001All right, it's time for another board agenda review. I'm here with our board president, Steven Chapman. Let's fire away. This meeting will get through its regular opening. After that, we're straight into celebrations. >> Celebrations? Uh yeah, we are uh recognizing our finance team uh getting recognized for the ninth year in a row, I believe, from the GFOA and the ASBO International on our uh financial accountability, transparency, um how we're doing our budget work. So, I want to thank Joyce Council and her team and uh your leadership on making sure that uh you know, we're budgeting correctly for the district and investing in our students and our staff. >> Yes, many hands going to making that work and appreciate all of them. All right, then we'll get into our information items and we'll have a discussion
002on the update for the Auditor General's Classroom Spending Report. Uh so, this is an annual report uh that's been being done since the year 2000 when when Classroom Site Fund was first established with Proposition 301 and it takes an assessment of all the school districts in Arizona, looks at how they're spending their dollars, and then rates them on how they're doing. Uh one of the newer adds to this report is a listing on teacher salaries and there's a nice chart in there on our page. It shows the history of our salaries since 2017, where you can see the district was well below the state average, but now we're the best in the state, over 20 grand above the state average. Uh so, that's a nice graph to look at and we know that we haven't
003just done that for teachers. We've We've been able to do that for all employees, which also means in a lot of the other categories, um when comparing to other districts, because we have high salaries and that drives most of the costs on most things, we also look high in comparison to other districts because we have those high salaries. But, don't want to take all of Joyce's thunder, but that's some of the components of what you'll see in the Auditor General's Classroom Spending Report. >> Yeah, and and then uh another good thing for the public to know um because they will say classroom spending and non-classroom spending is the way they identify it. Uh Uh we see a little bit differently. When we have uh qualified school bus drivers taking our kids to and from school
004safely every day, that's student spending. When we have uh our cafeteria folks are serving nutritious free breakfast and lunch to our students, that's direct student spending. So, while the state doesn't see it that way and we're investing in those things, all of our dollars are being spent on making sure students are safe, healthy, and ready to learn every day. >> All right, then we'll go through our consent agenda. And we'll start to get into action items. First action item is to approve the fiscal year 2026-2027 proposed budget. So, again, another annual exercise for us to put a budget together, bring it forward to the governing board. Uh the the state is just wrapping up their budget, so we know that that this budget will have some changes to it when we get to our revision
005time in December. Um but this is off draft form since the state did not finish uh session on time, they put us on draft forms. And we're getting hold your breath, the bare minimum from the state this year, uh 2% increase. So, um under Proposition 301 and then reaffirmed by Proposition 123, the state is required to give us an increase of at least 2% or inflation, whichever number is lower. Since inflation is well above 2%, they can give us 2% and call it a day, and and that's what we're looking at coming out of this year's legislative session. So, >> Yep. And then uh also good for um our community to know, this is the proposed budget. Uh so, it sets forward a a hearing date, which will be our July board meeting. Um at
006that time uh folks will be able to come in, hear uh hear the budget again. Uh we'll go over the proposal obviously in this meeting, but we'll hear it again. Um there will also be time for uh public's uh public members to ask questions, uh provide feedback, and then the board will be voting on the budget um in on the July meeting as well. >> Yes. And then we'll have the audit and compliance questionnaire for fiscal year 24-25. Again, another annual requirement. We get Heinfeld and Meech, an outside third party to come in, review everything that we're doing, hundreds of questions, and it is a simple yes, no, or not applicable. There isn't a yes, but or no, but. It's just uh those three options on each question as they go through them. And so,
007uh with those hundreds of questions, we're seeing that it's it's another typical year for us. Um which, you know, we'll we'll have around 10 or so questions that the answer ends up being no on, and and that's pretty standard for most districts. Uh you don't you don't see any district who just gets every question as a yes, because then an auditor would probably lose their job if that was to happen. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also important to note uh for our community that uh yeah, this is a a neutral third party that comes in. Uh when you hear questions about how a district is spending money, uh how they're prioritizing money, this is a group that comes in. Are we being financially uh compliant with state law, uh state regulations, all of
008those things? And it kind of goes back to the awards that we'll be celebrating um in our um earlier part of the agenda. Um that yeah, we are meeting the financial needs and requirements of our district and the state. >> Yeah. And then we'll have uh an issuance of our school improvement bonds. This is the last issuance out of our existing authorizations. Uh 125 million. And and it's being used to pay off the existing projects. Obviously, we have the the new school along with the um training and learning center. So, those those projects will be paid off by by this issuance, and and then then we're tapped out on bond. >> Yeah. Um our next item is a uh discussion to approve the governing board's argument in support of the maintenance and operations budget override
009election. Uh so, at the previous meeting, the board authorized uh two ballot questions, a bond and an override, uh for our community consider. Uh this is a uh statement on behalf of the board about why the maintenance and operations override is important. Um again, these are dollars that go to salaries, programs, things like that. So, the statement of why the board is asking for this will be voted on and be included in the voter guide. Um and then after that, we are looking at a review of professional staff fringe benefits first read. This is an existing policy we're just amending that allows superintendent to ensure that certain staff members across the district have access to a mobile phone. We have a lot of folks that work on school safety, whether it's our site administrators, district
010administrators that need to be in contact with each other in the in the event of emergency, be able to call first responders, things like that. So, we want to make sure they have a reliable communication device to do that. So, this will authorize the superintendent to be able to make sure that the right folks have a cell phone available. Um and then we have a discussion consideration to approve a coaching stipend agreement language. This is just to make sure that our coaches are aware about driving white buses, things like that. We also do provide training for anybody that's driving a white bus or any other district vehicles to make sure that they're especially with students on board they're driving safely, following all the laws and everything like that. >> And then our next item will
011be an amendment to the GMP they the guaranteed maximum price and although it's phrased that way that the amendment to the contract does not change any dollars. Um it does it does change the delivery of the new school. So, the new school was set to be delivered in two phases and and now they're looking at a full delivery with only one phase. And so the contractor and the architect will be out there to explain that to the board why they are looking at a single phase approach due to the complications are running in with trying to do a two-stage approach. And and then that'll be for the board's consideration. >> All right. Then we just have a couple of executive session items. We come back from that. We'll have a few pieces of action after
012that. One of them is the superintendent's evaluation. We do that each year. Every school district does a full evaluation with their superintendent including performance pay as required by statute. So that'll be one of the action items we take after coming out of executive session. We also have to consider a proposal from the city of Tolleson in regards to a pedestrian bridge project. And then from after that we have a following action item based on executive session conversation in regards to communications with the auditor general's office. So that's that's our our meeting for Tuesday. >> All right. Lot of action items. Hopefully not a long night, but we'll see you all out there on Tuesday. >> See you there.