March 8th Study Session Board Meeting

001michael robertson of the 26th west hospital hills not to be confused with wendy robertson i'm not on the school board and i don't speak for her and she does not speak with me or individual people this is my statement arriving in 2016 my wife and i didn't choose ajo lightly we had friends here and fell in love with the place but as parents of two school-aged children our primary consideration was the school we met with them then principal dr carrier and some of her staff we talked to teachers we enrolled our daughters first semester only then did we commit to ajo and we remain committed but over the past couple of years my perception of the school has dimmed i've volunteered on campus i've come to know several teachers i've seen some of our best

002teachers leave aho i've heard their stories grown angry the staff at ajo unified school district are not treated like professionals many of these as many of those who stay share a discontent and however positive their intentions their poor morale lessens the classroom experience for our children the community isn't blind to this i know families leaving or who have left otto because their kids educations must come first the attrition is terrible for otto and i blame this administration and the board that enables it shame on the school board reporting to keep dr dooley in power for another year shame on this school board for going years and years without checking his power to treat staff poorly where is the employee satisfaction survey that was requested almost a year ago dr doing knows if you had a

003clear sense of how unhappy our teachers are you would not have predicted this contract last month but you didn't and you did and sadly you did so when there are smart eager administrators all over the state that would come to ajo for the opportunity to lead our district that's what our kids deserve and that's what this board has denied though and i fear the extent to which that decision will harm otto another thing we're all aware of the 500 000 district budget shortfall that will further diminish our children's school in the months and years ahead i urge the board to be clear about something dr dooley is to blame for this shortfall not coveted as he would have you believe what did dr dooley do to encourage parents not to unenroll their kids i never

004read an op-ed in the copper news explaining the importance of keeping students enrolled urging the community to stay unified during this crisis pledging to do whatever was necessary to keep kids enrolled presenting a non-ingenuity option anything he should have been on the phone personally to every single family because it was that important he failed and now we're in dire financial straights i'm worried for ajo worried about this board's ability to do what's necessary to save our school and all right the next daughter is informational items and the first is discussion of personal items 8a for the regular board meeting are there any questions about any of those all right yes please thank you madam president um looking at the agenda for march 10 personnel the first time on the personnel agenda is administrative regulation this

005is something that has been discussed in-house for a period of time and as [Music] resignation uh the second agenda under personnel uh contracts uh for teachers for 212 school year uh last month we approved uh several a number of i forgot to how many were the number uh teacher contracts for 2122. uh the two teachers listed here mr kevin commence and mr jose diaz at the time we're not prepared to have a completion of a contract for 2122 has since are prepared and so we'll ask the board to approve those these two men are currently teachers in our school and have received good evaluations yes i want to interrupt you but i have a question i'm sure and uh now's a good time to ask it so the administration yourself the principal hires the teachers

006and the custodians right we recommend them the board takes the vote so so we hire yes okay so they work for us or they work for you i'm immediate the mr mr ed under who are the principal is a media supervisor of all teachers i supervise business staff and maintenance probably more directly than mrs [Music] so we do the evaluations we supervise but for termination or hiring uh the word that takes that vote so if you recommend a a teacher for instance and we choose not to approve her then she wouldn't build it resignation of a special ed teacher rachel ronario mr nario has been teaching here three years she has at the end of her j-1 visa through the u.s state department they are allowed extension for fourth year and fifth year mr nario

007does not choose to ask for that extension uh this is because of personal reasons she has two children at home she wants to re-establish the relationship with us so she's asking to she's not not not asking to not have a contract without the board to know you may know the staff we'd go ahead and put on the agenda um second teachers in a similar situation after mark retiree mark is the third grade teacher at this time um he has completed his initial three years of j-1 visa work he decided thank you he decided to return to his home country after completing this fiscal year this calendar year so again we uh his his current contract is effective to uh may 27th so we wanted to make the vote the board and officially i think it's

008better to have the board accept the resignation than just wondering what happened to these people um mr edmund and i interviewed a lady last week via zoom she is a qualified english teacher she currently teaches in nogales um and chuchita chobardi we were impressed she's an international teacher from india her english is very very understandable so it's something to take into consideration when you interview an international teacher uh she has good recommendations and will be recommending her uh to fill a vacant english position that's going to exist again because of someone's visa running i am reading that so i keep asking these questions okay i read in the agenda here that that was pending um in an investigation she has to right now um the same immigration attorney represents ajo and that represents the district

009when she's coming and so he's kind of being a rock and a hard place um she wants to have a to put under h1b because her pieces on each one became the path to a green card and a citizenship eventually and um she wants to have a green card moving up the food chain it depends on the country they're from how long it takes to go from green card to citizenship uh some country may have in a couple years some it may take 10 or 12 years um that's a small fee it costs a district 480 bucks something like that uh which is an insignificant amount of money so our insurance yeah and so um but we've got to face work out the deals between now if her if her district for some reason wouldn't

010release her then unless she's currently under contract and as best we can understand when you talk to her she's under contract only in the end of the school year just like the other two people accepted so if there'd be a problem there or if they if they gave her uh a deal whereby they would break a precedent and sponsor that green card then she may want to save it right now she has an offer so what we want to do is get because we have several vacancies we want to get a contract to her so we got her we have her locked in for our kids in fall the next person i like item is um a math teacher we have a need for a math teacher this is a young lady from the philippines

011that we hired last year the board mrs robertson and mrs vitelli you may remember this person made the agenda item probably in april may of last year to offer the job through october and if she wasn't able to be released from philippines by that time the offer would be withdrawn and that's exactly what happened because of the copen 19 she was unable to gather the country and she impressed us a year ago she presses again this year so be recommending uh recommending her for the math decision the next personnel item is for the spring summer session i'm sorry spring intersection this will be this during spring break week it'll be four days monday tuesday wednesday thursday four hours of the day uh eight til noon basically and teachers will be trade 25 in an hour

012um mrs burns and i had a comment birds i had a conversation a while ago would be nice to have these kids on campus i don't know whether the teachers are ready for that right now it'd be a zoom session we know it's going to be safe with with cobit 19 any administrator you talk to probably any educator is going to share frustration with lack of control for teachers about what goes on in classrooms it's hard to control the screens much easier to control someone five feet from here six feet from you but i wanted to make the offer for parents so if they felt their child wasn't doing well and this will be the week after fall i'm sorry after spring break spring apparent conferences i hope that teachers will point out to parents

013and a little so-and-so need this extra help so and so forth to kind of do some marketing to help parents realize i was important how important is our children to keep working so we have eight people there uh they'll be paid about 125 a day so that'd be a thousand dollars a day we're talking we're talking about four thousand dollars this will come out title one money it doesn't come from mmo uh obviously it doesn't come from capital so we would recommend the approval of those teachers we hope we have responses and this is always a bit of a gamble we can't force kids to be here for intersession but we can certainly encourage which we do so traditionally how many kids do we normally have i'd say you probably have 50 60 kids typically

014springer fall interesting what are you expecting this year no idea it's too early to tell i can tell you over winter break mr casey and i both worked every single day and unlocking and giving retakes and things like that on tests and we had approximately 80 students participate over winter break that doesn't mean it doesn't mean we'll have that many for spring intercession but we're sure going to try i mean that's definitely one of the things that's going to be involved in the parent conferences i'm going to try and get it out thank you we're happy with personnel items this time of year it's not unusual uh the next item on personnel is a classified resignation of the custodial worker uh alex bamas herrera i'm mutually decided upon that alex probably uh would be happier

015elsewhere and so he did attend his resignation last week um the next one is an abandoned position by a paraprofessional um mr has worked here one or two days no she was here a few weeks but she just did not return after wondering and so we understand she's working somewhere else in town so we need to declare that position vacant it's about formality the next item is employment of a custodial maintenance worker mr daniel cotton uh early last week and he um he's been on like a um internship the last few days uh good work ethic uh mr yan's pretty pleased hopefully that'll be the long term so we could ask the board to keep bothering on this no it's fine so just anecdotal just from my experience you know the football coach and everything

016seems to me like we have a significant turnover in maintenance and custodial what do you what do you address that to why do you think the pay just who we hire what do you contribute i think all of those things are contributing factors i think that there's um it's hard work uh it's a it's a different schedule for some people if it's custodial staff they work from 3 30 in the afternoon to midnight with an hour for lunch where they could get eight hours the pluses are does provide benefits and does provide retirement uh but the young man i just mentioned i remember talking to him about potential retirement he's 20 years old that's a lifetime away so that's not an attractive uh addiction um we have to be right now part of it is

017we're pretty picky about the work they do because it's going to get worse coming 29th of march we've talked to people about that about having flat surfaces sanitized every day maybe more than once a day we're going to have classroom students help us with that because it's just not possible to do to do that isolated i think that's part of it some people think that and when i came to ajo we had two custodial staff members that worked here 30 years and i think some people think that believe that if i go to work in school district it's an easy job guaranteed we've been short two people for most of the school year i haven't been in a hurry to fill those spots just because i didn't think we needed as much as we do

018we have children present so uh so we do clean classrooms we've uh cleaned the school offices the district office the library the cafeteria the bathrooms it's going to get worse i think some people are fearful of that so so traditionally what you know when you read about all this they always say that it's it's better to keep employees and keep changing out employees because of the training and and everything else what in your opinion do we need to do to keep these these maintenance people longer more money would always help helps everybody right but one of the things the challenge we have is i'm supporting philosophically increasing the minimum wage i didn't vote for it four years ago or whatever that was it wasn't as opposed to i didn't vote against but didn't vote for

019it because we couldn't raise the price of education to make more money if i was wearing bob's grill i could raise the price of a hamburger 50 cents and pay for that one of the challenges we have is that the minimum wage is now 12 15. and it's one of the things i think arizona is doing well i think compared to other states is higher than those states i mean but what i find is we're having people that typically people in our organization are paid the least our custodial staff paraprofessionals and maybe some of the cafeteria staff depends on how long they've been here because of the minimum wage these people are making extremely close to what mr edlund's two school secretaries are making or even some people in my office and that's that's ugly

020because we demand we do demand a different skill set for people to be in the school office or district office then some of those other things are getting wasted that hurts i think that's part of it i think that we had some people last spring during the first uh coveted legislation uh we lost at least one or two people that thought they could make more on unemployment right than they could make here whether it's true or not and that all ran out uh or it is in the process of growing on this country's acts again that was a short-term solution for those people but they they got in essence some decent money they felt for over a short period of time that they didn't have to do as much work hopefully in 30 years we're

021making mr cotton congratulating on his retirement right well i uh and that's one of the things some of the paraprofessionals that we have lost this year have taken positions that pay more and that's one of the things here too is a retirement program that is 12.8 percent right off the top comes out of their paycheck which doesn't happen if they go to work for a non-non-state employee so it's like getting a 12.8 percent raise right away immediately not long term but immediately so those are some of the things that we have to take into consideration as well i read an article the other day that there's a company offering paramedics sixty dollars an hour to do covert testing how do i compete with that i'll take that job yeah someday i'm too soon okay uh

022moving on um the second one that we have a second maintenance worker um i'm sorry alex a gentleman named axel gonzalez uh again mr yan i interviewed him two weeks ago we put him in a temporary position and we've been pleasantly um impressed and so we started almost on probationary creativity david uh we added that full time this week pending the board approval we think it's going to work out so we may i'm optimistic i'm always optimistic we are optimistic we have two big candidates hopefully they'll help us a lot with custodial maintenance because it's going to become more important here in the next three weeks for the rest of the school year dr dooley he doesn't speak english yes he does oh it wasn't checked out his english is limited but he probably doesn't

023have people that the people he works for i speak spanish so that's not a problem he has a colleague he has two colleagues that work with at night with him they're both bilingual yeah and uh the last person we hired before these two gentlemen um i believe the time the interview lived on us off the border predominantly spanish speaking but he was impressive and his i'm impressed his english has come a long way and he's about a house in town he works off the good work and i i just i remember telling jose i can't understand halfway says but he his character just kind of exuded he had a good work ethic and that's been proven for the last couple months that's a young man named so hopefully mr axel and mr cotton do the

024same thing so are you guys going to be janitor are they going to be the maintenance test these two develop right now actual is working custodian night mr cotton was hired as a custodian but his mechanical skills are good enough he's got some work experience that jose right now has in one day should help him out because sometimes recently he got here on the day and when school starts he's our bus driver right now and so we have one part-time driver that usually drives sports that we'll probably use because we want to keep kids social just on the bus but that's that's running things that's in two things that's the best personnel for you thank you and the next item is discussion of the business items on eight b i'm going to ask mr edlund

025if you want to mine folks to talk a little bit about this as you well know um 301 plans had to be approved by the teachers um after developed by a typically by committee or by administration one of the big guys about 301 this year was maintain the school grade which we had an a b there's no school grades this year so that does not make sense for people so i asked mr hedland to meet with people and to do a vote and approve the 301 plan and the next item you'll see a list of things that are incorporated in that would you like that on that please um so to replace the one section and i believe it's in bucket two um that accounts for 25 of bucket two with our school grade um

026which everybody basically was relying on everybody else's but what we looked at doing was replacing that section with something that would be uh easily attainable so that they should be able to maintain a decent amount of money and would reward their participation in the other categories that we were monitoring and like i said reward their participation not necessarily achieving the goal of participation so what we did is i put we put together this categories of the six categories and we came up with if they were to submit documented effort and evidence of at least five of those six categories they would receive a hundred percent of that 25 percent four of the six would be eighty percent three of the six would be sixty percent and anything less than three women would not uh participate

027uh or would not receive funds from that category um we did put this out to a stop vote as well after we put it before them and we discussed everything answered any questions anyone else that didn't wasn't part of this originally putting it together voted we have 30 certified staff members 28 responded they all approved two did not respond by by the deadline um and uh no nobody disapproved of the book uh the other two that did not respond one responded five or six hours later that day and said they abstain and one responded about three days later instead they chose not um so that's kind of where we were where we were adding this so this would replace um part three i believe of the 301 portion this would replace part three of the

028301 plan which is page 41. so if a teacher performed and and got all their their goals what kind of money are we talking about uh i think last year it would have came up to just about the funding that we get but if they need all the different criteria there will be a good extra 4 000 or 4 500. awesome yeah so it's it's significant it is different every year the legislature establishes how much is paid for that as well but it's also based on prior year atm so as we move into a year from now this year's atm is going to go down like everything else i'm a little bit curious about the positive teacher contracts or contacts do they need for the positive parent contacts i'm curious do they have to i

029mean i know they have to document it they have to get in touch with a certain percentage of the parents 100 class that they have to reach page 39. page 39 on the bottom yeah they have to reach uh to receive credit for the positive parent contact they have to reach 80 percent of that specific class that they're working with um now in the replacement category they don't have to reach that 80 percent to be credited with effort and attempt they just have to turn in the paperwork that shows that they made the efforts to contact those families we're not penalizing that would be penalizing them twice but instead we're rewarding their effort to show that they documented their and honestly i can tell you we've had very few people not meet these criteria this

030year that we put out i think we have three staff members who haven't turned anything in yet this year but everyone almost everyone else has met almost everybody that was eligible okay so the only difference between part one and for the eligibility and what we're voting on now is what we're voting on now they don't have to get in touch with 80 they have to make a good effort to exactly okay and there's the other one they do have to get in touch with that money correct is there a reason that they don't have to get in touch with the parent what we're trying what we're trying to do is we're trying to encourage them to reach out because there are a number of families that simply won't respond no matter how many times that

031our teachers are reaching out to them via email via phone calls sending letters i mean we've even got teachers that are sending certified letters um trying to show that they've documented you know because if they continually show effort to contact these families we give them credit for us if uh if a family chooses not to respond after three four or five attempts that's i don't know how we think we'll blame the teacher for not making their worries you think they're giving their due diligence on it exactly we want to reward that due diligence there are three buckets of money on the 301 plan mr guthrie the first bucket of money we don't put on the salary schedule because 301 moneys all come from sales tax 600 sales tax was passed by the voters in about

0322 000 that expired this year and during the red fred demonstrations three years ago the legislature got a little apprehensive they passed it until 2040 something so it'll be around the rest of our careers i believe and so um we depends on the sales tax we'll give people that money the second bucket the money is for performance pay the third bucket there's a there's a menu of things we use it has to go basically to help with teaching staff they have they have given information for uh some other parts of staff we've always kept for teachers they have to be certified in the classroom so even a certified like an instructional coach out of the classroom if they can't yeah and we pay for those too but we paid out mmo because we have teacher

033x getting five thousand dollars in future y not getting any it creates a little stress and disarmament that we don't need can i just have one more thing there were two primary parts teacher pay but it's also for increased student achievement so they're very clear increase student achievement that was the hope and the next one is um a donation of a scholarship by uh john burns to state yeah those of you who have been around more than five years or three years i remember john burns mr burns this his whole teaching career was spent here in oahu high school he lived in the north part of the town unfortunately passed away in december of 19. um mr burns has served on the school board for i can't remember when i was eight years of 12

034years after retiring from teaching um i was contacted by an executor of his estate about a week and a half ago that sale of his house he wants to have donated to scholarship fund we have three scholarship funds two of them are getting used up a little bit walter's did loud war visitors that loud was an engineer i believe for the mining company for years um a lady named may hall she was a teacher here had no children and now mr burns has no children and he uh mr farmer who was a friend of his uh will be here wednesday night to do the presentation and uh we will i believe he will give us the outline for the guidelines for the uh for the the the scholarship one of the things we've done when

035we're able when rotary club is they we didn't do it last year because of codeword but when military club was able to have the scholarship banquet there's a lot of excitement because it's fun to get together and celebrate kids success and we some people give someone x amount of money patty spencer's brother and i did for patty i didn't help some of the people for joyce uh but we have a limited amount of money we basically cover one here help with one year put down these more sizeable scholarships is have it be for about four years but the person has to have a c average take at least 12 hours of college and then we pay the funds directly to the the purchaser's office at this college or university so the student's not walking out

036here with ten thousand dollar check or five thousand dollar check so they can use the money poorly they go straight to their college so i appreciate mr burns foresight doing that and then a discussion of the principal search the board to know and get some input from you folks as you see from from the insert we've already started advertising we have received a couple of applications i would my goal would be to hire the person no later than the may board meeting may even perhaps it may even be necessary to call the special board because the board will be involved in the interview process i believe they should be they have been in the past um to uh we may want to do this in a special meeting sometime perhaps even later in april that's

037up to you folks um i'd like to have a staff selection committee uh when the last principal search we had three or four staff members that went over the applications with me i presented them with interview questions i don't think anybody added a question but if they had a question they want to change somewhat or maybe change the focus of we did that in that setting those staff members were involved in the initial interview mr edmund was hired we had i think six or eight that we interviewed with two finalists and brought those finalists and finalists to the board and then i put down april 14th as a deadline i'd love to have it done by them because um mr president's been he's had a unique year in some several ways but kobe has been

038the most um unique about what he's gone through i believe but he has even only been here a year i think has a feel for staff and where we are and so on and so the last several principalships have changed i've brought the new principal in perhaps two weeks or three weeks before the first july so that they could work with the existing principal and kind of again understanding the climate of our school district our needs our strengths and so on and so forth so plus if we wait too much after april 14th the strongest candidates are going to be gone and so uh that's just some ideas and open suggestions from you folks it's one i wanted to be aware that i was probably aware of this board agenda i am coming tonight than

039prior to though i was where before the board was and so we want to get a head start as much as we could so we've already started wasn't to try ignoring this agenda and but we started the advertisement about three weeks ago so questions or comments or ideas i just think april 14th is too early not that i would love to have a principal but you know we're almost at the 10th of march we're not leaving a lot of times five weeks away yeah maybe first of may just a little extra so again the board hires the principal of the superintendent and hires the principal uh the board does i recommend you folks hire okay and because i'm saying this respectfully right i'm not saying it not respectfully it just seems to me that if

040you narrow it down to two people you've almost hired them because you're just giving us a very little pull right correct and so if we're hiring them i know myself i would like to have more more options than than that now that may not be traditionally right or wrong or whatever and i i'm more than happy to stand corrected but um i could throw something in there on i'm fantastic i've been to this principal search stuff before marcia has also um so though i i'm gonna also i'll kind of lay it out how we did this this previous time i can recall we had the board dr dooley and we had i believe it was two teacher representatives in their wishes during the executive session when we interviewed each applicant um we did that the

041same i like that that format the one thing i'm a stickler on and i made it vocal then we have to stick with the time because there was everybody took about an hour and a half to meet all the questions there was one candidate had almost two hours i thought that wasn't fair to the other ones right so they're asked if we're going to do this i want to take you here we'll pick up time frame this is how long you're going to respond and we stick to that [Music] when we did brian mckenzie we had more than two people though yeah there were a lot we had a lot of candidates out there i was gonna say one of the reasons i'm sorry all this kid that maybe there are a lot of candidates

042that come in that sometimes you just say that doesn't really meet the minimum requirements or experience or things like that so you kind of cut some of the candidates along the way so could you and again i'm just throwing this out here in ignorance could you have these qualifications and they have and put that out in your search and if they don't meet those qualifications they don't apply they will apply they will apply experience whether we require experience or not it depends depends on the skilled person we also talk about obviously qualifying for certification arizona et cetera without naming anybody the committee the teachers and i when we did the interviews um there was a significant difference in our opinion between the two that we brought the board and everybody else and one person wasn't

043even in the room this person was it was just it was not not a candidate i the one reason i'm hesitant to have the board totally involved it could take a couple days and that kind of camera you know and you don't know people people sometimes write a resume people look for jobs the most are the best interview yeah certainly so it's not necessarily limited to two candidates because we started the process later last time yeah i mean i mean i would love to have a candidate in place that april 14th but i think that's getting kind of tight right now and i think if we have these individuals putting their application i understand they would probably apply to five or six other places also so um i i kind of like going to the

044end of april but trying to get it done as soon as possible any other suggestions and you said you already had two okay math where you advertised we advertised through asa uh the hairdresser department of education arizona schools association um arizona's uh association of administrators and then you advertise that's what we get a lot of our job fairs and stuff to help you really close your ohio you put the job out there and then you go through the different colleges and the colleges decide whether or not they're gonna accept that um so there's different qualifications so it's different schools without having to go to every single school's website and advertise on their career you know posting job work so i like handshake a lot of content does a lot of good things for us and

045where i went to nau asu uva all the ohio schools um arizona state so all of the ones that we go to for um onu all the ones um what's the new paloma one that we just went to last year uh in california yeah for seven year universities in one town kansas michigan um now we try to do with many postcards as possible um because that's where we're gonna get the candidates uncomfortably probably never gotten a candidate a teacher or otherwise from any of the arizona schools they don't want to come down here that's always the first question i get is like you guys have a walmart like no and then our movie theater or what is there to do and you can't hear shoulder shrugging on the phone there are challenges we all like

046it here let's just talk about some other day i like the clean air except for the clouds today and i like the fact that i don't live in traffic but not everybody does and i don't know if i've been here when it's 25 years old or not but it's tough to when i was hired um one candidate walked in i was told i didn't meet this person walked in and told the panel there's no way i get my wife lived here and walked out i don't know why they didn't do some research beforehand that was a story i've told that could be a a rural myth but that's kind of some of the things you do but we all have those same yeah yeah it's just not the school everybody has those those sort of

047issues getting people to move on and work and we understand that thank you you know well and i'll say it again if you were to recruit at uh prescott college right away you'd find a lot of people in the education department wouldn't be put off they'd actually be drawn by the remote let's set the town i will do that as long as we don't advertise at asu i don't care [Music] um will there be an article not an advertisement but an article in the copper news about the announcement and the job search i'm just thinking maybe maybe there's family of local people that are you know off being educators that might hear about it any other questions or ideas i'll write myself so on the board then we will have a executive session with the

048candidates then okay do you want to see you want any no clarify then you want any kind of screening before you folks start talking i think just the screening of making sure they meet the qualifications because if someone isn't because you're gonna have people that are certified to do it that doesn't necessarily make sure that make them qualify for it so here's what i can do um we do reference checks before the interviews now most people are not going to pay on the reference anyone on their reference is not going to make them look good but i always try to call them be the supervisor whether they list or not do some research and use that and bring that maybe the board and i could need an executive station to talk about that say okay

049who do you want who do you want last time there was a set uh list of questions that we used for each tradition and the board had an opportunity to add their own questions um to the standards that is that something that will yes and i think and here's the reason what mr uh courage touched on this was the length of the interview it's important to have the same set of questions because if you were not successful you could say well uh the questions are different than the successful candidate an hour later so we want to make sure we ask the same set of questions you have to be but you can use your own yeah you did last time yeah we came up with questions yes now um how would y'all feel about reviewing

050those previous questions and maybe changing if the board sees fit beforehand because i know there's some questions i like to ask and i want to get the board just put on those questions i may ask or i may ask to meet with you folks next week to look at stuff like that and if anybody has questions they'd like to email them to me and we can consolidate them all then we can go over and see how we're going to go with it angelina you got something to throw in no no you're like email them and then they said to me then i'll shoot them over to you yeah let us say the usual point of contact thank you coach appreciate it and please don't be shy this is a big decision and it impacts our

051kids and if you think of things i wake up about two o'clock every morning until i think i go back to sleep and sometimes i don't make it so i'm really ready to have a phone call around five but i'm available five till 9 30 every night for phone calls so don't be shy that i'm in the book and you also have my cell number if you have an idea or text me and i will be glad to put that down so i have files from previous candidates we had over the years uh and uh angelina's has everything online so we can work on that thank you very much folks thank you i might have missed it on the audio but are we talking about getting doing away with the teacher portion of the selection

052no no no okay good good i think that's important i think i think yes they need to have buy-in and there's communication then from that committee to their colleagues saying you know this person is really looking strong this person don't know why the board hired him or her yes when we hired mr edelman the teachers were here and they let us know their thoughts and we let them know our thoughts and we pulled them all together and yeah it was very good okay okay all right the next d is the presentation of the budget we're going to put 20 20 morning leon burns as was alluded to earlier this evening there are budget challenges um and as you all know from the summer board meeting we had significant uh budget cuts for their division and

053that's continuing so you have in front of you and angela try to put it on my screen uh questions or comments i appreciate you talking about leanne for a little bit she's not a slouch um she's not from ajo sparky she has been an auditor for the state uh she's worked with many districts on a consulting basis she's been a district business manager for medium science districts in the phoenix area and so uh we've had some of our best audits on the last two years and i give her credit for that and appreciate it even though sometimes we debate so almost almost always madam president members of the board dr dooley thank you for the opportunity to present to you tonight um i'm not gonna try to kid you it's not good news and what's

054on the screen you have in front of you it's not good news honestly anywhere just about other than there's a few probably charter schools that have actually increased their enrollment this year almost everybody's statewide has decreased so but it doesn't make it it doesn't make the challenges any less real just because there's a lot of us with the same challenges so what i'd like to do is i'd like to give you the presentation overview i'm going to give you an overview of funding for arizona school districts just very simple simplified um because some of you may not know the different parts of money or the different silos of money uh the errors of the oho unified school district budget where do we spend our money i want you to know that are challenges and then

055discussion next slide you know major sources of funding maintenance and operations or what we call eminem it's used primarily for our day-to-day expenses such as salaries employer paid benefits that's fica ficomid it's our airborne state retirement it's our health insurance utilities consumer consumable supplies maintenance agreements etc it is our biggest source of funding in our schools the second major source of funding is what they call the district's additional assistance or daa we all refer to it as capital funds or fund 610 it's used for textbooks instructional aids computers tablets instructional software in the classroom it is our only dedicated source of capital in the district this is a district that we don't have uh any type of override you don't have a demo override we don't have a capital override and we don't have any

056bond funding so what we get based on enrollment is that much more critical it's also our own company we have grant funds expenditures are limited to a specific purpose for groups of students grant friends also have a supplement not a plan requirement this means that grant funds must be used for the extras rather than the day-to-day expenses of school for example title one we get title one funding because of poverty and it's used for either english language arts reading and or math supplementary instruction to help our students that come from poverty or from lower socioeconomics to increase their student achievement so could that be used for salaries if you had a teacher stay over to help math we can like for tutoring and primarily on our title one because it's it's about 120 000 a

057year and again it's all reliant upon enrollment from prior years but we use it for our intercession tutoring we use it for um for both breaks we use it for that and we use it for summer schools and then our jump start for our k-8 we use it for that thank you we also have other funds such as the prop 301 which we just discussed earlier instructional improvement instructional it's improvements the indian gaming money um etc and they can only be used for specific so for the purpose of tonight's conversation we're going to really talk about mno funding but we'll talk just for a moment about this ea also go ahead i know what i want to hear i want to make sure i'm right title one when i came the district was probably twice

058what it is today i've been told that it's because of the growth of charter schools and savers or they're bleeding out funds because some of them do low-income children as well so that hurts that's a part of it also what it is is it comes to us based on what we're seeing as in our community for example i was telling dr dooley before our meeting um i worked for another superintendent ultra valley which was a team account outside of tucson they're considered a rural district and they're a little bit larger than we are but we're considered a town so that also puts the socioeconomics in a whole different so when they're starting to look at all of this data i believe being a town because as we get into some of these grants the most

059recent grant we got i mean he's got 50 more kids than we do but he got almost a million two he got 440 000 based upon allocation it's not significantly different other than he's k-8 and k-8 students normally are their families have been more readily willing to turn in free of reduced price applications that's not true for high schools you see a statewide probably nationwide that high school kids they want number one they don't want school lunch they want like to go in and get pizza and fries or something else if you have those offerings but they're not interested in they don't want to turn in that application i know that we don't do that anymore but all of those factors don't help and that's how we got our position through the elementary was 84

06082 84 82 and the and the high school's always in below 60 because of the high school and the elementary school holds the high school so that's what the entire district is provisioned to live now you're gonna have free breakfast and free lunch for all of our students can i take this down so you can continue mnl funding i just want to in general emino is what we have current year funding for we have our current year 100 day atm which occurred january january 25th times what they call the base of ground or the per student amount then we also get funding for transportation it's a fixed amount for us in our district since we're declining in total mileage so it's a fixed amount and it won't go down unless there's totally different uh legislation

061that changes that go ahead to the next one so this is where we get the current year and this is the full beginning of funding next month daa capital funding calculations prior year 100th day adm they did not make this current year times the curse it's not this is not the only piece that they that's still prior it's like kind of like a maze of you know whack-a-mole um it's times a per student funding amount and again this funding is our only dedicated source for capital like if we needed to buy a bus or have bus leases or this year we needed to buy two copiers because we had copiers with so many copies on them it doesn't serve our teaching staff well so we put these brand new machines where they were needed the

062most in 2021 we get 240 000 worth of capital money now in a year we'll be using this year's atm and so i expect it to drop at least 20 percent so that's going to be and again and that's our only dedicated source so if we wanted to do the textbook adoption if we wanted to go through and refresh computers maybe for staff laptops or other things unless we can get it into a grant and we have those monies it makes it real hard to meet all of our needs dr dooley has been um we have many discussions frugal is the kind word he's been frugal with the district money and so the district has good reserves coming into this year but those reserves are savings take years and years to build up little piece

063it's like it's like at home you know we put a little a little away every paycheck or whatever and before you know it you've got a chunk of change but it didn't come overnight so go to the next slide please i just wanted to kind of give you a history of the base support level and that's our per adm funding amount let's start from the bottom fiscal year 1516 it was 3 645 per 1.0 atm 8 am is basically from day 1 through day 100 a student enrolls and then you have 100 a day that they were here the whole 100 days you have 1.0 adm average daily membership if a student comes in day 10 and then you go through the day 100 you'd have like a point actually night one now student starts

064with this day one and then drops because we've already geared up to have all those expenses to educate that child maybe it's going to be all of a sudden day 15 they're gone that's only 0.15 so all that data for 100 days that's what average daily membership is and they have to be in school at a certain time in the in the school day that course well you have to have instructional hours and they used to penalize you and this is very odd about arizona because we have a lot of rules that don't make sense or that are the long way from point a to point b and we seem to be really good at that but then they used to have these rules that if your attendance or your absence rate were too high

065and this is pre pre-coded they would penalize you because we if seek time or being in school isn't important what are we doing we're not doing something right and then they took that out of the law about maybe three or four years ago so there's no more you're not penalized but still we know that attendance is important kids in school is important you know the same way that getting breakfast in their bellies is important for learning all of those kind of things the only thing that i ever see with my dealings with the legislature is they are really good at legislating a problem into existence and they have a lot of make work and then they tell us where to administratively um so i just wanted to give you a history like for example then

066it kept going up each year the last three years counting 2021 1920 and 1819 those have been what most of us refer to as the red for ed increase it is a result of our teachers they can't strike that's illegal back in i think may of 2018 where they basically weren't in their classrooms and schools had canceled school and there was additional um monies committed by our governor so but we are done with that now again that is times our adm go to the next like is that from kids that are enrolled or the number of days those kids are enrolled are going to school they have to be there's all these rules it can never be simple for example if a kid is enrolled but they don't show up what they call for 10

067days unexcused absences you've got to draw them you dub your forum that's the type of withdrawal it is and withdrawal withdraw them back to the first the last day of attendance or the first day of non-attendance so there's all these rules and you have some kids because coming to school their attendance is so varied and maybe not wonderful that you have some kids that get enrolled and they don't show up and you withdraw them and then eventually they show up again you put them back in and maybe they come of course then that also causes issues in the classroom where you've got students that aren't in the teacher's classroom for all continually for that period of time so thank you you're welcome this is our average daily membership and i just pulled reports before i

068sent this to dr dooley last week and we are now down 85.506 students from last year if you look at from fiscal year 1516 through fiscal year 1920 we have been pretty consistent actually in 1819 we had a nice little jump um i would have normally would have included another jump when i did the budget the 1920 budget was my first budget that i planned for i didn't i held at the 425 we actually went down to the 416 so we decreased a little bit but then all of a sudden came the pandemic and we are down significantly it's always simplistic to find one cause for this pandemic is what everybody's saying we are not alone i feel like it's important to fend off over here we are not alone 55 000 was a number

069a year ago today were in school in the state of arizona not the school not the public tucson unified one remember they this doesn't help off but i want you to know the reason it's not just because of some person tucson unified is losing 13.5 million of course they've got a huge budget they probably have 78 000 students but this is something that we hope there's no guarantee we hope that we will recover some of these students uh maybe once school starts again with a hybrid model or maybe which is too late to help us financially this year but we hope that maybe hopefully please this pandemic is manual by august so we can have a regular start of the school year and that will help my my role in a school district is i

070am your financial expert for your certified so my job is to give you the best advice i can the best guidance i can i want you to look at this 85.506 that is significant it is over 20 a little bit over next slide please we'll come back back to it in a few more slides so you're saying we lost 20 almost 20 percent of our enrollment and here are the dollars for this year so far and and dr julie gets frustrated with me he's like what do you mean so far that's 100 there's a whole process because everything with department of ed's not easy either every 20 days casey and his staff have to upload their data their adm their attendance data so it's basically enrollment and it's it's um absences and all that data

071it's what was uploaded then there's an integrity that the data has to clear checks and balances on the ape side then if there's problems with integrity then the data is kind of like in limbo so it's not finalized and now remember to department events to their defense the legislature will not give them totally all the dollars they need to to fund their new software systems so they kind of have this kind of new software with old software bubble gum together duct tape together now this is a billion dollar system you'd think it would be priorities for funding so department of ed is doing the best it can with what it has also um fiscal year 2021 the revenue loss in mno is currently projected at 477 and this amount may change as the atm data

072for the current year continues to be processed by ade and district staff then for fiscal year 2021 again the current we have the revenue loss due to distance learning there was no other model and the legislature and our governor were not willing to implement anything else for all of this this distance learning so we have what they call aoi or basically arizona online instruction your adm for full-time students is reduced by five percent so we have an additional five percent reduction so that's 123 035 right now total fiscal year 2021 mno reduction 793 512 and that is out of the total budget or what uh 3.3 so you lost about 30 of your funding yes no about about 20 20 20 25 we have other things outside our funding like carryover and stuff that also

073add to it but i want us just to stick to what we get from the kids the really frustrating part of this is 98 of last year's funding or that's coming yeah now remember school districts the way the process works normally is you adopt a school calendar in january or february go to the gym go here go to the things i go to because i work at home mostly and i was very women let's go to the next step so we're down 793 000. how we made it what are we doing because this is serious now that doesn't even count what we've been spending to deal with all this we'll get to that the district has a healthy level of reserves of carryover which is similar to savings we've also gotten additional code related grants

074or cares from the basically from the federal government we have what they're calling um cares sr1 you've got 112 445 i use that to offset job loss because i could use it we could either use it to buy things which then i have to submit that to department of ed and then you have to go through and if you're buying things like oh i bought 12 ppe this i bought six of those you have to go through every single thing with more trouble than it's worth so i put positions in and i said because of our enrollment our decrease in funding we would have had to let these these staff members go and that was allowable then we had enrollment stabilization grant of 169 524.50 that is the one that mr edlund is saying that

075was supposed to be initially the government thought the governor thought he would keep any decrease or loss of enrollment would be limited to two percent he kept telling us that now that's not what happened we got 169 000 instead of like 725 000. he has made it clear he does not plan to fund any more npcs he's made it he kind of got cranky about all that we have now what they're calling the crrsa sr2 and that's going to be 440 720 and 17 cents that can be used similar to the sr1 the five initials i forgot to bring it over the cover page of the grant paperwork it's basically like um the covid recovery it's for recovery and care getting kids that safety student safety act but it's similar to cares federal grant one

076one should assume one time only um if i add those three things up that grant the sr2 can be spent this year and black next year and you can go back to march of 2020 which is a problem with fiscal years but that's just a different problem total of these grants is 722 000 we still we're down we're down for funding the hundred and ninety three thousand five hundred and twelve so we're still down with even with all these grants we've still lost seventy thousand dollars and next year is going to be bad because now here's the question next slide um the grant funding receives is less than the m o reduction this year so we still are short 70 000. in addition we've spent approximately another 225 000 it's approximately because we've got open

077pos waiting for chromebooks that are taking now suddenly four or five months to get here um and that is a statewide probably nationwide problem because of supply and demand um another 000 in an expenses so we are still down about 300 000 after all of this next slide please and that's just this year so how do we spend our money and i just took this from each year we get um just as simplified we get dollars in the classroom reports in the legislature the auditor general has to issue it i just used they're required to issue it and the last um data we have is 1920 because we haven't finished this year yet we put 64.8 percent of our mno money it's in classroom spending so directly in the classroom that also includes student support

078things such as the attendance office um a lot of the special ed services speech um psychology the psychological test all those things it also is instruction support which is our teachers like pd and stuff again only in mno so that's almost 65 percent of our whole m o budget administration is another 16.6 administration is often viewed as a dirty word but you've got to remember what administration is it's the school administration it's the principal's office it's the secretaries it is the district office superintendent's office your business office it's i.t it's eric actually we have half of eric in 2500 the other half of him more in student support plant operations are 12.4 even without kids in these buildings there is a base level cost we can close some wings i've been trying to get dr

079dooley to look at things even if we close some wings you still have to go through at least weekly you have to flush toilets turn on water do other things because you don't want it to go into dry rot or other issues but there's a base level we basically have room if you look at the school facility board data we have room for about 900 students we only have now less than 400 so we're cooling heating cleaning a lot of space for not a lot of kids food service is 5.6 that's for all of our meals and then transportation is um less than one percent that's because mr yan is only in there a few hours a day so and we have split him at one time he was in like all transportation where he

080should be next slide fiscal 21 22 next year you know we're already looking at hiring and doing a lot of other things our challenges these 85 students how many will come back now when we were looking at the data and mr i call them mr casey because it's easier it took me a long time to realize is his name the left the big word i can't pronounce or is it baboo because i kept calling them different things every time i heard like i'm confused so mr k i called him mr casey um we were look he was looking at data and when i asked him to start looking at things for me probably in the in late fall he's very thorough he actually went through there was like 75 kids we were down he went

081through and he pinpointed where the kids who they were where they came from i think they also made efforts to follow up where they were what they were doing the schools will also get requests for records so if there's a record for example one of our families moved and the students in tallison union so they'll have requests for records of records are sent there but he had gone through student by student his best feel knowing his community looking at his data now again this is just his best estimate is that he thinks that we will recoup if we have school in person about half of these kids now here is where it gets tough if we make changes i.e budget cuts and and we're talking about most of our budget that can be cut our

082people because you can't get rid of your electric bill you can't get rid of your water certainly you can go around and you can put controls on the ac instead of using i don't know how many buildings we are we have but instead of using all of them you can put more i don't want kids too crowded but we don't necessarily have to spread out over all of our buildings because we don't have that kind of enrollment you can make some changes and and make sure that we're we're being responsible good stewards of them of public money but you can't get rid of a lot of that we still have to get our our liability insurance we have to pay for our health insurance which is another thing that'll probably go up yes yes yes

083so uh with payroll and utilities it's probably 85 80 85 utilities and payroll so what's your gift i'm just a 75-80 yes just on payroll and then the related employee benefits yes yes so people we're always talking about people we've taken i haven't done this here because we haven't had to in my previous district we would spend all this time three administrators trying to save a hundred thousand dollars or five hundred thousand dollars pick a figure and we would always take a look at xerox paper construction paper it's chump change we in that district it was 92 percent of our mno was salaries so that's the that's and that's what yeah leon's saying it's it's it boils down to people unfortunately my preference is always that we we don't hire and fill vacancies before we

084start going through that's always my preference if you can do that and i think most school administrators it doesn't make anybody happy or governing boards because we recommend to you where this dr dooley does but you're the ones that hire fire and set salary those kind of things um but the question is a tough one because if those kids don't come back or we lose more i've asked dr dooley to cut at least 250 worth of expenses next year and he told me but you told me the cuts are a lot bigger i said they are we're behind more but i can't get you to 250 because he's been kicking and screaming you think and he asked me so many times like the answer is going to change it's just getting that's true like he

085forgets like it's like you dr julie we talked about this we talked about this again you talked what about this i said no he said why don't you ask me to cut like 750 000 in a perfect world i wish you would that's my best advice as your accountant well with our cuts you can't get weight i can't get you to 250 000. our it has more excuses our cuts from december to now will be basically 130 000 because if you those of you on the board last year would revise the budget in december for capital 508 000. and this is another quarter million so it's it's something to lay awake at night about yeah it's um but he's going to be 750 000 and you can only cut other decisions are made will we

086get some of those kids back i'm assuming we'll get at least hopefully at least half and if we don't the contract should be written where you can either reduce salaries or you can go ahead and do re nobody wants to do any of that especially after people have made their commitments um i think with the current legislation going on at the federal level there will be different federal money coming down the road but i think it's going to be more targeted it's going to be more targeted at student it's also going to be more targeted at safe school facilities which is a good thing because we don't really have much money for that either in our state that it's funded so but you can't count on oh big brother's going to save us we really

087need to be working to save ourselves so if you say at the end of this year we're down 300 000. that was at 70 000 plus the 225 we've spent we're depleting our carryover so as we look at next year we have to if enrollment shows we're not going to recoup those kids decisions have to be made very very quickly if you cut too much you can have kids come to you you know the kids the enrollment change is not ever going to be oh it was two in first grade it was two in this it was three it never works that way so it's not exactly even to put it together you know casey and mr edlund need to be putting together the master schedule for next year you know they have some idea

088they've been doing both of them have experience putting together math they need to start putting that together what does it look like what are our choices because we also want to give our kids the best but we also have to be good stewards of public money and we have to pay our bills we cannot we cannot deficit finance yeah and one of the things frustration i have because most of my career we yes i have to i've been there uh pardon me most of my career we have done previous year funding so we had a year to get ready for this about five years ago wasn't it something like that three i think we're in the third year into current year funding exception capital so theoretically if you budget for x number of students per

089month and you have less than 100 have 100 less show up if they all worked in three 30 groups of three you'd like three teachers off just like the private sector we have never had to do that i hope we don't but we're going to cut to make this happen the minimal cut is 250. i have to go with mr casey's best bet that will only be half of the students back no kids have been out of school for that's a long long time and then i do believe there will be additional grants to do things such as after school tutoring in person more supplementary i think there will be money for that but again it will be very specific to for student learning and supplementing you know it won't be going i think i

090think that the yes your monies that was a blessing and an awful awful situation question go ahead um i'm not trying to put you on the spot i know you've earned it no um quite when we talk about carryover funds yes if i was sitting in one of these four seats and plus on zoom i would wonder if we've got carryover money why do we have to worry about cutting the budget can you talk about that a little bit in eminem we had to carry over from last year to this year let's say it's about 000. we're going to deplete it because we still have that almost 300 000 now capital he had saved up and saved up i don't know how many years and he's telling i keep telling eric that the only you

091know that pandemic has been a godsend to him because he finally got to buy chromebooks our kids need to have one-on-one they need to have these these materials they need to have that tool um so we're gonna probably that's probably gonna be depleted to probably six maybe seven hundred thousand but again capital is for instructional aids computers instructional software all of those things it's not for people so so my elements business losing eighty thousand dollars a month before right we yeah three months in a while we lost eight thousand dollars yes you did you're killing me yes wow and we don't get ppp's so at that point i had to make tough decisions in order in order to survive right now this cares check comes in the mail and it really helped out right but

092we had to make tough decisions you've given us the problem when are you going to give us your solution for that problem probably in a month so in a month we're going to get your solution for that and it's not going to be pretty i'm sorry it's not going to be pretty uh because it's going to impact people and that's that's our business but our number one person is people from preschool to high school and they'll be impacted as well but we have to adopt a budget at our uh january i'm sorry our june board meeting we'll have a have a budget hearing and uh then angel in uh august i'm sorry july i think it's the 9th of june the 14th of july we have to adopt a budget and so we're going to

093have a budget to adopt but it's going to be different than we've seen less but we still it's before school even starts and kids come back and i've gotten comfortable enough with there's been lots of years that i was projecting budgets that the legislature hadn't even ended and so you didn't even know what funding was going to be for sure and so this crystal ball i've gotten pretty good at maneuvering but this is really tough because the enrollment drop is so severe and the consequences or the effect on the budget is just devastating we have families moving out of the community because we don't have sports yeah yeah major families six kids seven kids families are moving to the thatcher and other places because we don't offer sports anymore i'm not saying we could have

094i'm just saying when you go to figure out how many kids you're gonna have next year yeah you better start thinking about these families that are moving out and more are gonna move up you know i don't want my kid to miss out on playing sports in senior year so i'm gonna move to thatcher right i'd love to think that kids come to school for you know calculus because i was a math nur i'm a cpa but you know a lot of kids come because they like the debate team they like sports um they come here because we make them feel good when home doesn't i mean there's a lot of issues with our students so i'm wondering given that we don't know what the shortfall will be yet or what the makeup of the

095shortfall will be and the fact that we have so many hirings on the agenda for this month ms burns would you think that we should postpone the hirings of new employees until we have a better picture i on your teachers that are core that are hard to find here almost everywhere ela and math i would hire if you have the opportunity because those those teachers are scarce in the valley so if you have those teachers i would really be careful um i think that we have way too many instructional dates um dr philly keeps telling me while we have all these when i look at the severity of the handicapping conditions of our kids it just doesn't make sense to me because it's not severe that doesn't mean some kids still don't need that that

096one-on-one maybe it's time to we only work our instructional aids and and this isn't all for next year but our instructional aides we we set to 29 hours a week so they don't have health insurance maybe we need less instructional aids and more really qualified ones and give them a 40-hour week or a 36-hour week give them health insurance which is a huge benefit district those kind of things to look at i would i would proceed carefully on hiring he's gone asleep mr hopkins i i tend to shut a place down in the future i've asked dr dooley we have our audit from last year and it's really really good but i've asked him to put it on the may agenda because i'll come for the board the budget revision but i would like to

097also bring for you there's like a 20 page as what puts it out it's basically a budget overview and it's really a nice kind of like to go through and look and go oh this is what i see this i see i it's just kind of a cool tool i'd like for all of you to have a copy of it to it's just a good learning or just a good oh what was she talking about again i can look in here or you can't sleep at night thank you any more questions mr hopkins no no more questions thank you and we're back now the last thing is the governing board discussion on foreign administrative terms are you leaving no i'm gonna wait i'm going home tonight yes okay i have four dogs i'm sorry so

098i asked for this item and uh after all that we just talked about you seem like really small things but i do think they're important and i think it's important that we address them as soon as we can um i asked for this item because for nearly two years i've been extremely frustrated with the pace and efficiency in which our board addresses administrative issues i mean board administrative issues not administrator issues it should not take two years to come up with a workable email solution or months to agree on a base on basic board processes we will not be able to fix everything in one night but if we work together to address the issues we face we will be more efficient and more effective governing board before we start the discussion i want to

099remind board members that we must limit the discussion to board administration issues only you'll notice the discussion topics are unusually broad this was intentional and is only possible because of the administrative nature of these topics there are four issues that i hope to resolve tonight these may seem like small things but they have a significant impact on board operations communications and transparency i think we can work through them fairly quickly but i first want us all to be clear on something yeah wendy are you referring to something that other board members have that i do not no i'm just i'm just reading um i did pass that but i did pass out the um the uh communication template the response to public um comments but you already have seen that i just i just um

100i i passed that out at a previous meeting um according to the asba we do not have to vote on these administrative decisions simple agreement is all that's necessary i really hope we can agree on these straightforward issues tonight because we need to get things done and we need to get them done as expeditiously as possible so i i just have four things but first just a little information and eric you're aware of this because we worked on this together a little bit um on quorums abstentions and recusals so we had a vote not long ago where there were four bed board members two board members voted yes one voted no and one abstained that most vote passed as it should have but after the fact i wondered if we counted the votes properly properly

101because there were four people voting but only three counted i contacted asba and got clarification it turns out that extensions do not count as votes so the tally was actually two yes and one no and since our quorum requirement is three members the vote passed two to one just as we thought but here's where it gets tricky and this is just information i didn't know this um what if instead we had two yeses and two abstentions does it pass but it's a quarter to meeting it does except it doesn't count for a quarter a refusal would correct it's it's the reverse so it passes because and this is where it gets a little weird an abstention counts to contribute to the quorum so we have three people but it doesn't count as a vote so

102you have two yeses out of three so it passes now if instead those two people had recused themselves so we had two yeses and two recusals does it pass are you not it doesn't in fact we can't even vote because we don't have a quorum because recue uh recusals don't count for the quorum and they don't count as votes so so then a refusal would have to take place before the vote was even called for yes and in fact recuse if you recuse yourself you shouldn't be involved in the discussion at yourself all as soon as that agenda item is brought up so i will be refusing myself exactly and some boards uh they even ask the person to leave the room yeah so anyway just this little bit of knowledge that i i wasn't

103aware of the windy spirit of this i really appreciate it and afk got back to what five minutes oh my gosh for five minutes chris thomas he's a lawyer at asba super knowledgeable and yes very responsive yes so okay so moving on to getting things done hopefully the board response letter each have a copy of it rodney seen it from a previous meeting we need to improve communications community members who make the effort to contact the board directly deserve a response from us to achieve this i propose that we implement the policy-based board response letter template that was created for this purpose and that one of us takes responsibility for this task is anyone opposed to implementing this board response letter which we would send to um community members who address the board at public

104comment it's um i know you've seen it before we've discussed it a little bit but i'm not against this i think um if this is something we do on the forum that the public fills out there should be a check box asked that they're requesting feedback but then some people just want to make their statement known and that's it um i i personally won't respond to individual comments during a meeting just i think that's the best practice um i'm not opposed to contacting someone after the fact with some kind of information just broad letter here seems okay um but i think you should have an option on that form if they want additional contact from us they can say check yes so my only issue with this is some people have come to speak around

105meetings from personal experience but some people that couldn't speak our meetings could be somebody that is so combative and so angry that as an administrator i wouldn't want to call them up on the phone because i know i'm just going to you know where to come you might to have you know so actually i'm going to get to that but right now this is just about us this is a board response so we're committing them oh oh okay so or you were hoping for a board member to say i will go ahead and take care of sending these communications up right so about the the very specific components of this ladder that can be adjusted so if there is someone if they're if it if this is um a public comment where um it seems

106clear that there shouldn't be a response or or that there should be a particular response this way it's a template it can be adjusted according to the commenter but i think in general people want to be heard they want and they want to know that they were heard and we often have situations during public comment where there are misunderstandings about what the board's role is um that we could clarify if those things come up i'm not talking about making any decisions at all just communicating clearly so i think you're right i think we should the first paragraph or something that i really like the only department i have an issue with is committing the administration to having to follow up with every single one you kicked my kid out of school we've already had a

107big discussion on this may have got a heated as can be now i'm going to come in and tell the school board what i think about it and now i'm committing the administrator to calling the parents up again and rehashing the whole thing over again right you want to do that right so i think i don't know did i put that in bold i'm looking at where it is about the third paragraph then yeah this related information administrator can give you more information no that's not it um oh the board has requested administration to contact you to further discuss this issue um we could put that in bold as well all the things i put in bold were things that i thought would be subject to change we could put that in bold as well

108um but i do think in general and that's actually my my number two i do think in general um we should send something out an acknowledgement like this clarification um then my next one is actually about the administrator's role in this um but yeah i think that does make sense to put the board as request of the administration contact you um because that won't always be the case it depends on who to me it depends on who is some of the teachers that have come in here they have no they shouldn't have been here we're not they were illegal to come before you go through the steps and uh it's been causing a lot of trouble and the policy and everything else and this is just too broad which is to run your letter i

109mean it sounds like we have to do it for everyone who comes to speak and i don't think that's necessary see i think it would do a lot of good in terms of it's time consuming i understand that but i do think that we could do a lot better with with communications we don't do a good job there's a lot of misunderstanding in the community can i finish nobody wants can i finish but these are the people that are coming these are the people that do care enough to take their time to come and talk to us it seems like we could have just it's a form letter i mean it needs to be customized but it's not a lot of work and then most loan ratings most board meetings we don't have that many

110public comments so i don't see it being all that time consuming in the majority of the world we certainly would have been during the board meetings we were voting on opening and closing i also think that had i know the teacher issues you're speaking up i think had one of those teachers received a letter like this the very first time they came that outlined what their procedure was we wouldn't be hearing that from them meetings still coming to the inappropriate venue well even if we would have we would have notified them of the appropriate venue it would not have been on us at that point i like the fact that you're communicating to the community what the world is right yes or whatever i think they need to understand that we can listen to that

111but really we're not going to be able to change that right right and so i think that information should come out the only issue i have with this is this letter is mandating that the administration follow up with every single person that comes in to speak tell you from my business there's people that call my office want to talk to me and i don't ever want to talk to you right you know you know what i'm saying i don't want to talk to them and because i know where it's going to go and it's not going to be productive for either one of us so that's the only part that i have a concern about when you look the letter issue itself i have no issue with just i don't i don't want to commit

112the administration to having to you agree with that to follow up with all that what do you think brother rodney can you hear us all right he's a little bit choppy yeah i think it's an important step just simply getting something from the board thanking them for their concern for their engagement in the community and in those cases where it's appropriate saying by the way this board is not able to work with what you suggested here is the proper avenue for you supposed to respond to them when they're addressable i think something like this would go away to at least letting people know that you know the board is there the board is responsive and it might lead to us getting more community in front of them but then the paragraph down here that says

113this issue will be scheduled for the month board meeting and i realized that we're here in march will be on the april board meeting um i i just don't think it's necessary so i would go ahead i would include that as as optional um i i actually should have should have holded that one sentence because that's not always this is more to be a template so you know what things on here apply to this comment let's use them and it could be i mean over time well now the question becomes and i know this working who decides who decides whether the administration needs to contact this person and who decides whether this topic can or should come come before the board how how does that work so [Music] what this letter sounds like right now

114what i'm getting from is this is a response from before as a whole to that individual not from the administration correct okay so um i think it's a pretty good layout i'm not opposed to having a response letter at all i think it's good um i don't think that everything that is brought up by the public needs to be made to an agenda is the person who came and spoke to us i wrote this immediately after she spoke to us and her subject happened to be an upcoming agenda i know and so that's why i put that section um but certainly that's only gone excuse me really basically the first part you know um is just say thank you for coming i mean i don't think it has to be elaborate this is quite elaborate

115and i don't think that it needs to be that way i'm not have fun to have a letter go out to them and to recognize that they were here to speak but i don't think all of this needs to be in it um i like the idea of a letter and your first paragraph at the minimum should be what's unless basically what we're saying at the minimum that way they're getting a written correspondence yeah through mail or email and as a clerk i'm sending that email out to that person that's fine i know that's one of the other things you're going to bring up too um i think the more basic we keep it but yet still acknowledging that we receive the information from them thanking them for their time coming in and leaving for

116that um and then i think then we say okay if you have any other questions please contact the administration yeah and i and i think that's sufficient obvious when well i mean i i really don't want to limit us to the first paragraph because there will be situations where the other ones apply and then they do and i i agree but it's it's not it's not it's not going to be essential in every case so how are you going to decide that that's one thing i have is how are you going to decide on the administrative part of it on the administrative and also on the on the future agenda item are you going to have part of every meeting that we discuss the uh the speakers and then decide how we're going to um

117follow up with that so in in some cases we will be aware that there's a future agenda item on it and then we can share we can share that there will be knowledge that we have which was the case with this with this comment in other cases we might ask for it so if someone approaches the board with a community comment and it's something that the board wants to discuss we can then and there say we're going to ask for a a future agenda item on exactly what you are bringing to the board that's one of the things that we can do as a board we don't do it very often but it's one of it's one of the things we can do so if that happens then sure that would be on there otherwise

118it probably just but we would have to vote if whether who would agree did now anyone can ask for an agenda item because the way we're doing the agenda is that we think it gets emailed to me yeah then we decide so i come in because i lost my job and i bring that up so one member of the board wants that to be an agenda item i'm not saying it could be but i'm just throwing an example and somebody else doesn't want it to be an agenda item how has that worked out when is that worked out when we get the other what is the logistics of that regarding say a personal issue like a termination that let's change that let's change it to well that's rodney i think just a um letter you

119know this thank you for this um something like i think the simple