001Hello, my name is Carmen Trillo and I currently serve as the governing board president for Phoenix Elementary School District. And I'm Deborah Gonzalez. I'm the superintendent of Phoenix Elementary School District. And before we get started, I want to give a shout out to Herrera and Kennallorth, our performers who came to the uh celebrations before our board meeting. They were phenomenal, and it was their very first time singing together. And it was just, wasn't it great? away. I'm not throwing away my scruffy and hungry. >> They were great and I loved getting to celebrate our store award winners from Adetta and Kennaworth as well. >> So, let's go ahead and talk about the presentations that we had at the board meeting. Our first presentation was one that board member Edmmyston had requested and that was the
002ballot question to understand the um land sale lease and exchange and let's talk a little bit about why that's important that the governing board put that on the agenda for our voters to approve. Absolutely. A yes vote gives the district the flexibility to use our property to generate long-term revenue. uh long-term revenue streams that uh directly impact our students without without creating new taxes. Um it goes directly into their programming among other things. The flexibility enables the district to responsibly manage our assets, reinvest lease revenue into student programming and school improvements. And some of those student programs are things like preschool, afterchool sports, um field experiences, and then it also supports our um teacher training and supports for our professionals. >> Absolutely. Our leases definitely provide all those things. >> Board member OA brought up
003a point that I think can be confusing. She had asked about the issue or the question that we're putting on the ballot about leasing, selling, or exchanging our lands and whether or not that was a pathway to closing schools. So, let's talk about why that's not true. >> Right. The governing board does not intend to sell district properties, but we want to seek voter approval to be able to enter into long-term leases of our unused and underused school properties. uh closing schools has a completely separate statute that requires governing board members to hold a public gather hold a public meeting sorry public hearing uh to gather community feedback. It's a completely separate process entirely. We have no intention of closing schools and this question to the voters is not about closing schools but again flexibility
004about using our unused and underused school properties. Yeah, I'm glad that she asked that question because I do think there's confusion around that issue and we definitely want to clear that up. We aren't going to close schools. In fact, what we want to do is redesign our school so that every child has an exciting place and a beautiful place to be learning. We want to make sure that they have knowledgeable, caring staff so we can make sure that with those lease revenues, we're able to support children coming to schools with knowledgeable, caring staff and that our staff are supported and our families so that every child can thrive. In fact, the annual financial report that Mr. Riddle shared or AFR from 2025 showed that 88% of our maintenance and operation funds are going directly into
005supporting student learning. So can you talk a little bit more about other takeaways from the AFR presentation? >> Absolutely. The end of the EST grant created a loss of $8 million in grants and we also had other cuts in federal grants. Uh but even with those cuts in revenue, the district is moving forward with a $1.3 million balance uh budget balance carry forward and there's a plan to increase that annually so we can get the 10% budget balance carry forward goal. I'm most excited that we are now ahead of the timeline and getting our audits completed timely and I'm really excited about that. Speaking of that, can you walk us through the budget reporting process? >> Yes, and that's an important one for us because a lot of people get confused about how budgets work.
006So, every year we do a budget projection and that's based on what we've seen from years prior, which is why being excited about being on time with things is really important. But the budget for the current year is strictly a projection that's due to the state in July. We don't have students in July. So, we're making a guess about the number of students that we have and the number of days that they're going to attend. And that's the actual basis of our funding. So in December we have to do a revision because that means that we now have the students and we can estimate more accurately what our budget will be that we get from the state. So that is due in December. Our annual financial report is the report that's the what actually happened
007in the year prior. So that's why having our auditors checking that information is so critical because it makes sure that what we are reporting and what we are seeing aligns with what the county and our auditors are seeing as well. So that we're making sure everything is there. That then when we're really solid in that kind of budgeting, it allows us to make sure that our budget for the next year is more accurate as we go on. And they use that process annually. Speaking of our goals, uh please share what we learned about uh monitoring for goals two and five. >> Yes. So moni our goals two and five are our math goals. So two is early literacy math and five is middle year's math and we are looking at focus schools. And let me
008tell you a little bit about focus schools since we're looking at how we are monitoring achievement. While we were monitoring achievement, one of the things that we started to notice is that we're some schools were consistently performing below their peers. And so when we saw that, we thought, how do we turn this monitoring, excuse me, this monitoring of student achievement into something that we can really dig into to help change what is being predicted based on past performance. And so with that, we created focus schools. And those focused schools have more resources deployed to them in the terms of having a coach there, having instructional assistants working with them. And everyone is really focused on what do we do to really support these focused schools. So what we saw, we started looking at their scores
009from fall to winter. The fall, we know that they're just coming to that grade level curriculum and by winter we expect to see that they're going to grow. And so what we're looking at is how much growth our students are going to make and are we predicting that they're going to be on target with that. This helped us to understand that some of the things that we really have to focus on is that intentional use of vocabulary instruction, helping our teachers be very planned and purposeful in what they're doing so that we understand who's understanding the concept and who needs more focused attention on it. And with that, we're being able to take students from not knowing very much to being able to show much more impressive growth by the time they take their assessment
010again in winter. Thank you for the overview. We also monitor your superintendent guard rails and these are put in place to ensure that as the leader of our organization, you're focused on strategies that support the adult behaviors that improve our student outcomes. Um, this guardrail was specifically related to our customer service plan across the district. Please tell us more a little about that. >> Yes. So, with customer service, we know that there are a lot of different aspects that play into that, but part of it is making sure that we have good systems to accurately report our data >> and being able to train all members of our district community on good customer care. And what does that look like? So, um, caregiver supports are used to reinforce the, um, the partnerships with our teachers
011and with our our school leaders, but we're also looking at making sure that when you come onto our campuses, you're welcomed, you're greeted, you feel like you belong on our campus, you belong in our district. That's really important to us. So, part of what we do is surveying different communities. includes our PTAs, our PTOs, uh we have capacititos and coffee talks with principles and we're doing roundts across the community with business partners as well as with family members and community associations. So some of the feedback that we're hearing through that is um the families are asking about how we ensure that we have safer communities. And so coming up, you're going to be able to see some video series that we did with the chief >> assistant chief police from police from Phoenix Police >>
012who are helping us to make sure that we're supporting how do we ensure that we have safer communities. >> Another request that we keep getting from families is we want more social workers and more supports for families and caregivers including safe uh school safety officers at schools. They love music and arts classes and so they want to continue to see us able to offer music and arts as a regular part of our core curriculum. After school performances, after school supports, enrichment programs, >> training for our parents, training for our teachers. One of the things that are um we've heard at a couple of different sites is training for parents on how to work with middle school students because we all know that middle school is a really difficult age to figure out how to best
013communicate. They want to be adults, but they're still kids. So, how do we how do we find good ways, positive ways to interact and make sure that our students are being safe and making good choices? We also know that programs that include STEM um one of our comments was about an honest teaching of history that came from our Indian education family support group. And then um they said that there's another group said we have better food in our cafeterias now than we used to have, which is a good sign, but they want larger portions. >> So those are the sorts of things that we're hearing about. transportation, longer preschool days, making sure that our our arts and our music and our academic programs are competitive with other schools. Those seem to be the recurring theme
014that we're hearing. So, President Truillo, to your point earlier, you talked about adult um behaviors have to change in order for student outcomes to change. And one of the adult behaviors, the governing board also has its own set of guardrails. So, talk to us a little bit about that. Absolutely. The board did adopt guard rails for ourselves. It's about it's built around holding uh ourselves accountable for creating the conditions uh that make improvements um and student outcomes possible. So we took a look at board goal number I'm sorry board guardrail 2 which says that the board should spend at least half their time 50% of our board meetings um focused on progress monitoring of our student outcomes and our superintendent guard rails. And while we didn't quite meet our goal uh because we allotted time
015to financial matters, administrative things, and our study session in August, um we are still taking the time to focus on student achievement. And you'll be seeing we'll we'll be seeing that consistently in future board meetings. Before we close, I want to take a minute to invite the community to a couple of events we have coming up in October. Uh October 14th, we have a round table at Magnet. And Saturday, October 18th, we have a community session um with that we're partnering with Roosevelt's governing board with. Uh please check our website and social media for details to join and we look forward to seeing you if you can participate. Thank you so much for joining us for this governing board recap. We really appreciate seeing you in our audience and taking advantage of this social media
016opportunity. Our next governing board meeting is Thursday, November 13th at 5:15 p.m. in our governing board room. All are welcome to join us in person or virtually via liveream. >> And we have student performances and celebrations before every board meeting at 4:15 in the governing boardroom. See you next time.