001foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] all those in favor Brian aye Michael hi Paul hi I am also and I sure that it approved unanimously administrative reports Las Brisas Academy school report Miss Schaefer president acquire Dr Chef members of the board were so excited to share all of the amazing things happening at Las Brisas this year I have our assistant principal Miss Malley with us tonight and our instructional coach Miss Benson as well as one of our teachers and some of our amazing students who will present at the end but we're going to save the best for last so we're going to talk first and the kids are going to go at the end um so our vision and Mission is something we got brought back to this summer when we worked with
002our teacher leaders and we refined it a little bit just to make sure it matched who we were as a school and what we all collectively believed in so I'll give you just a second to look through our vision and Mission and then I'm going to talk about how it connects to the work we're doing this year okay right there you also see the world word Elevate and that is the word and the theme we've chosen this year for our staff and then to pass on to our students because we are doing these things that are in our vision and vision and Mission each day um we're just going to elevate it we're going to be bringing them to a higher position and making all the things we do even more impressive than we already
003were we chose Elevate because it means that there's already something there we already know we have an incredible teaching staff incredible students incredible families and we just wanted to tighten up some things to make sure that we're meeting that mission and vision even tighter really focusing on the collaborative relationships the lifelong Learners and the creativity of our students and you see pictures of all of our teachers the top left is our teacher Leadership Retreat which we had one of two sessions over the summer um with our teachers the top right is our new teacher orientation and then the bottom was all of our staff right after we had the welcome off um and I included them because we can't do this work with without our incredible teachers I know we have a dynamite teaching staff
004who is you know absolutely committed to this mission and vision and who is elevating what they do for kids every single day so with that I'm going to pass this off to Miss Benson who's going to share a little bit about what we're elevating here we go so we chose these areas to focus on to elevate this year we chose these different areas for a few different reasons we looked at teacher data parent survey data research so we took all of that and decided these were going to be our Focus areas so you just saw some pictures from teacher leadership so one of the ways that we're elevating our teacher leaders this year is we had our district teacher leader kickoff that was amazing over the summer and then we follow it up at our
005site to just continue that work and continue that momentum we're also meeting uh continuously at school and just really focusing on how can we Empower our teachers to be leaders on the campus and lead not only their grade level but other teachers on the campus that are focused on perhaps like the same content area as them we're also focusing on our professional learning communities and elevating those plcs to get to the next stage of our plcs which is really focusing on data and that's another way that we're empowering our teachers let's look at the student data let's look at it consistently and Empower our teachers to make instructional decisions based off the data that they have from their students and then of course we focused on instructional alignment that oftentimes gets overlooked right alignment sometimes
006people think of it as are we following the curriculum and are we teaching the standards but alignment can be so much more than that so it's really digging in deeper to are we aligning every piece of information we're putting in front of those kids um to connect to the learning Target for that day are we aligning our teacher responses to the students are we staying on track with our activities and our questions to make sure that everything is lining up to make sure the information is as clear as possible for them uh we are also elevating our student engagement and our ownership we're having the kids really track their own data and take ownership over all right this is where I'm currently at what am I going to do to get to the next step
007and one of theater um um plays that we do we also have our community outreach maybe I won't say Outreach or community events like our cookies and thank you cookies and conversations um which we're having as a result of our parent surveys um so just doing some work there to really bring our community together now on this slide you see at the very top we have our goals and again you see those plc's professional learning communities so that's the same goal that I just talked about elevating to the next stage and we really believe that by focusing on that goal and reaching that goal is going to impact these other three areas so by reaching that PLC goal we're going to get 70 of our students to at or near Mastery for the fractions domain
008in math we're going to get 75 percent of our students at Ernie or Mastery for the reading for information on that state assessment and then that last one time in learning so time and learning is a goal that's centered around attendance so not only are we working on increasing our attendance and reducing the number of students who aren't in class were one of the things we're doing is also looking at decreasing our number of students who are out of school or in school suspension so supporting teachers with how can we support these students in the classroom so they can stay in the classroom social emotional support and things like that all right let me hand it over to Megan to go a little deeper all right so we talked a little bit about what we're
009elevating as far as like our professional learning communities and things like that so we're specifically looking at our teacher leadership which we mentioned a little bit about the summer program that we had we had two summer sessions with our teacher leaders where we really focused on ways to support them and how they can help in their plcs we've also done peer observations with our teacher leaders they were able to go and do math observations and see our new um the ladc structure and provide feedback which led to really great conversations on ways they can do the vertical alignment um instructional alignment we have just like Melinda talked about we're focusing not on only the curriculum but on how we can dig a little bit deeper for our alignment are they are the questions aligned are
010we providing correct responses those parts of things um student engagement and ownership we've created a Student Success team with different teachers and our counselors we're really focusing on our tier one instruction how are we making sure that students are in class learning how are we making sure structures are school-wide so that all students can find success and then for our community events we have our Fine Arts night where our Champs teachers put on a really great performance and highlighted some of the really great programs that they are doing in the classrooms and our Dia de los Muertos which are going to be able to see some of our friendas in a little bit which highlights our signature program and um sign of the Performing Arts piece at a combined both there we go so we
011talked about meeting our alignment goal which was a huge goal that we really focused on through all of our professional developments this trimester and we were super excited through our walkthroughs and um you know observations that we had our teachers were fantastic at their alignment they blew our goal out of the park and so one way that we wanted to celebrate them was through our alignment cart um so we brought around treats for them that were all in lines or mints and then we were able to have our students celebrate them as well which you'll see in this video foreign [Music] yes so as we were walking around with the cart the teacher or the students were just so excited that we were celebrating their teachers they came out of their classrooms and started chanting
012along um and then that led through and our entire building which is great because it echoes so all of the kids were just so excited to you know see what was going on and cheer on their teachers um okay we are blessed with two signature programs at Las Brisas because we like to have double the fun and double the learning um so our first program is our dual language immersion and we just celebrated with our Dia de los Muertos presentation we have one of our wonderful dual language teachers on Senora Lopez who will come up in just a minute tonight we are really moving this also into not only the instruction that's happening and the culture um you know knowledge and building that's happening but also the connection to the Arts which is our second
013program which um this year we're just absolutely taking to the next level we're looking at how we're making a school our school somewhere where you walk in and know that we are in art school we're elevating that the students artwork is connected to the work they're doing and we're going to be starting an Arts committee where we're working with the Arts institutions downtown that we have access to to also be elevating the work we're doing so that's some exciting things that are coming there and with that to share some of their Arts that are connected to the Dual language program Senor Lopez would you like to come up with your students you ready kids this is the fun part come on up all right we got a step stool for you or do you want
014to come up in front I don't know why don't you come up here come on up here one two there's four all right Mr Daxton will you share what your afrenda is um who it is honoring so this is honoring my great um grandma she was my grandpa's mom and she was very kind according to my mom you can stay up here because we're gonna talk to you guys you ready who are you honoring um my uncle and basically honoring my mom's brother who are you wondering I am honoring my great my great grandpa thank you I am honoring my um my uncle what is it like to get to make these in class and get to talk about these with the rest of your class what's it feel um a little nerve-wracking but also
015fun nerve-wracking at night or nerve-wracking in front of your friends both both here let's have we have one more to share will you share here [Music] um like who would I make it for her I'm I made this for my grandpa that passed away so this is just like about my grandpa and what he did for a job and stuff and I see you all wrote in Spanish about them on the front was that hard no how did you do that you had it on a paper and we were just copying off I didn't know that one what do you love about um language programs very nice and it's good to learn another language other than one because you can understand more people function s because most of the um people don't get to understand
016so like let's say that someone speaks Spanish and you only speak English and you and another person speaks English and Spanish they can communicate um it's like when like somebody doesn't know something in Spanish and the other person does know like you can like help them out um one time I met somebody that speaks Spanish and I didn't understand anything they said so I went into dual language and these are second graders so let's give them a round of applause thank you guys um should we ask them if they have questions for you do you all have any questions for them Brian I would say that's amazing work there's two words that come to mind the Artistry and honesty thank you so much Miss Bixler yes I also want to thank those students for being
017here and taking on the task of presenting before a board item I know how uh nerve-wracking that can be and good job uh you students have done an excellent job as far as that I also had a chance to see that presentation and the uh the work done by those students and they were very very impressive excellent job out there at Las Brisas congratulations thank you Michael no he's unfrozen now ask him again Michael hello hello can you hear me what language was that Mr Todd we didn't catch your question do you mind re-asking it I'm sorry hear me now yes oh great I just want to thank the students uh they've done a great job one of the highlight of our board meetings is seeing the success of our students and uh kept up
018and done a great job so thank you students um I do have one question a couple times you mentioned about keeping students in class was one of your goals and I'm just curious a little bit about how you're doing that as far as what which what are you changing or what are you doing differently to keep the kids in class and keep your time and learning goals up absolutely so um if there's ever a time a student needs to be removed we we do remove them we're not saying at you know every second of the day they need to be in class we know there's discipline issues that they do need to be removed so I just want to um I don't think I was clear about that in the beginning um but when to
019in order to keep them in there we're working with our counselor and our Student Success team who's a group of teachers to implement strategies for our teachers to implement them in the classroom so we know that social emotional learning is more than just do I know how to get along or can I talk about my feelings it's also all those soft skills of how to disagree appropriately how to make friends how to ask to play and so all of that shows up on the playground right yeah and if our kids that's where we saw the highest level of our suspensions happening was after a playground incident um so we're trying to keep our students are supporting them and agreeing more on the playground having those supports and lessons on how to get along so that
020they're not choosing to act in aggressive behaviors that then require office referrals that then require suspensions so that is anything from we have some people in or some kids in different boys and girls groups or we're working on those skills we have individual levels some of them work with myself or Miss Mally as a group or in a check-in checkout system and then all the teachers also work on implementing it in the classroom too so it kind of depends on the student need the grade but those are the strategies we implement it just looks different depending on the child thank you and just to clarify I did not at all take from you that you were not removing students okay just want to make sure like we're not if they're fighting we're not leaving them
021in the room for that I just want to clarify for everybody okay a little bit more details so thank you so much so were you all nervous yes it wasn't that bad though right no wasn't that scary all right you did it in class all right just right you guys did an excellent job and thank you so much for sharing parts of your family with us so thank you very very much [Applause] guys question for them no you're good okay thank you guys you can go sit down and a huge shout out to Senor Lopez who's here who guided these amazing second graders into making these and presenting them and writing their amazing essays um so thank you for that any other questions for me or the team I already lost the clicker so here
022it is okay thank you Miss Shaffer yes sir uh president here we do have yes a quick question I I appreciate the goal you have I said be your staff has set before themselves not I absolutely agree with them the the one that that you have that interests me is the increase in student engagement in their learning clearly the uh uh was a good example of that could you share with us some other examples of how you're you're increasing student engagement learning yeah one of the probably most simple way is our students are tracking um their own data I was I thought I was looking at him now I'm looking at myself all right I'm gonna move um they are tracking their own data and so um for example we walked in Miss camp and
023I were doing walkthroughs and we asked a kid hey how are you doing on this objective he whips out his data folder he's like let me tell you and he pulls out all these papers he's like well I'm proficient proficient proficient so I'm proficient on this objective he attracted in his folder and so by doing that the teachers will set goals at the beginning of the unit and or the beginning of the standard and then the kids set their own goals and then as they're going the students are putting their own data in which then motivates them to want to achieve better you know ask more questions when they're stuck and so that's probably the simplest strategy we're doing and then we're also trying to infuse fun things throughout the day that are also motivational
024to learning so we're doing on Thursday or trimester awards ceremony we're also going to be planning some pep rallies before the assessments just to get kids excited to show off their big brains thank you president I'm sorry about misspeaking your last name but I terrific idea I like the idea of the students holding themselves accountable terrific thank you anything else thank you item 2.2 trust attorney administrator report Dr chef president acquire members of the board the governing board requested some additional information on our District's involvement with the trust the expenses around those things and overall what that provides so the trust essentially provides our umbrella Insurance that's their primary aspect that they provide and then we also receive pooled support for um but legal services so in here in executive summary is some background information
025around those questions and I just stand ready to discuss or ask any answer any additional questions Mr Parks uh thank you Dr Chef um I was the one that brought this forward because it was it was confusing to me and I kind of wanted to bring it up to the parents and the taxpayers because it's a big ticket item uh for the district and I just wanted to make sure everybody understood what it was going for the liability in the caps and what we what what we pay for is actually it's a pretty good deal you know compared to what we see out in the private Marketplace and it protects the school from uh you know from obviously lawsuits and um I was just having difficulty because it covers a lot of expenses here at
026the district and I didn't understand as a board member how many things it really does coverage so it's a great program I'm glad we can participate in it thank you for your research you're welcome Miss Bixler I have no questions Mr aguar Mr Todd um my only question and I just I want to make sure everybody understands we do pay for these services and it looks like our rates have gone up considerably over the years some of that is because we took out covert coverage but if we look at um the last the last table my understanding is that's our legal our number of claims has gone up considerably the Board needs to take a look at that and identify why the claims since since 2009 to do 1020. the two have gone uh 28
027to 111. if I'm understanding that table correctly um so I can provide some background on that you would expect to see the number of incidents increase because our enrollment has increased so in the last four to five years we've increased enrollment by you know nearly 25 percent so you would expect to see that number perhaps keep Pace with our overall enrollment percentage of increase also with a change in leadership on the governing board with additional questions on board policy changes are this governing board has made we have had a number of additional incidents this year that would be not necessarily claims they aren't legal claims against the district however they are requests for Legal Services by made by the district foreign export report perhaps give a listing of 111 times that Gus Rosenfeld has provided
028services so we know what those are I'm not aware of 111 times we've asked for it but sure um yeah obviously I just like right you'll see in the executive summary The increased costs were due to policy guidance for board meetings the board organization meeting board policy revisions complaints by board members to the attorney general engagement of the attorney to attend some of our board meetings public records requests review of legal contracts or agreements as well as we did have some a couple of atypical employee or student-related manners that were more extensive than they had been in Prior years so basically I'm not hearing Michael so what this comes down to I guess what I'm seeing is anytime a public records request is issued we have to get legal involved to make sure that we
029did everything correctly basically what it comes down to is anything that we have to do to make sure that we are legal we're calling the attorney whether it's public records request whether it's them needing to attend a board meeting uh to answer more questions um what are some of the others calling the attorney having to deal with the attorney general what organization meetings all of those things are costing the district a little bit well the rates are going higher for the following year correct it's based on prepaid but we're not we're not feeling the pain this year but realistically we're going to feel the pain next you're kind of like one wood on their car insurance exactly yes it will it will hit another example this year um we there were a number of legislative
030um changes so um that's a number of policy revisions so we'll see more things where the Attorney Services will review our policy changes for the first and second readings we did one big batch of them we'll have another big batch of them coming up so those are some examples that are in this current year and there were some of those as well last year foreign thank you Dr chef is there any other discussion on this topic Miss Bixler president McGuire I have no other questions Mr Todd Brian another question I have no other questions item 2.3 school report card administrative report Mrs Camp I was debating if I was getting on the stool tonight um governing board president members of the governing board in person and online it's my pleasure to present to you tonight
031an overview of our state a through F letter grade accountability system um I am going to present and further explain for you how letter grades are determined for each of our schools so a through F letter grades are assigned up to a maximum of a hundred points and the letter grades are determined by the range of points earned as stated in this slide so you'll see that 100 points to 84 and about a half um is an A and so on and so on and so on the K8 model is built on the following categories so 30 points or 30 percent is proficiency 50 points or 50 percent is growth acceleration and Readiness make up ten percent and El proficiency makes up the final 10 percent I'm going to dig into each of these categories
032uh throughout the presentation and we will start with proficiency first which makes up to 30 percent so there are two ways that you can earn proficiency points or percentages these proficiency points are determined by a student's proficiency level there are four performance levels on aasa minimally proficient which is level one partially proficient level two proficient level three and highly proficient level four each of the performance levels earn the following points minimally proficient students earn zero points partially proficient six tenths of a point proficient one point and then highly proficient 1.3 the proficiency points can also be determined by what is called stability proficiency this measurement takes into con into account students that have been in the same school for multiple years and their proficiency performance the purpose of this measure is to reward students for
033longevity and their performance with that longevity so again depending on which is higher that will be awarded to the school if your proficiency um if your proficiency points are higher or your State uh stability proficiency is higher they will take the higher of the two um I'm happy yes so are you telling me that these letter grades are not just based off of if a child's learning but if they've been in a school for a long period of time and maybe aren't learning as quickly as someone who just came in a year so a child who's been in that school for one year who scored higher on proficiency that is not weighted as high as a child who's been in the school for four years but didn't score as high on a proficiency test that's
034the way that the state looks at this um so let me let me just clarify and I'm gonna look over here to Dr Sloat who might have to save me um so two ways you can get 30 percent of your proficiency and they will calculate it based on the number of children in a particular category so let me see if I can give you the formula number of students falling in a particular category is multiplied by the points distribution right so let's say we have 200 students falling into highly proficient they're going to multiply that by 1.3 and they're going to divide it by the total number of students tested that's going to give you a percentage right they'll do that for all of your students that score in those levels no points for anyone
035who scores in minimally proficient they will do the same thing for your proficiency stability so what they're looking what what they're trying to do is equitably say do you have proficiency points and do you have proficiency stability which means you have students who stay with you longer and are performing better if you do you get more points for that I am happy to report six out of our seven schools earned more points in stability that means that children who stay with us longer perform better okay that's a good thing for us okay growth points 50 points for growth so this is a graph that's just going to show you what I'm going to try to describe the growth calculation starts by grouping everyone with the same score from the prior year in the state of
036Arizona like a cluster or a cohort you and I score 25 on aasa we're in the same cluster for that group of students the state then looks at the current year end of end of school score this produces a range of growth so we all started here and then we spread out so this produces a range of growth across a particular cluster or cohort the range of growth is then determined as low growth average growth or high growth every cluster of students for every single score on the aasa will have a range of growth so what does that mean points are determined for student growth percentile as follows if a student had prior year high proficiency so now I'm I'm up here in this quadrant right prior your high proficiency and low growth this current
037year zero points okay if a student was highly proficient last year and had average growth within their cluster one point if a student had or excuse me was highly proficient last year and had high growth this year one point what is what is important to know and the reason I want to talk about highly proficient students is even if a student is highly proficient last year and they go into this cohort and they they fan the growth someone will be low growth someone will be medium and someone will be high in all categories in essence this model says kids that come into the school year with the lowest achievement will get more points if we can boost their academic growth the most so take a look at the minimally proficient students the minimally proficient students
038last year if they get average or high growth they will score you the most growth points El is another category El proficiency is determined by the number of el students who score in comparison to the state average of reclassification percentage so if your reclassification percentage is higher than the state average your school can earn up to five points for that El proficiency is also determined by movement within the El categories from one level to another and five points are awarded for that as well so for example if a student moves from pre-emergent to proficient they can earn up to three points okay we get more points for the more levels that we move an El student it's also important to note that your El students earn you proficiency El growth proficiency and overall growth they
039hit you three times so we really want to focus on our El students because they can earn us a lot of points right um I think that's all I had on that one okay acceleration and readiness the amount of points that a school can earn for acceleration and Readiness is only 10 points but there are way more than 10 points so you you you can get okay but a school is limited to only 10 points lots of different ways you can get those 10 points first way you can get the 10 points is the 8th grade math performance the intent of this metric is to incentivize schools to increase their percent of Highly proficient and decrease their percent of minimally proficient 8th graders from the prior year right so we want to get more kids
040in highly proficient we've got less kids in in minimally proficient you get points for that up to Five Points El minimally proficient third graders reducing the El minimally proficient third grade students from one year to the next or the current year uh percent minimally proficient is less than 12 percent this is tied directly to the move on when reading Law okay so again we want less children and minimally proficient in third grade and if we have less children and minimally proficient five points are awarded for that chronic absenteeism is another way of earning acceleration and Readiness points reducing the percent of chronic absenteeism from one ear to the next or having an overall percentage of less than four percent students identified as chronic absenteeism so let me tell you what a student who's identified as
041chronic absenteeism is any student who's missing more than 10 days in a school year is identified as chronically absent now if a student is chronically ill totally different right let's say we have a child who um who is a a cancer patient and they they have to miss a lot of school right and because of their treatments they identify as chronically ill they're filling out medical paperwork for that and we those children are identified and they are removed from this calculation subgroup Improvement also worth six points for this Improvement bless you for this Improvement um it's it's really just subgroup improvement from one year to the next and the subgroup um that we're looking at white hispanic Native American Alaskan Indian Asian African-American Pacific Islander two or more races so those are the subgroups um
042that the state will pull and see if we are if our subgroups are more proficient than they were in years prior and then finally another way of acceleration Readiness points being earned is special education inclusion the intent of this metric is to reward schools that have greater than the state average of special education students in the general education classroom for at least 80 percent of the day and you can earn up to two points for that okay there are also bonus points you can earn a total of three that's not true yes you can earn a total of three bonus points I lied again nope there's more than that it's five five bonus points um and this is um this is indicated by special education program enrollment so this is a little bit of a
043protection for schools that have special education programs self-contained on their campus right those those schools should not be penalized for having self-contained programs on their campus so it says schools with high populations of Fay full Academic Year students enrolled in special education will earn bonus points a school's current Fay special education program enrollment percentage if it is greater than 80 percent of the Statewide percentage percentage excuse me two points if it is less than zero points and then science proficiency so science proficiency is awarded to schools up to three points for a science science achievement of your full academic students in the year if a school's current year percentage of proficient students in science is greater than one standard deviation above the Statewide average you can earn up to three points if it is greater
044than the state average and less than one standard deviation above the average 1.5 points just so you know I don't figure out the standard deviation but we do have people to help us with that and the state um obviously has all of these formulas so you're wondering what does that look like for us so I want to start with blue Horizons because they are a little bit tricky this year they are a brand new school they do not have prior year performance so when we talked about the stability question just a moment ago the blue Horizons campus can only get stability points for one year they cannot get two-year they cannot get three-year right the other thing that's important to notice about blue Horizons is last year they had K5 so the only students who
045provide proficiency points for blue Horizons are fourth graders and fifth graders that is why the state will not provide them with a letter grade for their first year right so they they kind of get this just first year is not reported and then next year they will get their letter grade so going across a couple of things just to highlight the proficiency points that's in the one two three third column there again you can get 30 points for proficiency and you'll see that some of our schools have a really high level of proficiency Australia is sitting at 20 points for proficiency followed by Estrella Mountain 19 followed by Las Brisas 16 and so on this really does follow our our trend of socioeconomic status in in our schools if you look at the growth points
046we had tremendous amount of growth at our schools can only get 50 points Australia coming in at 47 out of the 50. and uh Rainbow Valley 43 Las Brisas 43 West Star 42 um Liberty 39 and freedom 38 so a great a really great push in growth and I'm going to talk about that in just a little bit El points I think this is an area of opportunity so when I look up here um I really think we should be getting all 10 of our El points if we have enough El students notice that Estrellas is blank they do not have at least 10 El students so if you don't have at least 10 students that that particular category is not weighed against you acceleration and Readiness again I think this is an opportunity we
047should be getting all 10 points I don't care how we get them right that that should be something that we really focus on and and get all 10 of those points you'll then see total points earned and then your added bonus points so all of our schools received at least one of the bonus points most of them received the two bonus points for special education inclusion and then Australia and uh Westar also received 1.5 additional bonus points for their science proficiency and so finally in between the bonus points and the percentage earned you will see points are calculated out of a hundred except Australia is not because they don't have at least 10 El students Fay full Academic Year so they divide their score by 90. okay and what that flushes out to be is
048that uh both Estrella and Westar are in the a category Las Brisas at 81 falls into the B category uh Rainbow Valley 71.8 really close almost into the B category there um Liberty is at 65 and freedom is at 69. and this is how our letter grades distributed this school year and I stand ready for any questions that you might have complicated but I but I took notes okay good so um the testing it's a explain how the testing is done to come up with these numbers if you would like there's obviously we're being tested somewhere the kids are being tested for this could you explain it sure so every spring in the month of April and we have a window in the month of April the students take the aasa in English language arts
049and in math and if they are in fifth grade and eighth grade they take the Science assessment and so those tests are administered online in a secure State portal and um as soon as we hit submit the state has the student test I I followed some of the the logic through this as I was writing my notes here and you know one concern I have if I have of any through this is are we teaching to the test here I mean do you know where I'm going I mean um we can get caught up real fast and going okay well we need a better grade so we need to move stuff around I mean what are we doing I mean are we worried about that I mean where obviously we're worried about letter grades but
050I mean how's that really affecting the district sure so I I would say that a letter grade does not define a school so it is a point of data for that particular school but the culture and the climate and the teachers and the experience um that students receive on a daily basis that's really what defines a school do we want student achievement to increase every year absolutely but it it is it is one point in time the students take that one assessment in April each year perfect thank you you're welcome Michael thank you Mr chairman um I really have no questions that accept a what what Mr Parks asked already and would agree um it's very confusing and it's unfortunate for the public that the this comes down to 11. better grade um we see
051growth when we see those letters go up but I just think that this is great and I'll just ask everybody keep that in mind and encourage our teachers while we are working to bring this up and we're kind of in a strange grading system to go with the state for a lot of this is Bixler yes thank you uh president McGuire uh Miss Camp a couple of questions uh first of all this rubric is very interesting I have some interesting aspects to it is there a a description within the text of the rubric itself of the descriptors within the rubric to show the uh the The Benchmark points the break points from one uh rubric uh advancement to another is there is that written down somewhere uh let me see if I could answer your
052question there are business rules um and you can get these online for some light reading um and um then each uh School actually can go into their letter grade um through the Arizona Department of Ed and they can see exactly how they got their scores for each of the categories and so our principals have already had some time to look at those and then also identify you know at the um some at the student level who should we really be focusing on to ensure that we are are supporting especially in tier two and tier three interventions okay thank you uh not quite what I was hoping for as far as the descriptors but I'm glad there's something we can look at because it is a very complex rubric that we're talking about my second question
053involves the stability and I really like the idea of of showing uh how the longer a student is at a school uh the better they are that that I think is a terrific thing to know my concern though is that I I think it bypasses an idea that I call value-added that if we have a student that comes in at a very low place and then suddenly grows remarkably we don't seem to see any kind of of uh uh recognition of that value added we've added so I think that is in the growth model when we were looking at I was trying to go back so I could show you which slide it's on but if you look at the growth slide I think that is really the value-added slide which is saying a child
054who comes in minimally proficient if we grow them if we if we grow them and they receive high growth we are a rewarded many more I mean we are rewarded the most points ah all right so that is the part of the value add uh Miss Bixler right thank you very much that does explain it I'm that yeah I think that's an important thing to recognize so thank you I have no questions I'll just say one final thing our teachers worked tremendously hard last year to ensure that they were in school that our children were in school and that they were teaching at high levels yes we have many opportunities but we are extremely proud of our schools um for their scores we are extremely proud that we had two two schools move into the
055a category um and and this is showing that we we are keeping our focus on what's most important and that's students and the education that they receive thank you Mr Kemp item 2.4 quarterly financial report MS strickler president McGuire members of the governing board on the quarterly financial report is presented for you that provides the information context of where we're at quarter for the entire fiscal year we've presented this slide deck each quarter now for several years and just want to ask if you have any additional questions or clarifications for MS strickler Brian no no questions Michael no questions thank you Paul uh president McGuire no I have no question also thank you for your preparation Mr stickler additionally um for 2.5 I'm sorry I'm running right along you take 2.5 item 2.5 attendance enrollment
056report that's School newsletters Dr Chef I knew we were next since those my apologies again we have our attendance and enrollment reports and ready for any questions the board may have questions hearing none item 3.1 governing board updates Ryan well I got the opportunity to do the Trunk or Treats both with no questions for me freedom and Rainbow um we had a blast I you know the only downside think thank the Lord for the PTO out there they I think they refreshed our candy four times um we literally went through 500 pieces of candy I've never seen so many kids in costumes it was so much fun meeting all the parents and the kids and in both uh rainbow and um Freedom Elementary and you know the interesting thing is is apparent um I actually
057dressed my kids up in dinosaurs and uh they had more fun doing that than they did running around for candy so that was a that was a lot of fun to watch so thank you for everybody's support on that Michael uh just a one quick update I am to be more involved in our District talking about a few communication issues that we can work on together in the future I think I think overalls very positive meeting I'm very encouraged uh to uh okay start gaining his support of our district and look forward to a long-term relationship with the City of Goodyear Miss Bixler yes president McGuire thank you very much and I'm going to apologize right up front for the length of what I'm about to say my in my defense all I can say
058is if there was ever a holiday that was designed for a K-8 school district it's going to be the uh the celebration of All Hallows Eve there was a lot going on so first of all since our last meeting I got a chance to go to the uh Estrella Mountain School uh second third grade vocal music presentation and it was incredible uh great costume that's called ghost Zombies witches skeletons all kinds of things princesses uh random Mario Mario with a magnificent mustache uh Spider-Man or Mario from Hogwarts uh an alien that appeared to be uh uh trying to abduct one of our students Ninja Turtles ears of corn it was incredible wonderful experience and very very well done I congratulate uh Estrella Mountain on that vocal presentation uh next I went to Las Brisas Academy
059where I saw their parade put on by the PTO and it was great um uh some very fun things to see and what I found Most Fascinating and Well Done by that was the orchestration of the movement of the students to and from the site where they were allowed for the to participate in the parade it was a great experience to see the eighth graders handing out candy to the Kinder through seventh grade students uh excellent to see that as far as the parade itself there were a number of things that happened there it was just great uh my favorite uh had to be the the student that showed up in a suit who was all orange and you gotta understand this had a matching tie and with that then there were there were in
060Black different things like pumpkins on this all orange suit I later found out this was kind of a celebration of a character named David Simon pumpkin on a Saturday Night Live but it was really wonderful again the traffic flowing the organization of that Kudos that went without a hitch and it would break uh later on I went over to Freedom Elementary School for their trunk or treat uh great support by the parents and I've got to admit one of my favorite things was the introduction of the Jurassic parks and their uh a trump presentation with the dancing dinosaurs uh the Parks family went all out and we was great from there Rover to Rainbow Valley in their Carnival and and Trunk or Treat uh it was fascinating because it was Community sponsored the whole thing
061was paid for by Community Support uh again the return of the Jurassic Parks uh had a giant chicken uh I did discover that I need to spend a lot more time in uh in Elementary uh fiction because there were a lot of characters both not only the students but also the teachers that I didn't recognize and I kind of got myself into a problem because I uh mistakenly uh I recognized a student as a uh a Ninja Turtle when in fact it was already Deadpool and so I was corrected uh and put straight by that and I was felt lucky that I got out with just a warning on that uh then from there went over to the uh a tour of Kerr Elementary I want I want to thank uh a board member uh
062Todd for for asking did we do that uh that was a fascinating experience uh members of The District administration and building Administration along with uh three of the board members did attend that and it was a great thing to see it was really wonderful to see that um the student docents that we talked to at that tour were great and they gave us a lot of really really good information and were very very inspirational uh from there back over to Las Brisas to see their K-5 celebration of family uh and that was great uh the performance by the students uh really really showed why we have a signature program in Las Brisas it was it was great and more than that we were lucky enough to get an impromptu Tour by Brian from uh from
063core that gave us a look at the new construction that's going on over there and that was really really insightful so we appreciated that and hopefully uh some positive news coming out of that construction as far as when we'll be able to use those classrooms uh there was a prediction made and hopefully that will pan out and I hope that does happen uh from there on to the Freedom Elementary School uh family Thanksgiving and it was normally in my experience as students get older in grade you have less and less parent participation in events like this and that did not hold true the parent participation in this Thanksgiving celebration was incredible all the way up and down it didn't matter if they were Kinder or first second or third all the way through sixth grade
064there were a lot of parents there that were part of the celebration so I congratulate freedom on what they have done with that uh and then finally at West start their Carnival uh wow I've got to tell you it was wall-to-wall parents as far as the eye could see it was incredible to turn out congratulations Bogart and your staff and especially the PTO over there they did an incredible job of that it was more fun than you could have imagined uh the BTO did have a hot dog set up and I did test out the a hot dog as much as I enjoyed that PTO presentation the work they did I've got to admit uh the Chicago style hot dog still is Kang but thank you very much for everything that was done between now
065and the last uh board meeting it was a terrific experience to be on the board and one of the real perks of being a part of the school district so thank you very much for all the schools and staffs that made it possible for me to be a part of it thank you I got to uh go to truck or treat at Rainbow but I think most importantly kind of one of the favorite things that I like to do and get to do is I went to veterans breakfast here at Liberty Elementary School it's uh something that the school's been putting on for quite some time um it's always interesting to hear out in public hear the word fight Patriot patriotic you hear all these all these terms and then when you actually go to
066a Veterans Day event and you actually meet men and women who put their life on the line that's a patriot that's what the word fight actually means also got to go to the Veterans Day Parade Downtown Phoenix always a always a great uh great event for my family so all the veterans out there again thank you for everything that you've done thank you for everything that you continue to do item 4.1 calls of the public so every individual will get three minutes it would be greatly appreciated that when your three men's is up that you simply just stop talking and move on and let the next individual come up and have their time on the mic also I have one here there isn't a name or a telephone number um I'll hold it up I
067won't say the address but I'll hold it up if this is anyone's handwriting you forgot to put the name thanks the email address it's hard for me to read I don't know if it's w Loretta that sound familiar one eight one eight five spreading the override okay okay so before we before we start you have another one in here also oh and it's not me okay somebody cannot see that I play it is no worries I apologize also whenever you're ready sir your time will stop hello to the board yeah hello to the board um and my name is William Bretner and I'm a Community member of over 20 years and my kids went to Estrella Mountain Elementary School back in the early 2000s and I'd like to read a resolution here and the resolution
068uh States be it resolved that the Republican legislative district 23 Republicans of Maricopa County dated November 2nd 2022. whereas Liberty Elementary School District 25 board member Paul Bixler known as a self-described transgender who testified at the AZ State House Education committee that he supports talking with children about transsexual and gender issues without the parents knowledge as described in his testimony on the house education committee meeting whereas Paul Bixler during Liberty school district 25 school board meeting on September 26th stated that SB 1165 a bill passed by the AZ legisl legislature and signed into law by Governor dizzy which states that the AZ School sports teams for girls only have girls and boys on the teams that they represent is uh unconstitutional whereas Paul Bixler violated his oath of office to uphold the laws of the
069State of Arizona by voting against District policy um jjia written to comply with the Arizona but revised statutes whereas Paul Bixler attends events of all of the elementary schools and interacts with Children of the Liberty School District 25 at which Paul Bixler could have the opportunity to have conversations with the children whereas Paul bexler believes that the conversations are good for the children as stated in his address to the house education committee held on January 22nd um January 2022 whereas we the elected Precinct committee men and women of State committee women of and parents have been battling this LBGTQ trans grooming in our children's schools for the last two years whereas LD 23 recognizes the importance and rights of the children protecting parental parental rights now therefore be it resolved that ld23 and electric Precinct
070committee men and committee woman and state committee Men Thank you Mr Bretner [Applause] Eloise flag hello board my name is Eloise flag and I fully support the ecrc and the ld23 and this resolution and will not support any financial support until this issue is resolved by a Bixler resignation and until the leadership of this board has changed and is transparent and honest with the parents [Applause] John Kane all right hello board my name is John Kane I'm a member of ld23 and the ecrc and I'm here to support this resolution but it's not the only issue but is one of the worst grooming has become a major problem in our schools but Lawless is also rampant Paul Bixler broke the oath of office when Saints know to support sb1165 which is Law and District policy
071jjia we have violations from the ag office on open meeting laws which I have personally been involved with and hidden contract negotiations with superintendent Lori Shu I am done supporting any bonds or overrides for all of these reasons thank you [Applause] Leah colatrea hello board my name is Leah colatrella and I am here to support this resolution as well um I'm all I'm a mother of a lesbian daughter but I'm also Against The Grooming of our children in the schools um it's become a major problem but again as John said it's not the only problem but in my opinion is one of the worst and Paul Bixler did break his oath of office when he was saying no to support of the SB 1165 in the district jjia thank you [Applause] Heather Sim thank you
072governing board my name is Heather Finn I am here in support of our children's safety and protection against the grooming and the trans ideology this is why and this is why I fully support the resolution and will continue to say no to any bail but any bonds sorry not bail bonds and overrides until Paul resigns our children and Community deserve a board that is truthful and transparent and that isn't what I've witnessed this past year [Applause] I apologize about the last name ma'am Bill Toms Thomas good evening ladies and gentlemen I would like to start by making a couple things clear I am both a strong Christian and a strong conservative as a Christian I believe in what Matthew 7 1 teaches us judge not that ye not be judged I may not agree with
073Mr bixler's lifestyle but it's not my position to judge as a constitutional conservative I believe every person has a constitutional right to express one's beliefs I just asked Mr Bixler keeps his personal life out of official business I'd now like to introduce myself my name is Bill Thomas and I am a Precinct committeeman in ld23 for the Republican party for the record I am against any sex education or discussion with young children the science has proven that introducing sexual content to young children has had devastating psychological effects as they grow into their teens and young adults I won't go into sources they are ready readily available to research your well-educated individuals with the ability to do your own research Liberty 25 will start the new year under new board leadership if the budget override passes
074as it's looking it will there will be no excuses if test scores don't start to rise this can only happen by changing our curriculum back to direct instruction models and plays into social engine engineering part of the current curriculum on the back burner with all this being said it is time for ld23 to abandon his their efforts to push Bob Bixler out of office as his only offense was to vote against the state statute he believed to be wrong don't get me wrong I do not agree with Paul's position I'm just agreeing with his first amendment rights to his beliefs and Free Speech at least 23 resolution was voted on by 13 people only half a Precinct committee men were present to vote but it was it was a legal Quorum not all PCS voted
075to accept his resolution I being one of them his public record as to who did vote for it it is time to end this discussion and move forward with new tools to turn our education education system around Arizona was just listed by Forbes to be number 47 in public education we cannot blame this on Paul Bixler if Liberty 25 is listed 31st in the state that puts Liberty 25 as one of the worst school districts in the nation statistically wise we have a moral obligation to give our youth the tools necessary to be successful and competitive on the world stage and since the USA ranks 23rd among industrialized nations that puts us at Great disadvantage let us end as this this distraction with Paul Bixler and get to work Paul can answer to voters in
0762024 as Community leaders and parents we must turn our focus on making sure our kids are getting the Education and Research resources they does that so desperately need thank you [Applause] Susan Cheatham good evening board my name is Susan Cheatham and I'm a Precinct committee woman right here in the Liberty school district and I am here to support the resolution and to uphold the rights of children and their parents and protect them from transgrooming Mr Bixler has openly chose to be a transgender that's his choice and he has told the Arizona State House of Education committee that he supports to talking with children about transgenderism and gender issues without parents knowledge and has and as a parent that absolutely goes against my rights and it makes me very angry he has also stated that the
077bill sb1165 that Governor Doug Ducey passed which states that in the state of Arizona School sports teams for girls will only have girls and the same for boys he called that unconstitutional this would include locker rooms and bathrooms and I want to address that issue I personally do not want a strange man in my bathroom it public in the public or at home that is a very vulnerable place and how much more a little girl a little girl not to mention this opens the door wide for sex offenders to Prey Upon both little girls and women and there's been over 20 articles supporting this this is the sexual danger to females of all ages bathrooms and locker rooms need to match the god-given genders they were born with now I support this resolution until Paul
078Bixler resigns I will continue to vote no on all bonds and overrides and I want to leave you with this headline in July of 2022 this headline transgender woman who impregnated two inmates was removed from a New Jersey female prison a transgender inmate who impregnated two women while incarcerated at Edna Mahan correctional facility for women has been moved thank you let that sink in [Applause] Michelle Hello Lord my hello board my name is Michelle Altair and I'm here in support of the resolution that was read and I have a different uh unique perspective on things because I traveled with the super superintendent during the primaries all over the state who was addressing the transgender issues the sexualization of children and we happened to talk with or after such a Talk 11 year old girl came
079out and um she was just asking about are you against this I mean isn't it you know shouldn't we be more accepting with these we shouldn't be more accepting and as the questions were being asked she she shared with us that she played on the girls volleyball team 11 years old played on the girls volleyball team and there and she knew it was a man it wasn't a you know just because you're in a in a dress or you're wearing certain clothes does not make you a female she knew that it one of the there's their student coaches was a man and he would come into their locker room and he would just stand there at the door staring at them and she was asked just that you no he just stares at us all
080of us girls as we're changing and the the the the issue yes that's that's a horrible thing but the bigger thing was she felt bad because she's being indoctrinating that this is natural this is normal and so she felt bad something's wrong with her because she was uncomfortable as he's watching her now no you know it's I have never had 11 year old girl but I would imagine they don't even want their fathers in the rooms with them when they're changing let alone some strange individual who says I'm I'm I identify as a woman in the locker room so I would think you know that we're we're all going to have to answer to a much higher higher power for our role in the destruction and it is the destruction of children we all had
081our issues growing up we all maybe had some idiosyncrasies some things problems that we had growing up but I don't think we were ever told that the reason why you have these problems is because you're really a girl or you're really a boy basically telling them that God the god of uh the universe he made a mistake when creating you and man fallible man we know what's right and we can change you into what you really should be so I think you know we all need to take a deep look within ourselves and know that you will stand before a higher power and you will be asked about your role in what is is the destruction of children in this generation thank you [Applause] Lindsey Graham hello my name is Lindsey Graham and I am
082a cat meow meow I'm not a woman dressed as a cat I am a cat by show of hands I'm curious uh how many of you believe and confess that I'm a cat Great I Am by show of hands I'm curious how many of you believe that your child or a child from this school would believe that I'm actually a cat no one you are right why because you are not stupid and these children are not stupid truth prevails over imagination reality exists discernment is innate and something we are biologically wired to have one look at me and you know this to be true I am a woman posing as a cat you may also think correctly that if I truly believe I'm a cat I have a mental disorder if I suffer from a
083mental disorder and if I'm unable to discern reality am I safe to be around children would you put me in charge of making critical decisions about the safety and well-being of children and about the direction of their education when I cannot even discern truth from fiction confession I'm not actually a cat guys just because I say I am you've not agreed to or committed to addressing me as a cat simply because I demand it no tail whiskers or outfit makes me a cat just like no lipstick high heels or long hair makes him a man a woman it is just as biologically impossible for me to become a cat as it is for a man to be a woman women and you have one job as members of the school board and it's defined as
084this school board members are responsible for broad forward-thinking minute analysis and decisive action in all areas that affect students and staff in their schools I ask you do you believe that the actions of a grown man playing dress up as a woman affects the students and staff positively or negatively a public school is not the place for social experiments in Altered realities or gender ideologies it is not the place to celebrate a grown man with a mental illness dressing as a woman and teaching kids lies children come to school to learn facts and truths about reality including unchanging biological truths about science and nature not to learn that they can change biological realities and become anything they want in the name of diversity what you're actually doing is worse than just lying to our kids
085you're forcing them to be participants in your life in your charade you're forcing them to deny what they see with their eyes and you're forcing them to speak lies I ask you again am I a cat and if you say no then the mindset must be aligned with your discernment across the board by allowing a falsity to be displayed and paraded around the school you teach children that truth is non-existent facts are not real and biology is a lie you fail at your job your only job by confusing children and teaching them untruths and to coddle a grown man playing dress-up as a woman if you were to address me as a cat right now it's as ridiculous as when you say Miss Bixler and a grown man's voice comes thundering over this thank you
086foreign superintendent Jeff president Mark McGuire board members present and online I'm going to finish reading the last sentence of the resolution uh all parents demand that Liberty 25 School Board member Paul Bixler resigned immediately be it further resolved that legislative district 23 along with all the above mentioned elected Precinct committee men and women State committee men and women grandparents taxpayers and friends will not support any Financial bonds or overrides for this District until these issues are cleaned up my name is uh Butch Consular Elwood counselor is my official name you all know me I've been here before I am a Precinct committeeman uh with uh legislative district 23. I am the uh first vice chair of the legislative district 23. uh and I am the chair of the Australia Conservative Republican Club I have been
087fighting this battle in favor of children for two years and it just needs to stop it's ridiculous foreign we are asking again Paul bexler to resign as we did many times after his testimony at State education hearing but now Liberty 25 School Board member Paul Bixler violated his oath of office that is way more serious than what you thought testifying in front of the state committee was okay SB 1165 jjia revised statutes for the schools is not unconstitutional it's realistic and it makes sense Paul wanted to support that any girl can play on any boys team any boy can play on any girls team therefore referring to the same locker rooms the same showers in the same bathrooms now he did not actually say that but that's where it leads okay lgbtq Community has been
088up in arms about transgenders it is a lie that they support transgenders of any type or any matter it's just an outright lie they've been kicked off of Facebook Tick Tock and other social media platforms because they came out against it so it's not a gay issue either the uh the precinct committeeman vote for ld23 was 16-2 that's the verified vote on tape there are 37 Precinct committee men committee women in ld23 so that'll give you the average it was 18 on board with the vote and the vote was 16 to uh to support this resolution and two against please do the right thing Paul Bixler and resign thank you [Applause] thank you Jerry Spencer hello thank you for allowing me to speak tonight um I have a an experience I'd like to share with
089you that was um very uh tough for me uh I was uh pull Observer during the primary election and I was at the stationed at the city hall in Buckeye and I was there my shift was about six hours and I was there and I just observed you know the poll workers and what was going on at the polling place and so when my shift was up I went to the bathroom and so I finished and I'm washing my hands and in walks Paul Bixler and I I'm 72. uh but I don't care how old I was I mean I'd been taken to the bathroom my mother you know my mother used to see me when I was very small and I had an expectation of security safety and at that moment it was completely
090broken because this man walked in to the bathroom and I was so shocked that there was there was no warning there was no escort hey is anybody in here there was no there was no accommodation for me as a woman with my expectation of privacy and security and I was so shaken that I got out of there as fast as I could I didn't even report the incident to the troubleshooter who who was not there at the time but the next day I did because I was a pull Observer at another location and I spoke to the troubleshooter about it and she said you know that really bothers me too and I'm glad that I have a hotline number that I reported the incident in because when you vote the experience is supposed to be
091welcoming it's supposed to be secure uh and this incident just reminded me about hey this it isn't welcoming and it isn't secure and I'm here doing my civic duty voting and this shouldn't be happening this person Mr Paul Bixler should have enough judgment enough sensitivity to know when it's appropriate to use a woman's bathroom and in my mind it's never appropriate but and I'm not being judgmental I'm just saying this thank you very much for your words [Applause] Zimmerman foreign I have two very important things to discuss tonight and each deserve equal attention and time and I will try to do them both Justice in three minutes and Mr Jensen I didn't take his advice and ask someone to read my second statement for me I thought they should come for me so as many
092of you know I have served as the pack chair for the yes for Liberty schools for the past seven months I really was gonna try to do this and I am extremely proud to stand here tonight and say that the override is going to win and we are currently up by 389 votes after the last drop moments ago I just want to give everyone an idea that at the end of election night we are only up by 80 votes and progressively each night we increase our lead I'm excited for the district to be able to have the funding to truly make a difference in students lives but more than anything I'm excited for students who will continue to receive a well-rounded education with art music and PE they will get to have lower class sizes
093which research shows has a good correlation with student achievement as well as teacher morale there are many people that were an integral part in helping getting the override pass and I want to thank the leadership team who met weekly every single person who knocked on a door put a sign in their yard donated to the campaign encourage other people to get involved we could not have done it without your help but most importantly thank you to every single person who voted yes your decision will make a difference in the lives of 4 000 students and I personally am forever grateful the second thing I want to talk tonight about is the four day week I have sent the board several emails over the past three days about many different aspects that will impact the district
094by moving to a four-day week but when it comes to the bottom line it is not in the best interest of children to decrease the amount of learning they are receiving all research states that the best opportunity for student achievement is to increase instructional minutes and we are doing the opposite of that by moving to a four day week I think this sets a bad precedent and the perception that the district is providing students with less not more I think we can all agree that public perception is important especially when going out for overrides and bonds which are absolutely necessary in this state as our state government continues to underfund public education I can understand that the board is looking at this decision from many different angles however the guiding Factor should always be student
095learning and I believe that if you are really honest with yourself there is nothing to be gained for students by going to a four day week I think your decision puts our vulnerable student population students on IEP and at our Title 1 schools at even greater risks and why would you do that to students where school is already a challenge for them please make the right decision not the most popular one thank you Miss Zimmerman any board members have anything they'd like to say Mr Parks no comment Mr Todd oh Miss Bixler I have nothing to add Mr Todd do you have anything to say after public comment thank you sir item five does anyone have anything on the consent agenda they'd like to have pulled hearing none I'd entertain a motion to approve the
096consent agenda as presented Mr President I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented it's all second so we have a motion in a second all those in favor Brian aye Paul aye Michael I am also and I sort of approved three votes one week he's having all kinds of technical difficulties so I'm not sure how you wanna how you want to cast that item 6.1 discussion on maintenance and operations override election results campaign impact on maintenance and operations budget planning Dr Shuff members of the governing board I would like to Echo Kelly Zimmerman's comments about the just the extensive effort and interest and commitment that our staff the PAC leadership team meeting meeting participants our administrators parents teachers all the way across the board this this election is largely due to people have
097an understanding of what this override funds and it funds programs for children the fact that there are campaign out there against the election based on other factors I can appreciate those other factors but this was about our children and the learning experiences they have the size of their classrooms class size ratios all things that directly impact their learning experiences Mrs Zimmerman um as long as I've been in education I have never seen the leadership the commitment the dedication that Kelly Zimmerman has offered to our district she has pushed pulled coerced done the work herself when nobody else would she has just been an incredible Force there's no words there are no words to thank you on behalf of our children and also our teachers you know our teachers have looked at they've been completely stressed
098by what the implications of this election means for them whether it is Teachers 29 teaching positions that may have had to be cut as a result of this whether it is our teachers who have already to at a lower preparation time this year and risk we're having what would happen does that just go away we didn't have Solutions or answers to that um the class sizes were raised significantly this year that only comes with more stress on our teachers and more impact on our children and the attention they get received from their their teachers so this was an incredible incredible thing that passed um on behalf of our kids and I'm just thankful for everyone every one of you sitting out here and out in the audience I'm very very grateful Mr Parks well it
099sure makes our job easier thank you very much so um it's going to be interesting to see moving forward and I look forward to getting our class sizes back down to to where they should be and getting the support for the teachers moving forward so thanks again Miss Bixler I also want to thank Kelly Zimmerman for all the hard work she did I I also over the last couple years have the opportunity to to see all the effort that Kelly Zimmerman has put into this and the dedication she has made to the students of the Liberty Elementary School District um Kelly German thank you so very much it was I really really appreciate what you did Mr Todd Mr chairman can you hear me better now yep great I apologize I'm uh at a meeting
100with the Navajo Nation and it's a little a little rugged on internet connection so I've uh finally been able to get a cell phone signal that works I I too would like to thank uh Miss Zimmerman uh for all of her work as well as everybody else who has stood up for children uh who are who are looking out for them um I I just uh it's a very touching moment to see the communities come together and fight for the children and I certainly appreciate that foreign Mrs Zimmerman um and not most importantly but just as importantly Mr Zimmerman I don't think that a lot of people know that Mr Zimmerman uh came to my house picked up some signs picked up a t-post driver and that man put up 75 Signs by himself um
101also want to thank Mrs Basinger her and her son also took some signs and they put up signs in Rainbow Valley area and the surrounding areas to the principles thank you for coming to the meetings as I was as I or my wife was at every single one and this is what happened is the product of what happens and when folks get involved and you and you march to the same drum and you know that it's only about children children they're innocent it's not their fault that adults can't agree on issues it's all about children and there is right now there's 7 681 adults who said it's all about children I'm willing to forego a cup of coffee a week in order to pass this override so that children can have a better experience at
102education and I too agree with you Dr Shuff that I can for the life of me cannot understand how anyone can look a child in the eye and say I am campaigning against you because I do not like people who are on the board or I do not like people who are in the administration and I wonder what that child would say would know what to say because a child only knows love and kindness and understanding and it's adults who teach them everything else Miss Basinger what you've done we haven't been able to do and you did it right it was you it was your drive of that we're not going to lose this one and you're right it came out and it was 80 votes ahead and guess what every single drop it ganked
103because I was watching just like everyone else and while they have not called it yet it's there students one teachers one Administration one public education within Liberty Elementary School District they won and I'm here to say that if we come together and we stay together and we let go of our differences there's a tremendous amount of things that we as a community within this school district can accomplish and truly it really comes down to adults because the kids are ready to work Administration they're ready to work teachers support staff they're darn sure ready to work so with that on behalf of me and my family thank you president Aguirre had one other thing to add I think that our staff and our parents may be wondering some next steps for the district this time of
104year is when the budget committee starts up so to you know the point that was made that makes the job easier as we go forward it certainly does um and some of those things where we look at how do we add back pieces or aspects the budget committee will work through those look at the cost surrounding of those how now that we've got the additional budget that restored back into the budget we aren't looking additional cuts that work will be happening here in December with the committee coming up with some those things so the community is welcome to attend the budget committee meetings and our staff can be involved in that as well so just know that that will be coming back to our governing board with what are the next steps to restore is
105there any other discussion on this item Mr President can I make a motion for a five minute recess please we got a lot ahead of us so there's a motion for our a five minute recess is there a second I can second that okay so we'll take a recess at uh so we recessed at 7 18 when we come back we'll be on to item 6.2 thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] at 7 23. we are on to item 6.2 discussion on school morale and with that I'll just open it up to the board for discussion Ms Bixler yes I did have a couple questions I was hoping to uh to ask on the morale um when we look at
106the uh uh the uh non-certified staff environmental survey it appears that 62 percent of the responders had uh one to three years of of experience I'm not sure why that would be is that because we have is that as far as experiential is that the age of our staff are they really as far as non-certified uh had that uh less than three years of experience Mr nettle do you understand the question about the overall demographics of our teaching staff um so what you saw there was the people who who responded to the survey that's the percentage it doesn't necessarily mean that's the percentage of people in our teaching staff that have only have one to three years of experience yeah I mean I I will I will add to that um specifically to say that
107over the last uh three to five years we have gotten a little bit younger and more inexperienced as a teaching staff there's a lot of factors that I think everybody's well aware of of those factors of what contributes to that level of experience um but yeah generally speaking we are getting a little bit more inexperienced across the board from a teaching staff perspective yeah that was the way it appeared as far as the uh the information that was presented I I do understand there was a difference between the number of people possibly that could answer and the number of people that did so I do understand that it just seemed kind of interesting that that we had that that kind of demographic breakdown that that we had that kind of 62 percent uh being uh
108responding so uh my second question involves slide number five is it possible to pull that up so you can see a little better what I'm talking about I will do so yeah if I'm reading this correctly it looks like 76 percent of the responders uh responded as far as satisfaction they're somewhat high or very high that that seems like a very positive number for me am I uh interpreting that correctly I'm on Slide Five it's it's um around teacher credentials oh I'm sorry I must be this was the uh uh I jumped I jumped uh uh a presentation just the non-certified staff work environment survey I'm sorry okay so repeat your question again uh slide number five presents 76 uh responded satisfactory somewhat high or very high am I reading that correctly man I'm afraid
109I'm not sure which one you're on so let me I'm just looking to see if I can catch up with you yeah my notes I have it written down at Slide Five yeah foam around thank you Mr Garrison all right so for for that uh question four um that's you know what the one you pulled up is non-certified so let's look at it you are looking at you are looking okay so it supports staff and administrators is that what you mean correct okay and your question is um whether it's high or very high and you you added yeah it appears to me that the uh the number of of satisfactory responders was 76 percent yes to me seems like a pretty high number um it is certainly more positive than negative yeah and I was
110just wondering if I was interpreting that correctly that yes that is true that 76 of the responders did respond either somewhat or very satisfied yes and also in response to your first comment um I attended a conference on essentially you know retention and induction of teachers and Dr Ingersoll was a researcher that I had studied for a number of years and referred to the aspect of kind of that younger population or younger Workforce is The Greening of the teaching profession in that the percentage of graduates coming out of the College of Education eligible to be teachers as far as declined significantly and therefore also the number of people coming into the profession has declined and they become increasingly younger and increasingly less qualified or certified so that that holds true that just thought the concept
111of green uh The Greening of Education I thought was interesting and just so I understand uh what you just said uh that that young that growing younger in age of our our support staff is largely in part due to not only people not entering but also the more experienced staff leaving and not being replayed correct my comment was related to the teaching teaching staff but we also are seeing equal concerns with support staff um whether we can secure them to take a position for example our warehouse supervisor left the position and then when we went to hire an offer the position it wasn't enough salary compensation to attract them to accept the position so while we see a lot of issues with our teaching staff it also transfers as well to our support staff okay
112thank you and just one comment as I went through the slides and and researched the information it appeared to me that on slide 45 again in the uh part of me slide 38 in the non-certified the sports staff survey that it looks to me and at least what I can read it looks very very positive things are moving in a very positive direction at least what slide 38 has to say I just wanted to comment on that Mr Todd thank you Mr chairman are you able to still hear me better yes great um you know as I look at this I'm not really sure which slide to uh to go to first or last um overall it appears that we have a morale issue um now certainly that's systematic probably across the country with education
113right now but to be perfectly honest I don't care so much about Across the Nation I care about Liberty and the school district that we rep represent um I think it behooves us to not only look at this plan or these surveys but then after a true plan of what are we going to do to improve the morale I'm looking at slides and I see 24.71 they they're somewhat high in their job satisfaction morale and only 8.82 percent that are high very low at 17 and low at 17 somewhat low as 30. that's all below the line for me and the only way as we continue to talk about teacher retention which we've made a huge issue this year is to change this this has spiraled out of control in our district and it I
114believe it's cultural from the from from some changes that were made so it's not the principles I've heard the principles have been told so do stuff to fix morale it's long past that the principles are not the scapegoat in this and they should not be the ones that are handling this um later on tonight I'm going to ask that we agendized um a topic to talk about what we're doing to our teachers and our staff please understand when I say teachers I mean everybody our teachers our paraprofessionals our bus drivers um and I think we need to raise the bar on what we are doing in the district I have seen very few Awards sent out from the district office I'm on social media and I see other districts recognizing teachers almost weekly we're not
115seeing that not hearing that I think this board must take action now or after the first of the year to instill a level of support for our teachers to make morale a top priority with that comes a bar of expectation that they're going to have to perform and continue to do good by our students and improve but this isn't a principal issue this is not a leadership at a campus level this is a district-wide problem and it shouldn't happen we're only as good as we are in our darkest hours and our darkest hour right now is not looking very good so to the teachers to the staff to the bus drivers custodians I would tell you to give us a chance um in the past who is said by somebody that they didn't really care
116why teachers were leaving um now make no mistake I never felt that way I've been asking for these kind of surveys for a long time and we now see the writings on the wall and this has to change and to Simply take this and say well what questions do you have as a board personally I think if you're responsible from our leadership team I think when it's this bad they should have come forward with a plan that says this is horrible and this is what we're doing to fix it and if they have to work 24 hours a day seven days a week in order to turn this around and make this right for our teachers which in turn benefits our students and that's what needs to happen so for me the bar has jumped
117on board of SpaceX and it's somewhere way on the atmosphere and that's how high this bar needs to be raised in the future make sure that our teachers and our students know that we are dead serious about keeping morale High which will turn around our our student grades we'll increase the performance levels that we have and make things right so I can tell you the changes are coming and people can either jump on or jump off but we need to teachers give us a chance and administration needs to fully come up with a plan that's going to fix this and I'm quite certain that I would at this point recommend that we cut back some professional development in the district to give some teachers a little bit of time to do their own professional development
118which might not be data driven but it might be driven for their mental sake and give them some time to improve and come back after the first of the year ready to raise the bar thank you Mr Parks well I went through all three of the PDFs and dug through them quite a bit I think the some of the most valuable information was in the called q a some of the you know the questions and answers and there were a lot of them I started writing down kind of some ideas going along and some consistency as far as what people what the what I focus more on the teachers um what they were saying and it seemed there was a theme here it's overworked under appreciated in student Behavior um so I think those are
119kind of our targets um you know I've been thinking about this since I since it I've been here a year and the it's been a I've seen this as a problem since the day I sat behind us you know sat on this Dice and I've been pushing you know quite a few things that have to do with it with student behavior and it looks like it's kind of creeped up on us we're going to have to take some issue with some of this stuff and you know we've talked about teacher pay I've said this to to Dr Shuff and I've expressed that you know unfortunately teachers haven't been paid well forever something else has changed um it's been my experience in the business world when you have people showing up for their paycheck those aren't
120your best employees and we need to really start thinking about the the culture in the school district and figuring out how as a group and a team how we can make it better and I think we have the people to do it so um I support what Mr Todd was saying I think we have to sit down and come up with a with a plan of attack and and hit it and uh you know with everybody's help we'll we'll make it happen so when I look at morale there's some things that we can't change some things that our hands are tight on as a school district the law there's just some things that you can't just can't do if you got there's a child who acts up does that mean that child's no good just
121give up on them right I'm not saying that you you let him off scot-free but you just give up on that baby this is a compounding issue that we have and we bring it into the morale we have teachers who have just gotten into the teaching profession they're new at their job they haven't adapted all the way yet they're not seasoned professionals that they've seen all the different aspects of their career so of course there this is you know they're going to feel uh that is this what it's all about as far as not feeling supported the one thing that I look to and this is something that I've always done is everything stops starts and stops with the board I think morale within the district starts with the board I think that things that
122the board says out in public gets back to staff and then that just trickles on down I think when board makes disparaging comments within a board meeting that's all part of morale I talked about it a little bit a little bit before at some point folks got to think about what's best for the district and not best for themselves individually I think once the board quits picking at what's wrong with this school district and truly focuses on the beautiful things that this District does and has done for goodness sakes when I came on the board you weren't going to get a survey like this not this much participation you aren't going to get teachers who were able to send disparaging emails to the governing board because a fear of reprisal guess what that happens today
123this governing board gets those emails from staff and from teacher because they know that this that there is integrity at the administration level and that it's okay to express your opinions because opinions negative opinions are towards the board make the board better what doesn't make the board better is pushing a political agenda that's bad morale when I hear that either now or we wait until January I take that as a threat and shame on you this is about children and this is about families whose parents educate our children so that those parents can make money to feed their children Mr glare might make a couple other comments yes please we went about this um for an important reason because we saw from our spring survey results um a drop in overall job satisfaction or or
124positive feelings about the district so we approached it um try to do it in a personal way to start with in two ways meeting with support staff at every school and with certified teachers at every school and asking them directly what do you need or want in terms of support guidance and resources what does that look like what is that and that was helpful for the principals to hear but it was also helped for us as a district to hear collectively when we hear it Bubble Up from all of the schools so while we did absolutely get our principles involved you can see in the survey results the positive support that they feel from their administrators and it makes a significant difference we also asked the principals to interview not all but a handful at
125every Campus of teachers whom they would perceive as being Irreplaceable so they could learn what are they doing that contributes to them staying not waiting until somebody is unhappy and makes a different decision to leave like the exit interviews which we already have in place so this provided some valuable information from those people as well and after that less personal but an opportunity to be perhaps Anonymous in this way is asking every employee what it is they think about these important topics or aspects of job satisfaction and morale and it is you can hear the voice of people come out in the comments you can hear um I can hear the struggle that they have and um so I just would want our employees to know that we ask these hard questions we're not afraid
126to ask the hard questions and we want to know what it is we can do to make things better like Mr Parks we you know try to summarize at a at a high level and also at a more of a micro level but at a high level what are the big themes that come across in all three ways that we were asking people what do they think what do they need and over and over again we heard compensation from both support staff and from teachers um that's an important piece um the administration recommended to the governing board and the governing board a hundred percent rally behind the additional 1.8 million dollars that we have from the state of how do we utilize that to put directly to staff and teacher compensation we needed to wait
127till after the override to make that happen and perhaps some consideration also for how do we handle that with the aggregate expenditure limit but it is limited by the amount of funds we have to work with in the state of Arizona so that's an important piece compensation didn't used to be a top priority for why people stay in the teaching profession that has now changed in the last two years the research points to compensation is critical for that our staff are overworked that includes both our teaching staff and our support staff the support staff survey you can hear the comments come through that they have sometimes the same number of people in that department that they had five years ago when we'd increased 25 percent enrollment since then but we've kept our administrative costs low
128you hear it with our teaching staff when they are they have over um high class sizes or we don't have enough special education staff so they're taking over caseloads that creates additional work that impacts their work-life balance one of the steps we took to try to compensate them for additional money but it doesn't support them with additional time or the work-life balance it's still a frustration it's still a point of exhaustion for our employees hope if there's an opportunity to pay our people more and be able to attract more people to the profession we won't have as many vacancies um that will be a support to our overworked staff curriculum I'm being complete a lot of heavy lifting was done on that I would say primarily prior to the pandemic and since then our teachers
129have really just said I can do this much and no more and we respect that the issue then comes with the opportunity for them to have a resource that they desperately need and if they aren't able to support the development of that the experts in those areas and for those grade levels perhaps the solution is it's an expensive solution but maybe this is an opera this is an opportunity where we use some one-time funds to be able to pay for the development have contract out for that work if our teachers are not willing to do that for additional pay um the grant we accessed is allowing us to pay our teachers thirty dollars an hour far more than they typically do but they still are not willing to do that extra work and we don't
130blame them for that they've got a heavy heavy load another issue that surfaced was the student behaviors there are a number of things that we have put in place to start the school year with but I don't think our teachers are seeing the impact of those things yet so an example of that would be the behavior Specialists that were authorized this last board meeting and we have you know we're beginning to look for those candidates but that means our teaching staff are not feeling the benefits of those things yet so those are big things a lot of them do come around the areas of money so the only other thing that we have that we have control over is time and so what can we do to flexibly respond and that we can flexibly respond
131and I think our administrators have made some adjustments already this year they may continue to make more um examples of that of how we use our early release time um we've got special education teachers that have a very very high caseload principals have excused them from some of the collaborative work or the school projects or their professional development so that they can go write those IEPs do those evaluations and be prepared to meet their their requirements to deliver those IEP meetings another example is principles instead of the some professional learning time in the collaborative team time they have swapped those out so that their staff their teachers can then prioritize what it is they need to do during that time collaboratively because today how we used to teach when each teacher went to their own
132classroom and did their own work I'm sorry but that's not as efficient as when we have some collaboration where perhaps one teacher is preparing for English language arts a different teacher is preparing for mathematics and we're sharing those professional learning professional lesson plans or how we assess teachers to Mr aguirre's Point we've got a number of new teachers that requires a team to come along so that we can make sure that we are meeting student needs all that's to say um there is tremendous pressure that we push internally and externally against academic learning for our kids and that frankly is why we exist we are a learning education institution that is our mission to educate children we cannot abdicate from that we our children deserve to um gain back what was lost during the pandemic
133and all children deserve to learn so I would say teaching in our principles it's a very very difficult job it is a challenging job and it comes with a high level of expectation but yes we hear our employees and we will continue to put things in place and bring things to the governing board that can provide relief can provide recognition and can provide compensation and time for what they need to do to do their jobs as well as they can okay one other thing I'd like to say is this is public education more importantly there are federal laws in place that protect employees from threats from intimidation and that this District being an employer within the United States of America those labor laws have to and shall be followed I don't think that it helps
134morale when we have administrators their jobs being threatened president Aguirre Maya make one comment yes Miss Bixler yes I I agree with a lot of that's been said and Dr Seth you're right compensation has become a much greater impact on our our especially our teaching staff and not to say the sports staff don't also fill the impact but definitely within the survey information that we receive certainly compensation has come to a higher Point than I've ever seen it in my experience but I also want to point out a couple other things 70 percent of the teaching staff surveyed that responded indicated a real disparity and a dissatisfaction with their life work balance that is something we have to really look at the other thing that I think we need to keep very much in mind
135is that 65 percent of the responders on the teaching staff are really really and this is anecdotally really responded positively to what they see as a team that they're a part of and I agree the culture within the schools and within the district I think we need to utilize that team aspect because I think that makes a big difference is there any other discussion on this topic hearing none we'll move on to item 6.3 discussion and consideration to a change the instructional model from a five-day school week to a four-day school week for school year 2024. Dr Shuff president McGuire Administration is not bringing anything additional um beyond what we have discussed in our public hearings the study session we most recently had so really this is a final opportunity for the board to discuss
136and consider um whether to make the change Ms Bixler any more questions that you had that you haven't already asked in uh some of the other meetings I do have one quick question uh Dr stuff um as far as the uh uh the five-day week uh for me uh instructional time is sacred I have a real hard time losing instructional time but I have a question because of the strength of the statement made by the staff in the survey concerning the team aspect uh is there within a five school day week a way to and I don't mean markedly change the amount of instructional time but is there a way to find additional time for collaboration and planning for our teachers and for extending the Champs uh experience for our students we're increasing the amount
137of time I say I think I heard two parts to the question during the five-day week we did extend the amount of early release time that does increase the collaboration time we have asked to hold sacred you know at least 40 minutes of that time for their team time so is it possible to reduce the remaining two hours or to say across the board have it be longer than 40 minutes of Team time absolutely and I think some some principles flexibly do that already um the second part of your question oh gosh I'm sorry I'm already forgetting it Champs all right so this year um and it was a budgetary decision to uh decrease but not or reduce but not eliminate programs so we reduce Champs from 40 minutes to 35 minutes and that was
138a budget Savings of the additional positions we would have had to have added to be able to maintain the 40 minutes if we were to increase it to as much as 45 minutes this next year with a four day school week excuse me 46 minutes with a four day school week um just some rough calculations I see that as you know costing an additional two positions two to three positions depending on how um class sizes come in with with our growth so your point about how to increase preparation time for our teachers that can happen and depends on how many periods in the school day in the master schedule that is okay thank you and obviously not at cost Mr Todd um I just have a couple questions one I still would like to see
139some different models for professional development uh we've only seen one and I think that's a very important thing but there's just been one I think we should see some other ideas secondly I just want to ensure um that we are planning to include in the future contract language um the expectation for professional development to really make sure the teachers understand what it is but to protect them I see sometimes this is a slippery slope um on a Friday if they're coming in for professional development um I want to make sure that this doesn't get slippery on a six hour day doesn't turn into a seven hour day six and a half hour day um they're they're going to be working if we go to a four-day model they're going to be working longer days um
140which which is fatiguing if you go from a typical eight hour day to a 12 hour day some of us have done that uh it certainly changes a little bit if you run three in a row three 12-hour days might feel longer than five eight hour days so I just want to make sure that we're we're doing this much like in our contracts we we talk about their uh you know they have a minimum one out valuation a year uh I I just want to lock that in but but most of all I really want to see some other models for professional development see how if we're going to afford a how maybe we can free up another Friday for the teachers uh but maintain professional development I'm a big believer in it I do
141think we need to do it I just don't want this to get out of control um and part of the retent the biggest reason I think we're doing this if if we do it is for retention and recruitment and if we start that way but we we add to it with with too much PD because it starts late there's a technical issue whatever case may be and now uh block of time extends 20 minutes 30 minutes an hour that changes things so those are my two concerns that I would like to have some solid answers about so as far as we haven't yet done the work on how to change our contract language um we are looking at what we are calling work days or non-work days for Fridays and that may be a way
142of kind of defining that so teachers can be much clear and and have confidence that those are non-work days so that clears up that aspect of it and the contracts yes um you know was we work through with our attorney how to develop those and what constitutes the work day Etc um that is work yet to do but there is the commitment to be clear about that and then the second aspect is um kind of the work day isn't necessarily always professional learning um there is work that happens in schools um it you know these events that the governing board enjoys the community events that takes a great deal of work from staff to pull off a Carnival and get everything ready and or the planning around things um so work day may need mean
143what are the community or the school-wide work that needs to be done they may need to have an extended time period studying how discipline is working or not working in their school that's not professional learning but it is collaborative Community time in the school that principals need access to teachers and teachers need access to one another and if we can work it out right with the schedule it would be a beautiful thing if teachers also had access to time with the support staff that work directly with them for example the paraprofessionals you know that becomes a budget issue so it's um I think the emphasis felt um out in our meetings that it was the emphasis on professional learning because one of the things we were trying to safeguard was um to make sure professional
144learning wasn't lost when we modeled it certainly going to two times instead of four times you can imagine now the frequency and consistency of which teachers convening together to work on things you know for their classrooms and for their grade level or for their content area they have less consistency or less frequent time and the overall amount of time is reduced from when it is in a five-day schedule so um looking at it I think we all can agree we we can reduce that professional learning time and still have a good go of it every school district that I spoke to that implemented this the number one thing they said they would change and they regretted because now they can't come back from it and it's causing some detrimental negative impact is the lack of
145community time a lack of work time together because the school day teachers are isolated in their classrooms and this isn't isolated work anymore um it re it's too much work in an isolated way so that team time is really critical it's not just professional learning um it's it's everything else so I would say in terms of models I I'm hesitant to say any one particular model I think it's going to be modeled differently um at every school um and at different times in the year of how much of that is actually professional learning versus collaboration team time versus perhaps even on that work day some individual time um I think that there's a lot of decisions there's a lot of different ways to make that work and I'm hesitant to actually structure that and say
146it's going to happen in one one way I've heard some criticism around that that we aren't differentiating professional learning um we're differentiating more than any uh School District I've ever been a part of um but it again is limited by the number of people qualified and able to provide that to differentiate into more smaller minute smaller groups to have it be completely job embedded to have it be completely supportive what somebody needs but we're doing it by grade level we're doing it by content area subject area you know there's not a lot of other ways to differentiate it even further and it requires every principal assistant principal instructional Coach reading interventionists all hands on deck to be able to differentiate to the level it is if you want even greater differentiation that's going to require
147more instructional support staff to be able to pull that off and that comes at a budget cost so I would say that I would feel strongly to retain the two work days or the work days that are shown on the calendar if you move forward with the four day it can be something that absolutely could be evaluated it's something that we could reevaluate the upcoming the following year but I don't want to replicate mistakes that other districts feel like they've made in implementing the four day week Mr Parks your thoughts um just real quick um forgive me I didn't bring my sheets from last I thought I did what was the actual difference on the seven hour and 40 minute four day school week what was the difference between that and the five day was
148it 30 hours a year when it um the instructional hours is five hours difference okay all right all right couldn't remember which one was which but uh it was this seven hour 40 minutes 148 days okay so we're talking five hours correct that's with one day for parent teacher conference in the fall and one day in the spring with the expectation that one of the work date that Friday work day is actually a work day for conferences okay perfect really that's it I been going over just about everything cut in my spare time kind of going back through this and um This is complicated so thank you I only had one request I believe it was I asked it at the work study session that I asked for a number the amount of money that
149it would take for the most needy kids for lunches and do we have that number we know the um what it would take to make them make them babies whole that that's the only number I want to know my understanding of your question um I don't know that we're able to get to any more knowledge about the neediest of students other than to say do they qualify for free or reduced lunch and I know there's a narrower group you'd be looking for yep I want to know the kids who are eating cheese sandwiches okay that those are the ones that I'd like to know and I want to know what it'll take for someone to buy buy their lunch or buy food that they can take home with them on on Thursday if this goes
150through and I'd really appreciate that number I can provide you the number of what it would cost us for Staffing over the course of the year so that's part of it right to make sure that we had the opportunity to staff that that additional cost for Food Services is eight thousand dollars in Staffing um the the one consideration I believe that the question was asked at our study session on Thursday specific to which particular schools could offer that so in the slide deck that was presented for the study session there's a summary on some food service questions that were asked I had reported earlier that 1748 students qualified for free and reduced lunch of those 1748 567 currently qualify for free there was an additional question specific to how do we know and can we
151identify of those 1567 students those particular students of that group that are have food insecurities at home and there's there's no way that we can tell other than to identify the 1567 students that qualify for free but whether or not those students have food insecurities we we don't we don't know that number so to to say what the reimbursable component would be over and above the eight thousand dollar expense for labor specific to The Limited number of schools that are qualified under Ade is high risk the numbers that we are going off of uh to kind of give a ballpark to it would be our summer meal program uh and so we have those particular numbers okay um you know our highest level of uh participation is that blue Horizons in which we averaged over
15230 mules per day um at Rainbow Valley and Freedom the other two schools that we provided at Rainbow Valley we average two families per day over the summer and at Freedom Elementary we averaged about five so I don't know that that gives you a real number of how many meals could be served in those particular schools the only number I could come up with concretely would be the eight thousand dollars specific to Staffing it on Fridays at those high risk schools over the course of the year so the question I believe Food Services that might be able to answer this the question that I have is not to staff it on Friday but to send a meal home with that child on Thursday so I'm not talking about additional staff I'm talking about an extra
153meal for that baby on Thursday can you come to the mic please sorry are we referring to the students just at our free reduced meals free just the free students I would not have an exact number for you but I can come up with that number because that's what I'd like I'd like to know what that number is I'd like to know that dollar amount that it's going to take to make sure that those kids have a meal and so they would go home with a meal on Thursday yes a breakfast and a lunch yes yes we can look into that number we have no idea what that number is right now I wouldn't Mr Nuttall can you say the number of students that receive free lunches here in the district 1567. and for that
154um do you the dollar amount that we get reimbursed that we would have to come up with this dollar amount do you think that is a comparable dollar amount that we charge students currently for their meal or would it be you know a smaller package meal maybe not meeting all the requirements but it's a smaller packed you know what is that per unit cost do you think so right now we offer reimbursable meals because we are reimbursed by Ade but if these meals are going home we're not going to be reimbursed so um so just give a meal price and then what you know an estimate of what that meal price would be with since it's not reimbursed What's the total price that it would probably cost us per meal so we currently do offer
155meals that are not reimbursed to other schools for example Sierra schools and I believe it's 450 per meal just for the lunch then we would have to add the breakfast to that so four dollars and fifty cents times the number that he just said that I've already forgotten times 148 days um times the number of weeks in a school year okay the number I came up with is 253 854 came up with like only three in the numbers for that's for lunch only right Miss Kevin yeah excuse me is there a wire a quick question just so I understand we're talking about adding uh those two meals and we're getting a number for lunch only for those Fridays that we don't have students am I correct that in our five day week that we currently
156have if I understand what was uh said before is we already are offering uh meals to students who are not reimbursed to us um do we know what that number is I'm what we're spending as a district on non-reimbursed meals for this school year yes so we are not spending those dollars that amount is billed back to Sierra schools okay so it's not costing us anything right now correct okay thank you Dr stuff I I do have another question real quickly I know that when we surveyed the support staff specific to the transportation which in my mind uh has the bearish the greatest impact of of going to the four day week we had a number of respondents that indicated that they had no interest in in taking on assignments outside of of the transportation
157we had a number that said they would be interested uh being trying to keep them whole uh of doing other things that are needed by the district badly that they could be uh influential on could assist with um do we have a strong feeling on the the folks that we have talked to that would be uninterested in taking on additional assignments uh I know the the proof will be in the pudding but do we have a feeling for how much loss we would obtain through that uh specific to Transportation when we interviewed each one of our current Transportation employees we know that six Transportation employees indicated at that particular time that they would not be interested in and or willing to perform additional duties to increase their hours we have 32 bus drivers we have
158several aides as well so of the other remaining 27 of them ish they would be willing and we feel like we could augment some hours to get them to uh closer to whole um does that answer your question that does and dark stuff one one last question let's I think of another one but uh I know that uh one of the things that that that makes a four day week uh Bible for me which I think is our our number one issue we face as a district a state and as a country is retaining and recruiting highly qualified quality teacher um I know that we don't have any specific numbers other than anecdotal but as far as the administration's feeling do you think that uh going to a four-day week might improve our recruitment and
159retention I do um we had a percentage you know around a fourth of our teachers um that said that they do not or they were not in favorite but I also think that um they may have been unclear about what would be work days or non-work days on Friday so I suspect it would be slightly larger the districts that I spoke to said that they did see an initial increase in ability to fill positions by August um that you know we did not have as strong a result as they did and some of them have been in this program for a couple of years now have said they are no longer seeing this as the primary reason for staying or their primary reason for coming but I don't really have any evidence other than that
160but I would say yes it could definitely help us recruit retain thank you can I can I also can I also add just one point in the research that I did with other districts teacher attendance had a tendency to increase and the reason why is because typically Fridays and Mondays in that order are your least attended days for for staff and so if you will If you eliminate uh Friday from being a possibility to be absent if you will what you have is in the research that I did was that teacher attendance also increased and student attendance increased so when you have teacher attendance and student attendance increasing you have more highly qualified certified employees in the room more often and that was just from the teacher perspective I just wanted to comment in the
161research that I did certainly we did collectively teacher retention did increase and the recruitment component specifically was targeted at more experienced teachers um you know in the 10-year range specifically who have some veteran teaching experience thank you I had forgotten that I do remember that now thank you so much so if there's I have a question yep go ahead Michael uh Dr shuffler or something from staff maybe can clarify I think in our work session we recognize that our students on the four day would lose um would lose a few hours under the different models we 've kind of identified would work best for us but I believe there was discussion that those students who have IEPs uh or or some other special needs would be able to get those hours back in the extended
162school year uh is that did I understand that correctly um so let me just say that the number of hours that we have an IEP minutes now could be met within a four day week as long as we are fully staffed with the special education staff that warrants um you know the children that we serve so it does become a staffing issue in the event like this school year where we aren't fully staffed in special education and if the students are not getting all of their instructional minutes for their IEP we are obligated to provide extended school year that is not the first choice that is something we do to make sure we keep each of those children whole with their instructional minutes okay thank you I do agree that's probably not our first choice
163but we are not going to shortchange those students IEP if we do choose to go to a four-day work week no we um ethically we are obligated to provide the children the number of minutes they need to help to overcome their disability and to support them with their learning trajectory okay no that's great and I I just think beyond the obligation it's just our it's what we need to do with the board and as a district is to make sure that those those are never shortchanged thank you so if there's no other discussion on this item I'd entertain a motion to approve a four-day Work Week instructional model for school year 2023. so I make a motion to approve a four-day School week instructional model for school year 2023. is there a second a second
164did you get who's seconded I posted Michael Todd I did second that okay all those in favor Brian aye Michael aye Paul I I am also and I assure that it approved unanimously item 6.4 policy IC instructional model second reading president McGuire members of the governing board the first reading for policy I see was brought to the board previously there are no changes in this second reading there were no recommended changes offered by the governing board so it stands ready for your approval questions anything Brian no Michael Paul I have no question no I have no question okay with that I'd entertain a motion to approve governing board policy IC instructional model I'll make a motion to approve governing board policy IC instructional model a second so I have a motion and a second all
165those in favor Brian aye Michael hi Paul aye I am also and I showed that approved unanimously item 6.5 discussion excuse me discussion of sixth through eighth grade science primary instructional resources for 60-day review board president um members of the governing board I am uh happy to present some information regarding our sixth or 8th grade science primary instructional resource committee work we have met uh three separate times uh so far this year on October 18th 25th and November 1st our meetings were open to the public our committee members included teachers administrators and parent participants the purpose and the outcomes of the committee are listed in the executive summary I want just to draw your attention mainly to our outcomes of reviewing the criteria as a committee to score the primary instructional resources and to determine
166two top resources to recommend for 60-day review and teacher pilot our science teachers have been without primary instructional resources that are up to date for quite some time and so this is a really important really important work that this committee has committed to all of our meeting agendas and our meeting documents as well as our meeting minutes have been posted in board Docs our committee has previewed over nine primary instructional resources scored each of them uh I will say my timeline was quite tight and we had to extend because there were so many resources that they wanted to meticulously score and look at to choose the best during the meetings the committee members discussed the merits and the possible concerns with each resource each of the resource listed below were recommended based on consensus of
167the committee that reviewed the resources and so the following resources following our discussion tonight um open site Ed and stem Scopes will initiate a 60-day review to gather public input on those resources that would begin on November 15th which is tomorrow and in February Administration would bring forward a recommendation to our superintendent and then to our governing board to consider adopting one of those primary instructional resources for sixth through eighth grade science and I stand ready for questions great it's not necessarily a question my concern is we still don't have parents I mean that's that's a concern of mine and I'm not sure what the answer is but we need some participation here uh if you have pizza or something I don't know but anyway uh nice work thank you and I look forward to
168looking over the materials myself thank you Miss Bixler I have no questions at this time but I will uh reserve the right to uh uh at the point where we talk about agenda items for the board to ask for something there Michael I'm Mr President I would uh just like to thank Miss camp on on her work I know these are uh arduous tasks and progresses that go through this um so in into the rest of the committee I I would Echo Mr Park's concerns about parent involvement um man we just feel like we've got to do something to get parents involved so since Mr Parks brought it up first I'll let him make some suggestions perhaps but uh um but uh otherwise I just want to thank the work of the committee so far
169uh it is truly exciting that we are updating our curriculum and getting uh new materials available for our students so that we're up in The Cutting Edge of of the education that's all thank you and I have no questions thank you Mr Campbell thank you so we are going to bypass item 6.6 we're not going to be going into executive session or recognizing that item 6.7 discussion consideration to approve governing board resolution urging the governor to call for a legislative session to approve the override of the aggregate expenditure limit and Mr Todd this was uh for you yes sir thank you um I I believe uh well first of all I'd like to thank Ms Bixler as well for bringing this up on my behalf but I had to short out on a meeting that
170changed and I believe in watching that you wanted it as well I think this is important that the governor here from local elected officials um we are the ones who are attacked by legislation to run our district I think that the legislature this last time around kind of dangled a carrot in front of us with budget that we're going to be getting some money and they kind of forgot to open the door to let that money out so the uh Agri expenditure limit is critical without it uh we don't get the money that would ultimately voted on by our legislature to to send our way and as we well know it's very critical to properly fund our schools so um if it's good enough I would motion that we approve this aggregate expenditure limit uh
171hearing special session by the legislature that we're asking Governor Ducey to call any other discussion on this item yes I do have one comma on that uh I I agree with you Mr Todd it could be no more in agreement that this resolution has to go forward but I also want to point out the fact that one thing that was pointed out by the teaching staff within the survey is that they also recognize that the obstacle to fully funding and supporting public education in the state Arizona falls directly in the lap of our legislature they need to support public education and so yes I agree this needs to go forward anything Brian with that I'd entertain a motion to approve item 6.7 Mr chairman I would make a motion that we approve item 6.7 approving
172a resolution from the Liberty governing School Board to encourage Governor Ducey to call it let's call the legislator back to session and address the aggregate expenditure limit second you have a motion in a second all those in favor Brian aye Michael aye Paul aye I am also and I show that approved unanimously discussion and consideration to approve developer agreement form Dr Shuff president Aguirre members of the governing board um as I know you all are aware that assessed valuation of land in our school district has increased considerably we have developer agreements that we are honoring um that date back as you know as long ago as 2003 so there's some aspects to the the template language that we've asked our attorney to review and put into place and also to increase the per rooftop fee
173that or donation I should say from the developers and as more and more developers are starting now to work with us I would like just the board to have an opportunity to see this ahead of time and give your input on this because this is essentially what I would be negotiating to with individual developers you know of course there could be some language here language there that they could come back and we'd need to navigate through ultimately every developer agreement this District brings before the governing board for approval that is not the custom in all school districts but we do so I just want you to see this up front and get your approval on that the next agenda item is for a specific developer an agreement but this one is the essentially the the
174template in the form to use questions Brian no questions Michael uh Mr President I would just like to thank Dr Shuff for bringing this to the board um as she mentioned a lot of a lot of districts don't do that I think this is important uh for us to see and also for the general public to be able to see I don't think most people realize that school districts don't get any impact fees developers come in make a lot of money off of building houses and ultimately they don't really have to do very much to support the education and the strain on the education that they'll cause on the system by building new schools or new houses that we have to provide my only question here is should this uh have a spot that specifies
175probably under the recital um it says uh the city and we may not always be in the city so do we need to change that differently or perhaps change the word and say within the Liberty Elementary School District for example Rainbow Valley is not in our city so um I I think we might spell that out and I'd be okay with staff just making that change on it if others agree Dr Chef um thank you for that we'll uh we'll look at that okay with that I'd entertain a motion to approve the item as presented Mr President I will make go ahead I apologize with the exception of Mr Todd's Edition sorry about that Mike you're fine I'll make a motion to prove the developer agreement form for negotiations with developers with the exception of
176the um amendment that Mr Todd has put forward second so we have a motion in a second all those in favor Brian hi Michael hi Paul hi I am also and I show that it proved unanimously item 6.9 discussion consideration to approve developer agreement with Mountain View Business Park Dr Shuff so this is the first agreement coming back I'm using this new template and this particular development is the first of its kind and in our school district and it will be for detached apartment units I think there is another set of those going in in Buckeye I pass one every day on the way into work along the 101 heading south to the I-10 it's a changing Dynamic of what's being offered in real estate today so here you see the amounts filled into the
177template and we have preliminary approval from from the um the developer they ask that it go and that we get it fully signed and executed and then send it back to them so our assumption hopefully holds true that they are just accepting it in whole but they are also waiting for Buckeye Union to also fill their so it may take a little bit to get executed because I think they want to do them all together but we're fulfilling our requirement what they ask was if you will is to take it to our board questions Brian nope Michael I have no questions Paul I have no question with that I'd entertain a motion to approve item 6.9 the chairman I would make a motion to approve item 6.9 the donation agreement um with uh developer developer
178agreement with Mountain View Business Park second so we have a motion and a second all those in favor Brian hi Michael hi Paul I I am also an eyeshadow that approved unanimously item 7.1 board comments agenda topic requests Brian yeah Michael um you're looking at uh um between now and the end of the year ensuring that at least uh um one possibly two of the professional development days on Wednesdays are dedicated to personal development um relieving teachers from having any expectation other than to personally explore some professional development I can back that Paul yes um as we talked about the science curriculum and the materials uh six eight uh I would like to uh get a report back from after the committee's completion uh I would like for us to take in consideration to the
179K-5 involvement in science as well so as we look at that six eight adoption that we consider how that will filter down to the lower grades as well so that we have a vertical alignment there additional support for I'll support it okay anyone else no upcoming board meetings everyone's good for the 28th and the 12th of December or 28th in November 12th of December yep I'm good okay with that I'd entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting make a motion to it during the meeting yeah yeah so we have a motion in a second all those in favor all together say aye aye all those opposed say nay the eyes have it show that we adjourned at 8 39. [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you