to not have some of these positions in a building that's fully operating, if you will, or at least, you know, half operating with half the students in there is going to be much more complicated for a school than not operating the school period. So I

149just want to be clear on that. Okay, I'm going to flip to kind of the next section. So this slide we talked about earlier or we prefaced it earlier really gives you the ability to look at some what-if scenarios for how you might save different amounts of money depending on the number of elementary or middle schools that would be considered. We did not share this with the Long Range Committee. I think they were very strong at math. They seemed to be doing a lot of the calculations as soon as we gave these numbers. But I think it's nice to be able to see. you know, some what ifs. So the way to read this would be if you close zero middle schools and you wanted to close anywhere between one to six elementary schools, kind

150of read across what that personnel or what that building day-to-day operational cost amount might be. And then the next grid really would be one middle school. And again, Between one and six elementary schools, you could read across to see what those amounts would be. And then the final grid would be if there were two middle schools and up to six elementaries. And again, the very, very bottom line is where the long-range committee had recommended. So I just highlighted that, but that's the way you could read this if you wanted to see different combinations of what the impacts might potentially be. I do just want to point out again for those that maybe... tuned in later, just that remember number of buildings is a little bit different than number of schools because really we're closing nine

151boundaries, but we're only going to close or yeah. Eight buildings because we're repurposing or recommending repurposing one for the gifted program. So just remember, that's why it's six and two it's eight. It's not nine because this is by buildings, not by actual. boundary at this point because this is where the savings come by the buildings. So again, closing nine leaves eight buildings. You're going to still operate that other building. In this slide, we've talked about at various times and various degrees. We mentioned this on Tuesday. This we refer to as strategic level three. What's at stake? If we weren't to balance the budget, if we weren't through our staffing process, if we weren't through our departmental budget changes process able to balance a budget, these are the things that would be considered. None of these

152items on this slide are popular for a multitude of reasons. I think when we talked about this with our long-range committee, they talked about a lot of these things really make the Kyrene experience for the students in the schools, right? So the supports and the electives and the opportunities. These are the things that really is behind the words, right? But when we're asked what else is on the table, these are the things that are on the table. And the only other thing, we can talk about how deep we want to talk about this list, but the only thing I really want to mention is at the bottom, because some of these things are overlapped a little bit with our maintenance and operations override, right? We use the maintenance and operations override. And we're going to

153talk about this on October 5th. 14th, so sorry for the repetition that's going to happen in a month. But we use it to keep our class sizes small for elementary and special, or I should say special areas, both electives in middle school and elementary schools. more services to students. And so there's a tie in there, right? But if the override does not pass, you know, those things would be impacted regardless. And so we did not bring the committee any kind of... options of an M&O override not passing because that really wasn't their job to look at things like that. But I do want to make it clear that, you know, if that did not pass, those losses in the $14.6 million that would be staggered in in year six and seven of the override would

154be on top of the $6.7 million that we're already talking about. So that I want to make very clear could be in addition to that, barring or... once we know the outcome of the election in November. I also want to point out, we didn't call it out in a separate bullet because it does get caught up in class size increases to some degree. But in addition to this, right, one of the things we invested in recently was specifically lowering class sizes at K-2, right? And we're seeing some nice results with some early literacy. And I forget exactly how much that investment is, about two. It was just under $2 million. Just under $2 million. About a million and a half. Yeah. So, you know, that would be an example of something that might have to

155go away again, right? We wouldn't be able to continue to maintain that low class size. That is outside of M&O override to what Mr. Herman was just referring to. That was an additional investment that the district made in managing to keep our K-2 class sizes, you know, significantly lower than. than most of our peers. So again, these are the things I know we've talked about these, some of these have a lot bigger dollar figure than others. You know, for example, we don't have a whole lot of certified district staff, but we have some that go out and support the 25 schools. I forget exactly how many it is. It might be about 12, maybe 13. certified district staff that go out and support 25 schools, right? And so again, some of these things are going

156to naturally decrease even if you close schools, right? Because you're going to just need less. And so some of these things will naturally decrease in alignment to how many schools we close. But if we close no schools, there's no option but to start picking some things from this list. So when it says, you know, by closing schools, we do reduce the risk of having to go deeper on this list. Can we go back to... The numbers. Right. So looking at this, the committee was tasked with $7 million. They came back with $7.4. Is it fair to say that if we start to alter, so, you know, let's just, you know. I'm going to pick the six and the zero up there. So, you know, we say we're only going to take 4.8 million, no matter

157what, we're still going to have to go back to that. What's at stake. So not only are we close, like, you know, repurposing or consolidating schools, then we are also impacting that experience. Correct. Correct. And I do want to be clear, right. To get to the 4.8 or even the 7.4, in addition to closing, the board would have to say. we're not going to do any, we're not keeping the building either. So, so remember, that's why there's a range there. There's a chance you close. And it's somewhere in the middle of that because you decide out of the eight buildings that are left, we're only going to tear down four of them and we're going to leave the other four. Now, you might lease them out eventually and recoup some of that money. But just

158know that, again, the best case means those buildings, we are no longer either they're no longer there or we're no longer operating them. Again, you can keep the land without operating them and you can keep the land without. a building on the land. But so there is a range there. I just want to be really clear that there's no guarantee you get to the 7.4. The 4.6 is obviously the personnel piece, which does occur. And on that same note, as Member Nelson said, is that we, if we delay, it's the same exact situation. Absolutely. Absolutely. If we delay, we are, there is no option but. to go to lever three and start to look at what we're going to reduce the $1.8 million next year. And I will tell you, like I've said, that's getting

159harder and harder to do every year. You saw what some of the decisions had to be last year. So there will be an impact to our schools next year and an impact to our district office. Let me be clear. It's across the board impacted. It's not just to the schools. It will be. But I do anticipate. It impacts the experience. The Kyrene experience. So, you know, I'm just going to give an example because it's one on there. You know, the district made an investment in having two middle school electives for our middle school students. Right. In some cases, some districts, you have one middle school elective that costs a lot of money because that's a lot of personnel that it takes to double your number of electives. It could be looking at things like that.

160Maybe we don't have two middle school electives. Maybe you only get one offering and we would have to reduce. I will tell you some of those things on, um, lever three in all likelihood would result in a riff because once you start talking. about our teaching staff and some of those positions that are related that way, it would be very hard to reduce those when you still have the same number of schools. And you'd be more likely to have to lean into a reduction in force if you have to go to only level three to use. And you're talking about a reduction of force also in certified staff? Yes. potentially. I mean, if we were to go to, I'm using that as an example, because that's a good example to take you all the way

161through. If you, I'm not saying by any means, that would be the thing that would be chosen. I'm just using that to play out the example. That's an investment, right? The district has made. There's no requirement we have to offer to. We'd have to start looking at things that we've done that are investments and not requirements. I mean, there are some things we have to do. You took that elective away. You need less middle school elective teachers. If we don't have enough attrition in a case like that, it's highly likely you wouldn't. Then you would have to riff because you're talking about such specialty positions. So it gets. Again, I'm not saying closing schools is a 100% guarantee we don't have to do a RIF. Both are a little bit at risk when you're reducing

162personnel. So I just want to be really clear. They're both at risk, but definitely by not closing schools and only leaning into reducing personnel, you may not have a choice. Go ahead. No, no. Just kind of because we can we can pivot back to the what's at stake slide now. Thank you. OK, so looking at that, yes, we have middle school electives. I know there are districts where, you know, we offer a wide variety of election and I imagine those would. scale down to what we are legally required to offer. But the other piece here is like, I know we've made a concerted effort about counselors and making sure, you know, counselors, with the staffing. And like making sure we adjust the staffing models for our rise up schools. Are those all things that would

163be impacted here as well? Absolutely. Absolutely. And counselors is a little bit unique right now because of the school safety grant that has offset that for us. So that has has been able to be something we haven't had to look at. But the reality is, if at some point we didn't have that grant, the district. wouldn't have that money to put back into counseling. And I know there's a concern. I'm so, okay. I know there's a concern a little bit around. So looking at our speech language pathologists, our school psychologists, a lot of them do a lot of campus sharing work. And I imagine that those caseloads would continue to increase. Absolutely. That's how you adjust. So class size increase directly impacts your... your classroom teacher, where it says student support service caseloads. That's when

164you're talking about those other support staffs could increase their caseloads and the number of students that they would have to serve. And again, the smaller we are in each school, the more we've spread those resources across 25, the more likelihood you have of staff having to travel across sites. And I will tell you, you know, part of our strategic plan, we did do an employee compensation study and we'll be bringing some feedback back. But, you know, we're starting to lose our competitive edge there. And there's no question that we have some positions that we're losing in the district because other districts have now outpaced. Kyrene had been able to be one of the top in some areas. And we just haven't been able to come with staying competitive. because you're trying to balance that budget.

165I'm sorry. Our psychologists, for one, our school psychologist is a big one. Speech-language pathologists, both of those positions. We are really struggling to attract staff because they can get a higher salary in another district. And so we're ending up contracting, which costs... much more than it does to hire someone in-house. Because legally we're required to provide those services. So that is not a service we can say we're not, we can't just say we're not going to have a school psychologist. We're not going to have a resource teacher. We're not going to have, so some of your harder to fill type positions, I will say our dual language classrooms are getting harder to staff and becoming a little more competitive. Some of our other hard to fill positions would be I think we're still okay in

166science and math right now. But they can get kind of difficult. They fluctuate there. And then a lot of our specialty positions, our resource, anything to do with exceptional student services is getting harder and harder to compete, which forces you to then be in a position of hiring contracted services. So it's kind of a catch-22 because now you're spending more money on a contracted service, but you don't really have the money. So you're tapping into your one-time money when you can to help offset that. It's a little bit of an issue. So, again, there's a lot of there's a lot of things up here that no doubt have an impact on the school. What are. Oh, I'm sorry. It's OK. This question literally just popped in my head when we were looking at the class

167sizes and cuts. Have we considered. Well, I know we haven't, but maybe y'all had private conversations, but four day school week. There are a lot of districts that are not teaching Casa Grande, the surrounding districts, the elementary districts. They go to four-day school weeks, and I know there's been some schools in central Phoenix and on the west side. They implemented that option to save money. Is that possible? I mean, I know, granted, we're like, what, 25, 26 schools. But has that been a consideration? We have not. considered that. I have yet to see, I would love to see some data on does it actually save a district money? Because the reality is you still have to operate the building on that day. You still have to pay for your utilities. As Mr. Herman say, yes,

168you might be able to lower the temperature a little bit, but I have not seen that. close areas around here. Other districts have done that as a cost-saving measure. I've seen it be implemented, and my conversations with other superintendents has been as a... employee retention strategy, which is very different than a cost-saving strategy. So I have seen it used to help retain staff. Yeah, because Coolidge and Casa Grande Elementary, they said, I've heard their superintendent say that they've saved money. But like I said, granted, they're a lot smaller district. I think Coolidge only has like two to three schools and Casa Grande Elementary, I mean, Casa Grande has like eight. elementary schools out there, which is confusing to me, but hey, but anyway, but it was just something that just popped in my head right

169now. One of the things that I think would be a challenge for us when you think about, Kyrene has a really strong community ed program. And I anticipate again, where we might not, you know, if you're going to operate your program on that fifth day, your expenses are still there for the building. So I'm not sure, but we could definitely do some research and see and bring something back to the board around. around that. I do not believe it will get us enough to the 6.7, but we'll definitely go ahead and look into that and see if there's something to that. I do think from an employee retention, especially in your more rural districts or districts that are harder to fill positions because they're not staffing as easily, we typically can fill most of our

170classrooms. It's usually our special education classrooms that we have the hardest time filling. They've tried strategies like that to ensure they have enough teachers. But, you know, you do see up there work contract calendar days. So that is a something that we may have to look at that even, you know, right now our school administrators are on a 12 month contract. If we shortened the school administrator's job, which would be very difficult for them to do what they need to do to get a school ready. But those are some things you could do. is start to shorten people's work contracts. Now, that does mean everybody's taking a cut, right, across the district as you do that. But that is one way to look at it. But, you know, there's only so much time to get

171everything ready for school already between and the amount of stuff. So, you know, again, is that a lever I'd like to pull? No. Is it a lever if we get forced to pull? Yes, it is one that could be looked at. I have a question about teacher salaries. I, how are they set? We were a district that paid more than most others for a long time. And now we're moving to be one that doesn't. How does that happen? I don't understand. I'm going to attempt to answer and then I may hand it off to Ms. Gibson. So. We had what's called, so Kyrene has fluctuated a little bit over the years, but for the most part, we've had a salary schedule is what it's called. Most districts in the state of Arizona run off of

172a salary schedule. So for example, there's a certified salary schedule. In the past. administration would come to the governing board annually and say, we did all of our budget process and it looks like we have 4%, I'm just making a number up, 4% to give towards the salary schedule and then meet and confer, which is KEA and representatives come together and have discussions about how they would like to apply that a dollar amount, whatever that 4% equates to, to their salary schedule. So they have some flexibility. That's part of those work agreements and how they'd like to apply it. As you know, this year, when we came to the board, we were able to say 1%, which is really doesn't even really cover, right? It's not even enough for them to do a couple things

173to the salary schedule, which is usually move it up. down and over. So I'll let Ms. Gibson, if she has anything she wants to add, or even Delia, if you would like to say anything about that, you are welcome to come up and speak as well from somebody who's been part of that process. But the reality is we've been able to bring very little. So it's not that we've reduced them per se, it's just that other districts are making bigger jumps quicker, possibly each year. Why? Yeah. Well, when we've had to reduce our budget by $24 million over nine years to stay balanced, that doesn't give you a whole lot of latitude to add costs in, right? And so every dollar that we've had to add in for compensation has had to be equalized by

174a reduction in expenses, right? It gets harder. I don't work at other districts, so it's hard for me to know exactly what their policies and what their practices are as far as how they prepare their budget. Every district faces a little different situation. High school districts get a little bit different funding. Some districts get desegregation money, right? So everybody has a little different variable that they can deal with. But I will say, you know, we're starting to feel the demographic shift. And so we're not growing. Districts that grow typically have the opportunity to put more money towards compensation because it's the opposite of reducing your budget, basically, in the timeless model, right? So there's lots of factors like that. You know, we would obviously love to keep our compensation high for certified and for every

175employee group. But when you have to reduce by $24 million, it doesn't give you a luxury to put tons of money towards really, really big compensation increases every year. And for just the sake of about a 1% increase in employee compensation is about a million dollars for the district. So for every 1%, you're going to increase. That's a million dollars. You've got to find somewhere else to reduce a million dollars to offset that, which is why it's becoming so difficult, right? If you already have a $6.7 million gap. Yeah, because of like state funding. Like I remember about five years ago, we were on a pay freeze in my district where we didn't get a raise for like two years. So that's something that just happens in education because of how the funding is dispersed

176and the money that we're giving. And I'm a high school teacher. So, you know, unfortunately, that's just how it is in this business. I think Mr. Herman's point about right, we don't get this huge influx of title funds. We don't get a huge influx. We don't get any desegregation funds. We don't, you know, there are different funding sources. And then I think a little bit to what, you know, President Walsh, you alluded to some districts. Try to do that, maybe use one-time money and then find out they can't sustain that. And we've just been very careful to not do that. What we've done with one-time money and the way we've done our best to offset that we can't give it to the salary schedule is to try to do stipends when we can. So if

177you've seen, we've come to the board a couple of times with, let's do a retention stipend and at least your one-time money can go to that. But at some point that will run out as well. So it's not. It's not a fix to the compensation problem. Right. She has a point. I can't remember his name. He was one of the legislators that was like, let's give teachers this $10,000 raise. But us with the AEA, you know, the board, we were like, okay, that's fine. But that's a one-time thing. what's going to happen in the fall of next year. Like, so you see what I'm saying? So it gets very convoluted when we do things like that. So a lot of districts, they got that ESSER money and they use it for certain things, but that

178was money that was there for certain things and certain timeframe. And now they're struggling. No, you guys did a great job. But of the districts that I talked to, the only districts that are really able to increase salary or offer like a 4% increase or a 5% increase are districts that are still growing. And so districts that are not growing or are landlocked, their salary increases are... very low, like 1%. But over the last couple of years, even in certified meet and confer and in our KESPA meetings, when we get to compensation, there isn't even anything to really negotiate because a 1% increase is a 1% increase. That's a 1% lift to the schedule. So we're not even able to do any type of allowing. certified meeting confer groups really negotiate how they use that

179money. We just haven't had that much money to bring to the table. I don't want to further complicate the issue with compensation, but a lot of our districts also use their 301 money differently and they place it in the base. We do not do that currently in Kyrene. So sometimes when you see that percentage come out in compensation, it also includes going into the base. We use our 301 differently in the district for our certified staff. And unfortunately, we're not just competing against other school districts. We're competing against entire different professions because Arizona continues to underfund public education. We're around 48th in per-pupil scrutiny. So, yeah, we might have districts that pay more, but we're still being paid fractions of what our neighboring states are able to pay. Yeah, we have some very technical positions

180is the best word I can think of right now, but that we can't even compete with the private sector at all. And yeah, some charter schools get really and then you've got charter schools. They get a certain amount of money and they could say, hey, you know what? We like you. You're a great math teacher. We'll give you ninety thousand dollars. You're going to take ninety thousand or you're going to keep getting forty five to fifty. People are going to make a business decision. And this is what we've referred to a lot, in my opinion, you know, about the people that we need to always keep up in our minds that until public schools are funded the way they need to be and respected by our state legislature, we're going to have these problems. They're

181going to get worse. I often think about this Arizona State Lands Trust money that, you know. Do we get any of that? Do you know? So that was at the heart of Proposition 123 negotiations. I don't want to derail too deep into this, but the law changed where the amount of money that went into education from Prop 123 reverted back to where it was. when Prop. 123 was adopted, right? So they did not put more money into education. The difference where it dropped got replaced by the state general fund, right? So we didn't lose money from Prop. 123, but they also chose not to increase the portion of what was required. north of that level, which could have resulted in more money. So we do receive money from Prop. 23, but it was not increased

182for us to be able to do more things with. And I said this the other night, and I just want to repeat this, because we absolutely need some more funding from our state. There's no question. But even with... a higher formula that gave us more money, we are still going to be facing this declining enrollment, right? So I do just want to be clear that that's still going to be an issue for us. Again, they would have to offset it significantly to be able to get us to a place where it didn't have the impact that it's having. You know, we've been given no indication that that's coming anytime soon from our state. Yes. And we would still have to deal with the declining enrollment. But as far as the services go, we would be

183able to be more effective. Possibly. Yes. Yes. So, yes, the numbers would come down, but the services could be better. Correct. So, you know, we wanted you to kind of have a summary, if you want to go back one slide, just to kind of see, we may come back to this slide, I know, as you get to the end of this presentation to kind of talk about this, but just was to give you a picture of, you know, we were asked, what would it look like if we closed less buildings? And we wanted you to have a solid understanding of what that would actually look like. whether it was a middle school or elementary. And obviously, you know, the committee, I do recall when they were having conversations about the approaches they were choosing, whether

184it be regional capacity. What did I just forget the last one? Minimal. That they looked at at that time what those ranges would be and what the dollar amounts would be. And again, I think they all felt based on the feedback that came out of those meetings was the concern. There was a couple concerns with minimal. I think it was there was maybe not enough schools with the minimal. And there was a real consensus on we don't. want our district to be K-5s and then a handful of these K-8s because you closed, right, the joint campuses and just moved the kids over. Yes, it would have been way less boundary changes. You would have just closed all your joint campuses and you would have moved the younger children over to the middle school building. Yes,

185that would have been less disruptive. It wouldn't have quite gotten us. to this number. And it would have meant that now there are a handful of K-8 schools with no middle schools in the district. They would all be either K-8 or K-5s. And so the committee felt that wasn't the best option. And then the capacity driven and the regional were the next step up from that, if you will. And I would say the capacity was a little bit... The capacity, people didn't... The capacity was basically dissolving all school boundaries, reboundering everything until each school was full and the ones left over were the ones that closed. It was taking a sledgehammer to the entire district. And the committee felt very, very, very, very strongly that that was not the route to go. Minimum and capacity

186were on opposite ends of the spectrum. And likely we would have been down to about 10. maybe 11 schools left in the district because to fill them all up, that's basically what that would look like. They didn't that. So they went more middle of the road, which was regional. And even with the regional, I'm sorry if it's okay. You were on the committee. Yeah, no, if to give a little bit more context when it came to the regional discussion, and I think Mr. Herman's absolutely correct. We all had like our calculators out, kind of. People were very concerned that this be a one-time thing. Yes. They did not want to offer a recommendation that would put us back in the same place. Everybody felt very, very strongly about that. And even when offered different... Like

187with the regional approach, the consensus really was just a four region. But because some tables, you know, five came in second, you know, we wanted to bring that back so people would still have options. But they were very clear looking at the capacity and looking at the numbers came back. They really wanted to set the district up for financial success according to the parameters that they had given. the demographer. And I think there was, you know, the demographer was clear that there could be some enrollment loss from whatever we do. And I think the committee paid attention to that to say, so if we go. too low and we have this additional enrollment loss, we're going to be back here again. So again, it's that middle of the road. How do we get, again, there's

188no crystal ball here. Nobody knows for sure what the exact right number needs to be to stabilize us, if you will. But the reality is if you have that disruption and now we still go back to having schools sitting at 50% utilization rate, we're right back where we were when we started this. Right. And I do know there was some thought given to, I don't think we have this slide here. It's one of my favorites, where it talks about the number of schools that existed, you know, back when we were at certain levels. And when we were at, when Kyrene was last at 12,000 students, we had... three middle schools, and 11 elementary schools. And so there was some thought to the committee about, well, it seems easy, just do a one-to-one, which would be

189more of that capacity-driven approach. But again, they wanted to be a little bit more thoughtful than that. So yes, that's the one. Yeah, yeah, we shared that. It's a great slide. It's very interesting. It is interesting to see. And again, I don't know exactly what the utilization rates were at that point because I don't have, obviously, the data from then. But we do know that it was. about 14, well, it was 14 schools, three middle schools, 11 elementaries when we sat around 12. And even when we sat around 11,000, it looks like we were also at 14. So that might've been right around the time that the district started to see, but you can see when the district peaked, it wasn't for very long before it started to then see the decline. So If there's

190no other financial questions, we wanted to dive into some of the programmatic stuff. Before we jump into that, is there any discussion we want to have right now? We can come back to it after programmatic, but we can have a discussion now too if you want, just based on the financials. No, because they answered my question when they brought up the combining of the K-8 schools. Because that was one of my thoughts, like, you know, because I know a lot of parents, their concerns, and rightfully so, was my kids being split into schools. Well, and then one thing about the joint campuses, so there were a lot of different... And to be clear, even though members Satri and I were on members of the community just there in a board capacity to listen, we were

191not able to vote on consensus because this is an item coming to the board. So we were just there to listen and report back to our fellow board members. When they talked about the joint campuses, there were a lot of concerns around mixing the very youngest learners with some of our oldest learners and how we would have to go in from a capital perspective and retrofit a lot of those schools because we can't have like a little kinder can't use the same bathroom as an eighth grader. the facilities are different sizes. And so there was going to be a lot of work to do, to do that. So even though it was minimal disruption from a boundary perspective, from, From a cost perspective, it really wasn't going to get us where we needed to be.

192And then we were just worried about, you know, there are some discipline issues that happen in middle schools and maybe don't happen in our K-5 setting. And so just kind of combining those populations, were we inviting different problems? And maybe we didn't need to borrow trouble, I think was the feeling. No, I understand because I've taught on one of those campuses before where it was K through eight. And we did have like separate sections for the younger kids and the older kids were in another section of the school. And, you know, it was very, I don't want to say hard, but it was tedious sometimes monitoring, especially the older kids, like wondering, trying to skip and go to the elementary bathrooms, you know, so I understand that. Ready? Okay. Let's talk a little bit about

193program. I'm not going to repeat. I do have some slides in here. Before I start talking about the two that we've been mainly talking about, dual language and gifted, I do just want to preface, you know, there's been a lot of chatter around, well, what about all the other choice schools in Kyrene? And what I want to be really clear with the board and our community as well, is that right? Not all of our choice schools that we're talking about here, the reason we're not talking about them, such as International Baccalaureate, our IB Middle School, our Arts Academy, our Computer Science Immersion, our schools that offer AVID, our Traditional Academy, all of those programmatic things that happen at a school, or even if they're whole school, or even if they're just a strand within the

194school, can continue in whatever building. the school moves to. If a school is moving to more than one building, then it might take a minute to figure out where is going to be the best place for that to continue to happen. So we're not saying those things can't happen. I know we've heard that a lot from traditional. We're not saying we can't have traditional education here in Kyrene. What we're saying with our choice schools about open enrollment, and we have landed on that the two, when you look at the data, The two areas that seem to attract the open enrollment is dual language, and we know we're losing enrollment on gifted, so we believe we could potentially bring that enrollment back. and to the district. So that is the reason for that conversation going that

195way. So absolutely, any one of those programs that is sitting up, Leader and Me, another great example, all of that can continue. It will just be at a different building. So again, it might take a minute to establish it and it'll, you know, I understand that there will be a transition period, but absolutely those things will continue in this district. So I do want to talk about... specifically gifted first. This slide was shared with the board in our August, I believe it was fifth study session where I just shared some data around gifted. This just shows you that right now currently, and that is K-8, it is not just K-5, there is about a thousand students that are identified for gifted. And you can see the numbers by grade levels or grade spans over the

196last four or five years. So we average, you know, again, middle school's usually a little bit lower, but elementary seems to be right around the 500 mark, give or take a few years that it dropped a little less. 2021, 22 might have been a COVID year issue. But you can see out of those gifted students that are in the district in K-5. How many go to our self-contained schools? And just so you know, self-contained starts at second grade. So really that probably should say two through five. But self-contained starts in second grade. So again. In last year, we had 523 elementary students that were identified for gifted, and we had 163 between the two schools sitting in self-contained gifted. So I want to give you just a little history, and I have Beth here who

197is going to Snyder, who oversees our gifted program, to also jump in. And she's also here to answer any very specific gifted questions. Just before you jump in, when you talk about identified as gifted, what would that look like for a parent? Is that like, okay, we're in compact math, so my kid is gifted? It could. Yeah, so for those that don't know, in order to be identified as gifted in the state of Arizona, a score of 97th percentile or higher in one of the identified areas, verbal, nonverbal, quantitative, there's also a composite score that can qualify. And the state has about 19 different. IQ tests that are used at the approved test for identification. We primarily use the COGAT and we also lean into, well, a private psychologist, our school psychologist. There's a myriad

198of reasons. Students who participate in gifted self-contained generally are gifted identified. The students in our GATE programs, which include our compacted math 4-5 and our middle schools, are identified either through gifted identification or through our academic criteria. So those are the students we consider. academically talented. Sure. And that criteria varies depending on the grade and the topic. But these numbers up here would just be the ones that are specifically identified for gifted and wouldn't pick up maybe an academically talented kiddo in our gate programs necessarily. Correct. Got it. Thank you. So I want to talk a little bit, and I'm just going to give you a really high level overview of some history. And then I want to talk about some of the current challenges we were facing with self-contained gifted. So we were going

199to be having a conversation about gifted, regardless of whether the school closure conversation was occurring. We would have been in front of the board having this conversation. So back in 2017, there was a district-wide curriculum audit. I believe, Mr. President Walsh, you were here around that time. And that curriculum audit revealed significant gaps in our services and mostly around equity access and quality of the program. And I know Beth joined us right about the time the audit wrapped up to help us figure out how we were going to address these concerns with our gifted programming. Back then, we had three self-contained elementaries and we actually had two self-contained middle schools. Did I get that right? Yep. All right. And then, so right after that audit between 18 and 20. a gifted advisory committee and program

200redesign was pulled together. And I'll let Beth talk a little bit about that committee. Sure. So we brought in parents, students, teachers. It was kind of a call to the community who would like to contribute to this feedback. And from the curriculum audit, we had stirred up a lot of interest in the feedback loop. So we had about 20 stakeholders. Mr. Kupf was a part of that committee at the time, principal at Altadena, correct? Oh, you were at Montevideo at that time. Oh, you were. Okay. Anyway, I don't need to derail that. So we had Tempe Union High School representative. We had a very diverse community come together and look at what are our program services? How can we expand this? How can we improve it? And a lot of the feedback came from our

201Murata, Monta Vista community that they really just didn't want us to touch their schools at all. They love their programs. They wanted to keep their self-contained programs. And a lot of the other schools gave us feedback that they wanted to stay at their schools and not need to go to Monta Vista or Murata for gifted services. They wanted to be able to have services at their own school. So we looked at how do we increase services at those other schools. And I think one of the things that I shared with... with Ms. Tenius that was interesting in this experience was we found that the self-contained schools, or pathways rather, those kids, by the time they got to fifth grade, majority of them had been looped up together. You know, they became like siblings because they

202were grouped together forever. And then when they went into middle school, they became a self-contained pathway. And that pathway became a little bit problematic because they just, the students started, I'll say loosely, infighting. They were not doing well as the same confined group. So when we expanded that self-contained program to be GATE, there was more opportunity for... a diverse group, more teachers, more students, and that became more inclusive. So we eliminated the self-contained model at Pueblo and Altadena, and then we kept the self-contained programs at Monta Vista and Murata. Cielo had already sort of been phasing out. That was the third self-contained school. And I don't actually know the history much behind why Cielo was being... phased out. I think it was a numbers challenge. And then we added our enrichment program, which is what

203we're currently operating now at our self-contained schools and the compacted math courses as well. So I don't know if... And enrichment is offered. So gifted enrichment is offered at every elementary school and it's offered for our K-1 students at Monta Vista and Murata. Is that correct? And then there's second through fifth has had self-contained. But we wanted to talk about some of the current challenges. So one of the biggest ones, and I think you kind of alluded to it with Cielo, which ended up phasing the program out, is there really is a staffing constraint that's occurring. And it's as we continue to decline in enrollment, it's getting worse. It's every year becoming a bigger issue for us. And what that means is there's space limitations and it's getting harder and harder to meet our class

204size limits or class size targets, I should say. So, you know, what happens is if the identified gifted students, let's just say our class size target for second grade, Susie, is 23. I'm making that number up. Don't quote me on that, but I don't have it off the top of my head. But let's just say it's 23 and we only have 17 gifted students identified. You now have, right, not enough kids to fill that room. So you have one of two choices. You don't fill it and you just eat the cost because there is a cost to that for us as a district, right? Or you fill it with students who maybe haven't qualified yet. And we call those guested students. They're usually students who have shown some level of higher achievement and we guest

205them in. And so I'm going to give an example of something that happened at a school two years ago. Has it been two now? We had a situation where. You had to guest students in and a pretty good number of students were guested in that year. We have had years where it could be almost half the classes guested in. We had some guest in students. Then either gifted testing occurs or more students get identified who now want to come over. There's enough students to fill the class. Another gifted teacher gets out or another teacher gets added. Those kids get moved out of that room. the gifted class fills up and those guested students in the middle of first quarter, second quarter had to go get another teacher. So we have faced that multiple times over

206the last few years. Some schools are more extreme than others in this, but that's happened. Remember that students who reside in the school boundary are required to be enrolled in the school. So I can't, if a gifted self-contained class fills up. I also have had to turn kids away from the self-contained that identify as gifted that move into the boundary because there's no space in the classroom, but I have to service them at that school because that's their boundary school. Also, the opposite has happened where, um, So anyway, any student who has to reside in the school boundary is required to be enrolled in the school for their boundary. So I can't turn them away regardless. And then the one classroom per grade level really does limit our gifted enrollment at each school. So it's

207not like you can go out and expand that, right, because seats are first offered to our gifted and then again. It's first gifted if you live in the boundary, then it's gifted if you're coming from out, and then if there's not enough space or not enough filled to the target, we'll fill it with guested students. But again, we've also had to fluctuate that. The smaller we get, the more that's going to happen. You aren't going to be able to staff or you're going to have an investment in needing to add more staff to a school in order to be able to. service the kids. Anything you want to add to that challenge? I know that's been one of the biggest, and it's probably the one I hear the most at the beginning of each year

208when I've got parents saying, wait a minute, I thought I was in a self-contained class, and now you've got kids in here who are not self-contained. Well, that is true, because if we don't, it's going to cost a lot of money for us to add addition. Every teacher we add, right, the average teacher is about $75,000. So every time I have to do that, that's an extra $75,000, right? And when you're facing what we're facing, that's just not something we can manage. I think you captured it. Okay. The other is, right, you know, it's really hard to market a self-contained program in the way that we do this because of some of those staffing limitations and constraints. And then one of the other issues we've noticed, and again, this also came out, I think, in

209the audit and some conversations that we've had a chance to have is, you know, when you have a program like this as a pathway, as a self-contained, it's very difficult to bring in a whole different curriculum, especially when you're starting to guest kids in and have some of these conversations. So, you know, when you look at what some of these gifted and talented academies are doing. their programming looks very different than the conventional school. Like they may have additional supplemental programs. They may have, you know, so it does require us to be a little bit more aligned to the core programming. And I think that was everything there. Was there anything you want to add to the curriculum piece? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the piece that. is real as well from a

210professional standpoint is that it can be very isolating as a colleague who you know you have the gifted identified kids and I don't gifted education tends to be very different and gifted learners tend to learn at a quicker pace there's more opportunity for extension projects we do coding robots things like that and because that does deviate from what often the core is doing, then that can be very isolating for the teachers if I'm the only gifted teacher of second grade. then I think it also can create a perception of the haves and the have-nots because we have an expectation that core teachers are doing one thing and the gifted teacher can be doing something different. So I think it can be an isolating professional experience as well. And I think we really experienced that when

211we had it in the middle schools as well from the feedback that I recall being shared. You know, and when you only have one teacher, when you think about professional development, you think about training, you think about PLC and all of that, it's very difficult, right? When there's only one teacher. Remember how we talked about before, we're starting to see where we have some schools that are getting to maybe two teachers in a grade level and even some that are close to one, you know, at least two, they can collaborate when you just have one teacher in a grade level. Yes, they can collaborate with their, with their general ed peers, but it is not the same as collaborating as a gifted group of teachers teaching. second grade. So those are some of the challenges

212that we have faced, but the real reality comes down to the staffing constraints. This is becoming a bigger and bigger investment for us to be able to maintain it as a self-contained pathway. So some benefits of going to a whole school model. obviously are some of the things that just are the opposite of what we just shared. I do think it does help with school culture. I do think it does help with PD. And the other real reality is the marketing piece of this, is that it is much harder to market a self-contained than it is a whole school model for a district. It's probably why you see so many districts going there. And the reality is we're losing, we know of at least a thousand. We do not know yet what Tempe's that just

213opened up. We know we've lost some children. We don't know the exact number yet. We probably won't know that for about another year when the data comes out. But currently we lose about a thousand students that are choosing not to stay in Kyrene that live within our boundaries that could be going to a Kyrene school because we're not offering the service they're looking for. Questions? Yes. So. One of my children is also gifted identified and we participated in the enrichment model at our homeschool and then gate program in middle school. And one of the benefits. outside of the academic and I think is really critical for gifted learners is really the social emotional learning component. I am curious, well, okay, sorry, it's now late. Okay, here's how I want to address this. First, one of

214the things that I have heard out there and some of the feedback we've been getting is those who are concerned, you know, if they haven't chosen their current families, they haven't chosen to attend Murata or Monta Vista for whatever reason. They're concerned that the limited gifted enrichment that they get at their home schools is going to go away. Is that the case? No. No. The enrichment courses, courses, the enrichment support at the schools that are not the academy would continue. Okay. Is there any thought to, I mean, okay. You know what? That's, that's another, that's a question for another day. Actually, that's way cart before the horse. Okay. Thank you for that one. Next is around. The social emotional learning component for these students, I know with the gifted enrichment environment in elementary, we don't

215necessarily do that as much as I might be happening in our self-contained units. I do find, and so that's a concern that I have. I do see in kind of, you know, that we have about a third of our gifted identified students choosing to be in either one of the self-contained programs. is interesting to me, but I think that's like my main concern is just making sure that anything we do, there's like a heavy emphasis and focus on that component and continuing. But I just am a little concerned about the implementation. of a gifted academy and learning from maybe mistakes or pitfalls. I mean, no one wants, no one wants their kid to be the Guinea pig per se. Um, and so just being really thoughtful about this proposal, I, I do understand, but I

216all, and as someone who chose. to keep my child at their, their school because of the inclusion and multi, multi-level learners and all of those things. Like I understand the benefits of that integrated learning style. So. those are my own real reservations about this, but I do, I, I get it from like a marketing perspective. I get it from a staff support perspective, but I just want you to know that those are my concerns and wondering what thought we've given in those areas. Yeah. And I do think what's nice about having both options is there as options for families, because you will have families that want to stay and. be more integrated and just have an enrichment experience. And you have families that want a fully immersed gifted experience. And this gives us the opportunity

217to be able to do offer both, you know, will we get all thousand back? Again, we don't have a crystal ball. Will some of the 500 that are already in the gift in the, in the program. choose. Are some of them not going to the self-contained because that's not the model they want? So if it's integrated in both ways, then they've just chosen to go ahead and stay at their home school. Those are some things that, you know, remain to be seen. But you also have to think about, right, that this is growth. You're going to have to grow a program. Anytime you implement something new such as this, it's, you're not going to turn around the first year you open it and have a full school. I think that's pretty clear. Also, depending on

218what grade levels we start with, we are planning to bring together an advisory group similar to the one that was formed before once we know the board was moving forward so we can have more in-depth conversations about the curriculum and some of those pieces that you just mentioned. A question. We are still going to continue doing universal identification, correct? Correct. Yeah, so I would like to also address the enrichment question and the social-emotional. Some of our, well, when we began the inception of this enrichment program, most of our teachers served two schools. So a site would have three days a week and two days a week. Many of the schools now have, I shouldn't say many of the schools, some of our schools now have services one day a week. And so students... are seeing

219their resource teacher for less than an hour once a week. And we know gifted children are gifted 24-7, right? So that is what Ms. Tanya is speaking about. Like, you have a choice. And some of our schools, well, not some of our schools, all of our schools have something unique to offer. The enrichment program, I think, depending on who you talk to, is not scratching the itch enough. It's not enough. So I think we'll, depending on where the board goes with this, I think the committee will be looking at all of our services and what can we do to shore that up. Was the gifted advisory, I know, so you indicated you, I'm so sorry. If anybody has questions, I don't mean to like just dominate and go in on this. So the gifted advisory

220was doing their work until 2020. I am making an assumption here that did it get derailed by school closures and whatnot? And we just have not picked that back up again. That is correct. Okay. The committee never came to a vote or a consensus on anything. We really, it was kind of a point at which that, I like to say COVID ate the bus. Okay. We kind of just had a... a pause on the committee that really never resumed? I, regardless of what the board decides to do in December, I do think that is a very appropriate thing to bring back up. I know we have had, and I participated on SPED advisory committees and things like that, but I think this is also a group because gifted learners do fall under our exceptional student

221services. So I'd like to say it's just. Another part of special education. But we really do need to have that stakeholder group back up. We agree with that. We agree 100%. I mean, the timing just worked out that we were also having this conversation. So we felt like it was a good time to bring it up. Regardless, if the board was to say, do not move forward with the Gifted Academy, we will not be operating self-contained the way we've been operating self-contained. We can no longer do that. That's what I think I need the board to understand is that. Our gifted services are going to have to look different. We can't afford to continue to do what we're doing. And so, again, this was an opportunity to look at, could we then still have an

222option for a family that wants a more immersive experience and look at our enrichment and figure out a better way to serve all of our gifted students in the district? And the testing, just to clarify, it is gifted education as a state mandate and local school districts are required to offer testing three times a year. And the state has recently been funding universal testing for second grade. We participate and take advantage of every opportunity the state gives us and we are required to offer testing three times a year and we do that. Yeah. Okay. That's great. I think the other piece about this and making sure that we, that really hurt, that we take a look at what we're offering for enrichment is because if we are doing the universal identification, we know that this

223is an area where we can see a lot of gaps in who is represented and who is identified in these groups. And if we move to this model where we have one school in one area, my concern is we have learners who might not have the ability to be transported from, I mean, let's say like Guadalupe and Kyrene all the way out to millennial due to parents working, lack of transportation, what have you. And so moving that centralized model, we just need to be real honest. You are going to be limiting Who gets to attend that school? And so making sure that we shore up. Again, if this is how we move, shoring up the enrichment that's offered at each of our other remaining campuses is going to be paramount. I saw Principal Soto back

224here, and I know he was talking earlier last week about how many gifted, identified, I think it was your fourth grade class that you had. I was shocked. But again, they're choosing to be at that school. We still want them to have that enrichment and making sure that that is actually robust in meeting their needs, I think is just the bar, the lowest of the low bars for us. And the issue you talked about with equity is an issue right now, right? The reality is it's the same issue. They can't get to self-contained schools. But at least now they have one side, other side, one location. Yeah, I... So our decision is that we're going to be going into this again in greater detail about gifted education. Is that what I'm hearing that we're going

225to talk about? I view us as we're just having a discussion about this. And so I was asking the questions that I had and just kind of getting some understanding about some of the concerns that I had as we move forward. That's all. I don't think we're not making any decisions. We're having a discussion. The advisory committee, which is separate than the discussion as whether we move forward with this model. will come in January. So if the board was to say, do not move forward with... taking one of the buildings that we're talking about. Right now, we've identified a building for that, but it could be any of those buildings repurposed. If the board was to say, don't move forward with repurposing a building, we still are going to need an advisory committee to talk

226about what our enrichment looks like across the district, what our gifted services will look like. If the board was to say, yes, go with the map as it is, say, or a different map with that, then, then, Then we would still pull an advisory committee together to talk about some of these things specific to an academy and the other services across the district. So, again, at some point, you're going to give me some feedback, I think, at the end of tonight to talk about, yes, are there any other parameters? If you were to say to me, run a parameter that says no gifted academy, then we take one of those buildings offline. But just, right, or you could say keep the parameter of the gifted academy. Okay. I, um, and, and having taught myself, um,

227in areas where gifted education was a pipe dream, but there were a heck of a lot of gifted kids that I worked with, in my opinion. I mean, there's so many factors that determine giftedness. I just, I don't know if there's a place, and it may be right now for the conversation about, um, an academy versus, I mean, like dual language training, for example. I know that there have been studies. I don't know how recent they are, but I am aware of them. That there have been studies that show that if you have someone who learns two languages, it raises their IQ scores. It raises their performance in school. So the factors that make someone qualify as a gifted child are... Just numerous. And I've always been confused about qualifying for giftedness based on narrow

228parameters, all these tests that we have, and just wonder where the place is for enrichment activities for all kids, not just the ones who test into gifted education. Having our classroom teachers, you know. develop activities for classes that, you know, so. That's where you talk about, right, what is your rigor? What is your curriculum? Are you having your tier one instruction, as we call it, which is your first level instruction, absolutely should be at that rigorous level. I think the piece we're talking about is the piece that we're required to by the state for students who meet the qualification. How do we provide that service that we are required to that is outside? the regular classroom. So there is a state requirement that you have a gifted education program separate from? There is. There is.

229That's correct. Thank you for letting me know that. For the record, I think most, I shouldn't say most, I should stop using words like most and always. Many people, and I would imagine at this table, would agree with you that giftedness is an interesting thing and the way that we identify it is very vast. And we say gifted teaching is good teaching. And don't all children deserve good teaching? Absolutely. We are talking about a very specific population that is identified through basically the state mandate. And Arizona has a really interesting way of defining that for us. So as a school district, we do our best to meet those state requirements and then expand those services in every way possible. to ensure that students who would thrive in those environments are getting those environments. So I

230think, yes. And that would come out through the advisory committee of how do we define this program and how do we set the criteria so that it is. inclusive of not just a very small population potentially. Is there a certain amount of money attached to how many kids you identify as gifted? Not much. So gifted funding is a partially funded mandate. And I think that the people around me could answer this question better. I want to answer it from my perspective, which is Gifted students, like all students, come with funding. And these families are often the families that mobilize and choose. And I think we are in an environment now where we recognize that as a school district, if we want to compete with what is happening around us for gifted education, that we probably

231need to look at doing things differently. So I think the funding specific to giftedness is quite minimal. However, these students tend to be the high-performing students that often come with a lot of funding when we have things like results beats funding and so on. So the state has taken away that funding. Oh, are you going to give the weight? No, we both pulled it out. You asked and you shall receive. No, no, I'd like to hear that again. So the weight is .007 of ADM. Chris can ensure do the math. So it's very, very minuscule, right? So we had last year or in our budget this year assumed about 850 students and that application of 0.007 times that equates to just under six ADM that would be multiplied by the states. funding per ADM, right?

232So it doesn't generate very much money. We, uh, last year, uh, we had about, it's about $5,100 was the state funding per student, right? So that's it. So about $30,000, $31,000 maybe. To service all 850 kids, by the way. Okay. Thank you. It is an investment. And that's why, again, we brought this recommendation that we believe this is a good investment in the long run. Again, will you see the results tomorrow? No. But is this something we build upon knowing that, again? You bring back at some point kids who choose to stay in the district because we offer a service from what we the research that we have done and the data that we have really leaned into to look at this. Yeah. And I just want to point out just for myself that this

233points out to me this whole treating public education as a business. This is what we end up with, you know. rather than the finest general education for American kids to learn about our country and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it sounds like pie in the sky. It happens to be the kind of school that I, at my advanced age, had the very good fortune to attend when I was a young child, had a great public school system that... made me a patriot and made me care about my community, et cetera, et cetera. And we were anything but a business. If a business came close to a public school, people went, ooh, you know, what, you want to put your name of your business on our campus? I don't think so. You know,

234so that's just my personal bias. I'm speaking only for myself. Any other gifted questions before I jump into dual language? So dual language, and I believe Mr. Soto is here to help answer some questions. And Ms. Williams was not able to be here tonight, but she did want me to let you know that she's very aware that we're having this conversation. You know, dual language, again, these are similar side slides. I'm not going to necessarily read them all. I just want to be really clear. There was some confusion. Maricopa is reflected in that bottom little square down there because obviously they're not in our boundaries. Again, we've had this conversation over and over. And as far as how these dots play out. So there's about 400, if we were to look at today's enrollment, or

235actually 24, 25. At Lagos, about 19% of their enrollment is coming from out of the district, meaning completely out of Kyrene. And 81% is coming from within the district. Out of that, remember Lagos-Australia is what we call a super boundary right now. So just know that when we're talking about Lagos' boundary, I am referring to the super boundary. It's that whole area. And so... You know, you can see the demographer's projections where we were headed. The capacity at Lagos is about 688. And I know where the committee's recommendation landed based on some feedback we had gotten in the study session was to attempt to keep Lagos in Lagos with their dual language program, but potentially add some children back in. And so, you know, again, with doing that. You can see. And one of the

236things the demographer has shared, right, when you look where that concentration of students are coming, it's either the super boundary or really close to the super boundary. We are only bringing in 82 out of district and only 31 of those are coming from Maricopa. So there's only out of all of Lagos's enrollment. Most of it is in district. And then Norte, just to give you a refresher. has a little bit of a different story. Norte has 59% out of district and only 41% in district. So they're actually bringing in more students from out of the district than they serve that are in our boundaries. Their enrollment is expected to be a little bit more stable. Oh, sorry, I clicked the wrong slide, didn't I? Clicked my slide and not your slide. Sorry. Their enrollment is

237intended to be a little bit more stable. And they bring in, let me just look at my notes here. So, you know, what did I just say? Lagos brings in 82 out of district enrollment. Norte's bringing in 298 from out of the district. They are our school that brings in the most students from out of the district by far and away. 298, yes. And the other was 82. So, you know, again, we had made, and I just wanted you to see this just so you get a feel for the grade levels over the years. The number of teachers per grade level, again, is enrollment declines, more schools experience. Sorry, I keep doing the wrong one now. See, I can't see that far. Experience grades that have fewer than four sections. You can see what's going

238to potentially, if our projections are correct. Lagos will get to the point that in dual language, at some point, they will have only two teachers in each grade level teaching dual language. In Norte, it looks like they could potentially get to four. Now, that's up in the upper grades. At Lagos, they could have three in the lower grades, and you can see four and three at Norte. And then this just showed at the time during the study session, I had made the recommendation that we should consider consolidating the programs because that would be basically a full elementary school. You would bring that together and now you would have at least four classroom teachers with grade levels ranging from four to seven teachers based on enrollment. And again, your projections would be about 800, but you

239can see that our kids would be spread out. all over from, you know, way back in the Foothills area all the way up through Mesa, Tempe, Roosevelt. Based on the board's feedback, again, this is just another way to look at the numbers by site. You know, based on this board's feedback, the recommendation was to try to keep, for the demographer to try to run a model that kept. the programs on both sides of the freeway. What I can share is since the committee made the recommendation, our team has had a chance to go a little deeper and just, you know, confirm some of the data and just make sure. I do want to bring a couple things to the board for just for your consideration. I'm a little concerned, you know, Again, Lagos, I'm not

240worried about the pathway program as far as the numbers. We will still be able to keep what we would need to keep at Lagos, moving the boundaries that I believe the demographer had created. We are good on numbers, partly because their enrollment is so much lower to begin with. Moving Norte as a pathway program with as high of numbers that they have and the demographer expecting them to stay at 500 creates a couple more challenges for us. And so, again, I think the demographer took the feedback from the board the last time and said, OK, I'll keep two on each side. I assume those both mean pathway. I'd like the board to consider keeping the west side, if you will. or the east side, I'm sorry, I get my east and west, maybe we consider

241keeping one a pathway and one a full dual language. Again, which building, we can talk about that later, but keeping one a full, and the reason being we have no room for growth if we merge them with another campus and make them a pathway, and we no longer can keep our preschool program, our Bienvenidos, did I say that correctly? I'm getting better, our Bienvenidos, together with their dual language peers. And that was a concern that we hadn't quite uncovered the dual language piece or the preschool piece. And again, we were going off some feedback that we had gotten about keeping two separate and go ahead and going to Pathway. But I'd like the board to at least consider that. So if you have questions, I know Mr. Soto is here to answer those. Again, when

242you have 500 kids versus 300, it's a very different scenario. So could we consider two different scenarios? Thank you for bringing this up. This was on, I went through all our old study sessions before we came and this was on my thing because the math doesn't, the math didn't math. And so I was going to bring it up, especially because, especially for where Norte and especially if it's the current population, the current program, not necessarily like the building, you know, if that's stable enrollment and if I'm understanding principal Soto with Bienvenidos, is there a waiting list for that? I know you, didn't you recently expand to a a second room. Yes, we just expanded to another classroom. And as far as a waiting list, Josh Gleiter probably gave us a better number, but I don't

243know if he's here. He got out of being here tonight. I will say it's very popular in preschool. Even back when I was trying to get my oldest or considering my oldest for preschool, I remember trying to sign them up in March. And they told me, oh, no, there's already a wait list. But that wait list has been continuous. Nine years I've been there. So, okay. I do want to be clear. The, the, the math does work from a part of it. The math works. It's tight. And what it does do is what it, what happens is the same problem I explained about gifted a minute ago. Yeah. Your boundary students have to go to the school, right? If we're bringing in this many out of district and putting them at a boundary school like

244that. for some reason, more families want dual language, we may not have space to service them on that side of the freeway because your neighborhood kids, again, remember the numbers that you've all seen are only going to continue to go down based on the projections. But really what struck us is I was more concerned about the preschool piece and separating that from that program is pretty. Because again, the demographers numbers don't look at preschool. That would be something different, especially a signature preschool program. So I do, it also forces us to move some other preschool programs that potentially, because you wouldn't have room to have any extra programming at Wagner if you put both dual language and. conventional together. And I do want to say in our beginning to talk about placement of programs in

245this, Josh Gleiter was looking at expanding Bienvenidos. He was going to add the fourth classroom and we would still, there's demand for that. So we would want to be able to add an additional classroom. And again, you know, we could. If the board felt like that was an okay direction to say, yes, we're okay with having one side be a pathway and one side be a standalone, I can work with the demographer to then. figure out which of those buildings makes the most sense. Whether it's keep it in the same building it's currently in, which would be just fine. Or, you know, there's some challenges with the building it's in. And I know Mr. Soto can probably speak to some of those, such as some really small classrooms because of the footprint of that building.

246But that is an option. It holds the site. I think I have the capacity on here is 830 students. So 810 is the capacity at that site. And right now, again, they're projected to be around 500. And do you know how many preschool students you have right now, if you have three? And if we were to add a fourth? We're like at 30, I want to say 36. So we have 474 K-5 students. And then around 513 total overall pre-K-5. So if we add another, you know, there's plenty of space to add another. Right. Dr. Ostmeyer. I'm listening. No, you've got your light on. I want to hear what you have to say. Thank you. I think some of the complexities in looking at the aggregate numbers, I'm curious about the math doesn't do math.

247Maybe I was looking at the numbers wrong. It just seemed very tight to me, especially if we, I know we talked about dual language being kind of. something that attracts people. So if we were wanting to attract, I think in my mind, looking at dual language as an opportunity to grow and something that, I mean, Ms. Helm, fairly easy to market. It just seemed like a very constricted. direction though. 100%. I think that the summary data that you're looking at and trying to determine whether or not that capacity there, I think our superintendent has spoken to eloquently as far as looking at your total numbers and if there's interest to be able to really preserve the capacity and allow the program to continue to grow in its own space, that would certainly be a factor

248that you would want us to look at to move forward and we could do that. When we start to look at the aggregate numbers and the complement of programs that are in addition to the K-5 enrollment, there's a layer there where you're looking at the number of classrooms that are available and the two of you sat on the committee with us as we defined how do we identify the capacity of a building. And we look at the instructional space. We do reserve a set of classrooms outside of the K-5 instruction for special education, for preschool programming. When you look at our dual language program at North Day specifically, they have an incredibly robust complement that exceeds the number of the average classes that we preserve in a building. And that's the tug, that push. that

249we have and really trying to keep our preschoolers together with their K-5 siblings or with their peers in that setting in order to do so. Was there a need? I do want to also say, you know, again, I would just like the board to consider. Would we and it might be a good test run to to see what happens by having one side of the freeway, a pathway before we just make the commitment to going both pathways, because, again, Nortec has proven to be very successful with their out of district enrollment. If we were to keep one as a pathway and keep one as a, you know, I'll call it a. total dual language school. I do believe it would need to be an open enrollment school, though. It would not have a boundary. It

250would be because, again, 51% or 59% are already coming from outside the district. So, again, if we just, for example, if we chose to keep it in the same building it's currently in, it doesn't have to be. It could be one of those other schools that have been identified. But if we chose to keep it in the same building, knowing that most of their Enrollment is coming from pretty far north, you know, and that's a good location. We could do that. It could be an open enrollment school. It might mean the demographer needs to adjust a few of the other boundaries on the east side. So I know that there's been some hay is there any way to not have to split schools as much as maybe we did. That might give the demographer an

251opportunity to go back and fix and tweak a little bit of that type of thing. on the east side by doing this. Because if you don't put Norte at Wagner, you don't move the dual language there, then that would leave Wagner too small. So there would have to be some adjustment into some of those boundaries for him to... spread that utilization rate out like we've been talking about. So again, I would like some direction from the board if I can ask the demographer to do that. I feel pretty strongly the more I dug into the preschool portion of this that I, and I'll be honest, again, I go back to the recommendation I made. I think a standalone dual language is the way to go. I am comfortable. And we will support a pathway program

252if that's the board's decision on one side of the freeway. But I feel like until we actually, because Kyrene used to have a pathway program, by the way, and I know Mr. Soto came in right around the time that was being dismantled because of some real challenges with it. So if you want to share any of your experience, but I just want you to know that we'll support both if that's the direction the board wants to give us. I would like, excuse me, before you start, I'm going to ask you a very silly question. Could you give a full explanation of a pathway program as opposed to? So the instruction itself doesn't change for the children. It just means that there is a campus. So I'll use Lagos as the example, since that's where we

253have decided that right now Lagos is 100%. Every kid that goes to Lagos is in a dual language class. In a pathway, and we're calling it pathway, you can call it lots of different things, a strand, whatever, there would be dual language classes for the families that want dual language. And there would be regular education or general ed or there's still special ed services, so really more conventional education. In the other half of the building, if you will. What you're describing is how dual language exists in middle school. We don't have middle schools that are exclusively dual language. We do not have dual languages that are exclusively middle school dual languages. Now, could we run into some of the same challenges I shared with the gifted self-contained? When you start to staff at something that's

254got a little strand, we could at Lagos. And that's what we're going to have to monitor and watch is when do we, because you can't. You can't staff the same adult language as you do the conventional when you need. So we are going to have to monitor that over the years if their enrollment starts to dip. So what is Norte? Is Norte a pathway or is it a... No pathways right now. When I first got here in 1617, it was the first year, Mr. Norte, we were laughing because... 1617, you don't look a year older. Yeah, thank you. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other that first year doing duty in about 200 degree temperature as Norte and Niños. So prior to 1617, our dual language program was at Niños, and

255it was a... pathway, for lack of a better word. And they made a decision. And again, the decision was made before I even came into the district. It was the year I transitioned that. Dual language would move to Norte. Niños would stay the conventional school. But the kids that were at Norte, mostly fourth and fifth that year, was that it? Got to transition out. So for a couple years, you had like one class or two classes in a grade level that were non-dual language as they transitioned out. Yeah, my first two years at Norte, in 2016-17, we had fourth and fifth grade students. Say, for instance, we had four sections of one grade level. One of those sections was dual language and say the other three were non-dual language. And so each year they transitioned

256out. So within two years, it became a full dual language academy. No, no. We just call that dual language academy. It's a whole school academy. You know, there's some real advantages to having a dual, a full dual language academy, similar to some of the advantages we talked about with a full gifted. Right. And so, you know, again, I, I don't. I do not feel from an administrative standpoint what we could manage. There's no reason that we have to keep them the same. There's no reason that you couldn't have two pathways. There's no reason, well, you can't have two-fold languages. We just don't have enough kids on one side. So you could either have two pathways like we're talking about, but I do believe we may have to think about then we lose, you know, there's

257some disadvantages. You can't have your preschool kids. together and there's not a lot of room for growth if we merge or we say a pathway on one side and a full dual language on the other side of the freeway. So if, you know, if the board's comfortable with that, I would just like some direction so that I can have the demographer do the math. And by keeping a robust pipeline in our K-5, it helps mitigate the challenges you were talking about our middle schools. Absolutely. So by that, I mean, if we have a lot of kids coming out of dual language from K-5, you're not going to have those same challenges with a small cohort because dual language cohorts never get bigger. Correct. They only get smaller. So as you move into a school or

258third or fourth grade, you're not doing it. You can't just join in. Yeah, you don't join. You can't join dual language in third or fourth. So we typically see a little bit of a decrease in enrollment by about fourth grade. Yes, I would say. You can join if you test in. I just had a third grade parent from Spain, a parent that wanted an impromptu school tour. And of course, I'll give him the tour. And he's coming over and he's working with a company that's tied to Intel. But he's bringing a third grade student. And of course. The Spanish is there, right? But I'm still assessing or we're assessing the student to know where his English is at to make sure we provide the services that he needs. But yeah, we get those in the

259upper grades and anything beyond first grade, first quarter, that's when the student can actually be assessed unless they attended a dual language school. Yeah, if they did. So I'm just looking for some feedback. Questions on the dual language. Go ahead, Member Collins. Oh, it's not necessarily a question. I really would like for us to definitely keep the program. I think it's something that's important. When you say keep the program, go ahead and kind of what I suggested, a pathway on one side and a full on the other. Yes, yes. That makes sense to me. So could we go back to the slide where it showed? The number of buildings open and the dollar amount because I think we are now coming full circle. We are coming full circle. Oh, wrong presentation. Sorry. Basically, what you

260would be doing is taking one of the schools that the committee recommended and saying, let's repurpose it back to a full dual language. So if that was the only change in parameter we would be giving, we would be just moving one row up on the bottom, if I'm remembering correctly. Correct. You would be moving one row up on the bottom. Now your range would be 4.1 to 6.6, which is pretty close to the... 6.7. So it'd be bringing one of the six schools back online and keeping it a full dual language school. And then we would leave the pathway on the other side. And again, what that actually does to the boundaries, it wouldn't change any other schools that were identified by the committee. It would only change potentially some of these boundary lines that,

261you know, the He may need to go back and look because he'll look at utilization rates, he being the demographer, and maybe have to tweak some of this. And I would give him back the parameter that was a parameter, but it didn't work out in every case, which would be to try your very best to have minimal splits between schools where you can do that. I appreciate that guidance. I know we can't do it in every instance. No, we can't do it in every instance. I think we've heard from some. communities that they feel there's been a disproportionate divide and if they can go back and remedy and look into that. And some of that really just came down to capacity in a building and you run out of space, right? So there is this

262limitation of space. As far as which building we go back to use, my recommendation is we just use one of the buildings, whether we leave it in the building it's in, which is the least disruptive for now. Some of the challenges that we have with that building, maybe we can address in future years. But for now, because again, we can't just go demo that building. I will tell you, Mr. Mason's over there. That building is very oddly shaped and some pretty hard concrete structures. Is that what you've explained? You can't just like take down a wall like you can in other places. And Mr. Soto can speak to that as well. It is not going to flop over. I would say I love the 1970s architecture. If we could bring back the courtyard in the

263middle, we're there. It is one of the challenges. I don't know if you've ever been into one of Norte's classrooms. They're not a rectangle square. They are a pie, piece of a pie almost. And it is very difficult. You can't fit a lot in a room. So, you know, when we say. 25 kids, 30 kids in a classroom, it looks a little different in a place like Norte than it does in some of our other classrooms. That has been a big challenge. Just opportunities for creativity. Yes, they've gotten pretty creative over the years. And with the fidelity of language, you know, in the Spanish class, teachers get really creative and they'll use that space as what we call the safety zone. That's where the Spanish teacher can leave Spanish and talk to the student in

264English. So we definitely use the space. This is true. And like I said, I will work with the demographer. I did hear the board's feedback in August when I brought this forward that, you know, we do know since where the kids are coming from, it is not going to make sense to move it as far south as we could go. So it most likely makes sense to probably keep it close, if not in the building it's in, in order to... There are some disadvantages of keeping it in that building, and we're very aware of those, but I also want to acknowledge the location is important. So I'll work with the demographer and ask him to provide what that might look like. It only moves us up one, so it brings us to 4.1 to 6.6.

265Yeah. Go ahead, man. No, no. This is kind of where, when I spoke on Tuesday, the conversation I was hoping that we're having. It's a little bit late in the night, but here we are. I know. Sorry. A lot. The question I wanted us to consider as a board, and I'm glad we have the financial information to make an informed decision, is whether we want to consider keeping more schools open. And I've just heard from Superintendent Tenius that, you know, we might be able to keep at least one more school open. And then the question is, do we want to keep even more schools open? But then that brings us back to at what cost? And if you go to the next slide. Oh, you did it again. If we go to the next slide,

266keeping this in mind. Right. And that's and I'll be I'll be honest here. I'm struggling with this. I'm struggling with this a lot because, as I mentioned on Tuesday, I don't want us to be closing schools. I also don't want us to be taking some of these cuts here that's going to impact all of our kids throughout the entire district. And how do we find the balance? Because if we go back to the slide earlier and we said, let's cut the recommendation in half, let's cut. Only one middle school and only four elementary schools. That only brings you to the $4.5 million. Now you've got $2.2 million we have to make up, and then we're going to be pulling a lot of those levers, right? If we go somewhere in between, we're still having to

267pull levers, and those levers are painful. And what does that do for our students and our staff and our teachers? But you're keeping maybe one or two more schools open. Well, minimizing disruption is one of the things that I've been trying to do. And disruption looks different ways because you can keep more schools open. But if you're pulling resources out of the classroom, you're still having disruption. And I do want to just add to that. There's one thing else to consider in that, as you said that. In addition to still having that disruption because you've pulled things, you also think about the, like we said, you could end up with some schools that are going to end up with one or two teachers in a grade level. You're going to end up with so few,

268the utilization rate. So in addition to some of the resources from that what's at stake that could potentially get pulled, you could potentially end up, because there won't be. enough, there will be too much space to spread out the number of kids we have left. So some of your utilization rates are going to significantly drop. And now you're back to the same issue where you maybe have a school or two that has very few resources because they're sitting with a couple teachers. Correct. And that would be predetermined if you wanted to keep a lot more schools open. If, you know, for example, the change you just recommended on the dual language side is moving up the column. that's probably not going to exacerbate the issue as much. Not too much because he would be able

269to, again, just reconfigure these boundaries a little bit to spread the utilization a little more. Well, one of the things that I think I've heard from our community at large is the difference between the utilization rates on the east and the west. And for those of us who were on the committee, we also addressed the fact that the east has more children in its space than on the west side. So by having an additional school, you actually equalize a little bit more the utility rates across the entire district. And you were feeling a little bit of that tightness in the numbers that you were looking at as you were looking at the pathway at the current location that was recommended. So you have a little bit of space on the east side in order to

270offer a little bit of an opening there. But if you go too much further into either side of the highway, you start to really compromise the framework, in which case you have three to four. for teachers in a grade level and can really embrace your professional learning communities and keep that experience more robust for your children K through five. So there's compliments there. You're weighing the options appropriately. The other thing to consider, depending on what that, let's just say the recommendation you played out a minute ago was what, 4-1, 5-1, something like that. 4-1, I think it was. Once you bring back a middle school, You no longer have the natural barrier of I-10. It's impossible to be able to spread your students out in a way to do that. So just know. And maybe

271that's okay. Again, I wasn't here when that was originally put into place. But I will tell you that was you saw the committee's vote was zero on the five middle school model. And one of the number one pieces of feedback we heard from the room was because, oh, no, we're not going to do the whole way. We're going to bus kids from all the way over here to over here. Again, similar to the year that I came, that dual language had a shift. It was the last year. And I don't think there's anybody here from Anita's, but somebody could probably speak to this. That was our last school that crossed the freeway. And I think Menides went to Centennial was my understanding. And some of the neighborhood that fed into Menides also came from across

272the freeway. And that was the very last boundary that they changed. And when they did that, unfortunately, you know, again, we tie our hands a little bit with utilization when we don't look at it as a whole district and we look at it as these separate areas. Menides' enrollment. dropped drastically at that point because they limited the boundary by so much there just wasn't enough kids there. So on that note, when we're looking at the different schools and how they're going to be, the other ones are going to be utilized, are we splitting up schools in those boundaries? Let me go to the boundary map that way. I'm not sure I'm quite understanding the question. Are the entire school cohorts able to go together? So we had, I believe it was four we identified at

273this point, if the map was to sit as it is. KTA ended up being split between two. Murata was split between two. Estrella was split between two and Kalina was split between two. So the boundaries do do that. If if we bring. the dual language back, that might shift that a little bit that we could fix. But I don't think it's obviously not going to fix anything on the west side if we bring the dual language back on the east side. So it's not possible in all cases because the capacity of the schools, it just doesn't work to be able to do that. You can't fit the entire school. Right. Can we... find out what that impact is. I'd like to know. Well, if I bring this back to say, keep the dual language where

274it is and don't change that, then yes, what I would bring back, um, hopefully by next week, I'll work with the demographer. He would have to shift these boundaries a little bit down here and, and then bring something back. But my recommendation, the parameter I would also give him would be, could you find a way where you had to split anybody into two that you, um, uh, brought that back? So we wouldn't have to. Correct. We would take a look at that option and evaluate it for you. But not in every case. It would only be. Okay. Yeah. I understand. Or the minimal impact. The minimal. Yep. Definitely. Because he did try to do that everywhere he could. Yeah. I understand. Yeah, that was a parameter the committee had given him as well was to

275try to do that. But, you know, you have to the parameters get a little messy because the reality is the more parameters you give, the more conflicts you have. Right. You start to run into conflicts when the demographer tries to do that. So you do kind of have to prioritize them as well. And at the time, was there a weighted priority? Or was just kind of consistent across all of those? You know, I think I was just going to pull up my slide that has the. I can answer that. We, on the long term, along the. It's so late. Long range crime. It's late. It's late. On the committee, we didn't give like a weighted priority list. I do believe that in his final presentation, there were some things that ended up taking precedence, like

276such as building infrastructure issues that the committee wasn't aware of. And so that lended some determination to things like completely outside of the control and that. kind of superseded some of those parameters. And regional approach was one the committee came to consensus on. So I found, I have them right here. So regional approach, obviously try to increase the school utilization and reduce the number of schools as best that he could. Maintaining, at that time, the board's feedback was two dual language programs, create a dedicated gift to school, account for the natural. man-made geographic barriers, minimize the number of boundary changes, try to preserve feeder patterns. So what he did really try hard to do was if you, if this school typically goes to this middle school as best as possible, keep them to that middle

277school so that there wasn't a big shift. So there was a long list. I do also want to point out that And just so that people are clear, we are not going back and I am not asking the demographer to pull any other maps that the committee considered when you talk about all those options. We are talking about using the committee's recommendation as the starting point that we take back to the demographer to have him rerun, you know, the small tweaks. So again, depending on where you guys land on whatever feedback outside of the dual language you give me, he can do it from there. So if you were to say reduced by two more schools, he will start with this as the starting point. The other maps are gone. They're done. The committee had

278already considered them. Do you want me to go back to the other slide? I would. I had a feeling. I probably should have put it at the end. And to be clear, board, we're not making a decision tonight. We have we have months to get. community feedback and hear perspectives and engage with our parents to come to the best decision possible. And I think we need to take advantage of every single one of those opportunities. If there's any guidance we want to give right now, we can. And I think that's what we're talking about right now, particularly with the open enrollment dual language. If there's any other guidance we want to give. And the reason that's so important is because, again, whatever map we put in front of the public hearing is the map the

279board will vote on in December. Correct. Again, it doesn't mean the board has to agree to that once they've gotten through the public hearings, but that is the map. You can't put a map in front of the public hearings and then all of a sudden change it right before the December meeting because you heard feedback. So whatever map goes in front of the public hearing, which is why we need this feedback from you or guidance as far as what map you want the demographer to build for the public hearings, if you will. So if you were to tell me. just make the dual language shift and shift the boundary around. I can bring that back. I would recommend I bring that back in a similar retreat or study session, hopefully next week, but possibly the

280following Monday. He needs about a week to run these and build them. And then we would share that with you so that then we know to move forward with the public hearing. If you were to tell me, have him run a map that actually... add these additional parameters take out two more schools, then he would need to do something different. That might take a minute longer, but still about a week is what he's told us. Sorry. So I'm hearing that we need to, we've got one school that we're considering keeping open that we were. We're considering, yeah, adding one more school to the list to be open. So do we need to talk about. So now would be the opportunity to say whether we now, before we start the seven public hearings, give guidance to

281make some of these changes now, looking at these cost implications. If we don't give that guidance, it doesn't mean that we've now agreed to whatever we've done. It just means that if we get to December and we decide we want to make a change then, we will have to do another public hearing. And then we will have to send out another notice to the communities. Which delays this a year. So it could delay it depending on the magnitude of the change and how that change is implemented. And it's not the guidance right now isn't which schools and all of that. The guidance is, do you want to see less schools than the five and two? Do you want him to run less? But remember, you're at 4.1 to 6.6 and we really need to be,

282I just want, I want, you know, don't forget that in the landscape. Right. We've got the number you're looking at. And this goes back to my earlier comment as well, where it's hard to predict the future. But is there a way that by taking down the number of schools that are being closed, we're actually preserving some of our enrollment because we're going to prevent families who were otherwise going to leave? Yes. And I don't know the answer. Me neither. But that's just something that I. Right. To your point, you said earlier, you might preserve some, but then you take away some of that level three and now you've lost it again. Correct. So then you're still back. Yeah, it would be district-wide. We're not going to take away a resource at two elementary schools. At

283one school, right. It's the worst place we could be in, right? There is no good answer here. That's the reality. But as far as disruption is concerned, it's also my major concern as well. The less disruption we can come up with, the better. So what you're saying is we, and forgive me for not being terribly articulate about this, but just trying to wrap my head around it. If we slow down this process so that we lose another year, right? We lose another year, which has financial implications for us that are not. We won't be able to overcome them. We will be pulling into the what's at stake slide. Yes, we would be taking things off of here. So we would be losing something somewhere. There's no way to cut two more million dollars out of

284your budget without losing something. I understand. And we're now at the point, like we said, we have chipped away at this in a way that it is now the types of things that are impacting. And I'm not suggesting we rush your decision tonight, truly. I don't want you to feel rushed at all. I'm just saying if there was clear, if the board had consensus to give clear guidance, we should do it now. If the board doesn't have consensus to give clear guidance, we can just go forward with the recommendation. That's not saying we support it. Other than the guidance you already gave. Yeah, other than the guidance you already gave. That's not saying we support it. That's just saying we're going to go forward right now. Now, in December, if we come back and make

285changes, depending on the scope and how quickly we make them, it could delay it. It might not. If it's not a big change and we're able to give that feedback very quickly and... were able to preview that with you because this doesn't have to be the only time we're having a discussion on this between now and December. I was going to say, right. Right. Yeah. So then it could be that the decision is not being made until January instead of December. That's not necessarily the end of the world. But the longer you draw this out, the harder it becomes for Ms. Helms' team to do marketing, for Ms. Gibson's team to line up enrollment piece, for Dr. Ostmeyer's team to do all that. Well, and I mean, facilities and technology alone, the amount of work

286that has to happen to get the rooms ready to... bring the children into. So there is a lot of moving pieces. It does mean a lot of, you know, school leaders waiting to start. talking with who they're merging with and having those transition plans. So that's why I say I think it pushes it if you get too much later than January. Yeah, but December 16th isn't the magic number. If it's December 20th, the world keeps spinning. And it's unfair. Speaking from an educator, it's unfair to the education personnel staff because they may have to look for other means of employment. So, you know, so we have to definitely take that into consideration as well, because we're, you know, yes, we're talking about students, but we're also talking about people livelihoods and how they provide for

287their families. So we have to also take that into consideration. Yeah. Very good point. Kind of along these lines, I know we've now that we're making kind of some of. We've given you guidance on this one adjustment. I'm curious what that would do to the implementation schedule that's been put out to the community. Good question. So assuming that's the only change, I do have a slide. Were you still asking a question? I was still going to ask a question. No, with the implementation timeline, I'm curious how it would impact because thinking of people's livelihoods, thinking of... transition, being smooth three years. I'm curious what the feasibility of possibly doing it in two years would look like. So we would have loved to do this in two years. We actually thought that was going to be

288the original when we first started this work. Obviously, before we had the committee's recommendation, we always knew it would be, we thought it would be a one to two year, depending on how many. Turned out to be a pretty significant. When we laid it out, we did, you know, landed on, we believed three. If we were to pull. At least one school off that was slated for that third year, we could go back and have a conversation from an operational standpoint if we could transition this to do it in two years. From an enrollment standpoint and a marketing and everything, it would be better to do it in two years and possibly transition. But, you know, the real issue comes down to can we have the rooms ready? And so I would really need to

289just have a chance to talk to my operational teams to see could we pull that off in two years. And again, I'm not married to anything, but I know we were, I think it was the October 14th meeting. You were going to have transportation come and talk to us. If that's something, would that be enough time to kind of look at the feasibility of that? Not saying we had to do three years versus two. We could kind of pair those together. I think that would be. I do think transportation, from the little feedback I've gotten, would definitely prefer to do it in less years. Okay. From a transportation standpoint. Yeah, I would just be interested from a staffing perspective. Thank you. But I need to just, I'll, we'll work with the team this week to

290talk about that. So when we come back together. But again, I want to see what the... map looks like. And again, if the board was to say, I keep going back to your slide, but if the board was to say, make this change, plus can you give me the parameter of one less school or one less elementary or one less middle or whatever that is. then I would adjust this timeline. This is all premised on the recommendation. Yes. The recommendation changes, then this timeline changes. And again, same thing. If in December we get to this point, let's say this moves forward just with the one change we made tonight and the board votes in December and doesn't vote to move forward with this plan and more changes come, this changes again at that point. So

291that's what's really hard to kind of Cedric's point is you've got a lot of people. relying on this, but, but, you know, until we have a final vote, it's, it really is tentative and there's no way around that. I, I, I don't know how to. And I was a teacher who experienced that. I went through that. We call it the yellow slip era for those of you who remember that, when we were giving out yellow slips to all the teachers and I was an elective teacher. So it was like, here you go, buddy. You know, so I remember that it was, you know, fortunately for me, I had other financial endeavors that I could fall back on, but some of my colleagues didn't. So that was rough for like three, four years for a lot

292of people. Yeah, I don't think it makes sense to draw it out unnecessarily. But I think I've given you my feedback before. I'd rather do it well than do it quickly. Absolutely. So. Absolutely. I agree. We're back at this slide. I knew you were going to ask me to go back there. So I went back there. I read your mind on that one. I was waiting for him to say go back. So you all heard my thoughts a little bit. I'd be welcome to hear what others think. No, I think I've talked a lot. I don't talk this much. No, I think especially when we look at an expansion component, I feel good about the direction that we've given. do, it does give me pause just because I know we aren't quite at the number.

293And I know that really does put us in the spot of possibly having to lean into that lever. And I, yeah, that's the only thing that gives me pause, not anything about the recommendation or the adjustment, but just, you know, are you. When you say that, then are you? I don't know what I'm saying. People just looked at me. You don't have to rush to get the guidance just yet. Let's let the conversation kind of marry it out. I don't want to give any guidance. I mean, I clearly, you know, broach the dual language program issue. But I mean, this slide is just very illuminating. It just kind of, like President Walch said, it just kind of sits with you. I don't, you, I can't see into the future. I have to say I'm really

294torn. I just know that it's important for us to be physically responsible. And I definitely don't want to be pulling other levels, levers, levels, especially since, of course, that would affect all of our students, all of our districts, all of our staff. It's a difficult situation to be in and even have commentary on. And, you know, we all want to do what's best to keep Kyrene Kyrene. And pulling those levers is going to just take away from that. All right. I'll be the villain. Let's look at 2-2. See that? 2-2. In the third section. Oh, I see. I mean, regardless, we're going to have to do something. And you said you'd rather do it well than do it fast. So if we're going to, I mean, because we don't know. This is what makes it

295so hard. People, everybody's commenting and criticizing, whatever the case may be. But we don't, we can't predict how things will turn out. We don't know how we may have an influx of students. And say we just for the sake of argument, say we say we don't want to close any schools, but we still may have a decrease of students. Nobody knows how this is going to play out regardless. So, you know, this is not a movie where we know the ending already. Unfortunately, we don't. But, you know, I'm torn just like Amy and I'm sure everybody sitting here. Hey, let's take a look at 2-2. Let's just see. I mean, that's just my opinion. Y'all don't have to agree with it. But let's just see. And also, I mean, maybe you guys can also look

296into the 4-8 week. We have options to look at here. They may not say it's feasible, but there's something, in my opinion. You know what I mean? No, the only thing, and I know... Chris can speak to this because he brings, he, he regrounds the team frequently and, um, the projections are pretty stable. From the demographer, he's been doing this, you know, again in our district for 30 years and he's been pretty spot on. In fact, when him and Susie use those projections to staff every year, how close are we like 90 something percent accurate. We're in the 99%. So, you know, I know we don't have a crystal ball. What I can say with confidence and I believe my team would support this and Rick is that. Do we gain a few more kids

297from what the projections are? Possibly. Do we gain hundreds more kids? No. It's not going to happen. So we're not going to get this large influx. Again, do we fluctuate by 50 kids? Maybe. overall, again, year to year, but there's nothing on the horizon that would give him any indication that we're going to see like birth rates aren't all of a sudden skyrocketing. Those things have such an impact. And remember, even if birth rates skyrocketed today, like it's still a, there's a lag. And I have no desire to market increasing birth rates, just so you know. So please don't give me that guidance. But, but, but really. I feel, and let me tell you, I was one that you, I say that a lot too, but this could happen. I look for like, Hey, you

298know, we could do this and we're going to increase enrollment. The reality is they're not there. And so, um, the demographers projections have been pretty spot on when I look over time that I just don't think we should rely on getting a whole lot of kids to solve this problem. Yeah. I, I hear you. I agree with you. Um, But one of the things, it seems like dual language, we do well with dual language. We do. So I feel like we should be protecting it and maybe even expanding it. And we try. Yeah. We've been trying. I mean, it's not for lack of marketing. It's not for lack of, I know, Mr. Soto doing things as well. But, you know, unfortunately, right now it's not there. But if we can expand it, absolutely. And if

299there's space, we will do everything we can to do that. I agree. So, yeah, that's all I'm going to say. Amy has something to say, too. There's no good answer. There's no good answer. I'm just 50-50 going back and forth. And it's like. the heavy responsibility of it all, you know, and the pressure of it all that we're all feeling. I don't know. We already moved, we moved it from 6.2 to 5.2. And you see, it's going to be a range from 4.1 to 6.6. And then member Collins, you suggested 2.2, maybe just to see, we can see a compromise between those or what do you mean by, what do you think? If we can come. The other thing I'm reflecting on, the model that we go out with for the hearings. I don't think

300we can come back and say, you know what? Oh, this isn't cutting enough. Let's go close some more schools. So, and I, that sounds ridiculous, but I mean that we're probably going to have to have some discussions with Mr. Herman. If we're going up on any of these rows, we know what the levers are, you know, realistically what that looks like. Because what I don't want to do is go out and say, let's do two, two. And then Mr. Herman comes back and says, okay, we're getting rid of art now. And then we say, nevermind, you know, because that's not fair to our community to go back and forth a little bit. So I'm trying to be very deliberate here. I remain open. to closing fewer schools and to keeping more schools open. I remain

301open to that idea. I don't know if 2-2 is the one I would go for, but I remain open to feedback. Personally, I would love to see another middle school come back online as well. I know that might Mr. Herman cringe because that's one of the more expensive sites. So if one comes back on, that means the hole he's got to fill is even bigger now. I recognize that. Go ahead. I am trying. Okay. So this is more an issue about like when and how we form board committees and the work that we ask people in the community to do and volunteer their time as stakeholders to help us out with. I just want to be really cognizant of that work where we ask for that on curriculum committees. We ask for in a lot

302of different spaces. And my concern is if we come back and alter this recommendation drastically, are we going to have people who are going to want to volunteer if the precedent is? we'll look at your work and then do what we want. Cause then we should have just done it ourselves. Just throwing out there. That's a good point. That's a great point. That's why I said I'll be the villain. That's why I said that in the beginning. Because here's the thing. As an educator who gives his time freely all the time, everything's free 99, you know, and even serving on his board, free 99. I understand that. I respect the work that everyone who volunteered did. So I don't want anyone to think that I'm disrespecting their work because I appreciate it because I know

303what it entails. Of course. Sorry. We have, I mean, in our policies, we, like one of our goals over the past couple of years is how do we collect and get stakeholder feedback and engage that work in how we roll out the operations of this district, whether that's through the strategic plan, whether that is through, you know, the district budget committee. a lot of different areas and we always take those recommendations. And if this is the place where we're going to be like, we want to put this together, here's the commitment. I just want to be really cognizant of that because I do think that also sends another message to the community. So that's all. I mean, I get what you're saying. I truly, this, I'm losing, this keeps me up at night. But I

304just. I there's just it's just a lot. So it just I would be remiss if I didn't. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing is like, you know, I respect their work and I definitely respect their recommendation. But it's like at the same time, we're also trying to see how can we prevent, you know, what could. possibly be. I don't even know what word to use. It's something that could be devastating to the district in my opinion. Regardless of how we look at it, what I mean by devastating, I understand we have to do certain things to save the money. But like I said, we still also don't know the fallout either. So that's what makes this really tough. I have to think that it's a bit of balance as well. Because I agree with

305Vice President Nelson that if you took the recommendation and threw it in the trash and said we're going to do our own thing, that's extraordinarily disrespectful. The flip side is if we say we're going to take it because they spent a lot of time working on it. and we're going to go through these seven public hearings just for show, well, then that's not showing our community that we value their feedback. So we have to approach, I believe, we have to approach this as this is the recommendation. It's the right starting point. But we cannot say we're not going to make any changes out of principle because then there's no sense of having feedback from the community. Yes. And the other thing for me is, as I understand it, the charge of the long-term committee was

306based on demographic changes and projections and building utilization, et cetera. But the other stuff of the education that Kyrene gives. has to do with programs and neighborhoods and community. And that's the stuff that the board... is talking about fitting in to the framework of the Long-Term Planning Committee. I mean, wasn't most of what they did, or if not all of what they did, based on demographics? They were given the mandate to maximize schools and facilities, but I think you looked at more than just demographics. So we were tasked to look at... facility utilization, as well as potential school reconfigurations as far as class sizes go. Like, do we do K-2? Do we do like, what was it? Like a K-8, K-8, 3-4, like all of those pieces. I will say that the committee was very,

307because that was the focus, they didn't expand outside of that. But I also would say in conversations, people appreciated having that as the only focus because the sec, I mean, you had people from. All nine schools that we are currently sitting here discussing on that. And had, I believe, we can't go back in time, but I believe had we started out in February and said, let's talk about all 25 schools, I think you would have had 50 people go to all of their different corners and the committee would have been useless. Yeah, absolutely. And so they never approached it that way until that very last meeting was the only time anybody brought up any single school name. That was it. And that was all they were charged with because there were so many deep connections

308to all 25 of our schools. It wasn't ours to ask them to do. Yes. And I hear you. And I think that that's what you guys did fabulously well. I think the work of the committee was done superbly, but I feel like the charge was quite narrow. And it should have been. I mean, I have no complaint. And the charge of the board really is as, so what I wouldn't want, again, I'm going to say this, every school in Kyrene is a great school, is an excellent school. And what we don't want to do is start to go program by program and pick because that is not going to serve this district well in the long run. All programs can be offered at every building. This is a conversation about buildings and utilization. from the

309parameters that the demographer will run the models. Again, programs, all those things we want to keep can happen in any building that we are talking about. So I just do want to be careful because if you start going program by program, every one of our schools is back on the table. There's no school that you could recommend. should not be open. They all have great programs. So I just caution the board to be thoughtful about that, which is one of the reasons to, for Vice President Nelson's point, that wasn't the conversation for the committee. And I just think you have to be careful with that because you would find yourself... again, bringing back every single school. There's no doubt we don't want to close schools. There's no doubt that we probably don't have a choice

310at some point. So even if the board said today, I don't want any, we're not putting a map forward. We're pausing this. We will cut the other things we're talking about. And I am a hundred percent certain the board will be a board, whether it's you, we'll be back having a conversation about closing schools. There will come a point you will tip. And we're close to that tipping point right now. We have a couple more things we can pull in lever three, but it's going to be painful. And to your point, does that impact enrollment just as much as doing this? Does that impact it by, you know, this ended up being 7% and that ends up being 10%. And then we made the wrong, right? There is a little bit of a, I don't

311know. And none of us have that crystal ball, but the reality is something's going away. We, again, the one other thing that I'll just bring back that the committee's stance was. you go too low, you are back doing this again to the community. You are having this conversation again in three years, five years. And, you know, five years may sound like a long time for people who are getting close to being out of here. But for a community that just went through some school closures, regardless of how many, and you bring it back five years later, that is very painful. So I just want to keep reminding you of that piece. Okay. Was that movie Sophie's Choice? Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know what I mean. And I think just based on what you said,

312Superintendent Tennis, if the board were to give you... you know, guidance, it wouldn't be on a school by school basis. It would be on a parameter basis. Like go ahead and, you know, again, you've asked me to reduce one elementary basically from the model, which puts us at five and two. If you were to say, go four and two, five and one, we give whatever that is. I'd like that parameter because then the demographer can use those numbers to go back. And what I will tell you is. It may contradict some of the other parameters that he originally ran, such as if you were to bring back a middle school, in all likelihood, we will cross I-10. There'd be no way around it. And I can't tell you which middle school he'd pick. So again,

313those other models are gone. There is no guarantee that it's one of, you know, whatever models were shown. He would have to take all the new parameters you give me and figure that out. Again, new parameters being. The conversation we just had around dual language. And if you were to say, just bring back one middle school, he's going to have to figure out where the best place is to do that based on utilization. So there's no guarantee which one it is. So when we spoke about dual language, that put us up at five to then. OK, we are at five to right now. All right. Five elementaries. The buildings would actually close and two middle schools. Can I get some clarification on what you just said? If we if we went to five one. Everything

314is back on the table because I know in Tuesdays it was stated if your school was not listed, it still will not be listed. But now we would be changing that because it's too big of a change. Everything would be back on the table for middle school because you'd have to look at utilization and where he could. So for middle school, yes. If you said one middle school in the district, he would have to look at all the middle schools. It'd be the only way to do it in a way that transportation and boundaries and all of that. So he'd have to then go back and look at based on where the elementary boundaries are, based on where these middle schools are and utilization rates. And they change again. You know, I know a lot

315of people are trying to compare data. You can't compare like, you know. one of those utilization charts to another because as soon as he makes one tweak in a map, it changes all those numbers behind that to figure those things out. So it could have a bigger impact. I don't know. But you also know that I think this was shared, our utilization rate, and I don't have those charts, but it was, do you have the one where we showed if we went to one? No, it was one that we used in the committee meeting. I'll see if I can find it, but this might give you some good. Give me one minute to pull it up. It was in the July meeting. Let me just pull that up. I won't be able to pull it

316up there because I'm on my computer, but I do just want to share. If you go in 6-8, in grade 6-8, if you go to If you keep six middle schools, right, if we didn't close any middle schools, we are, and I'm going to go out to 2031 in five years, but even if I, I'll even go 2027, we're at 55% in 2027. That means 55% of our schools are being utilized by 2031. We're at 51%. That's if we keep six middle schools. If we go to five middle schools, we go from 66% in 2027. to 62% in 2031. So that means you're still have about 40% of your middle schools, the five that are left that are not being utilized. If you go to four middle schools, and I believe this is why the

317committee chose what they did, you go from 83% in 2027 to 77% in 2021. So you're still, I mean, basically you would still have the space for 1,245 kids by 2031 in four middle schools. If you keep five, you have the space for 2,500 more middle school kids. The likelihood, we're not going to get 2,500 more middle schoolers, but that's how much space you have. So that's the difference between five or four sites. And that's, you know, pretty significant. Again, the numbers are only going to go down, not up each year for the next 10 years. An elementary, if you just want to know what those numbers are about, because again, he ran the numbers at 19 sites, at 13, at 12. And if we bring one back online, how many are we at now?

318If somebody can do the math for me. Seven, eight, nine, I think it's 13. I'm counting opened. One, two, three. Give me one minute. Four, five, six. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. So if you go to 13, we're at 19 now. We're at 49% capacity at our, that means utilization, I'm sorry, at our elementaries right now. At 19, you would go to 72 by going to 13. Did I say 13 or did I say 12? 13. I did say 13. Okay. So, I mean, you can already see that's a huge shift right there. And so if you close any less, I don't have it between 19 and 13, but if you close any less than what you've identified, you're going to be somewhere between 49% and this 72%. So 72 still means our

319buildings have enough space for about 3,000 elementary kids to come in. That's the issue we're in. So, you know, as much as the enrollment piece that we talked about and the pain from that, there is also still the issue of buildings sitting empty. Right. And I, again, I think the committee's recommendation did a beautiful job of addressing that. I'm just weighing the other factors that would have a negative effect on utilization. That would have a negative effect on, you know, that. I understand that. I totally get it. I'm still open to it, but I'm not sure I'm hearing clear consensus from the rest of the board, which is fine. I'm not looking to push anybody. My general thought is if we don't have clear consensus outside of what we already discussed, then we would move

320forward with the map as modified. The 5-2? With the 5-2. Yeah, I mean, because, I mean... We're still trying to save our dual language program. So, you know. And by move forward, again, I don't mean we are approving it. I'm just saying that's what we will go on the hearings with. Going to the hearings. Correct. Unless there is a consensus to give our superintendent additional guidance. Thank you. I don't feel comfortable giving additional guidance. I'm still. People who worked very hard came up with a plan. And we made one adjustment. And yes, and we need to watch our bottom line, as Amy just said. So, yeah, absent any clear consensus from all of us, I think that I'm certainly willing to go ahead with the modification as we did and move forward and see what

321we hear from folks. When we talk to them, we may hear some things we didn't think about. So I'm with member Davis, you know, because I also, you know, as I mentioned, you know, I still want to respect the work of the committee, you know, long hours and things of that nature, you know, but at the same time, I want to make sure we still keep some programs too, like with the dual language. Am I making sense with that? You are. So I think the guidance you have is to work with our demographer to go on a 5-2 to keep an exclusive open enrollment to language on the east. And with that change, we would go to the hearings and get additional community feedback on that updated proposal from the committee with that modification. Would

322you like, I will need to talk to the demographer Monday. And to see if it's possible to have a map to share. I do think you should see that, what tweaks it made to the boundaries before we've rolled that out. I can work with you to agenda size a potentially another. retreat to at least show you I will need that retreat to be virtual if you'd like me to participate since I will be out of the state. But I'd be more and it really would just be to show the board the updated version. Again, I don't anticipate based on that one piece of feedback, anything changing on the west side from what he's already done. I do anticipate a few changes on the east side lines and coloring. So that would have to occur to

323make that happen. So I can share that next week. And if you decide you want to do in person, I will see if one of my team members can be there and I will just call in. Can I just say one thing? Please. I just want to make clear that I am very appreciative of the Long-Term Planning Committee. They worked long and hard, and I in no way meant to imply by anything I said tonight. Okay. She was just sharing her experience. Yes, yes. No, no, I get it. But I had meant to say this anyway, because I hadn't had the opportunity before, and you just reminded me. You know, I think those folks were committed, and they stuck with it. It wasn't easy. And what we've been doing tonight. was what they went through

324for months. So just a shout out to them. And to all of you guys, you know, I appreciate you hanging in there with us, all of you. Or else they'd rather be on a Friday night. Yeah, really. So, of course, we are going to have a conversation on this in December. But to be clear, Board, if between now and December we want to have additional conversation, we can just agenda-size it. It can be another retreat like this if need be. That's always fine to do. This should not be we have one conversation and it's done. Right. And we may find as we get feedback from the community during the hearings that there's stuff we want to talk about and we want to revisit. Absolutely. Anything else? All right. With that, item 3.1 adjourned. The retreat

325is adjourned at 9.10 p.m. Have a good night. Have a good weekend.