001Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Welcome to the regular meeting of the Kyrene Governing Board. Today is April 22nd, 2025. Item 2.1 is convene our regular meeting. Our regular meeting is hereby convened at 6 p.m. So normally in our meetings, this is where I say if you wish to speak to the board during the call to the public portion of the meeting, turn in your blue card. However, I know we've got several dozen people in our overflow room up here tonight, so we're going to allow blue cards to be accepted. until later in the meeting. So if you wish to speak to the governing board, that'll happen later. All of our board meetings are held in public to conduct the business of the district. As always, our meetings are streamed live on the internet for you
002to watch online. If you can't watch a meeting live, recordings are made available within 48 hours of each meeting. All of our agendas are posted on our district office and our website 24 hours prior to the start of every meeting. Our superintendent, Ms. Laura Tenius, is here with us tonight, as well as, most importantly, so many families. students and school leaders so thank you so much for being here tonight item 2.2 is our roll call board members can you please state your names for the record cedric collins Bunny Davis. Amy Seadry. Trina Nelson. And I'm Kevin Walsh with the record show. We have five board members present tonight at the meeting. Item 2.3 is a moment of silence on our Pledge of Allegiance. I'd like to invite one of our school leaders to lead us
003in the pledge. We have so many school leaders here today. Do we have Principal Christy Winkleman here today? I think we do. From Kyrene De La Brisa, Principal Winkleman, you don't have to come up to the podium, but if you wouldn't mind. Would you please lead us in a moment of silence, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. Thank you, Principal Winkleman. Item 2.4 is our district land acknowledgement. As with all of our district meetings, the Kyrene School District acknowledges our community of schools is located on the ancestral lands of the Othman Peeposh peoples who have inhabited these lands since time immemorial. And with this land acknowledgement, we formally recognize traditional care and keeping of these lands by Native peoples allows us to be here today. Item 2.5 is our Kyrene Promise. We read
004this at every one of our board meetings now. This is the promise we make to our community, to all of our families. We promise to provide welcoming, inclusive learning environments in which every student is honored, valued, and feels a strong sense of belonging and purpose. We promise to provide rigorous, responsive learning environments in which every student is given what they need to develop knowledge, skills, confidence, and a passion for learning. And finally, we promise to provide vibrant, world-class learning environments in which every student believes they are empowered and prepared to make a meaningful impact on a rapidly changing world. That's the promise we make to you. Item 3.1 is preview and approval of agenda. Board members, any changes to tonight's agenda? I see none. Would someone like to make a motion to approve? Motion approved
005to next agenda. I have a motion by Vice President Nelson. Is there a second to her motion? A second by Member Davis. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion passes 5-0. All right, we've got a lot to celebrate tonight. We're so excited. We have our Poetry Award winners here tonight, as well as our super students. But first, we have two updates from our superintendent and our board members. So first, item 4.1 is the superintendent report. Superintendent Tenius. Thank you, President Walsh, governing board members, family, students, staff joining us either in person or online tonight. I am excited to share some of the happenings around the district in the last month since our last meeting. There we go. So first, I'd just like to start with this Saturday. This past Saturday,
006Team Kyrene was part of the annual Ahwatukee Easter Parade. We were thrilled to once again have the opportunity to walk the parade with our Kyrene bus. Thank you to everyone who walked with us in the parade this year, including Kyrene Governing Board members Collins, Satri, and right, Mr. Collins and Board Member Satri. Yep. And Kyrene Dela Esperanza, Assistant Principal Diana Stockwell and Kyrene's Communications and Engagement Team. So thank you guys very much. I think there's some great pictures up there you can see. Whoops. There we go. Also last week, Kyrene Traditional Academy became the first school in Arizona to unveil a book vending machine courtesy of Whataburger's Feeding Student Success Initiative. This vending machine will play a role in KTA's PBIS efforts, rewarding students with a token to be used in the machine for a
007book. During the unveiling, one student from each grade level was selected for exhibiting safety on campus and redeemed their token for their first book. Also on Friday, seventh grade students at Kyrene Altadena participated in the school's annual water walk fundraiser to benefit water for South Sudan. During the fundraiser, students were able to raise another $1,500 to help provide clean drinking water to communities in South Sudan. Currently, Altadena has its name on one well in Sudan as a partial sponsor and is working toward helping build another well. Might need a little help. There we go. The district art show is also now open virtually. The art show includes pieces from all Kyrene schools and showcases their incredible skills, lessons, and projects our students have been working on this year. Browse student artwork by visiting www.kyrene.org slash
008art show 2025. Our Kalina Coyotes celebrated Earth Day this morning by walking or biking to school. Family, staff, and students met at two locations just up the road from the school and then walked together to campus. Once they arrived, the Kalina PTO planted a new tree in the school's desert tortoise habitat, adding something lasting and meaningful to their campus community. There's a lot going on at our schools right now. Observing and asking questions are a big part of kindergarten science. At Kyrene Dell Millennial, kindergartners arrived to class last Friday with a surprise waiting for them. The cocooned caterpillars that they had left on Thursday had transformed into butterflies overnight. Through their observations, students learned about the metamorphosis and the life cycle of butterflies. That was always one of my favorite activities as a teacher. And
009at Kyrene De La Mariposa, teacher Ms. Russo was recently presented with a Tech for Learning Innovative Educator, known as TIE, award for Wixie. The award program recognizes innovative educators who support students with doing exceptional work with Wixie. As a TIE, she will be invited to their biannual virtual meetups and provided with sneak peeks of new features. Also tomorrow night is the annual Kyrene School District Gifted Showcase. Families are encouraged to join students at Kyrene De Las Menidas Innovation Academy from 5.30 to 6.30 p.m. for an evening of creativity and innovation as fifth grade students present their unique inventions and ideas. Don't miss this exciting opportunity to support and celebrate our future innovators. And our next positive parenting presentation is Teen Mental Health Building Resiliency. We'll be on Zoom on May 14th. Presenter Danielle Flowers will
010provide techniques for adults to build resiliency skills in our youth. And that concludes my superintendent update. Thank you, Superintendent Daniels. Lots of exciting stuff happening. Item 4.2 is board member statements. How many board members have statements this evening? Member Collins. How you guys doing tonight? Nice to see all you all here. You could be anywhere else, but you chose to be here with us. I just want to say we had a great time. Remember, Satri and I at the Spring Fling had my out-of-shape self-walking, passing out coloring books to the kids. But, hey, it was fun. I enjoyed it. And with Ms. Helm and Nicole, it was a good job. Appreciate it. Thank you, Member Collins. Member Davis. Thank you very much. I just wanted to give a shout out to Kyrie de los Ninos.
011They had a steam night last week on Thursday evening. And the principal, Ms. Perry, and the assistant principal, Heidi Katzenmacher, were both there. They had a terrific turnout. And it was very exciting, lots of fun. And I just wanted to give a shout out to them for a job well done. Thank you, Member Davis. Member Sejri. Vice President Nelson. Yes, just wanted to say this week was the kickoff. Well, last week actually was the kickoff for our Q4 sports. All the practice is over. So I know there is going to be a lot of activity at our middle school. So just, you know, good luck to all of those athletes who are out there in all the pollen right now. Lots of pollen. Lots of pollen. Shout out to Kyrie Middle School. They had an
012international festival last week. It was amazing. Great celebration of food, arts, and culture from all the various student groups and populations that make our district unique. It was fantastic. I know I think I saw most of our board members there. It was a great time. Also, April is Autism Acceptance Month. I got my tie on today, my special autism tie. It used to be called Autism Awareness Month, and they've actually... encouraged us to say Autism Acceptance Month because it's so much about more than being aware of our autistic peers and the students in our community. It's about accepting them. It's about celebrating them. It's about recognizing their diverse talents and strengths and contributions and about providing inclusive learning environments for them. So to all of our families out there that may have students or family
013members on the autism spectrum, thank you for bringing your amazing students to Kyrene. We value you so much. All right. Item 5.1 is our Kyrene Super Students. So we're going to recognize two amazing groups of students tonight. The first is our Kyrene Super Students. The next will be our Poetry Contest winners. For our Kyrene Super Students, the reason that you are here is because your school principal or your teacher or somebody at your school site saw you and thought that among everybody in the entire school, you demonstrate. the virtues of a Kyrene kid better than anybody. And when I talk about this portrait of a Kyrene kid, you can kind of see it on the screen on either side. This is what we as a community came together several years ago and said. What do
014we want our Kyrene kids to have when they leave Kyrene after eighth grade? And it's not about how well they test on standardized testing. It's about being an adaptable learner, a self-advocate, a community contributor, a communicator, a critical thinker. a problem solver, or a collaborator. So if you're here, it's because somebody at your school saw you and wanted to recognize and celebrate you for all that you do to be the best. Kyrene kid that we can have in our schools. So we are so excited to have you here tonight. We've got tokens of congratulations from many of our sponsors that we love. Sky Zone Trampoline, if you haven't been there, awesome bounce house. Zeke's Pizza, everyone loves Zeke's. Jeremiah's Ice, so good, as well as the Kyrene Foundation. So we're excited to give you those
015tokens of congratulations, as well as a fancy certificate. So what's going to happen for our super students? We're going to call your name up. one by one, kind of come up to the podium here and turn around. You don't have to say anything or make a speech. Turn around and look back at your families. Don't look at us. Look at your families because they're going to want to get a picture of you. And what's going to happen is one of the board members up here is actually going to read out the nomination. that was submitted for you. So after we've had a chance to read your nomination, just take a step off to the side here. Don't go back to your seat yet. We'll call up our next super student. And then once we've had
016all of our super students recognized, families will have a chance for a group picture. So I'm excited to start off with our first Kyrene super student of the night. From Kyrene de las Brisas, third grader Hilda Delci Benitez. Hilda is a third grader at Breesess and she is the perfect example of what it means to be both an adaptable learner and a collaborator. Two core qualities of a Kyrene super student. Hilda approaches every learning opportunity with curiosity, resilience, and a positive attitude. She embraces new challenges, adjusts her thinking when something doesn't make sense at first, and keeps trying different strategies until she understands. No matter the task, Hilda shows determination and encourages her classmates to do their best too. She also stands out as a kind and thoughtful collaborator, always ready to work with others
017and make sure everyone feels included, especially when supporting students who may need a little extra help. Hilda listens with patience, celebrates her classmates' ideas, and shows that teamwork and kindness can make any learning experience better. Her passion for learning and her caring heart make her a shining example of what it means to be a Kyrene Super student. Congratulations, Hilda. Next, I'd like to welcome up Millie Gorski-Kassler. She's a second grader from Kyrene De La Spreces. Millie Gorski-Kassler, a second grader at Breeses, perfectly exemplifies what it means to be a Kyrene Super student. especially as a true community contributor. Millie actively seeks opportunities to make a positive impact, demonstrating global and cultural citizenship through empathy, respect, and kindness. She introduced our school to the inspiring story of Terry Fox, a teenager who, despite losing his leg
018to cancer, ran across Canada to raise money for cancer research. His courage sparked the annual Terry Fox Run, now a global event uniting communities in the fight against cancer. After sharing his story on Gecko News, Millie inspired Breece's teachers and students to engage in the Terry Fox Story Walk at Desert Breece Park and encourage families to participate in Chandler's first ever Terry Fox Run. Millie's contributions extend beyond awareness. She welcomed Mrs. D'Angelo, our new assistant principal, with a heartfelt peace pillow, which she proudly displays on Gecko News whenever Breece celebrates a peaceful day. Millie also shares her creativity with the wider community by selling homemade postcards at Second Sunday on Mill, encouraging others to explore their talents and support local artists. Through her actions, Millie demonstrates how one person can spark change by lifting up
019others and contributing to the greater good. She stands out as a young leader whose empathy, respect, and dedication to making the world a better place make Millie truly deserving of this honor. Congratulations. And next we have sixth grader, Victoria Boschnikova from Kyrene Apprende. Victoria is being recognized as a collaborator and is amazing. She is always participating in class, completing her work, and then asking for more challenging work just to push herself. She collaborates with every one of her peers, even the challenging ones, with positivity and grace. She is offered to be group mates with her peers with learning differences, specifically to help them and offer help at their pace. Whether she's helping a friend or completing a group project, She shows leadership, cooperation, and a caring heart. Victoria is a bright, friendly person who brings
020positivity and kindness to all that she does. Well done. I'm very happy to welcome from Kyrene Dayla Spreaces, Tylan Johnson. Tylan Johnson, a fourth grader at Breesus, exemplifies what it means to be a Kyrene Super student, especially as an adaptable learner and collaborator. After joining Breesus this year, Tylan embraced new challenges with determination, quickly moving into the accelerated compact math class. Through hard work and extra practice, he mastered challenging concepts and became one of the top performers. In the classroom, Tylan is a strong collaborator. always supporting his classmates and valuing their ideas. As student council president, he actively seeks student input for activities like Peace Day celebrations and ensuring everyone's voice is heard and shared on Gecko News. His recent suggestion of a silent witness box further demonstrates his commitment to creating a safe space
021where all students feel they belong and their needs are met. Tylan's adaptability, growth mindset, and teamwork make him a true example of a Kyrene kid well deserving of this honor. And I am happy to introduce Eliana Hermes, a fourth grader at Kyrene Apprende. Eliana is being recognized as a self-advocate and critical thinker. Eliana Hermes exemplifies what it means to be both a strong self-advocate and a critical thinker. She consistently demonstrates the confidence to speak up for her needs, asks meaningful questions, and seeks support when necessary. Whether in the classroom, in a group setting, or during one-on-one discussions, she takes ownership of her learning and isn't afraid to advocate for herself or others. Good for you. There's a little bit more. I just wanted to say that. Sorry. Good for you. Stay there. I still have
022more to say about you. That was a little self-comment. Sorry. As a critical thinker, Eliana approaches challenges with curiosity and persistence. Rather than becoming discouraged by obstacles, she analyzes situations, considers multiple perspectives, and develops creative, effective solutions. Her ability to think logically ask the right questions, and engage in thoughtful reflection makes her a standout in both academic and collaborative settings. That's it. All right, all right, all right. Let's see. We have from Kyrene Aprende, 8th grader Santiago Frosto. Santiago is being recognized as a community contributor. Santiago is a highly involved Jaguar, a strong community contributor. He is an honor society, jazz band, crochet club, D&D, and theater. He often volunteers to help others and consistently leads by example across academics, clubs, and events. He has a welcoming energy that makes others feel seen. Can adapt
023to collaborate with any group of students and shows a contagious eagerness to take on new challenges. Santiago is compassionate, creative, empathetic, intelligent, and helpful. He is kind to everyone he interacts with, whether it is in the classroom, hallway, clubs. or other extracurriculars. It is evident that he cares about those around him. Santiago models exemplary values that truly make a difference in the lives of the students and staff around him. Congratulations again to our amazing super students. So at this time, if you are a staff member at Apprendi or Bresas, I'm going to invite you to come on up for this group photo. Board members, we're going to come on down for a group photo. Family members, if you've got kiddos here, don't feel like you need to sit in your seat. If you want to
024come up to the podium and get a good shot, you're more than welcome to come on up. Anybody that's here standing room only, feel free to take a seat that has opened up in the front. If you'd like, you're welcome to grab a seat. And then anybody that's in our overflow rooms upstairs after our student celebrations, we'll bring y'all down. All right. Thank you again. Congratulations again to our Kyrene Super students. Item 5.2 is our poetry contest winner. So I've been doing this a while and I have to tell you, this is without exception, the best night of the year for this board, because we get to celebrate some of the most talented students. to walk through our schools. And those are your kids that are here tonight as the award winners of our poetry
025contest. So I'd like to invite Dr. Sarah Collins, who's the director of our Pre-K through third academic equity and excellence to introduce the event. Okay. Wonderful introduction. Thank you, President Walsh, Superintendent Tenias, board members, staff, and our family of our poets. Welcome. Each year our district hosts a poetry contest to celebrate the power of poetry in our schools. And from October through February, students submit their poems at the school level, and then each school selects one winner per grade, and those poems move on to the district contest. A team of staff reviews all entries anonymously, and this year selected three district winners per grade level. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Tonight, in honor of National Poetry Month, we're excited to recognize and celebrate both our school and district winners. Okay, so I think you're going
026to be excited about this since it's your favorite night. This year, in lieu of printing a hard copy poetry anthology, we created a digital poetry anthology website to showcase all school and district winners. Creating a digital poetry anthology showcased the competency of a community contributor outlined in the portrait of a Kyrene kid. Publishing their work digitally. allowed them to take pride in their role as writers and storytellers, and amplifies their voices beyond the classroom. So this is our hiring poetry anthology website. And there are QR codes that we gave out, and it is already on the website. But if you scroll through, we're just going to stop right here and just briefly give you a taste of one of the poems. Blue by Jack Jessica. Blue. It's the sky. Blue tastes like blueberry. Blue smells
027like flower. Blue feels like my dog. Blue looks like the night sky. Blue sounds like bikes. Blue makes me happy. Blue is my favorite color. So every... Yes. So from kindergarten through eighth grade, all district winners had the opportunity to create that digital version. And we hope that this can be shared across the globe with family and friends of these amazing poets. Okay. So we'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who helped make this year's district poetry contest such a huge success. A big shout out to our site poetry coordinators who volunteered their time to run the school level contests and keep staff and family in the loop. Our district poetry coordinators, Megan Kroski and Brittany Maizia, led the way. Yes. organizing this year's poetry contest, communicating with schools, and working with judges
028to select our district winners, and so much more. And a very special thank you to our EdTech team, Jacinta Sorghold, Joanne Skoglund, and Alexis Lupertio for bringing our very first digital poetry anthology to life. We could not have done it without all of you. All right, so now we're going to recognize all of the poetry contest winners. School-level winners will have certificates mailed to their school site. And, of course, we encourage everyone to scan the QR code to access the entire digital poetry anthology website. But at this time, we're going to call up each district winner. They will receive a certificate and a framed copy of their poem for keepsake from Superintendent Tenius. So, poets. When I say your name, you're going to come on up and Superintendent Tenius will give you your certificate and
029your poem. And then we'll just kind of line up over here like the super students did. Okay. All right. In kindergarten, we have Aiden G. from Kyrene de las Menidas Innovation Academy. Next, we have Jack J. from Kyrene Del Millenio and Ambessa L. from Wagner. Our first graders, we have Trey S. from Kyrene de la Colina. This is Trey. Austin F. from Kyrene de los Lagos Dual Language Academy. Colby D. from Wagner. Second grade, we have Gemma L. from Kyrene de los Cerritos Leadership Academy. Adam Q. from Kyrene de las Lomas. Liliana Q. from Kyrene de la Mariposa Computer Science Academy. Okay, our third graders. We have Hannah A. from Kyrene del Cielo, Talia H. from Kyrene de las Lomas, Gianna N. from Kyrene del Norte Dual Language Academy. In fourth grade, we have Abigail
030M. from Kyrene de los Cerritos Leadership Academy, Kareem T. from Kyrene del Cielo, and Emma Jean D. from Kyrene de la Colina. In fifth grade, we have Tiffany N. from Kyrene de la Colina, Claire C. from Kyrene de la Morada Leadership Academy, and Delilah H. from Kyrene de la Sierra. On to our middle school poets. In sixth grade, Hope S. from Kyrene Hockemaul, Abigail R. from the Kyrene Middle School, and Ariel B. from Kyrene Traditional Academy. On to seventh grade. Elise K. from Occema, Roshan W. from Altadena, and Natalia Q. from Pueblo. All right, on to our eighth graders. First up, we have Anna C. from Altadena, Lily Z. from Centennial, and Liana B. from Kyrene Middle School. Congratulations to you all. That is an amazing recognition for all of you guys. We're so excited.
031If you haven't done so already, please go on and listen to these poems. They are amazing. And I want to just encourage you students, keep doing what you're doing because your creativity shines through. At this time, we're going to do another group picture. All right, this is going to be a little complicated because we've got a lot of people here. So we're going to do our youngest kiddos, kinder, first, second grade, come in the front row. Then we're going to have our next younger kiddos, third, fourth, fifth grade in the second row. And then we're going to have our middle school in the back row. And then families, just like we did for super students, you come on, take pictures. It might take a while because there's a lot of you, but we'll do it.
032We can come on down. Yeah, looks fine. That's good. Aiden! Yeah? Have a gift. Aiden! Aiden, I'm talking to you. Thank you. Congratulations again to all of our winners. At this time, we're going to take probably about a 10-minute break. Anybody that is upstairs in our overflow room, you are welcome to come join us down in the boardroom for the rest of the meeting. Congratulations. Hello! Congratulations. All right. I like to gym those. Hello? What's happening? All right, welcome back friends Item 6.1 is request to speak to governing board. So if you do wish to speak to the governing board this evening, now is the time to turn in your blue card. It looks like this. It was available at the sign-in table when you came in. As per our board policy 1302, our governing
033board invites the viewpoints of citizens throughout the district. You can submit your comments in one of two ways. You can come in person and submit a blue card, as I just mentioned, and address the board here at any one of our meetings. You can also submit. electronic public comment. This is electronic public comment that goes out in the email notification that's sent out to all of our families prior to board meetings. Those electronic comments are sent to the board in full and they're also included in the minutes, just like the in-person public comments. State statute does prohibit the governing board from discussing items not on the agenda, but we always listen and we can direct our school leadership to follow up. We do value transparency and input, and to make sure everyone has an opportunity
034to address the governing board, we set a time limit based on the number of in-person public comments that we have on any particular night. If we have one to 15 in-person speakers. each person will be given three minutes. If we have 16 to 30 speakers, each person will be given two minutes. And if we have 31 or more speakers, each person will be given one minute. I'm told that tonight we have 19 in-person public comments. That means each speaker is going to have two minutes to address the board. So when I call your name, come on up to the podium. There's going to be a timer on either side of the screen here. It looks just like that. And it's going to show you when your time is up. If you wouldn't mind, please state
035your name for the record when you come up. And we'll start off with our first in-person public comment. That is from Alexis Navarro, who's indicated that her current Kyrene parent. Ms. Navarro will be followed by Meg Astudillo. Sorry. Good evening. I'm here before you and I thank you for the time to hear my comment. Not only as a parent to current hiring students, but also to speak on behalf of current drivers who fear for their job safety and would rather remain anonymous than confront the Department of Transportation. A few things I would like to point out, in case you were not aware, there was a post made this past week on the hour 2 people in one group, which a student was left at the wrong stop. The bus was late over an hour and
036the lack of empathy shown by the driver and direct department. She blatantly lied. I am a former driver from the district, as well as a current parent of four Tyrene students. She blatantly lied to that parent, but also in stating that only kindergartners are required aid. parent present to be dropped off. And that is not the case. It is actually kindergartners and first graders. As well, I wanted to address that the shortage of drivers that Karina is currently facing is not due to drivers leaving on their own accord. As she has stated, I actually faced retaliation that I tried to bring up to the district to both Chris Herman, her director. person above her to Mary Jane Reencombe to Lisa Gibson and I was shut down on all avenues. I then tried to address our
037superintendent Laura and what my emails were intercepted and this continues to go on where drivers the lack of drivers is due to Them being forced out, Director Parley creating a toxic environment, and should she no longer be within the district, a lot of those drivers that have left within the 24-25 school year would be more than happy to come back, myself included, and my spouse, as well as at least 20 other individuals. Thank you, Ms. Navarro. And although we can't address this in the board meeting, I know Superintendent Tenius will follow up with you. Okay. Thank you so much. Our next speaker will be Ms. Meg Astudillo, who's indicated she is a current Kyrene parent and current Kyrene employee and community member who lives in the district. Ms. Astudillo will be followed by Dr. Dawn
038Penich. Hi. Thank you, Superintendent Tanias, members of the board, and Kyrene community. I'm Meg Astudillo, and I've got a fourth grader at Lagos and a seventh grader at Akimel. I'm here today to express social-emotional wellness policy and this board challenging Superintendent Tom Horn's absurd obsession with DEI. I would like to use my time today to shed some light on Superintendent Horne's long and successful programs that's driven by his personal motivations rather than what's in the best interest of students and staff. See, this is not the first time Superintendent Horne has made a base. In 2006, he made it his personal mission to ban the Mexican-American Studies program at Tucson Unified. This program has been in place since 1998, and it was wildly successful. Attendance was up, test scores were higher, and discipline issues were down.
039Most impressive was the graduation rate. Nationwide, only 44% of Hispanic students were graduating high school at the time. Under this program, the graduation rate at Tucson was 97%. So why in the world did Horn want to ban a successful program? Well, in his own words, he said it was un-American and racist. But the federal courts did not agree. The 10th District Federal Court ruled that Tom Horn's ban of the Mexican-American Studies program violated the students' and teachers' right to free speech. It went even further and stated Horn's ban was racially motivated and it was discrimination used to score political points. So there's more examples, but I've only got two minutes instead of three. So unfortunately, this is just nothing new from Superintendent Warren. He does not want public school systems where children learn and teachers
040have the necessary support. And we are still undoing the damage he did from his first stint in office. Thank you very much for standing up to a bully. And thank you for putting our students before politics. Thank you, Ms. Astudillo. Our next speaker will be Dr. Don Penich, who is a current Kyrene parent and a community member who lives in the district. Dr. Penich will be followed by Mark Turley. Good evening, superintendent and members of the board and my fellow community members. I am a Kyrene parent of more than a decade and we've used four different Kyrene schools and that to say thank you for standing up for all of our families, professionals, and students. One small personal example of the benefits of our district's commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social and emotional learning.
041is that my oldest child now in high school learned to speak English at Menides, and my youngest child is now learning to speak Mandarin at KMS. And I think that's an amazing, wonderful thing. He's also living his best life at KMS through multiple clubs and cultural events that the school holds and hosts. He wrote a paper last month, as a matter of fact, in ELA about our family's history as survivors of Dachau, a historical topic and fact that some in Washington and in Phoenix at our own capital would like to see removed from America's public education curricula. Every student and educator should have the chance to see themselves and express themselves in their learning environment. And the fact that my children and others can do that in Kyrene is why I'm so incredibly proud of
042my choice of using Kyrene schools. So thank you to this board and all of our Kyrene staff for standing up for all of our community. Thank you, Dr. Penich. Our next speaker is Mark Turley, who indicates he's a current Kyrene parent. Mr. Turley will be followed by Paul Weick. Hello. Thank you for the time. I'm Mark Turley. I have two daughters at Cerritos. I'm here because of enrollment concerns and a number of kids within student, within classes. And I sort of by just a couple of questions. We have two great teachers that are being let go. One in second grade, one in fourth grade. Was that due to a budgeting issue? I've been told it's on the agenda so we can talk about it. Or is that not the case? Yeah, there is a presentation
043on the agenda tonight on staffing so we can address those as part of the staffing presentation. OK, so it's not an interactive conversation. Correct. I see. OK, so I just have. very much concerned about that. As my current third grader will be fourth grader, as of now, we'll be going to a classroom of 30 plus students. I think that's well beyond what is ideal for a learning experience over the last five years. Test scores have been going down. Enrollment's been going down within the district. I don't see that changing with taking students or teachers away from classrooms and increasing class sizes. And on the website, it states that the teacher to student ratio is 16 to one, which is very misleading when you include PE teachers, art, music, which all are phenomenal teachers. I think
044we're blessed to have them. But when our teachers walk their students to that class, it's still a 30 to one. It's not, it doesn't cut in half. So. I just implore you to reconsider that and keep the class sizes smaller, which is more ideal for learning for our kids. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Turley. And Mr. Turley, Superintendent Tanyash, if someone from our team can follow up with you on some of the specific questions that you were going to ask as part of the public comment portion. Of course. All right. Our next speaker is Mr. Paul Weick, who indicates he's a community member who lives in the district. Mr. Weick will be followed by Stephanie Kennedy. Thank you, Superintendent and Board. And yes, besides being a community member, proud father of two Kyrene graduates. I
045think it's I'm here. The board and the district in passing the staff social emotional wellness policy and standing up as superintendent of public instruction. I think it's instructive that Mr. Horn has not put anything in writing more than a couple of news releases. I've been scouring those news releases. I've been scouring the website to see what basis he has for the threats that he's made to our district. Nothing more than citing a letter from the U.S. Department of Education head and no justification for withholding the funds. So I want to urge you to keep standing up to such empty measure, empty statements from a politician who... is just looking to bully us and the community is behind you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wyke. Our next speaker is Stephanie Kennedy, who indicates she's a current
046Kyrene parent. Ms. Kennedy will be followed by Jeff Warner. Hi. As you said, my name is Stephanie Kennedy and I'm a mother to three, two who currently go to Kyrene De La Mirada and then one who is very, very excited to start kindergarten there next fall. Very excited. And I've never been to a board meeting before, but I had to come out to show my support and appreciation for this district. They say that it takes a village to raise a child, and honestly, nobody is more of a village, at least in my personal experience, than my children's teachers. They spend just as much time with them as I do. And not only do they inspire them to learn, but they teach them tools to succeed, not only academically, but also socially and emotionally. And I
047think that that is incredibly important to meet those needs for our kids before they can even think about learning. We need to meet their basic needs. Our children, the teachers at... Murata has been key to helping my kids thrive and I think that they believe or that they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and I applaud you guys as a district and I think you are doing well at doing that. So thank you. Thank you, Ms. Kennedy. Our next speaker is Mr. Jeff Warner who indicates he's a current Kyrene parent and community member. Mr. Warner will be followed by Michelle Fay. Thanks, everyone. So I'm here today just to talk about enrollment, similar to Mark. Just a brief background. My son goes to Cerritos. He's in third grade. The situation at Cerritos has
048been less than ideal. First grade, he had 30, I think it was 30 kids in his class. Way too many kids for first grade. Second grade, he had... Less kids, but the teacher was a brand new teacher, first year of teaching. She showed up for the first day, and then after the first day, she didn't show up for a week. So we were like, what's going on? It took us emailing school leadership. She eventually came back after a week, but the entire year was a lost year. Multiple parents took their kids out of that class and put them into other classes at the school. So now we're in third grade, and it's been great. There's 21 kids, an experienced teacher, ideal. And then coming to find out starting fourth grade, there's going to be 31
049plus kids, which is just crazy, if you ask me. I'll read this real quick. I'm running out of time. So now we feel trapped. We are led to believe when we moved to Ahwatukee that the schools were great. This has not been my experience. I value public schools. I went through them. My wife taught there for 10 years. The public school route is failing us as far as with Kyrene. Large class sizes are chaotic, not only for the students, but the teachers as well. You can imagine there are a lot of personalities for fourth graders. Putting them in two rooms is a recipe for disaster. Can you really look me in the eye and tell me that 30 plus students is ideal? This is not comparable to other districts. I reached out to other districts
050and they do not have this. There's been study after study that a ratio of one to 15 students up to higher scores participated more demonstrated better behavior. It is just common sense. We're going to double this ratio. Is this a budget issue? Is this just how Kyrene does business? That's all I have. Thank you, Mr. Warner. And Mr. Warner, similar to Mr. Turley, I'll have Superintendent Tenias follow up with you directly on that. Good evening, Superintendent Tenias, President Malone, members of the board, staff and community. My name is Michelle Fay. I am a parent of a graduated student from Kyrene. I just finished an eight-year term serving on the Kyrene School Board, and I am a current community member. And I'm here to thank you all for continuing to prioritize the health, safety, well-being, and
051sense of belonging for all Kyrene staff and students with your staff social-emotional policy. Unfortunately, people in power like the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction do not understand that equity, diversity, or inclusion, he keeps saying just DEI, I don't even know if he knows what the initials are, is not about taking services away from anyone, but about supporting all students and staff so that everyone gets what they need. I'm angry that the Superintendent Korn is choosing to make an example of Kyrene by threatening to withhold federal funding. I thank you for your continued courage and support of all Kyrene staff and students and encourage you to stay strong. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Fay. Our next speaker will be Lisa Calderon. And Ms. Calderon will be followed by Charles Seidler. Oh, Ms. Calderon is not going
052to speak this evening. So our next speaker will be Mr. Charles Seiler. He is a current caring parent, a member of the community. He'll be followed by Mr. Nick Collins. Mr. President, members of the board, my name is Charles Seiler. I appreciate the time to come and thank you all personally for your support of our staff and the social wellness policy in the face of bullying from racist bigots in our government at different levels. So the fact that you all are displaying the courage to stand up to a massive amount of pressure is inspiring to me, and it makes me proud to be part of the Kyrene community. I know that many of our students and families are already feeling a lot of stress and fear from different policies that are impacting their lives in
053many different ways. And so I want to just pledge that I continue to support you all as you hold your ground in this fight, as we have no more ground really left to cede to the fascists in power. So thank you all for what you're doing. I appreciate you. Mr. Siler, our next speaker is Mr. Nick Collins, who indicates he's a current Kyrene parent and community member. He'll be followed by Misty Savage-Shepherd. Hi, Nick Collins. I live in the district. My son went to Aldenia. He's recently graduated. He's off to high school now. I want to reiterate what people have been saying. I support you. Thank you for doing what you've done, standing up for us. superintendent of public instruction. Hopefully one day we'll get a superintendent who understands how these things work and won't
054be threatening to even support us with more money for our schools so we don't have to have large classroom cycles one day. And the legislature would help do that too. So thanks again. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Collins. Our next speaker is Misty Savage-Shepherd, who's a current Kyrene parent. She'll be followed by Krista Trexler. Good evening, Governing Board, President Walsh, Governing Board members, and Superintendent Tanez. I am also here as a parent and a fellow educator in a different district just to show my support of your educator wellness policy. As we know, as educators, teaching is tough. And ever since COVID, I think we've had a more difficult time in the classroom with all of the stress. And so I think it's really important when we think about teacher retention and think about how teachers
055and the stress that they're feeling, that they are also offered these services that our children are so grateful to get. And so I just wanted to come and show my support and say thank you and that your community is behind you for standing up and making this policy. come voted by you into policy. So we are here in support and I thank you. And educators' wellness are just as important as student wellness. And if our teachers aren't happy, our kids aren't going to be happy. So thank you. Thank you, Ms. Savvy Shepard. Our next speaker is Frista Trexler, who is a current Kyrene Parent and community member who lives in the district. She'll be followed by Allison Jenkins. Hi, I've also never been to a board meeting before, so thank you. My son will be
056starting kindergarten in Sierra this July, so I'm really invested in the future of this district. I wanted to thank you all, as so many have. I know we all face an insane amount of struggles right now in a variety of different ways, and I think that... The way that you have all responded to the state superintendent's horrid threat of withholding federal money for our students and our teachers has been extraordinary. I think one thing as a parent of a kindergartner is it really feels like the options for education in the state are dwindling. It feels really daunting. So I feel lucky to have you all in our corner and I really appreciate all of you and I really just hope this district continues to stand on these values. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Drexler. Our
057next speaker is Allison Jenkins, who's a current Kyrene parent and community member. She'll be followed by Ryan Holtman. Hi, my name is Allison Jenkins, and I have three students that attend Cerritos Elementary School, one in kindergarten and two in second grade. And I came two weeks ago to talk to you all about class sizes and concerns with losing quality teachers or having them relocated. And the superintendent mentioned that she was going to clarify things, and I appreciate that it's on the agenda. But I didn't get a response from anybody after I left, and that was disheartening. And I'm also worried that clarifying or looking at averages doesn't really show the real picture. So I wanted to reiterate what had happened at Cerritos in years past. And I have limited time. So we had a third
058grade class, two classes of 30 students last year. And this year they're in fourth grade, and there's 26 kids in their class. It's a 13.5% decline in enrollment. And if you talk to the families at Cerritos, the class size that they had in the past two years was a major factor in why they left. And now it's happening again with the projections. They're trying to combine classes to max them out. We're going to lose quality teachers. They're not being fired. They're being relocated. to schools that don't fit with their families. They're too far of a drive. They don't have their kids at their school. It makes it too hard for them. So I'm here just to educate you all. And I hope you take this information. On the Kyrene website, I saw a bullet point
059that said that Kyrene values small class sizes and individualized education. And it doesn't feel like that with 30 kids in a class. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Jenkins. Our next speaker is Ryan Holtman, a current Kyrene parent. They'll be followed by Noah Merkham. Hi, good evening. I'm going to go quickly, just given the time. I'm with the Cerritos contingent. There's a number of us. I have a second and third grader there. I'm here to talk about the Kyrene promise of a world-class learning environment. My wife, Allison, spoke at the last board meeting regarding the reduction in teachers for the 25-26 school year at Cerritos. She's a scorekeeper for my oldest son's Little League team, who's playing right now. It's also my youngest son's birthday. But rather than watching my oldest son play and
060sitting with my youngest son, I'm here because this is an important issue to us, to other Cerritos families, and to the teachers and staff of Cerritos. I want to say thank you to Bunny because after my wife spoke last week, you assured her that you heard her. Quite frankly, it seems as though none of the other board members have. No one has followed up with her. You said that they would. They did not. We've heard nothing. It pains me to say that this is not surprising. Quite frankly, communication from the district around enrollment, teacher cuts, and class sizes has been poor. As a result, a very common question around Cerritos parents right now is, are you sending your kid to Cerritos next year? We love Cerritos. We are committed to it. Most families we know
061love Cerritos. They're here tonight. But the prospect of greater class sizes, once again, is just too much for them. And I get that. My wife came to the last board meeting with stats and numbers, all publicly available. She was told she had a misunderstanding, but we haven't been told what that misunderstanding is. Maybe we will find out tonight. I come tonight speaking from the heart and from our personal experience. You stated the quality of a teacher has a greater impact than class size. Two years ago, my son had an amazing first grade teacher. He also had 29 energetic kids in his class. His teacher was so amazing in the school year, so difficult that at the end of the year, parents pitched him to buy a $700 gift card to Southwest Airlines so she could
062take a vacation with her husband and recover. I know I only have two seconds left. A number of people have gone short, and we have a number of people from Cerritos that have not submitted a card, so I beg for another 30 seconds. I'm sorry. I have to enforce the time limits, but thank you for your comment. I just want to go on record saying that it's very unfortunate, particularly given that you won't engage with us. Superintendent Tenius, could I ask that you follow up directly with each of the persons who have submitted public comment this evening? Okay. Thank you. Superintendent Tannis will follow up directly. Our next speaker is Mr. Noah James. I think it says Northman. Yes. Yeah. Mr. President, it's Noah James. Thank you. Aloha, Mr. President and Ms. Vice President and
063to the rest of the members of the committee. I am in support of the board policy 1-302. As a native Hawaiian coming from Hawaii, from the Rainbow State, I know how much DEI means to education. And I thank you guys for protecting the Kyrene School District. And I sincerely mean it because everyone has the chance to learn from gay to bi or transgender students too. And being a student with a disability my whole life, all the kids will learn more about kids with disabilities too because we all deserve a chance to learn. Mahalo and thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Northland. Our next speaker is Ms. Jackie Starks who indicates she's a community member who lives in the district. She will be followed by Wendy Rosen. Thank you. So, yes, my name is
064Jackie Starks. I'm a parent of former Kyrene School District students. And as everyone else, I'm here to President Kevin Walsh and the board to support you in standing strong with DEI and social emotional wellness. Remember when my kids were in Kyrene School, on the wall it says, right is right, even if no one is doing it. Wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it. What you are doing is right. DEI is the right thing to do. Equity is the right thing to do. Because once we get into anti-DEI policy and rhetoric, it opens the door for hate and discrimination. And we don't want to go there. I've been involved with DEI as a practitioner for almost 40 years. So to understand what DEI is, somebody said maybe Tom Horne doesn't get it. But DEI
065is having the knowledge, skill, and humility to help all people. in their area so that everybody can succeed. So I would ask what point of that is about racial discrimination? Because what happens with Tom Horn is he's trying to make it about the racialization of people so that we can create a divide that should not exist as we have worked so many years to eliminate that particular divide. So that is extremely important. And what happens is that we know that DEI, no matter how you slice the DEI pie, everybody gets a piece of it. But when you start talking anti-social, emotional wellness, anti-DEI, you have only some people who want the whole pie leaving crumbs for others. So I would ask Tom Horn, who are your crumb people when you talk about race? Is it
066Black people? Is it Hispanic people? Is it Southeast Asian? Is it the indigenous? Who are the crumb people that you are trying to exterminate? So I appreciate that you stand strong against bullies because we tell our students, right, stand against bullies because once you allow a bully... an inch, that'll take a mile. So let's demonstrate what it's like to stand up to bullies in this district and what we do. So thank you. Thank you, Ms. Starks. Our next speaker is Ms. Wendy Rosen, a former Kyrene parent and employee and a current community member. Ms. Rosen will be followed by Yasmeen Castle. President Walsh, Vice President Nelson, board members, and administration, thank you. My name is Wendy Rosen. I'm a parent of two Kyrene alumni, one who is finishing her sophomore year in the Honors College
067at NAU and one who graduated from ASU a semester early. And while I am a proud mom, I mention this because I believe their success is due in large part to the foundational education and the sense of community that they received in Kyrene. In fact, several teachers and administrators who had a direct impact on my children are here in this room tonight. To the board, thank you for doing what is right. For our students, our teachers, our staff, and our community, the social-emotional well-being policy is a solid foundation for basic learning. If students and teachers, for that matter, if their social-emotional well-being is not being met, the students are not primed to learn. Teachers are not in their best place to teach. In a time when many voices are being suppressed, I'm honored, frankly ecstatic,
068to know that the Kyrene School District is continuing to stand up for what is right. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, Ms. Rosen. Our next speaker is Ms. Yasmeen Castle, who indicates she's a current Kyrene parent. Good evening, board. I came as a parent of a poetry winner and I'm staying as a community advocate member and I am so so grateful to be here. I have four children, two have graduated out of Kyrene, two are still in now. I'm sorry I'm gonna be a little loud. Okay I'll be really quick. I recently completed my doctoral defense in education policy and I canvassed pretty much as many people as I could in the state of Arizona. on open enrollment and what caused them to choose the school that they're in. And the
069number one. result that came out of my data research was school safety. School safety was the number one driver for parents and one falls under school safety, social emotional wellness, and DEI. And with that, I just couldn't say that I'm more proud to be a community advocate, community parent. Kyrene Parent, thank you for doing what is right to create a safe space for our teachers, for our students, for our community. I had no idea that my kid could write a single word of poetry. And I'm not honest. That was completely floored me. And it couldn't have come without this safe space that he had. Miss Violette back there, she practically saved my son. He's in high school now. That was a couple of years ago. You don't even remember. Because they create a safe place.
070So thank you all. Have a great evening. Thank you, Miss Castle. I believe that concludes all the in-person public comments. Does anybody else? Have a blue card. They turned in that I did not call. All right. Seeing none. Board members, again, we cannot address anything that's not on the agenda. So, Ms. Navarro, someone from superintendent's team will follow up with you directly because I know that item we can't discuss in this meeting. Mr. Holtman, Ms. Jenkins, Ms. Trexler, Mr. Warner, and Mr. Turley, we're going to have a discussion on this agenda about class sizes so we can address that topic in general. But with respect to the Cerrito class size in particular, Superintendent Tenues has assured me just here on the dais that she will be reaching out to you individually. We have your email
071addresses on your blue cards, so thank you for that. So she will be following up with you directly. And then thank you to everyone else who made public comment this evening. All right. Item 7.1 is our consent agenda. Board members, would anyone like to make any changes to the consent agenda? Seeing none, would someone like to make a motion to approve? Motion. Motion by Member Satri. Is there a second? Second. Second by Member Davis. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion passes 5-0. Item 8.1, Enrollment, Budget, and Staffing. I'll turn it over to our Superintendent, Tenius. Thank you, President Walsh. As I stated in our last meeting, we were going to come forward to help clarify some of this information and help also set some context. The timing of this
072was good because we are outdoing. Let me get that. budget presentations out at our campuses right now about enrollment and budget. And so we've included last year, I believe it was last year and possibly previous years, we've done a staffing presentation where we explained to the board how we go about allocating staff every year. And so my team is going to do that as soon as we get the presentation up. I want to kick it off, though, so staffing will come at the very end because obviously there's a whole lot that goes into the staffing process, and that really begins with enrollment projections and some discussions about where we're headed and then also looking at our budget. So what we're going to do is share with the board the same presentation that we are doing
073at every single campus, and we've been meeting with staff across the district. I think we have about, I looked to Garth because he knows how many, I think we have about five left. Tomorrow's 19 out of 25 campuses and we've met with all district employees as well. So you're getting a preview of the exact same presentation. Some of this will be repetitive. You've seen it in other budget presentations, possibly that Mr. Herman's done or the demographers presentations, but we think it's important for you to hear what we're sharing with staff as far as where we've been with enrollment. where we're headed with enrollment, what impacts that has had on our budget, and some of the decisions we do have to make. And then how do we use those numbers to help determine staffing every year?
074How do we right-size what we call right-size staffing, making sure that our staff are where the students are sitting in our buildings? So we've been kicking off the presentation. I've really been kicking it off before I hand it over to the team to just really reiterate our Kyrene promise. You know, we know our schools are living it every day, but what we want our staff and our schools to hear is that we also live it here in the boardroom and we're living it in all of our district meetings as well. And when we're making budget decisions and we're balancing the budget every year. We think about the Kyrene promises. We're having those conversations. But I'm really transparent in saying it does not mean we do not have to make hard decisions. We do not have
075unlimited resources. And you're going to see some data tonight. And worst case scenario, our demographer has shared, this district was built for 20,000 students, 25 schools. In the next five years, we could potentially be down to 10,000 students. All we have done, and we still have 25 schools, is spread our resources thinner and thinner and thinner, and it gets harder and harder to do. balanced budget every year, obviously. We have been really good at doing it, and we've managed through making some really big investments, too, with lower class sizes, as we'll talk about. We still continue to outpace all of our neighboring districts on class sizes. What I was talking about in clarification, you have to be really careful where districts use class size ratios, and I think I heard that this evening. A class
076size ratio is very different than a class size target or a class size. in the classroom. And so a ratio does look at the entire adults on a campus to how many students there are. And most districts publish ratios and do not publish class sizes. So we've always been really careful about having that conversation because, again, we still outpace most of our neighboring districts, if not all, in our class sizes. As we get older, we tend to be more in line with where our neighboring districts are. But for sure in our K-1-2, we are significantly lower than most of our other public districts next to us. I can't speak to all the private schools. So we're going to show some data that shows that here this evening as well and how we go about staffing
077and how our class size ratios, our targets, I'm sorry, were figured out. But again, as I said with our teams, when we're out presenting, We are at a point where we have to make some hard decisions. This year, after we right-sized staffing, we were still short in how much money we had to cut out of our budget for next year. Oh, sorry. And that forces to go have the conversation about, right, we no longer are having certified librarians in a class in the library. We are going to have instructional assistants in the library. Kids will still have library. That part does not change, but we can't afford to keep doing those types of things. We've made some decisions. Obviously, you're going to see a lot about what we've cut over the last. five, six, seven
078years out of the budget, and it's alarming how much money. As long as we continue to be a declining enrollment district, this will continue to be a problem for Kyrene. And so the other thing we just talked about is our key values and how, you know, we are at a time, we're having to lean into these more than we've ever had to lean into. And so we're talking to our staffs about that. And the reality is this, as you look at this data, like I... picture you guys being a staff meeting right now and all the staff is out there. And we're talking about we are at a point, if I was to ask every single person after you saw the enrollment numbers and you saw the budget numbers and you see where we're headed,
079as long as we continue to decline, as many different people are sitting in this room, there would be as many different ideas about how we might address that. And you're going to see some things we've already done to address it. And as you know, this board, the previous board, I should say, but this board is participating now. voted to form a long-range committee, and that committee is going to become really critical in helping to address this. So we're sharing that with the sites. We're letting them know about the long-range plan committee, what that work is. You're going to hear about their second bullet in a little bit tonight about the M&O overrides. I'm not going to spend a significant amount of time on that. But really, the Long Range Plan Committee is trying to look
080at how do we maximize where this projected enrollment is and how do we maximize the use of our schools and facilities so that we can have the best resourced schools possible and not spread our resources so thin. The reason we just mentioned the M&O override and the reason we do this committee together, I think we've already shared this publicly, but we've been sharing this with staff. So I just want to give you, again, the full picture of what we're sharing. is that so much of the data that we're sharing is used for both of these bullets to have discussions and make decisions. And so we felt that instead of trying to form two separate committees and bring everyone together, it made sense to merge these committees because we're sharing that information. What I'm sharing with
081staff around the M&O override, and again, that's the next presentation later tonight, is about the M&O override, is that... The M&O override, the continuation override, is just for operations. It is not capital. It is not anything to do with assets or bond. So a lot of times at sites, we get asked the question, well, why don't you just not fix that roof over there? Why don't you not order that furniture? Why don't you not purchase those books? And we could put that money towards our operations. That is not allowed in the state of Arizona. You cannot combine funds like that. So we cannot use our capital funds. We cannot use asset dollars to move over to our operating budget. Our M&O operation, our override, I'm sorry, is about 10% of our operating budget. It's about
082$15 million is what we get from that. And again, you're going to get more details. But what I explained to staff is that's about 200 teaching positions in this district. If we do not have that override, that is about $15 million that comes out of our budget. That was money that had been put into place to help lower. That's one of the reasons we're able to do some lower class sizes where we've done them and where it's helped with special areas and being able to have elective teachers and some extra things like that. So 200 teachers. just in context, is about eight teachers a campus. That's a lot if we were not to have the M&O override. So we just need people to understand. So again, sometimes we get asked, well, you're declining in enrollment.
083Why do you need an M&O override? Well, if we right-size staffing like we're talking about and we put the staffing based on our class size targets where the teachers follow the kids, we would have to still take $15 million out. Where would that come from? Where does that come from? Typically raising class sizes, which is not what we'd like to do, or looking at other ways that you can cut funds, such as starting to get into your programs, as long as we are operating the 25 campuses. So we've been having that conversation. We're sharing that with staff. We're giving them, it's a, you know, a lot of staff don't. watch our board meetings on a regular basis. And so some were aware that this committee is out there. Some were not aware. We are bringing
084awareness to this committee because we think it's that important when we're out talking to staff about why we're doing this long range plan. I am not going to read through all this, but I am going to just highlight number one. Again, for us, it's about how do we have the best resource schools so that we aren't having to keep making these very, very difficult decisions year after year. Before I hand it off to Dr. Ostmeyer, again, we're going to go through the enrollment, the budget, and then get to staffing because it flows that way. This is not just a Kyrene problem. It is a problem all around us. And you're going to see some data tonight that shows why. And again, you've seen this with the demographer. Some of these things are out of our
085control. There are some things that are in our control. Absolutely. And we are addressing the things that are in our control. But the reality is, and just so you know, for this graph purpose, Tempe Union, Tempe L, and Kyrene do get lumped together in the yellow line because in order to compare apples to apples, the unified districts, they look at us as a whole area. But we're... We're not solving this by running next door to our neighbors to get more kids. They don't have more kids either. The same conversations we're having, they're having. So I just, you know, this, the reality is as long as we continue to decline in enrollment, we will continue to have to make some hard decisions. because it does impact your revenue significantly. So with that, I'm going to hand
086it over to Dr. Ostmeyer to get a little bit more into the enrollment, and then Mr. Herman's going to take over with budget, and then I think Dr. Ostmeyer and friends are going to speak to the staffing. Thank you for the introduction. Hi. President Walsh, members of the board, Superintendent Tenyes, colleagues who are present and online, and of course our families and staff. Good evening. It's a pleasure to be in front of you this evening and have opportunity to share some additional information with you. Superintendent Tenyes has shared the landscape for enrollment. just now in her transition. And I really want to take a moment to kind of talk about this a little bit more in detail as to what are the variables that not only we as a district are experiencing, but so too
087are our neighboring districts, so that we really have a shared understanding as to what factors we have control for and which factors are not in our control. So as we think about that, there are three buckets of information for which the declining enrollment falls. The first is the alternative education opportunities, and the second to our housing demographics and our birth rate. So before moving deeper into that conversation, I have a simple illustration in front of you that only backs up six years to really highlight two important nuggets of information that I want everybody to be able to walk away with. The first is that when you look at enrollment from 2019-20 and moving forward into current time 2024-25, you should very easily see that we are a declining school district. Back a handful of years,
088we had 16,300 children, and currently we have about 12,800. The second nugget of information that I want you to quickly glean from the illustration in front of you is the relationship that we share with our families outside of the Kyrene School District. That's the gray cap on each one of those columns. We are consistently sharing in our partnership with families outside of the district at about 25% of our total enrollment. This really helps define that we have a competitive program of educational opportunities, that families across the Arizona landscape are interested in the opportunities that we provide, not only with our families within our district, but also from outside. So let's look at some of these factors that are really creating an influence on our overall enrollment for the district. The housing demographics has a couple
089different metrics that I want to share this evening. The first is, of course, the average age of the household owner in the Kyrene School District. This information comes from our census. So back in 2000, over 50% of our households were... that are between the ages of 25 and 44. Why is this important? Because that's typically the age of an adult that gives us their children in the eighth grades of kindergarten through eighth. What we can see through time is from 2000 to the current census, however, the overall population of homeowners in that age group has significantly declined. We now have a little over a third of our households that are owned by this age of adult. To then balance that with the children in the homes, you see the second set of columns. Back in
0902000, about 22%, 23% of our homes had children who had... who are between the ages of zero and 13, which of course would be the age of the children that we educate in Kyrene. If we move forward in time, the current census has us at about 15 to 16% of our homes have the children that are eligible for school that we service. So the second variable that we are seeing played out across the landscape of not only Kyrene, but Arizona, the United States, and really globally is the birth rate itself. I have teased that I joined the Kyrene team in about 2014. And you can see on this graph, I'm going to try not to point a laser at any of my friends on each one of these sides, but you see where it kind
091of flattens in the middle. So in about 2014, 2015, our enrollment was starting to stabilize. The conversations that I shared with our demographer at that time were good. I could get in front of the audience and I could talk about the reliability and the stability of our enrollment. And we could then construct our budgets and our resources in ways that felt good. The conversation, however, was short. Shortly thereafter, we experienced another decline in our birth rate. You see that illustrated to the right of that graph. Down on the x-axis, we have two different years noted. We are going to experience the decline in that birth rate all the way through 2028-29, even though the graph itself clips at about 2023. So when you think about a declining birth rate and the impact on the size
092of the kindergarten cohort, this illustration is simplified to simply bring that conversation forward. If our eighth grade cohort is larger than our incoming kindergarten cohort, we of course are going to experience a decline in our total enrollment. So here you can see our outgoing eighth grade class moving on to high school. Subtracting that value with the incoming kindergarten class, we show that we experienced a loss of about 524 students this fall. We are projecting 562 fewer students next year just looking at the difference in size of our eighth grade class in comparison to our incoming kindergarten class. So when we look at some of these variables over time, we want to estimate what our enrollment will be moving forward. The terminology that you will hear us reference, and our demographer had introduced it to you
093as a board back in the fall when we had our larger report, was trend data. So we're looking at a long-term trend. A way to think about that is the length of the line that we're looking at. So over time, over long-term time, we're going to look at the slope. to estimate what the projected enrollment is going to be moving forward. When we do that, over the next five years, we can anticipate a loss of about 1,500 students, landing us at about 11,300. If we change, however, the amount of time that we look at historically to predict the future, if we were to use a short-term trend, just looking at the last couple years, you can see that that decline is much more steep. We could actually land at 10,000 students instead of the 11-3.
094So we could be worse, but we also could be better. And so when we plan for the future, we're going to really look at that long-term trend rate to apply it to best estimate what our overall enrollment will be in the future. The other factor that Kyrene has begun to really start to unwrap and to better understand and respond to is our service rate. So our service rate is the number of students that we serve from the Kyrene boundaries divided by the eligible population. So going back to the census, we estimate how many students we have in our boundary between the ages of 5 and 13. and we use that as our denominator. So here you can see back in 1990-91, our service rate was fantastic. It was 94 to 96 percent, telling us that
095we were the public school option for our families. And so when we look at current day, all the way to the right at 24-25, we currently are looking at a 60 percent service rate. And so we've tried to better understand what are some of those variables that are impacting the total number of students that we serve from within our own boundaries. And we've isolated a few that have been out there creating an immediate or a long-term impact on our overall rates. So you see way back in 1995, the introduction and approval of the charter school legislation. We saw an immediate loss in our service rate of about 10 percentage points, and we continued to decline over time. It starts to stabilize a little bit. As soon as it gets to a stable point, however, the
096empowerment scholarship vouchers were introduced and approved. We saw a little bit of a decline in the year that followed, but if you look over the next four or five years, you start to get into a healthier percentage point. We didn't have as many families take advantage of that. They were typically military families or families with students with disabilities. In the spring of 2020, we all experienced the pandemic. We as a district felt the impact of enrollment the following fall. Mostly that was in kindergarten and first grade as families determined to keep their children in different spaces during those times. While we saw a small uptick in the first grade class the following year, we never recovered from the loss that we experienced in the year that followed the pandemic. And then just as we might
097start to experience some stabilization in that service rate, the expanded empowerment scholarship vouchers hit the landscape, and we are right at the beginning of feeling the impact of that external variable. we have time to start to stabilize a little bit more, as well as to really invite families to continue to participate in the educational program that we have here in Kyrene. And so we do want to take an opportunity this evening to also highlight what are the strategies that we are using as a district to really make certain that we are inviting families to participate. Good evening, governing board. I'm Erin Helm, the executive director of communications and engagement. And for the benefit of our community, that means I lead the team that does the marketing for our district. We just have this one slide
098that we've been showing as we've been discussing this with our schools. Not to walk everybody through a whole marketing plan, but just to show what are we doing? Because we know if we're standing in front of our staff and our community and saying enrollment's kind of doing this, it begs the question, well, what are we doing to move that trend line in a different direction? So that's what this slide is communicating. What we have not been doing is walking people through a step-by-step marketing plan, and we're not going to do that tonight. Although, if the board were ever interested in seeing that, we'd be happy to share that with you. What we do want to convey, though, is the 30,000-foot view of what we are doing. So from a paid marketing perspective, that means digital
099and print and add videos and outdoor advertising. Essentially, we do everything that a private sector marketing campaign would do, except we do it on our teeny, teeny, tiny budget. So I've been joking with our staff that there is Rafi's budget and then there is Kyrene's budget. And we've just been saying that to illustrate, like, if you have a very, very large budget, such as many in the private sector do, maybe you can buy 1,000 billboards a year in Arizona, and that's a good strategy. We do not. We just buy that one at ITEM and Warner. And we just buy it for like three months. But what we do do really well is we are strategic about using the marketing dollars that we have. So we use a lot of data. Obviously, with our digital marketing,
100that's easy. We know who our audiences are, what they're doing. And then if we are converting them to do what we want them to do. We've even found ways to turn our print and our outdoor and video marketing into data that we can use to make strategic decisions. And then we've been telling staff, if you don't always seek hiring marketing, that that's strategic as well. We use the data of our staff and our families, and sometimes we strategically pull them out. So an example of that would be. If our current families and staff are on our email marketing lists and they open our emails, we're probably not going to retarget them with the postcard because we're going to use those dollars to retarget families that maybe haven't chosen Kyrene yet. And we use those same
101strategies in our recruitment marketing as well. So when we're talking about marketing, we look outside and inside of our boundaries. Outside of our boundaries, Kyrene historically is very successful at pulling students in from other districts. And to date, state data shows that we pull in more students than we lose. to every other district. But a couple of years ago, we started looking really closely at that service rate that Dr. Ostmeyer just showed you on the previous slide and said, what is happening inside of our boundaries? And we layered in some new strategies to target that service rate. And again, I'm not going to outline what all of those are. We've actually discussed a couple of them in the past with the board. But suffice it to say, what we are doing is going specifically after
102families in that preschool, kinder, first grade level that haven't made a choice yet. Because we think if we can move the service rate in those early grade levels, then in theory, we move that service rate for the entire district over time. So that's really been the focus area of our marketing for the last few years while continuing to do all of our previous strategies. I think with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Herman for all of the numbers. Thank you, Erin. My role in this presentation is to talk about all the things that you've heard and turn it into a dollars perspective or answer the questions, how does this impact our budget, both looking backwards in the past as well as going forward? But I think before we do that, I always
103encourage our community to start here if you have any questions. We've done a budget report at Kyrene for the last five years. It's not required. We do it because we have a lot of support from our community, and we really believe in trying to provide as much transparency on where and how we spend money. So if people have questions that aren't answered through things we're doing tonight or any general questions about the numbers in our budget, I really encourage people to start there. But I think the place to start before you talk about the actual numbers is, well, how do we make decisions as a district and what things do we value? And we start by talking about a concept that we've been using here in Kyrene for the last seven years or so called
104a timeless spending model. And the idea behind that is looking at where you spend money as a district. And no matter how big or how small your budget is in the future, you want to maintain that same spending ratio going forward. So Kyrene has a very rich tradition that we'll talk about. of having a very high percentage of its budget going in to support the classroom. And that's typically been around 75% of all of its funding. And that includes, and the classroom area includes three main categories. And you can see it on the right of this graph. The first is instructional areas and that is really the group who is in a classroom teaching a student so that is mostly your classroom teacher it could be special area teacher it could be an instructional assistant
105it could be an academic interventionist those are the people who are directly supporting students in a classroom and that's by far the largest category of spending the second is in student support So these are people who are supporting students, but not necessarily in a classroom. So these could be people like your health assistants. These could be counselors. These could be your psychologists or your speech language pathologists. very important but not in the classroom setting so their category is student support and then finally in this group of classroom spending is a smaller group called instructional support and those are people who aren't necessarily again in a classroom teaching but they're providing support for a teacher or maybe for the curriculum so those might be your curriculum coordinators data coaches and people like that would fall into
106that that category And so that's the classroom area. The non-classroom area would include three areas. The first is administration, and that is not the same as administrators. We often get that question, but administration really are all the things that go into supporting the school on a day-to-day basis that... follow more of an office or an administration type role. So those are administrators, but they're also the people at the front office, front desk at a school. They're your finance team, your payroll group, your information technology team, and your talent management team. You know, all the people that are involved with providing administration type of functions. Plan operations represent the day-to-day cost to run a building. That's mostly your utilities, your facility costs, your custodial costs, your insurance. And then finally, your transportation is really your entire
107transportation team. Our superintendent started by saying, you know, when you talk about funding and you talk about operational funding, you... can't mix funds between groups, right? So I know our community has passed bonds and overrides on the capital side. We can't use that money to solve this problem or to talk about addressing these areas. So when we talk about plant operations, this is not capital. These are not infrastructure projects. And you can't talk about balancing your budget by deciding not to fix a roof or deciding to delay furniture installs or things like that. So these numbers were constructed mostly by looking at what we've done historically. Our auditor general in Arizona puts together a report every spring for school districts on how they spend money. And we've used that, again, to develop this model and
108these averages to say, going forward, we want our budget to be as much in that 75% range as we can, because that's a value that Kyrene's had for many years and never wants to let go of that. These are the numbers for the last five years, six years, sorry, that our Auditor General has published for Kyrene. We're the blue bar. We typically have been higher in the classroom spending area allocations of our budget than our peer districts, as well as the state average. You know, you might look at that and say, well, some of those numbers are close to 75% and some might not be there. You know, why is that? Well, the Auditor General in their calculation includes food service costs. And for Kyrene, like we talked about in the study session, we outsource
109that to a private or a third-party vendor, I should say. So what that means basically is we don't have to commit our operating budget. to support food service activities. We only pay money based on the number of meals served. And so when you remove food service from that calculation, these are our numbers. And you can see far before we started to see the impact of enrollment loss, we were typically in that 75%. Range and even in the years that you saw we've experienced some enrollment declines. We are still in that same 75% range That's not an accident It's intentional because of how we look at making budgetary decisions so again no matter how big or small our budget is we want to make sure that 75 cents out of every dollar we get goes back
110to the classroom area. I'm gonna back up because I forgot that If you're looking at these numbers, my apologies for the laser, that number in 23-24 was the 10th highest in the state of Arizona. And the year prior, the 73.6% was the 7th highest. We've always been in that top 10, and we don't plan on making decisions that would jeopardize that. So we're often asked about administration costs and could you just lower those and perhaps that's a way to address some budgetary challenges. And we absolutely, and we'll talk about all the things that we look at to deal with this. But what's kind of left out of the conversation at times is that as a state, Arizona has the lowest. administration cost per pupil in the entire country. And I've only been able to go
111back about eight years, but they've been at that, they've been the lowest over that entire time. And so, again, the graph that I'm showing is not to shine a spotlight on another school district, but to show you who we're evaluated against for larger school districts in Arizona. That orange line, or I'm sorry, the red line is the state of Arizona. And that represents the lowest per pupil spending in the entire country. So Kyrene is the orange line. So again, we're much lower than that and lower than most of our peers. It's something we keep our eye on. Absolutely, we want to keep most of our dollars going in the classroom. So I've shared this in different forms with the board. I think maybe even the same slide, but there's two things happening, kind of changing
112gears. I'm looking at historically what has enrollment changes done to our budget. And so really two things that I'd like to point out on this slide. The first is that the bars that you see on this graph represent the year-to-year changes in funding that we see from enrollment changes. And so when Dr. Ostmeyer mentioned the one year where we thought, you know, we may have stabilized or maybe saw a tiny uptick, that was fiscal year 19. You can see a very small green bar there. But every other year we've seen somewhere. between two and a half and almost four million dollars to our budget as being a reduction as a result of lower enrollment. Now that's a pretty sizable impact because our total operating budget is around 140 million dollars, right? So these are pretty
113big numbers for a district our size. I'm often asked about the fiscal year 21 year. That was a year we came back, that was the year we came back from the pandemic. Kyrene, like all school districts and all schools across the state, saw much lower numbers than what we would have expected normally. And we're funded based on current year enrollment. And so our state recognized that and gave us a one-year grant, like they did many districts in the state, to help buffer that enrollment loss. So that was a pretty sizable decline, but that was really more of a result of the pandemic. But the line on this graph represents a cumulative total if you added up all the bars. And so over this time period, our entire operating budget, again, not capital related, but the
114things to pay for day-to-day operations, is almost $21 million less than what it was in 2017, 2018. So what I like to tell people is, had enrollment been the same, as that time, we would have almost $21 million more in our budget to do things with. I mean, that's a pretty big number and a pretty sizable change. And so that's why every year we do have to look for how do we right size our expenses because they are, these numbers are happening. Now, I see this every day in my job. I recognize that others may not see this, but this is not something new for our district. We've been talking about this for years. But... we don't see that trend changing either. This is how we've been able to manage a balanced budget over this
115entire period, even with big losses in funding. So this is the year-by-year changes, reductions, I should say, that we've made to our annual budget. So we've reduced over this time period almost $22 million of expenses. These are not one-time savings. These are not using grants or any things like that, one-time funding to solve the problem. These are actually reducing permanent costs going forward. And so, again, that 2021-22 year, I'm often asked about why is that much higher than the other years. If you remember on the previous slide, we had a pretty sizable reduction, or I should say a pretty sizable loss in funding from the COVID year, but we had the one-year grant from the state. So we knew the following year. to balance our budget, we had a lot more expenses that we had
116to reduce in order to do that. That's why that year is so much higher. But again, it's not something new for our district. We've been doing this for many years. I see it again every day and recognize that that might not be as familiar to others. This is the exact same information as the previous slide, but it just shows what and where those changes and reductions have taken place. And so you might be surprised to see that the largest amount is in the personnel costs. Or maybe you might not be surprised by that, but most school districts in our state have an operating budget of about 85% being personnel cost. You just can't run a school without people. And so you also can't make sizable reductions to your budget without looking at personnel costs. There
117just aren't enough dollars in those other categories. Even though we absolutely do as much as we can there, it's just not as... there aren't as many dollars to be able to make those kind of changes. So how have we made those changes? We haven't done it over this time period by having any layoffs or reductions in force or eliminating people's jobs. We've done it by being as thoughtful as we can. And being very intentional about when people leave or retire or vacate a position, can we restructure the work? Could our departments function a little differently and more effectively? On the school side, oftentimes what that means is a teacher may be asked to teach a different grade than they had the previous year. Or they might be asked to... relocate to a different school. And
118we feel that's a much better opportunity to have and retain a position for someone rather than just entirely eliminate their position. So that is how we've been managing, you know, almost 300 or around 300 positions over this time period. And that'll always be our strategy going forward. We never want to have an elimination of a person's job if we have a different alternative. You might look at that number. Well, I should say I'd like to call attention to that breakout between school-based and what we would refer to as district-based. people. And that 75%, 25% ratio should look very familiar as the timeless spending model that we talked about. Again, this is not an accident. You know, when we make budgetary decisions, we are not trying to overburden a school by taking all the resources out
119of them. We know that systematically across everywhere we spend money in the district, all of those expenses have to be reduced. And 75% of our budget is in the classroom. So it is going to be the largest area that we would make a change to, but that helps maintain that same ratio of 75% going forward. Lots of stuff here. And the whole point of this slide is to show a little bit more detail from what I just shared. So on the right, as part of our annual budget activities, are all the things that we've done in a little bit more detail. So we talked about the positions being the largest two, but we look at everything that's an operating cost across our district and look for ways to be more effective. more efficient in how
120we spend the limited resources that we have. So we've made changes to our medical plan and made some major changes in lowering medical costs. We've renegotiated contracts with vendors. We've changed vendors. We've restructured our contracts and scope of work. We've reduced things in overtime and how we do maintenance and repairs across the district. We've done a lot of things, and I'm not going to go through all of these, but this is part of our work every spring. This is something we do every year. And again, the things that we try to do are intended to keep the changes out of the classroom. Besides the activities we do every year, there's also things that are more systematic, wide or broader. And that's that second layer. And some of our board members might remember some changes we've
121made years back to either the bell schedule, some middle school planning areas and things like that. Again, not as sizable as the other changes that were reductions that we talked about, but they're all part of the story. And so all of these things are about $24 million. Again, that's a pretty sizable number for a district our size whose operating budget is about $140 million. But I also like to point out that. This conversation isn't all about just reduce, reduce and cut budgets. You can also make investments, and we have over the same time period. It does make the problem a little harder to balance your budget, right? But you can do it, and we have. So over the same time period where we've reduced $24 million, we've also added counselors in our schools. We've also
122lowered the class sizes for kindergarten through second grade. We've also... increase the pay for substitutes because about three years ago we were falling pretty far behind other districts and we've invested a lot of money towards employee compensation and I will always say that's never enough but we will talk a little bit more about how that works as well. I'm going to go backwards too because I don't want people to think that this is always about losing people's positions. In this same time period we've hired teachers every year. So we have more teachers that retire than we need in the district to balance and right-side. So we always have higher teachers back every year. So I don't want to put the message out that we've always just reduced positions. We've hired a lot of teaching positions
123over the same time period. So if you were curious about how those reductions for positions equate to current staffing, this just provides a little bit of context. From the district office area, those reductions represent about 95% of our current staffing. The school-based number that I referenced before represents about 17% of our current staffing. And across the entire district, that represents about 19%. So just trying to give a little context to... how large those numbers are, put some scope to that. If you were wondering, well, how did we decide between school-based or district-based positions? We define the school-based positions as the people and supports that are providing that to a student during the school day. So we've pulled out things like community education because that's... before or after the day. And you can see that is
124the big group. Athletics is part of that group. That's the biggest group that we have on here. Some of the other bigger groups are transportation, our facilities group, our warehouse team. And then the rest, I believe, are about 124 positions, if you add them all up. And again, that's supporting about 1,800 people across the district. So that's the role of who those positions are. And then on the right, you can see a breakdown of... who are certified, you know, the certified teachers as part of that group, who is represented by an administrative position. So again, not just administrators. Well, actually, this one is administration. Sorry. Thank you. There's a lot of slides. So this one actually is administrators. And then the darker blue is our ESPR support group, which would be included in that total
125as well. Okay, so now I'm going to change directions and look a little forward, right? So we talked about how and what we've done in the past has impacted our budget. This is what we see coming. And so we shared this during the study session and also with the long-range planning committee about what do we think might happen in the future years. So we've developed a range with our demographer to give us an idea of what might be a lower or a higher range to plan for. And again, it's not something new. We've seen this before, but we would expect somewhere between 1,100 and 1,500 students less from today's enrollment than in five years. We would see about 1,100 to 1,500 students in five years versus what we have in our enrollment today. Same exact
126information, except turned into dollars. So this would be what I would expect the impact to be to our budget over the next five years. So again, that loss of enrollment would be somewhere I would expect between $7 million and $9 million over that next five-year period. So again, it's not something new. It's not something we haven't seen. We haven't been reacting to it. But every year you have to reduce your budget. It gets a little bit harder as you get a little bit smaller. But that's kind of putting that into a dollars perspective. So earlier when I talked about how do we make decisions and how does that timeless model fit into this, I know there's a lot of numbers on here, but we've tried to share this with our staff. This is really how
127we go about. making decisions and making sure we don't overburden one area with any budget reductions or changes for the coming years. So we start by looking at what do we think the impact to our budget will be from enrollment. And so between general enrollment loss and then how that impacts our M&O override funding, because that has a component of enrollment in the calculation as well, we expected there to be just over $4 million of lower reduced funding than what we had. the previous year. And so on the section below that You can see that percentage in there. Those are the same exact percentages in our timeless model. And we apply that percentage against that $4 million to tell us if we're going to keep those same ratios going forward, classroom, non-classroom, across all areas,
128administration, plan operations, transportation, where do we have to make sure or what kind of changes will we make to the budget and still be able to have those same 75%, 25% ratios? I can tell you when we talk about classroom spending, We are talking about using the same class size ratios and targets that we've had. We have not changed those. This is basically right-sizing staff to where the students are because there's fewer students coming in than what are leaving every year. And so that classroom spending amount is not about reducing and eliminating positions. It's about aligning resources where they're needed for the year. Earlier, I talked about making investments in compensation. I do want to talk about this. This is something we will bring to the board as soon as we can. Because it factors
129into how do we make decisions for employees' compensation. It's very challenging when you have less funding every year to be able to add more dollars into your budget. But we have these conversations for about four or five months. We've started these conversations before the calendar year flipped over in January. And so it takes a lot of time for all those variables that we were talking about tonight to really land before you talk about making commitments going forward. It's also very difficult to put a budget together before the state inks a budget, but we can't wait. We don't have that luxury to wait until the legislature and the governor finally assigns a budget. So we do our best to stay apprised of the situations out there and make our best judgments about what we could expect
130for next year. And obviously, if there are ever opportunities to do more, we will bring them back to the board and to our employees to make compensation increases. This is something I shared with the board last year. You know, there's lots of things that go into putting the budget together, but they're really, from a compensation standpoint, are four big things that really move the needle. And when you start to put a budget together, you know, the first thing that you know out of the gate and where you should start is what's happening with enrollment. So this is last year's 24-25 budget picture. And last year, that funding loss was about $3.3 million. And so the other piece you know is up in the top right. What do you expect the state to kick in for
131increased funding? And that $1.8 million is part of the inflation funding. That's, by statute, the absolute maximum we could have received last year. And we've talked about this during our general fund revenue presentation about. how that's not a very large number, but that's all we get. And so to put that in perspective, to do a 1% salary increase for all of our employees costs about $1.2 million. So that funding from the state really doesn't go very far as far as providing very large increases for employees, much less if you're losing money from an enrollment standpoint. Last year, the only reason, or last year we gave a 2% increase for all of the employees. That equated to about $2.4 million. And the only way we were able to do that is by reducing our expenses, which
132is listed on the top left, by $3.6 million, right? This has to balance or else you're not building a sustainable budget. So this isn't always fun work. It's very challenging work. But these are all the things that we have to consider when we... when we put a budget together for the year and make sure we're not leaving the district in the worst place than what we had found it the previous year. Same information. This is just over an eight year period. So again, you know, we talked about making investments in compensation. So those numbers on the left are the same numbers we talked about as far as how much we've reduced our budget expenditures, how much we've lost in funding over this eight-year time period. And then on the right side, this kind of shows,
133you know, we've invested almost $30 million. I will always say that's never enough. But we've only been able to do that because we've balanced our budget from making some tough decisions. And again, that decision always means trying to keep that 75% of all of our funding in the classroom. All right. Good evening, Superintendent Tenius, President Walsh, members of the board, staff, and community. It's my pleasure this evening to stand before you to start talking about the work of our staffing committee. And as many of you know, I've done this work for a very long time in this position. And I want to talk about how our staffing process has truly improved over time. very first started in this position, Mark Knight, Mary Jane Renton, and myself would sit in a room with then Assistant Superintendent
134Temious. And we had these. printed out Excel spreadsheets that we had to paste the papers together and then used rulers to figure out what school we were on and what decision we were making and looking at classes. I am very proud to say that over the last few years our staffing process has improved significantly. And we have really tightened up that process to make sure that not only are we looking at the data of each individual school, but we're also looking at all of the schools at the same time in order to ensure that there is equity and balance and those things across our schools and across our classrooms. The other piece of this is we've expanded the staffing committee to make sure that everyone who has important pieces of information about that school site
135and about what some of the specific needs of that site are in the room. So we talk a lot about interconnected teams, and I'm very proud to say that our staffing committee has become a very strong interconnected team with representation from school effectiveness. talent management, academic equity and excellence, and obviously our accountability and performance management team who have done such a beautiful job of creating the reports in Power BI that guide our work. With that, I'm super happy to pass the microphone to Dr. Ostmeyer, who's going to walk you through the process, system, and math behind some of our staffing decisions. Thank you, Associate Superintendent Fiorite. Again, it's a pleasure to be back in front of everyone. I'm going to see if I can really best represent the multiple voices in the room that really
136help support our students in every classroom. That's an awesome responsibility. So I do want to share with my friends in the house. Please feel free to lean in. if there's conversation or points of interest that you can better represent in our conversation and in our shared time together. So similar to the conversation that Mr. Herman and I just shared with you, as we look at enrollment and we translate it into budget, we also are going to do a similar activity here. We're going to start with enrollment and we're going to translate it into staffing. And so on this slide in front of you, I'm going to begin with this statement, enrollment drives staffing. In this way, it makes sense that the activities around staffing follow our enrollment timelines. Initial work begins with the 40th day
137headcount and generally wraps up by the 10th day. As shown here, continuous monitoring occurs year round. Regular check-ins help inform our allocations, but also our contract disbursement and then our final assignments throughout the school year. 40th day headcount is the base for projecting enrollment in grades 1 through 8. Here is a simple illustration of what grade level enrollment looked like this year. When staffing classrooms, we take this information and then we further break it down across 25 schools and all of the grades that they serve. And while that slide is simple, the calculations start to expand as you think about the number of schools and the number of grades. This slide shows you a simplified approach to rolling over the students. So we take the current enrollment in K-7. and we roll it forward to
138the student's next grade assignment. You'll see here that we're celebrating the promotion of the eighth graders moving on out of the house, and we're bringing in the kindergarten students for the new year that starts. The kindergarten number is generated through the census report that I just shared with you, which estimates the number of eligible students that we anticipate serving. Once this step is completed across all schools, we make minor adjustments in alignment with the trends that these schools and grades experience. And then after the start of the school year, we evaluate our projections against our actuals, taken again at 40th day, to better inform whether adjustments are needed for the following season. So here you'll see in a closing comment on the slide, we typically perform pretty well. At 99%, our projections are able to
139accurately represent the estimations that we experience at the district level. Rick Brammer, our demographer, will join me in the commentary that says at the highest level when we're aggregating, we are going to celebrate that success. But I also don't want to be shy about sharing examples. Once you start to break down the numbers and the children, they don't fit into perfect little pie shapes. And some schools and grades would experience a little bit different or lower percent of accuracy. And that's the information that informs our work. as we're continuously monitoring and adjusting the staff. So here, once the projections are compiled, staffing is assigned. Factors that guide these have been discussed this evening. They are decisions that are focused on classroom spending, ensuring that we maintain alignment with our timeless spending model for approximately 75%
140of our costs are integrated into classroom spending. Additionally, we lean into our strategic priorities, such as our literacy for grades K-2. We differentiate our class size across the grade levels, and we measure our school capacity and the opportunity to educate our children. In this manner, the staff and committee ensures that resources are allocated so that classrooms are optimized for learning. Class size is influenced again by the district's priorities. Of note is that while we have identified an approximate class size for each grade, they do not define a maximum. or a minimum. And that's really important to understand that for us to create staffing and make assignments to all of our schools, we have an optimal class size that we are steering toward. So in kindergarten, our class size range is 21 to 23. But we
141know that our children aren't going to come in perfect little size boxes of 23. Schools aren't going to experience 23 kids in each one of their classes. They might experience a little bit more or a little bit less. So when the class size looks like it's going to be over the right side of that range, we as a staffing committee have already allocated part of our budget to support those classes with instructional assistance support. So when classes are one to two kids above the upper bounds of the range, we do allocate additional staff to support the student's success in those classrooms. And again, if the classes were to break out smaller than those classes, It's because the population doesn't come in the perfect size that we've allocated for that grade. On this slide, you'll also
142see that we staff our Rise Up schools a little bit differently than our typical schools, offering an opportunity to reduce the class sizes in those classes as well. Both the typical and the Rise Up schools. have an emphasis in those early grades of K-2 where we've really lowered the class sizes over the last couple of years with our initiatives and the support that you've provided with the strategic plan of the activities. Here's what I want to kind of be clear about as we're looking at these class sizes and really trying to respond to some of the questions that have been shared with us. When we're looking at class sizes and experiencing the classroom as a family or as a student, what you see here is a celebration that we're holding steady the class range from
143last year to this year. A budget reduction doesn't have an impact on the class size. We've held that stable. So where the reduced revenue comes from our enrollment, you've listened to the conversation this evening as to what are the different areas that we can reduce costs to stay in a balanced budget. When we maintain the class size at these grades, It's because of the priority that we have to maintain those. That's the first layer in the budget to protect the sizes that we have articulated for each of our classrooms across our school. I'd just like to share because I think it's good for context while you're on that slide. So we, if you recall the previous board, we had a conversation about with our strategic plan when we lowered these class sizes. And actually, it's
144more than K-1-2 that has been lowered. So in 2023, which would be fiscal year 23, the 22-23 school year was the last time we had different class size ranges. And just for some context that'll help our board understand as well. In kindergarten, we used to be 23 to 25. We are now 21 to 23. In first grade, we were 25 to 28. We are now 21 to 23. In second grade, we were 23 to 25. We are now 20. I'm sorry. Yes, 23 to, I might have that one backwards, 26 to 29. We are now 23 to 25. In third grade, we've gone from 27 to 30. We used to go up to 30 in third grade. That was absolutely part of the class size ranges for Kyrene at that time. We were able to
145lower those to 25 to 27. In fourth grade, we used to be at 28 to 30. We are now at 27 to 29. And in fifth grade, we are 28 to 30. And we stayed at 28 to 30. So I just, I want the board to have an understanding. The class size ranges changed in the 24 school year. And of course, this year is the second year, as Dr. Ostmeyer just stated, we've been under these ranges. And the same issue that she described with these current ranges, even when we had different ranges, our kids didn't come in those neat packages. We always had some classes over the range and some classes under the range, which we addressed either through additional instructional assistant support. And there is a tipping point where we do bring another teacher
146in, which is also listed, I believe, on the website. Okay, so let's look at this. Let's see how this really plays out. So on this slide, I have a couple different examples for you. Here we have mocked up some information using kindergarten values to help illustrate how we calculate the number of teachers and then determine how many additional seats are available for new enrollment. So in this example, we have four schools, each with different enrollment. So when I'm talking about the package or the size of the student class that comes in, you can see for this example, there's 56 students in one school, 63, 69, 99. We then divide the projected enrollment by the grade level divisor and round up. We're always going to offer benefit to the school. A teacher doesn't come in a
147partial person. They come in a full person. So we're always going to benefit the school. So 2.24 is absolutely going to round up to three. And so when you look at that in the second step, we show the resulting class sizes. Two examples fell within the range while two are outside of the range because of the number of kids that were enrolled at that school in that grade. In the step three, typically I'm just illustrating how many students we can continue to accept with new enrollment. Our goal is to fill our classes. We've staffed the class to be 21 to 23. And so what you can see in the examples of the second, the first and the second record, we have seats available in those classes. Our intention during the spring, while registration is open,
148is to continue to invite more families in to raise the number of students that we are serving in each of our schools. Equally so, you can see in that last example, this is an example of a school where 99 students showed up. Because of the number of kids, they fall to the right side of that range, but they're within the allocation for instructional assistance. If that's the number of students that stabilize for the year, that's how we would staff them. However, if new enrollment continues to show up and we have students on wait lists, the staff committee convenes to really adjust. We monitor and then we adjust. staffing as the interest shows up in our schools. And I bring you back to that first slide I shared with you. We continuously monitor and adjust our
149staffing as our families are enrolling and showing up for school. Questions? Good so far? Okay, so then we want to say, okay, that's cool, Dr. Osmeyer. I kind of understand the math. It's not a perfect representation of 21 to 23 kids across all kindergarten, but it makes sense. So again, we take a moment to really evaluate. Did the staffing proportions work out in the way that we had intended? And remember, we're intending for our school classes to fall within that range for us to really create the staff that's aligned. So each season, we are monitoring how many sections actually fit. within the range. And in this example at the elementary level I put the class ranges up at the top. You can always add plus two to kind of figure out the overage for an
150IA, but for this example it's pretty tight as far as representing the range itself. So everything that's green is a section that actually falls just short of that range. And the numbers that are highlighted in blue are actually the number of sections that fit exactly into the range that we had set up for staffing. And of course, the orange are the exceptional sections, in which case they tipped just to the right side. of the class range that we had. And so in several conversations that we've had with staff, with principals, with families, when you're sitting in the orange, it feels like you're sitting in the orange. Absolutely. From a framework for staffing, however, we have created that range knowing that some are going to fall below. Some are going to fall within and some are
151going to fall on the outside of that. In the world of averages, you would always find numbers below, within, and over. And so here you can see 94% of our elementary sections actually fall at or below the anticipated range. When we flip this to our older kids, it becomes a little bit more challenging with the building of a master schedule. I was a high school and a middle school principal, so having worked out some of those sections, there are moments in which case you want to have larger classes, and you can see that more on the right side of that table. So you might have performing arts. I had a band teacher who didn't want anything short of 45 to 60 kids in his band class. where you're deliberately trying to increase that size to
152get a more robust student experience. But we absolutely allocate. Our middle school staffing within the range of 28 to 30 or 30 to 32 as we're looking at our different schools and their assignments. And as they're working through their master schedules and trying to create opportunities for kids, here you can see the percent that is at or under their expected ratios or their expected class sizes is a little bit shorter at 75%. So as we move from projecting or estimating enrollment, I do want to make a side note. We don't have a crystal ball. It is based on what we currently experience in looking at census data and applying trend information to see. What's lovely about those estimations and the shared work that we have as a team is that as our families show up,
153we adjust. the number of staff. So there are moments with principals, with our schools, with our families, in which case we announce the addition of a teacher, the addition of an instructional assistant, the change of an assignment where enrollment might not have shown up. And we do those moves throughout the summer and all the way through the 10th day. to really get to a final staffing number. Dr. Ostmeyer, could you do me a favor and go back just to the elementary class sizes? I want to use that one because it's a little easier. If we looked at that slide and we looked at the orange, I believe that's 19, if I did my math quickly, correctly. If we said... that anybody who's one over the range or the two over the range, we didn't do
154IA and we just added a teacher. If we were to add 19 teachers to our system, Mr. I'm looking to Mr. Herman, who can help me do the quick math because I'll probably forget the ERE expenses. But if we just looked at the average teacher salary and we had to turn around and add 19 teachers into the system because we were two over, how much would we be talking, Mr. Herman? I believe it's about 1.3. It's 1.4 million. I was close. 1.33 is what I came up with. So you can see that that's not feasible. It's just you saw the presentation on where we are with enrollment and budget. And if we had to add another 1.3 million, we're cutting 1.3 from somewhere. And now turn around and apply that in the middle school if
155you use that same methodology. So there has to be. a range and a point. And so again, we have the IA support. We do have a point where we also start to add teachers, but you can't just go add it at one location. If that's not part of your formula, you have to do that across the board. I think Ms. Security did a nice job talking about, right, equity across the schools. And it's just not feasible to be able to do that. That would actually mean then you're just lowering all of your class sizes across the board again. And for context also, when we made the decision two years ago to lower K-2, that was a $1.4 million investment in our strategic plan that we've committed to as an ongoing expense, and we have built
156that into our ongoing assumptions and budget in order to maintain that. But it also comes at, it's hard because now we have significantly lower, and at some point we're back to where we were. So there is that transition place, which is about third to fourth grade. So I really appreciate having this presentation at this time of year. And our colleague here is going to explain a little bit about why this conversation has a little bit more volume during this time of year versus other points of interest. So as Dr. Osmeyer mentioned, our staffing team truly meets year-round. And so as soon as those 40-day counts are done, we begin the work of staffing for the next year. But we also monitor our class sizes through the year, coming together any time that we have a
157surge in enrollment at a location or those kind of things. Spring is the most difficult time. for our staffing committee because we are experiencing both false positives in terms of class size and false negatives. And so I'm gonna walk you through a little bit of why that happens. In the spring months, as we are beginning to accept registrations for the next year, and we begin to look at what class sizes look like for the next year, what I will say is our families, particularly families that are joining us through open enrollment, do a very nice job of letting us know in January or February of the year previous that they want to attend school at Kyrene the next year. However, our families who are leaving us because of a move due to their parents' work
158or because of a change in location of where they would like to go to school often do not notify us until July. late June, early July. And so we end up in a situation where we have a false positive per class size because we have all of our new enrollment. in that count, but we have not taken out the withdrawals from that count. And so spring becomes a very difficult time. It's a difficult time for everyone. It's a very difficult time for our school leaders because they're looking at those numbers and they are advocating and saying, hey, I have a class size that looks like it's going to be over the range. And one of the things that we have learned is being patient with that is the best answer. When we have rushed to
159add another teacher. A lot of times what we have found is that then we get to the 10th day and there actually weren't enough students to justify that teacher. And then we're in a very difficult situation of taking a teacher who has set up a classroom and saying to them, we now need to move you to a school where there are students. And those students did show up and we need another teacher there. And that's extremely difficult for a teacher on the 10th day of school when they've already set up their classroom and they've made a connection with kids. It's very disruptive to a group of kids when we do that. We also have false negatives. And so I want to talk about that as well. Kindergarten will show under the numbers that we are
160expecting, particularly in certain segments of our district where it's just difficult to encourage our families to come and get their kindergarten or register so that we have an accurate count. We like to joke that... once the buses start running, when they start doing their trial runs of their routes a couple of days before school starts, is typically when we get a really big influx of kindergarten registration because the parents go, oh, school is starting. I guess I need to go register my kindergartner. So we do experience false negatives in terms of our kindergarten enrollment. And so that is why we lean really heavily into our projections for kindergarten. And again, one of the reasons. why we tend to hold steady in terms of not pulling a kindergarten teacher, because experience tells us that most likely
161those kindergarten students are coming. It's just our enrollment for kindergarten often comes later. The other thing is particularly families that join us from another state are always shocked by the fact that we start school in the end of July. And so we also typically see our kindergarten numbers grow over those first few weeks of school as families are relocated. and like, oh my gosh, school's already in session in Arizona. This last slide is just kind of a summary of some of the big pieces that we think are important when we talk about staffing. And the first one is, is that classroom size is set in alignment with our strategic priorities and with our student enrollment. But we also have to recognize that our student enrollment typically does not stabilize until the 10th day of school.
162We are often dealing with false positives. We're dealing with students who just did not return and the parents did not withdraw them. They're not returning our phone calls. We can't withdraw them until they have no-showed for 10 consecutive days. And so we really are driving this by... The priorities that we have set in our strategic plan and the enrollment that is happening at our schools, those are the things that are driving our staffing decisions. We do use a cross-functional, multidisciplinary, interconnected team to have these conversations and to work with school leaders with determining their staffing and making those decisions. They're not easy conversations. None of this is easy. And not a single member of this team takes this work lightly. At the same time, we have to be good shepherds of the dollars that we
163have to make sure that they're. distributed across our school sites and that we are monitoring and paying attention to class size everywhere and that we're making sure that across all of our schools we're doing everything that we can to make sure that we are within that range as much as possible. And then the last thing is that our school leaders, I just want to make it clear, we have a wonderful relationship with our school leaders. They call us and they advocate for their schools and they talk about the individual things that are happening at their schools. And we do try to consider those things as much as possible in our staffing discussions and conversations. Someone from school effectiveness or talent management is calling a school leader every single time that we are making a change
164or making a decision and having a conversation with them. It is not just we've made a decision that we are, you know, reducing. a staff member at your school. That's not what it sounds like. It is, this is what the numbers look like. We're looking at the Power BI report with them. We're discussing everything that's happening and we're reviewing all of that with them. And they absolutely have a voice as part of our team. Obviously, we're not going to have every, all 25 school leaders sitting at the table with us, but they are definitely a part of that story and a part of our team. And with that, kind of concludes our... I'd like to add just one thing, and Ms. Gibson, maybe you can help me. I know this has come up. I don't
165know if it actually, I don't recall if it came up in some of the questions we received, but we do get asked frequently. So when we right-size enrollment and when we're making these decisions and moving teachers, what is the process and how have the teachers been involved in helping determine what that process is, Ms. Gibson? So when we need to move a teacher, the first thing that we do is, well, first thing that talent management does is work with the school leader. We first ask for volunteers. So, for example, if it's we know that we are reducing FT at a school site by one teacher, I will have the principal, when we have determined that. We aren't going to have anybody. So we do this right around contract time. And so we look to see,
166do we know for sure that we're going to have enough people that maybe resign or don't sign their contract, reject their contract? Once we know for sure that they are going to be overstaffed, talent management will work directly with the principal and we ask for volunteers first. So we ask for a volunteer in the school to be an unassigned teacher. If they agree to go to the unassigned pool, then we work with them just like we would if they were an unassigned teacher. If nobody volunteers, then we look at least length of service. We look at our guidelines that are agreed upon guidelines with KEA and determine who is the unassigned teacher. And then talent management will provide them with an unassigned interest survey. The teacher completes the survey and they identify. different things like
167you know where is your certificate held are you a k3 teacher a k8 teacher we look at their certificate we identify is it do they want to stay on the east side of the freeway west side of the freeway we look at some what some of their choices are and then once we determine which school sites are understaffed then we place all of the unassigned teachers into their correct placements Ms. Gibson, can you just speak a little bit more to what you call the agreed-upon conditions to do this work, that this is something that is done through the Teacher Association directly? Yes. So the KEA president and I work together on identifying the guidelines. The guidelines have been set for several years. I'm going to say way back when Mark Knight was here. So at
168least 10 to 15 years, we have had unassigned guidelines. So those guidelines have been set in place. And each year, the KEA president and I review the guidelines to see if we need to make any changes. For example, last year was probably the first year that middle school was impacted the most by unassigned teachers. And when we looked at that, we made a change so that it identified if somebody was unassigned, they were unassigned in their core content area, which makes sense. more sense for middle school. So we make some adjustments according to, you know, each year when something new comes up. And are those board approved annually? They are just agreed upon guidelines between KEA and talent management. Great. So we know that we've put a lot of information in front of you. And
169so any member of our team is happy to field any questions that you have. Thank you to our presenters. Board members, questions or comments? I guess I'll start us off then. Okay. I've got a lot. All right. Thank you. It's a very in-depth presentation. Okay. A few questions. You mentioned the interconnected teams. I know you just indicated that site leaders don't necessarily sit on that, but then I was a little confused. I felt like there was some site representation on the committee, or is that not the case? No. The committee needs... Oftentimes, if we have a sense of what is about to happen, so we typically, when Dr. Ostmeyer is ready and the Power BI report is ready, she sends that to school leaders. She opens it up to school leaders. They can kind of
170see where the anticipated changes are in terms of their staffing. That is usually the time when we first hear from a school leader. They're going to call their school effectiveness persons, either myself, Dr. Cupp, or Mrs. Brunner, to just talk about, you know, if they have a concern or they have a question. We obviously take that into the staffing dialogue to say this is what the principal is expressing or the concern that the principal has. Once the team meets and we land on a recommendation, then we divide and conquer in terms of who is going to reach back out to that principal, follow up with them, note any other concerns that they have, talk through that. It is not unheard of for the team to leave and all of us to leave with two or
171three phone calls to make to a school leader. And then for us to send a quick email to say, hey, we need to come back together. I have some more information from this school leader that I think would impact the decision that we're making. Can we bring the team back together? So it's more that site leaders are given an opportunity to look at the projections prior to the team meeting. Yes. To provide their input. and kind of move from there. That's their level of involvement. And then once a decision is made, we also engage in a conversation. It's not just like we're, you know, like, for example, a lot of times, you know, we'll have a school leader. And this is like initial staffing, right? This goes on throughout the entire spring into the summer.
172This team meets weekly. At this time of year, we're together just about weekly. And so it may be, hey, we're watching your numbers creep up, and we think that it's likely that you're going to need another teacher. You know, you're getting to the point. What are you thinking about that? What are you seeing? Are you seeing a number of withdrawals come in? Like we're asking questions of the school leader as well. But it's always a conversation. It is not just a, we've allocated you a teacher or we've reduced you a teacher. That's not how this works. It's a dialogue and a conversation with the school leader. Next, like I said, folks, I have a lot. I got a lot here. So next, I think this might be more of a question for Ms. Gibson. You
173said that the staffing guidelines were agreed upon, but with KEA members, do you happen to know if, you know, President Lighting goes back to membership as far as getting recommendations for these guidelines or things need to change? I'm just wondering what the level of teacher input is there. So it's the unassigned guidelines that we have agreed upon. You know, I can't answer that question for Adelia. She goes back or not. But I do believe she had some input last year when it came to the middle school on assigned guidelines. And that's how we came upon looking at their core subject area instead of looking at least length of service in the building. That was very disruptive for middle school. If I can just add to that, I do believe when those guidelines were initially developed
174and we moved away from a previous system that we utilized, there was pretty significant feedback. But again, these guidelines have been in place for a long time. So what's happening now, again, to what Ms. Gibson said, is more tweaks. to the system, hey, we noticed last year this piece didn't work very well. Can we look at the system and make sure that we're addressing that concern? So I think that's more of what's happening now. But I do believe when the guidelines were originally developed, there was more input into those. Great. Thank you. Next question. I might have missed this. This is from... Dr. Ostmeyer, how is the grade level denominator determined? I mean, I get the ratios or ranges is what we're using here, not ratios. But deciding with that and looking at that number
175and then going to this slide where we've landed on, I know that's probably just an example for 25 for kindergarten, just wondering how you determine that. So we're actually going to go back one more slide. And we're going to look at that IA range for each one of those grades. So the divisor is actually two grader because that's the number that we're actually staffing for at the upper level of the student group. Does that make sense? So you're saying that the denominator for each grade level would be the highest number on the IA range. And that's how we go and choose the initial levels of staffing. not the average range because I think when I was looking at the presentation and then seeing that denominator I was like but that fell outside of the range
176that I saw and as a parent that would be very confusing to me and I would wonder why. Yeah, and so when you really think about the math behind that, we want to use as large of a number that still protects the outcome of having the classes fit within the range. And so as we looked at the four examples here, you can see I've used 25 for all four of those kindergarten assignments. And really, The large majority of them fell within the 21 to 23 based on the student enrollment that came into the house. So there will be times if the enrollment is magically aligned to match. whatever the divisor is multiplied by the sections to actually get us there. And we do have examples of that. The reason you have those kids sitting in
177the orange is because their class size was at a level that resulted in the larger number of students in it. Absolutely. And when we look at this slide on this range, the range listed at top, that is just, you know, our average ideal range. not the IA range, correct? So people in the orange would then fall into that IA range. I think one of the other pieces, and I think this is important to mention, I'm going to mention it because it was an eye-opening moment for me. So I'd like to highlight those. Can you go back to the math example? I think it's important to note, we used to make a decision to round down or round up. Okay. So it used to be, if you were at 2.24, we were going to round you
178down to two. We now round everyone up. And I think that's one of the reasons why the larger divisor is important because we are always rounding to the next number. We're always rounding up. If we use 23. as the divisor and we always rounded up, you would see this graph be significantly more skewed to the green, to the classrooms that are under that range. Right, Susie? That was a big moment for me, so I think that's important. Which would equate to significantly higher expenses. Exactly. And then my last question, folks. When a classroom falls into that IA range, is the IA in the classroom full-time? Or is, I noticed someone had used the term like hours were allocated. And it just kind of set off my spidey sense. Is this during small group time only?
179Is this, I mean, depending on the grade level or what students are doing, I mean, activity in the classroom can fluctuate. It can get. pretty chaotic pretty quickly. And so just really wanted to make sure like, what does that mean when those classes are in that range? If that support is there full-time or if that is just... So if they are allocated a classroom assistant, it is 10 hours per week for whoever is over that range. So if you have four fourth grade classrooms, one classroom is over the range, they're allocated the 10 hours per week. If all four of those teachers are over the range, that's 40 hours that they're allocated per week. And that would be one IA. So let's stick with your 40 hours. That would be one IA. for four classes,
180so 10 hours a class? So it would be, if it's 40 hours, it should be 10 hours per classroom. And let's say that that did happen, and that was a school, and somehow all the four of those fourth grade classrooms are over, that allows them possibly to hire one person for 40 hours to rotate between classrooms. It allows them to hire four people at 10 hours. It allows them to hire... two people at 20 hours. So we kind of leave it up to, does that make sense? It does make sense. My next question, I am really sorry. I don't, it's not this much. So my next question, and this would, this is something I've experienced with my own children. You mentioned that our kids don't come in neat little bundles, neat little packages. And when
181we have these ranges or these sizes of classes that fall outside of that range, they might get that IA support. I'm curious, and I'm looking at Dr. Lane. How does that work when we might have students within those classes that might have IEPs, they might have like some additional needs? Is additional instructional assistance then provided to that group or are they still limited to just their 10 hours? I called you out. It is 8.53, and I called you to the podium. No, if there is a child in that classroom with an individual education program and has IA hours allocated, that is above and beyond the classroom level support IAs. Okay. And I think that's just a concern for me, and I think for any other parent that... I have a child who learns very differently.
182And in these larger settings can get really lost. I think there are those additional issues that come up as far as behavior. And so thinking that there was only going to be... If everything were perfect, 10 hours leaves me still a little, like, itchy. But then thinking about the kids who might need extra support or extra things, like, that's important to know that that additional level of help is there as well. So thank you. I don't think I answered the second part of your question because you had asked what do they do. It really is up to the teacher to determine what they do. So, for example, they might, you know, they might find their. a classroom assistant better at helping copy papers or organizing some things for them. Or they might find that that
183classroom assistant is better at helping put kids into small groups and helping with small groups. So we don't determine that in the staffing committee. We really let the school help determine that. Thank you. And that actually brings up one other scenario that does happen for us. And one of the team members might be able to speak to it a little better. But we... We're monitoring this even after the 10th day. So yes, we say we do a lot of monitoring up until the 10th day. But if a class size goes over after that 10th day and we reach out and say, you know, it's so far over the IA range, it's time to add a teacher. Like we reach out to the principal. I will tell you in numerous cases. Depending on the time of
184year that's happened, we've had the principals and the team, the grade level team, say, at this point, we don't want to split our classes. We'd rather have the IA support. And so there are times that that discussion occurs. And so, you know, again, I don't know that parents are always aware that that discussion is occurring on the back end, but they feel that it's more disruptive to a kid to. to split the class mid-year or in the middle of a semester and bring in a brand new teacher than it is to go ahead and add additional IA support. So we have, in cases like that, increased. the hours from 10 to whatever would be appropriate and work with that principal and grade level. In cases like that, we have done lots of different things. In
185cases like that, they've said, we don't want to reassign homerooms, but we'd like another teacher who's here to teach during ELA and math to break our class sizes down smaller for those pieces of instruction. And we found a teacher that was willing to do that. We've done lots of different things. I do want to say we allocated IAL. for a school last month who had an unexpected increase in class size and we allocated IAEA last month. So that is going on all year long. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Member Davis. Thank you very much. I don't know who this is for, and I will admit right now that I am math challenged. So when you're talking about denominators, I'm having to reel back many years and figure out what number are they. But
186I think I've got it. However, my question is, where did these numbers of class size come from? How did you settle on whatever it is? Oh, there's a slide. The different class sizes. I'm going to start the conversation. I think our superintendent is going to bookend it for me. So the conversation related to class size starts with the strategic plan and the priorities of the district in looking at what is the size of a class that we would expect to create the outcomes that we want with our kids. I was not shy when I said the classroom teacher is the first layer in the budget. We start with the cost for our classroom teachers, and then we build everything up on top of that. And so when we think about the class sizes, we're looking
187at our overall revenue. How much does the district have? and we start to model it. Superintendent Tanyas typically sends me back to my room several times during the fall to say, yeah, no, do two more down. No, do two more up. No, let's go to the left. No, let's go to the right in order to really determine what is the overall cost. So when we were in those conversations a couple years and our kindergarten classes were sitting higher than they're sitting today, through the leadership and the vision for what we want for our children to really meet their needs, we have to model it and determine if we can meet the cost of that program. Does that help answer the starting point for that? And then I don't want to be shy about inviting Laura
188back into the conversation. If I could just interject before I hear from you. It helps, but I'm just, having been a teacher in my life, I know that there are recommended class sizes. There's a lot of research, longitudinal research about. what is an optimal amount, for instance, of kids in first grade. And that usually is how well they learn how to read, how well they learn how to do math, et cetera, et cetera. So I understand, I believe I understand the math of what you're talking about. Is there a generally accepted level where a child gets the best education possible or comes to, you know, do you understand what I'm trying to ask? I don't know where 25 came from. Do you want to speak to that a little bit, Ms. Fioriti? from the history?
189So the majority of the research out there states that class size truly impacts outcomes for students when you hit a class size of 15 or smaller. And never in all of my 30 years in the Kyrene School District have we ever been able to afford in a public school to have a class size of 15 or smaller. And I would also argue that there is nowhere else in the state of Arizona that has been able to offer a class size of 15 or smaller. And that's because of the state funding that is provided to us? The state funding that's provided. Just as I shared, if we were to add 19 more teachers and we're talking another $1.3 million for us to get to class sizes of 15, we potentially could be talking... I don't know,
190Mr. Herman, I'm looking to you to see if you can do some quick math for me, but I... I understand. I understand the concept. We're talking probably double what our budget is now. Okay. And in order to pay double what our budget is now, we'd have to get more money from the legislature, essentially. And we'd also have to be able to find teachers to fill those positions. At this point in time, that hasn't always been a concern. But at this point in time, the actual ability to fill those positions, it would be very difficult. Okay. Mr. Herman, would you like to add to that? Very, very simple, quick math, right? There's lots of variables that go into funding, but if you look at the base funding that our state provides per student, this year it's
191$5,013 per student. The average teacher cost is about $75,000 when you include their salary, benefits, and the medical costs. If you wanted to have a class size of 15, the state... would give you essentially $75,000 for those 15 students. That in and of itself only pays for the teacher, not the support staff, the building people, the lights, the electricity. So I think, and again, there's lots of other things that would factor into that, but if you look at what the base funding of the state is, it is not. It is not sufficient to even have those kinds of conversations because there's such a gap between lowering to that level versus the dollars you would need to be able to make that possible. Okay. That's just my question. Thank you. Thank you, Member Davis. Vice President
192Nelson. Me again. So this maybe really might be my last question. I don't know. Can we talk a little bit, I know we've had a lot of conversation around the initiative with K-2 literacy and keeping those class ratios down. And you mentioned how that third to fourth grade is really kind of that big, kind of a jarring change from those lower sizes. But what I mean, my real question is, do we have any data about how Our focus on lowering class sizes for those levels has impacted the class ratios for, like, what has the increase in impact been on the other grade? It's been no impact on the other grades because we set, again, we were at 27 to 30 in 23. We've actually lowered third grade to 25 to 27. So what we did
193when we lowered is we left everything else. Once we lowered the third, fourth, and fifth grade, or third, fourth, I'm sorry, not fifth. Fifth has always stayed 28 to 30. Then we just went in and lowered K-2. So really, third and fourth also saw a reduction. It just wasn't as significant as a reduction. So really, they all have. And when you say, I mean, I say it's jarring, but it's really, it goes to students each grade. So you go from 21 to 23. 21 to 23, K1. So we kept those the same. Then you go 23 to 25. Then you go 25 to 27. Then you go 27 to 29. And then it jumps up to the 28 to 30. So it actually is pretty small increments when you think of it by two. What
194can happen sometimes is if you had a, Dr. Ostmeyer, I'm looking to you, you have a really good example that we've used a couple times where you show that how it. moving from, you know, it can, it can go from seeming like two teachers to three, to three teachers to two teachers. I apologize. I had that back. So you could have three teachers in first grade or second grade, but then that's only two teachers in grade three. Once you start applying this formula here and that's whoops, wrong way. Sorry. This one. And that's kind of what happens is that denominator changes by two can skew it just a tiny bit to where when you were in, I know what the example was when you're in, sorry, I'm starting to lose my voice. When you were
195in second grade and you had the two teachers, you actually had, you were on the low end. You were in those green sections, right? You were understaffed. Sorry. But when you jump to third grade, you now went down one teacher with that denominator. And what that does is now put your ratio, your averages at the higher end. So that is what happens sometimes is that we do have some grades, cohorts of children that will fluctuate throughout those transitions. And there's just no way around that because they don't come in a neat package. And because we're changing the divisor annually. Right. So you could have a class size of X divided by 23, and it's going to break differently than when you take that same number of children and you divide it by 30. In one
196instance, you could have three classrooms. In another instance, you would have two. And nothing has changed with the student population. But it's where we're investing the additional teachers based on the lower grade levels. The other important thing, and I know Dr. Ostmeyer mentioned it, but it may not have quite, it kind of gets buried in there, is you can't assume what a class, so if you see a second grade class right now today. And you say, oh, my God, they have 65 kids or they have 63 kids between three teachers. Those kids are all rolling over next year. That is not the number she rolls with. It's not today's numbers. It is our 40th day. And so if they were actually if they gained five or six kids between the 40th day and now, what
197history shows us is. will be closer to the 40th day numbers for projections, not today's numbers. So we also have to be careful that it's easy to make an assumption that I see this today sitting in the seats. However, our projections, which again, typically aggregate up to about 99% accuracy. So again, there's always some one-offs typically tell us that we'll be back down. And so for example, you know, I know Ms. Furity mentioned, so then they'll reach out. So they have a grade that's really close, say that looks like, Ooh, they are right on the range. They're at the high end of the IA range. They're getting IA. We're going to watch them. We'll communicate regularly with the principal and the principal has information that won't show in those projections, such as. by the way,
198I have three families that are going to withdraw. They've already come to me. I know they're going to withdraw. My numbers are actually going to be here. Or the example was given. I know that I have typically a few families that join us later. I had somebody reach out to me. They're in my registration queue and we watch that. And if the kids show up, we add the teacher at that time. But if they don't show up, we haven't already allocated a teacher. that then we'd be moving as I think somebody gave the example if the kids weren't to show up. Member Nelson, what else? Happy to take more questions if you have any. Any other questions? Just a few comments from me. First, I appreciate the detail in the presentation, especially the foundation on
199the budget piece. Sometimes it's, in my view, it's easy to get lost in the numbers. And it's important to take a step back and understand how this impacts families and kids. And I know that you're thinking about that. So I appreciate you bringing that to this presentation. When we were talking about the... The jarring change. That's what I was thinking about. Because it might be, yeah, one or two up on an average scale when you talk about 25 school sites. It doesn't seem like a big deal. But when you go from a class size of 20 to a class size of 30, and as you said, Dr. Ostmeyer, nothing has changed with the student population. But all of a sudden, your class sizes have gotten significantly bigger. The kids' needs are the same. The behaviors
200are the same. That's tough. So I appreciate you recognizing that and saying that it's difficult conversations. I think it was, Ms. Jenkins, you might have said this at the prior meeting, that it's one thing when you think about averages, but it's a different thing when you think about the individual classroom. So the averages might look great, but that doesn't help your kid in your class in Cerritos right now. I get that. And I appreciate you coming here and speaking. This isn't a new challenge, obviously. We're hearing from our Cerritos contingent, I think you said, this week. Last year, I think it was Wagner. I think the year before that, it was Lagos. It's a challenge. It's a challenge that is not going to go away until we get more funding, which isn't going to happen
201anytime soon. One of the things I wanted to maybe reflect on is back on slide 23, if we might go to there. Was it 23? I got the wrong slide. The one with the greens, maybe slide three. The one with the green, the blue, and the orange, where we had the 19 or nine different teachers. Elementary, this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great for the green, yeah. And I look at those oranges, and I'm like, yeah, that's wonderful that it's such a small number, but that doesn't help the kids that are in those classes. I'll tell you this much. I have, in the years I've been on this board, rarely heard from somebody in a kinder or grade one class about being in the orange because being at 24 for a kinder is no walk in
202the park, but you're still at 24, which is different than being in fourth or fifth grade and having a class of 31. In the years I've been on the board, I consistently hear from kiddos that families that are at the higher end of this elementary school, where when you're in the orange, you kind of feel a little bit. because you're into the 30s. And I know we can't just make a want to get $1.4 million, which would get everybody out of the orange. But I just wonder if, not in this conversation right now, but as we start thinking about our staffing, if we could really look at our four fives that are not rise-up schools, because our rise-up schools are already lower. and look at our four fives and see if there's a way to
203try to get those orange numbers down. Because again, I'd love to see all of them have no orange, but we don't have the money for that. But I feel better about having an orange in first grade than I do about an orange in fifth grade, just because that could mean we've got 32 kids. So it's just challenging. There's no easy way to fix it. And I know we have to be equitable. And we can't just say, we're going to give Cerritos. as teacher because they're really organized and come to our board meeting. I'm glad you came, but we have to think about, well, if we give a Cerritos to teacher, what about the 14 other elementary schools who might be in the same boat? And I'd love to give everybody an extra teacher, but we
204don't have the funding. So if we could maybe isolate where the pain is the greatest and just think about that. And you probably already have done it and you might tell me there's no way to do it, but that's just one thing that occurred to me is. If you take out the rise-ups and you take out the lower grades, you're really only talking about a handful of classes where you're in a K-5 environment with class sizes over 30. So, President Walsh, the one thing, and I'll lean into Mr. Herman and Dr. Osmar to help me here, that is data for current. But next year, those numbers could be flipped and all of that orange could be in the fifth grade. So the problem we run into is how do you do that every year? You
205don't have that. That's where when you say we've looked at this, we have looked at this. That's not consistent that it's fifth grade that's sitting at two and fourth grade at three. We've had years where it's been maybe that's the six or seven. And once you once you increase your ranges, you still have the same problem. Now you just have somebody in the orange. even higher or a little lower and they're still not happy. So that's a really hard problem to solve because it will continue. Again, if we were a growing district, this is not as big of a discussion because we're declining in district because we're looking at cutting $4.2 million to turn around and try to find another million on top of that. would be very difficult. And again, there's no guarantee the
206kids all show up. So if we go by our projections and they all show up, this is where we would be. Then we watch this at the 10th day where there is, again, orange or the one above the IAA range, then we're adding those teachers at that point. But we really, if you add them now, you can't really go back and take them once you've given the contract. I recognize that pulling a teacher 10 days in is extremely disruptive. It's disruptive. I had a kiddo that had the same thing a couple years ago. And my kiddo goes to that school that I was talking about last year where they had a grade level cohort that went from three sections to two. So the change was really significant. And it was the same group of kiddos.
207So I feel it. I feel what you're saying. I really do. And it's really hard for the teachers, obviously. And when you move a teacher, it impacts the culture of the school because you might have some fantastic teachers that unfortunately are having to leave the site. So I empathize with the stress. Yeah, I just, I'll continue to support you in looking for ways to. to keep our class sizes down. I appreciate and support our investment in bringing the K2s down. I mean, those class size ranges are great, especially when you look at the statewide and peer group averages. Great. You know, our five ones are, like you say, they're consistent with some of the other ones, but I just know from experience, when you get over that range in grade four and grade five, it's
208tough. And the smaller the enrollment becomes as an aggregate at the school, the harder this gets to do at that school. So the smaller you get where you have less teachers per grade level, the harder it gets to fall within that range. So your smaller schools will struggle a little bit more. Again, this goes back to the conversation that we started with about why we're at the point that. we really need to have the conversation about as long as we're going to maintain 25 campuses, our resources are going to be spread among the 25 campuses, which does have an impact. President Walsh. Yes. I just want to sincerely say thank you for the lever and the lens that you're applying to the story in front of us today and really bringing the breath of the
209child back into the conversation and their school experience in their classrooms. The lever that you spoke about briefly speaks to the business rules. Do we look at the range as being a range of average or do we look at the range as being a maximum? And that's the difference in what you would apply. Those conversations happen in our conversations in the fall when we're modeling to determine, okay, what can we afford? What do these practices look like when we translate them into the student experience? So I would be remiss if I didn't say the one lever that we always want to lift is enrollment. we can champion an increase in staffing with increased students. So as we looked at our presentation today, and we really lean into strategies to increase our service rate and to
210create that invitation to bring families forward. best solution is to actually to bring the kids home. So use the opportunities in front of you in the grocery stores and the parking lots across the neighborhood at the barbecues to say, hey, come be a part of Kyrene. We've got good things going on that Arizona-wide has shown that they're interested in with our success and our outcomes. No, I appreciate you. And I think. The piece about the service rate is important to me as well because we don't control demographics. But the service rate we really can try to I think bring back up and I think one of the things that are Extremely attractive the families of course is small class sizes So if we want to have more families come to our schools and more Cerritos
211families stay at Cerritos I think continuing to invest in small class sizes is key because otherwise we could just see our service rate continue to decline which is a challenge so I know you're working with Dr. Mark at Cerritos now and keeping the communication. So, and I know this presentation isn't specific about Cerritos, but if you could continue to work with him on this particular point, that would be great. Any other comments or questions? Member Davis. Yes, I'd also just like to thank the parents who came tonight to make their voices heard again and encourage your friends to do the same. I'd like to see a lot more parents come because we've got to work together to solve this problem. And that's why I appreciate your attendance here, despite missing your sons. I forget what.
212And happy birthday to them. Yeah, exactly. Happy birthday. I'll echo that. Thank you for coming. Appreciate your voice. I see no other comments. That will conclude item 8.1. Our next item is 8.2. Board members, do you want to take a quick recess or do you want to push through this and go to exec? All right, we're going to push through and go to exec. Item 8.2, long-range committee, the continuation of the M&O override presentation. I'll invite Mr. Herman up to the board. You're a familiar face tonight. Thank you, President Walsh, board members, and colleagues, and those in the audience. We can go through this fairly quickly, or we can go through it as much detail as you'd like. Really, what I'd like to do this evening is give a little bit of an overview of
213the work that happened during the long-range planning committee's work. during the March meeting. And you can see on the slide, there really are two roles for that. One is really addressing facilities and schools and enrollment. But the second was really to form a recommendation for whether to continue the M&O override and when or how to put that on the ballot. So that's what we're going to focus about tonight. And really, the things that we covered with the group, we're trying to talk about, well, what is an M&O override? You know, how does that fit within Kyrene's budget? How do you determine that? How does that impact your taxes? Why is it important? You know, how do you spend the money? And so that was kind of the focus of the presentation. And again, I will
214go through this. Rather quickly, you've seen as a board member most of these slides in one way, shape, or form. For the new board members, I do absolutely respect the time to go back to the slide or talk to some more. I'm happy to do that. But we started the conversation with what is a bond, what is an override. Kyrene has a bond, a capital override, which is called a district additional assistance override, as well as a maintenance and operations override. We've really focused on what is that M&O override all about. And so the last time we had that approved by our voters was in November of 2021. That amounts to about $15 million. We'll talk through that and how that's calculated. We work with the group to explain that to them. But you can
215only use this money, as we've talked about several times this evening, for day-to-day operations. You're not allowed in Arizona to make a lot of switches between funds. There is some ability to do that with your general maintenance operations, but not with your override, right? It really has to go into the day-to-day operations. So that override for M&O is valid. for a period of seven years. You're allowed to go out and renew early. That's very common among school districts. If you renew early, that seven-year clock resets, though. You don't get to keep the entirety of that funding plus the new seven years. You reset that seven-year clock if you go out early. We're going to talk a little bit about that and show how that works. There is a decline, though, after the fifth year. There's
216five years of full funding, and that amount starts to decline by a third. And that's important to know as far as determining when or how you might make a recommendation to go out for a renewal. We've seen this slide before. What I shared with the group, though, is as far as funds go from a financial perspective, our state has a lot of different individual funds. Not every state operates that way. That's just the way Arizona operates. Each fund, though, has very different restrictions and areas that you can use the money for. So we have about 75 different funds in Kyrene. We talked about 30 of them just in special revenue funds tonight. And that basically means we're not allowed to be moving money in between the different buckets, so to speak. And that's all governed
217by regulations, statute, and the USFR kind of defines what that means. It's really hard to do a conversation about how does school finance work in Arizona? Where does the money come from in less than an hour? And I'm not going to do an hour presentation. But, you know, with this group, we really try to lay out where did most of our funds come from? And most of our funds from an operations standpoint come from the state. About 70% or close to 70% every year of our operating budget really comes from state funding. That can come from taxes. Property taxes is where that comes from, primary property taxes. Or if your district doesn't generate enough revenue through property taxes, the state will kick in. the remaining amount that you are owed based on the funding formula.
218That's called state equalization. That comes from most of the general fund budget from the state. Kyrene is about 50-50. Even though we're a big district, we have a lot of properties, we don't have a lot of industry. And industry typically is a higher tax generator than residential homes. So it doesn't matter. The state is obligated to pay that money to the district regardless if you are property rich or property poor. And so that's where most of our money comes from. We talk about if we want to move the needle, that's where the majority is, where you're happy to get money and look for opportunities to have money from any other area. Federal funds, federal grants make up about 3% of our overall budget. State grants are about 1%, and other cash funds, which include our
219community education program. Tax credits fall into that category. Gifts and donations. Again, we always try to do a lot of internal fundraising, but that's about 14% of all of our revenues. Our M&O override is about 9% of our overall budget. It's a big number. And our capital override is about 5% of our overall budget. So we are very thankful for our community and want them to understand how big those components are for us to be able to operate every year the way we do in Kyrene. So that's every fund, right? So then we try to boil it down to what about the funds that really are operational, the day-to-day cost? And those are the costs, or I'm sorry, the funding that is required really to keep your school district going. And these are not capital
220items, right? This is not about fixing roofs. This is not about replacing furniture. This is not about buildings and projects. This is about all the things it takes to run a school, most of that being people or supports for students. And, you know, again, you can see here about 71 percent of that is from the state funding in our M&O budget. And that's why a lot of school districts spend a lot of time talking about M&O. It's not the only fund that's part of the equation, but it is by far the biggest one. And then you can see out of those operational funds, M&O overrides are about 11 percent. Right. So, again, that's a big part of our budget. It's almost 15 million dollars. And, you know, there's a couple other ones in there, but
221really the point was how important that is to our budget and in the absence of it, how difficult it would be to perform the things that we do at Kyrene every year. I'm not going to go through and bore you with the calculation for how do you compute the M&O override, but it's governed by statute. We talked in the last study session about how you calculate state funding for your maintenance and operations budget. It's sort of similar in determining the M&O override. The revenue control limit that we talked about generating through that funding formula is set at, or I should say is a basis for the M&O override amount, 15% of your revenue control limit. is the max you can have, the little caveat being that it's calculated based on last year's weighted EDM, not
222current year, but it's the same concept. So for our 24-25 current year, we have almost $14.8 million in funding from our M&O override. So the years and what that means is really important to unwrap when you talk about how much funding you receive and What might happen in the years if you decide to wait or what might happen if it's not renewed? And so that's what this table is trying to do. And we had that renewal happen with our voter approval back in November 2021. So year one of that. five-year full funding would have been the 2022-23 school year. And then I've listed the funding amount in the column almost to the furthest right. And then you can see every year, year two, the amount was the 2022-23 year. I'm sorry, the 2023-24 years. It's
223a lot of 20s for this time of the evening. We're currently in year three of the override, and that's the $17.8 million that I just talked about. We're estimating next year to be about 14.5 million dollars based on enrollment changes. That's a factor in determining that. And then we don't really know combinations of enrollment versus state-based funding. So assume the same amount in year five. If you did not renew your M&O override by the end of year five, what starts to happen is you lose a third of your amount. And so for those first five years, you receive 100% funding at that maximum 15% revenue control limit. In year six, if you don't renew, that goes down to two-thirds of that amount, which essentially means you receive almost $4.8 million less in year six. Again,
224if it's not renewed in year seven, you would lose another third. that would be another $4.8 million that you would lose out of your budget, and then finally in year eight it would go to zero. So that's how the mechanisms of funding would work if that's not renewed. And again, we've talked about budget constraints. I mean, these are really big numbers, and so it's important for our communities to understand, you know, the size and the importance of poor, that funding. So earlier I talked about, you know, tax rates and how that works for funding, most of your state-based funding. secondary property taxes are how bonds and overrides are paid for by your community. And so this just gives, you know, we talked about giving information about what are your property tax rates. They're typically stated
225in amounts per $100 of assessed valuation. Everyone has a different assessed value. Probably no one knows what their assessed value is. We're all familiar with market value, right? Assessed value is much less than market value. So, you know, You get a statement every year that talks about what your assessed value is and calculates the property tax. I always encourage people to start there if they're curious about what that really means from a dollar perspective. But these are the rates that are set. We calculate this based on the overall value of property and work with the state and county to set those rates. We never get more money. than what we're supposed to get. So if property values increased, those tax rates would drop. And you can see they've done that over the last five years.
226As our properties in our district typically have appreciated, those rates will drop. So we will never get more money than what that funding calculation is for the M&O overwrite. That's a question that a couple, it's a very good question that a couple of our committee members asked. You know, property values are soaring. Doesn't that mean we get more money? And the answer is no. We get that set at that calculated level. And then talk a little bit about where or why that's important, and then finally where that money is spent. And so what we talked about is in the absence of having your community support and them to override, then we would just be reliant on the state funding. Like we talked about earlier, that's not always a very big number. To put that in
227perspective, Arizona ranks currently... 46 in the country, and you can see historically we've been kind of at that bottom level. We are always happy when our state makes investments in education, but other states are doing the same thing and often at much higher rates. So we always like to point out, too, we talked a little bit about this during the study session. and actually during the board meeting as well, that we do monitor administration costs. We try to keep the money in the classroom. You know, even though we spend, as a state, a very low proportion compared to other states, our state does a really good job of keeping administration costs low and has the lowest per pupil administration amount in the country and has, I could only go back to 2016, but we do
228a great job. for that and Kyrene does have lower amounts that we talked about earlier than both our peer and the state numbers. This just puts it in perspective on what that state funding looks like for Arizona. That's the blue bars on this graph. The orange line is the national average for funding per pupil, all data sources. There's no data manipulation with any of this stuff. I like to show with this, this all comes from the Census Bureau. I think that does about as good a job as I've seen anywhere of comparing apples to apples nationally. The only problem with that data is it's about 18 months behind, so it takes a little bit of time to get that. So that's why it only shows through the 2022 year. I'm hopeful in the fall we'll
229be able to update that. But you can kind of see Arizona didn't always have a tremendous gap or as big of a gap between our funding per student and the rest of the country. That gap really started to widen when we had the Great Recession back around 2008. And so... you can see as the rest of the country kind of rebounded as far as, and there was a decrease as well in the slowing of education spending across the country. But when the rest of the country recovered and started to get back into investing money in education after that recession ended, Arizona lagged that and often didn't accelerate the amounts like other states did. And so we talked a little bit about, well, what does that override do? Does that get us back, you know, per
230pupil? closer to what the national average is. And so there's a little bit of apples and bananas here as far as comparing dates and years and amounts. But just to try to put it in perspective, today in today's enrollment, today's MNO dollars, that's about $834 per student. I know we're comparing back in 2022, but if you added the $834 to the $13,360 for Arizona, That amount would move us from 46 to 43rd, right? So again, we're happy to always have the money, but if people have this idea that it automatically puts us in the top 10 or equal to the national average, that just kind of puts into perspective how far below Arizona typically is with the rest of the country. Same information, but this is just graphing the gap. It's a little easier to
231see how that gap, again, I talked about how it widened after that 2008 year. And we've had some pretty big investments in education in our state. We had the 20 by 2020 statewide initiative. We've done some other things that have put money back in by restoring our district additional assistance capital funding. But you can see. Even in those years, that gap still widened. Right. So it just kind of tells a story about other states value education as well and are making just as much investments every year. And so, you know, I'm hopeful at some point that gap will shrink, but it really in the last several years hasn't. So these are just the amounts for the M&O override. Just to give some perspective, you know, there's a little bit of balance that happens between the
232calculation. Your enrollment declines will typically lower that amount, but it's also based on the current year base level funding. So those two things kind of tend to balance themselves out. So you can see, you know, there was a year in 2021-22 where there was a big dip. That was the year we had a very sizable decrease in enrollment because of... returning back from COVID. But every other year, it's been relatively stable. And again, it's those two factors kind of working on different sides of the equation. Hard to predict going forward, but we know enrollment will naturally lower that number. But we also know there's a formulaic part of the state funding formula that should be raising the amount as well. So then we talked about how the money is used, you know, and for our
233M&O override, we use that to provide additional teaching positions and opportunities for students. That could be hiring more teachers, increasing their pay. Keeping class sizes low, you know, we've talked a little bit about that, but that M&O override does help us to do that in our lower grades. It provides more opportunities for more teachers in special areas and electives, areas like that, and also more support student services because we have students that are providing services for classroom, non-classroom, and also special education areas as well. So when you talk about 200 teaching positions, you know, we had a couple slides that tries to put that into perspective. And again, the math would not work this way if we didn't have an M&O override. We were trying to say, you know, we have 25 school sites, and
234if we didn't have that M&O override, that would average eight fewer teaching positions than what we have today. And again, that's not how it worked, but just to put it in context, we have, I believe it's 30 teaching positions on average at an elementary school and about 40 at a middle school. That's a big change potentially for either of those schools. And so we just wanted to make sure people understood how important that is for teachers. And so I tried to graph how many teaching positions are funded without. the M&O override. That's what's in these orange lines. And then the blue, orange bars, I should say, and the blue bars represent how many positions, and it's about 200, that are funded from those M&O dollars. So it makes a big, big impact. So we've talked
235a little bit about class sizes. This is not a graph that shows class sizes. I just want to make sure that's very clear. And I said it to the committee several times, you know, because this just is trying to get some context again about what those extra 200 teachers mean from a student to teacher impact. Our auditor general does a metric. We're not trying to do the same metric that they are. So these numbers will be a little bit different if you went on that. website and that's okay, but we're just trying to help people understand without that override, you can see there would be about 20 students per teacher and we're able to have that student have more involvement with more teachers basically, right? But again, these are not class ranges. These are not
236class size ratios. These are just all teachers in our district versus the number of students that we have. And then we were fortunate to have Randy Stein join us for that presentation. Randy works for Stiefel Nicholas, who's our underwriter. Randy does a lot of work with school districts on elections, and she assists both with voter pamphlets and also she monitors a lot of things that happen across the state. And before we got into some of the details, we talked a little bit about costs. And, you know, there's always questions about does it matter when you go out? How does that work? School districts have to pay for election costs out of their budget. And during an odd year, it's a mail-in only, and it's more expensive to do an election during an odd year. Last
237time we did that, it was $2.12 per voter. That's the biggest cost that you pay is from Maricopa County. They only charged $0.50 in the 2024 even year elections. The reason being they're staffed to run an election in the even years. They're not necessarily staffed in the odd years. That's why they charge you a little bit more. We have this covered in our budget, regardless if it's an even or odd year. We budget for the entirety of an odd year election. And then if we're not going out for an election that year or if it's an even year, we wind up keeping that money in a contingency for that year and we can spend it in a different way. So I wanted to make sure the board and our committee knew that. If we're not
238trying to make a decision, don't try to make a decision based on, well, you have more money or less money if you go out on an odd and even year. It's less about that because we've adequately budgeted for election costs. And then if another district or municipality decides to go out on the ballot during that odd year, then you split the cost with them. So it's unclear right now if Tempe L or Tempe Union or the city of Tempe or the city of Chandler would go out, but they have before, and sometimes that cost gets shared. So these were the slides that Randy spoke about. I'm not going to go through all of those. There's a lot of slides. I'm happy to pause or go back if there's any specific questions. But this was really
239just kind of a synopsis of what the current state across Arizona looks like for districts that have M&O overrides. So there's 89 districts that currently have them. And there's 29 districts that have a DAA or a capital override. And then we just talked about factors that... go into whether they get passed, odd years, even years, is it a renewal, is it new money, is it an increase? You know, at the end of the day, there's lots of data out there, but it all comes down to who your community is and what they typically, how they view those different areas. So this was an overview of 2024 statewide elections. So again, just giving some context of what the percent pass rates were. Generally, you can see there was more support for the M&O override. It had
240a pass percentage of 80%, whereas bonds last year had less than 50% passage, right? So, again, it's just context. It's information about voter trends, patterns across our state. This was a slide that talked a little bit about does it matter on an even year or an odd year? And you can see there may not be a whole lot of major differences between that when you look at overrides, whether they be imminent overrides, capital overrides, or bonds. And then the lower section of this table talks about five-year bans. So is there a trend? Do you see something happening? There's a lot of data here, I realize, but that's what the committee talked about. they had that as information to help answer their questions about does it benefit or not benefit you to go out on an
241even year? Has the trend been more supportive or less supportive towards bonds and overrides and those kind of questions? This is statewide M&O election history going back to 2003. The number of M&O overrides that were proposed versus the past number and the past rate. So again, you can see there are periods of times. Very, very high pass rates, sometimes very, very low pass rates. Most of the time that was correlated to some general economic conditions going on in the country or the state. But again, there are trends and there are times that you may see more success or less success. And this is a statewide number. This broke down the M&O results for this past November 2024 election. There were 30 districts that were out this past year. And she tried to break that down
242into whether they were new initiatives, whether they were increased amounts, whether people went out early or whether it was just a continuation. So, again, just, you know, the takeaway was. It's much easier for school districts to continue something that the voters have supported rather than to go out for something brand new. And that's what the data kind of shows as well as this. This is the same information, but it just goes back for four years. And again, broken down into what was it, a new initiative? Was it continuing? Did they go out early or was it the ask for an increased amount? So when you sum up all this. You know, there are some trends, and that's what Randy talked about, the pass rate being around 70% beginning in 2016 for M&O. But again, it
243really depends on who your district and who your voters are. It has been harder to pass elections in recent years for school districts. And, you know, that's just a reality of what you face when you go out for an election. You could see during the years of COVID, you know, sometimes that factored into this, sometimes it didn't. But her last point on the bottom right is regardless of trends or years or economic conditions, it's generally easier to retain and continue a bond or an override than it is to start from scratch. These are Kyrene's numbers and show over time, both for M&O overrides, DAA, excuse me, or capital overrides and bonds, what those pass rates have been. You can see Kyrene's passed every election during this time period except for one year in November of
2442020 when we just were under the threshold for the DEA and your capital overriding. You can also see, too, that the results in November 2023 were a lot lower than previous years. So it's something we have to consider. So that's a lot of information really fast. I want to thank Greg Larson for being here tonight. Greg's one of the committee members. And, you know, we kind of asked if anyone would be so kind to volunteer to come up and speak. Thanks. And thanks for sticking it out tonight, Greg. You know, I would really like for him to speak about the process. You know, we have two board members who. And we're there for most of these conversations too, but it's also nice to hear from the citizens who, you know, volunteer their time to be
245there. So I like Ray to talk about his experience, how they got the consensus. I'm going to leave a slide up that had the recommendation. Once he's finished kind of speaking to that, I'm happy and available to answer any questions that the board might have. Thank you. My name is Greg Larson. To the superintendent, to the president, to the members of the board, thank you for listening and for hearing me out here. I have two children who are Kyrene students, and I'm here representing the Long Range Planning Committee this evening. I'm mindful of the time of day. I will focus what I'm going to say on the dynamics of the Long Range Planning Committee group and how we reached a consensus to recommend to the board to continue the M&O override. We met in March
246from the meeting was scheduled to meet from 4 to 7 p.m. The committee is about 50 people. It was well attended. The committee room, we meet upstairs here in this building. And the room is situated such that there are about 10 tables, nine or 10 tables. And there are about five or six committee members at each table. And there's a presentation to the entire committee that is similar in detail to the slides that have been shown here tonight as I've seen them. And then the committee has an opportunity to sort of break out amongst their own tables to discuss the data, discuss the information that they received and that was presented, and identify areas of consensus and areas of concern or try to find some things that we agree on and things that we're concerned
247about. Some of the major concerns that we saw, let me take one step back. During those breakout sessions, each group would write down the items of agreement and write down the items of concern on a big sheet of paper. And then we took those paper and put them on the wall and had an opportunity for all the committee members to roam the room. and to look at the things of matters of agreement, matters of concern. Some of the main issues of concern that were consistent amongst the groups included information about what is an M&O override and how do members of the public generally receive that kind of thing. Is it a tax increase? Because if so, whoa, what is that? But it's really not. And so the question that that series of concerns rose was
248or the consensus was this is not a tax increase. This is simply a continuation of something that has been in existence for several years. And another area of concern was voter fatigue. And those two issues kind of play hand in hand. Then the group was tasked with a. consensus strategy, a five-layer consensus strategy, or a rating of five. So if you were strongly agree with the... M&O override continuation, you would be a five. If you disagree completely, you would be a one. And then each of the groups broke out, gathered what their individual ratings and sort of votes were, and then presented them to the group as a whole. And at the end of all of the gathering of votes and positions, it was really very overwhelmingly support and approve and recommend the M&O override
249continuation. There was a vast, strong majority of... votes of five. There was maybe one, two, maybe a couple threes, just a few fours. Overwhelmingly, it was a very strong recommendation from the Long Range Planning Committee to the Board of Governors to continue the M&O override. I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone might have about the decision-making process and how the committee achieved consensus. But otherwise, thank you for hearing me. Thank you for being here, Mr. Larson. We know it's late, and we appreciate your time, not just on the committee, but here with us this evening. No problem. Board members, any comments or questions? Member Seyfried. Yes, thank you, Mr. Larson, for being here tonight. I am on the Long-Term Planning Committee, so I already know the answer, but I just wanted to ask this.
250Those decisions also included which year to go out for an M&O override, right? Correct. Yes. And this year, one of the topics of conversation was, do we recommend early? And it was a resounding yes. Any other questions? Yes, Mr. Herman. Clarification on that. Part of the consideration about going early, again, is you lose that. funding over that five-year period, right, to go out in year four. But you also aren't penalized if for some reason you don't pass. You still have the opportunity to go back for a year. And that's why it's fairly common for school districts to do that, because you give yourself the opportunity to go out twice if that's necessary. And we certainly hope that's never the case, but that is one of the strategies of deferring that fifth year in order to
251look for a successful pass. We talked a little bit about sometimes it's easier to get your message out on, and Mr. Walsh talked about voter fatigue, right? It's easier to get your message out sometimes when you have a front sheet, back sheet, maybe a third sheet of things to vote on. And so sometimes it's a little easier for that. And so that was another consideration. But it would definitely be the November 22nd. Board members, we're not voting on this item tonight as our practice. This is just an opportunity to ask questions and hear the recommendation from the committee. We're going to have a special regularly scheduled meeting next week, a week from today on Zoom to vote on whether or not to accept the committee's recommendation, but no action is being taken tonight. And Mr.
252Herman, just thank you, as you did in the presentation, for recognizing our voters' support on our bonds and overrides and how critically important it is. So appreciate the time of you and the committee members. Thank you. All right, board. Item 9.1, convene into executive session. I will make a motion to convene into executive session. Is there a second to the motion? Second. Second by Vice President Nelson. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes 5-0. We'll now convene into executive session. Item 9.3, can someone please make a motion to conclude executive session? Motion to conclude. I have a motion by Vice President Nelson. Is there a second? Second. Second by Member Satri. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes 5-0. Our executive session is concluded at 10.19
253p.m. Item 10.1 is reconvene regular meeting. Our regular meeting is reconvened at 10.19 p.m. Item 10.2 is purchasing authorization. Award of contract RFP K250630. Anonymous reporting system. Board members, as you'll recall, this was on our agenda at our last meeting. The information for the contract is included on board docs. Do any board members have additional questions or comments on this item? Seeing none, would someone like to make a motion to approve the award of the contract for anonymous reporting system? So moved. I have a motion by Member Davis. Is there a second to her motion? Second. Second by Member Collins. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes 5-0. Item 10.3, authorization to execute reminder of legal obligations under Title VI. So, Board members, as you know, the Arizona Department
254of Education, at the direction of the U.S. Department of Education, is requiring school districts to sign a reminder of legal obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The document is a certification that Kyrene is compliant with federal anti-discrimination laws. Specifically, the document states that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs must not be used to advantage one's race over another. This requested certification aligns with the Kyrene promise to create welcome and inclusive learning environments in which every student is honored, valued, and feels a strong sense of belonging and purpose. Kyrene's commitment to anti-discriminatory practice is also addressed in our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policy 1204, which states, This educational and workplace policy establishes that each student, family, employee and stakeholder should have a sense of belonging within our district without bias or discrimination. With that
255in mind, I would like to make the following motion. Recognizing that certain terms used in the certification form, such as, quote, illegal DEI, end quote, are undefined, and thus this district is unable to attest compliance with such. The district can provide assurance that it does have policies and procedures in place that ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including our diversity, equity, and inclusion policy, and our social, emotional, learning, and wellness policy. Therefore, I move to authorize both Superintendent Tenius and Legal Counsel Jordan Allel to sign the reminder of legal obligations undertaken in exchange for receiving federal financial assistance and requests for certification under Title VI and SFFA v. Harvard, as required by the Arizona Department of Education to acknowledge receipt and review of the document. Do I have a
256second to the motion? Second. I have a second by Vice President Nelson. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion passes 5-0. Item 11.1 is Board, Committee, and Conference Reports. Do any board members wish to make reports on committee or conference activity? Seeing none, item for future consideration, item 12.1. Do any board members wish to list items for future consideration? Item 13.1 is meeting dates. Our next regular meeting is scheduled for May 13th, 2025. There is a long-range planning committee tomorrow night, April 23rd, that Member Satri and Vice President Nelson will be participating in. And then reminder that we do have a special meeting on April 29th, which will be virtual, to address the M&O override recommendation from our long-range planning committee. Item 14-1, adjournment. Would someone like to make a
257motion to adjourn the meeting? Motion. A motion by Member Satri. Is there a second? Second. Second by Member Davis. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes 5-0. We are adjourned at 1024 p.m.