001all right we'll call this meeting to order and we'll start by uh pledge of allegiance which i will lead in myself can everyone stand please um i just do a roll call of the board we have a quorum here present but jennifer brimhall is taking care of her responsibilities with her soccer team and she is participating with us on on a phone line remotely so we'll begin with uh recognition dr wright you want to take over absolutely uh we want to i'm going to turn time over to ryan grace to talk about it this uh project that occurred the awnings that occurred and were installed at the elementary school mr grace can you bring us up to speed with that and rachel and her efforts and our guests brad you want to help me out
002all right so before i got here there was a a push by one of our teachers miss rachel cottales you should teach the second grade and she is here today um to add we had one awning on the south side of our building that we were able to put essentially kindergarteners under fraud to keep them out of the sun to keep them out of the snow or the rain that kind of thing everybody else just was on the on the sidewalk and with very little shade and it got hot um and so this year with with the help of our friends at lowe's and walmart we were able to add four more awnings on the south side of the building so now that line stretches almost the entire length of the building we're able to
003fit every student at student pickup under the awnings provides a ton of shade we were [Music] incredibly grateful for the football team coach hathcock and about what you say 15 15 to 20 of his football players came and we spent saturday and put up those awnings and then maintenance came and bolted him to the ground and so i'll let brad go ahead and and uh honor our guests so the neat thing was the neat thing was is miss carlesi had a vision she saw a problem she saw a need and she called me about a year and a half ago just before covet and said isn't there any kind of a grant you could write to get this covered so we went to work and started to to do that process the grant was written
004took us about a year and a half to get everything through and then walmart community donated a truckload of money to us and then uh is jeremy here so uh or excuse me ryan yeah that ryan kessler from lowe's uh went right in and saw him immediately he got us taken care of with these awnings and we're just so grateful to to ryan and the work that he did and and we got these uh awnings uh ordered and they were brought in i think it took us two weeks to do and uh we fumbled around for about almost a year trying to get this done and ryan kessler from lowe's got it done in two weeks and so i regret that we didn't go to him first but nevertheless the the vision of a teacher
005seeing the need approaching a grant writer and having some fun writing that grant and describing the children huddling underneath awnings and grouping like cattle and the empathy that was played towards our students was a lot of fun and we're grateful for everybody in their vision and the teamwork to get these awnings up if you haven't seen it over at brez it's a sight to behold and i know that they have pictures that they're going to they're going to be showing but we also want to again thank everybody who donated those people who helped in the support of our superintendent superintendent and our governing board and brenda i know kicked in a few bucks for me so we really appreciate that and you'll see the the pictures up now of our kids uh out there putting
006the awnings together we had a barbecue for them as well and uh i think they did more eating than they did working but nevertheless dan robinson and ryan grace just killed it at the end and finished that project thank you i appreciate it rachel is a special person a special person in my heart because she grew up across the street from my house i mean i've known her since she was born and uh for her to to to ramrod this is really special tells you what kind of person she really is thank you so much and thank you lowes for doing that i mean that is as gives me goosebumps thinking about what happened and what you did thank you very much appreciate it so much take a picture real quick mr merrill and we
007want some pictures taken of all this we ought to get your pictures taken with those canopies in the middle of the snow storm with the wind blowing 100 miles an hour like last night [Applause] okay the next item on the agenda is recognizing the donations that were given to us and lowe's we appreciate the donation and we'll make sure special uh letters of thank you will be pres presented to you and and your management thank you so much and walmart also for what they did to help donate for that so the next item will be our br star award and uh dr wright we're going to turn that over to you absolutely this again ryan we want to talk a little bit about alexis vito would you introduce alexis a little bit and her nomination
008and we'll be sure to bring her plaque over to you for presentation there at the campus perfect yeah alexa's not here today she's our campus registrar she essentially registers half the district by herself over the course of the summer she's one of the first people in the office every day she's one of the last people to leave it doesn't matter if it's registering kids heading up fundraisers you know handing out ice packs answering phones talking to parents she's there for it all day every day so we're really grateful to have her in our front office thank you ryan appreciate that and we'll make sure she gets her plaque all right next item on the agenda is the consent agenda board after reviewing the consent agenda are there any items that you would like to take
009out and vote on uh individually the consent agenda consists of things like minutes from the last governing board meeting the vouchers and reports for the money spent this last month uh personnel those hires and and retirees noted are there any hirees that are here that we need to no no it doesn't look like anyway if there are any any items in those consent agenda that you would like to take out separately let me know we'll do that so we can if there's nothing then can we have a motion to accept the consent agenda as written i have a motion from chuck a second from diana all in favor let's pass jennifer do you want to can you say that again she got it all right business portion of the meeting item 3.1 presentation and request
010for approval of the annual financial report which we just reviewed dr wright do we need to discuss that anymore only if you have questions from brenda otherwise we just we need the board's approval on the annual financial report i have a question comparing last year the one we're doing right now that you have to turn in to the next year substantial differences will there be a lot of substantial differences in the amount of monies we receive comparing the costs that we have i know we've gone over them a couple of times in the past but they're so fluid just wondered there's still much up in the air as proposed right now the the arizona state constitution has a spending cap limit and frankly the reduced number of students that are in public schools the fewer
011students in public schools coupled with the influx of coveted funds um we're going to be over that cap and so if there's not an approval of the expenditure being increased the cap the constitutional cap being increased it would put virtually every public school in the state of arizona in a bind and so you're talking about large districts like chandler making 150 million dollar cuts and smaller districts like ours and snow snowflake making 5 million dollar cuts we're hopeful that's not going to happen a lot of it is still up in the air and it's going to be determined hopefully in january february and it has to be done by march so the costs are continuing to go up funding continues to go down the covet funds frankly have been the difference to keep everything running
012and we've been counting on that we've had ours budgeted and planned over the next three years and so a lot of that the answer to it right now is we don't know we do know our costs are going up and they're going up everywhere inflation we're feeling it in fuel we're feeling it in food cost we're filling in supplies thankfully nate was very proactive in a lot of this technology we ordered a year and a half ago two years ago and then again the board approved a significant order in april those moves that probably save the district and in effect the taxpayer somewhere between six and eight hundred thousand dollars and so it's been significant the computers that we have had ordered are now in costs are going up and a lot of these requirements
013are just remain unfunded or grossly underfunded and so the other element of that is to see let's see how the capital lawsuit comes out there's a lot of moving parts over which we have zero control does that answer your question mr president i think thank you for sharing that i'd like to just uh thank brenda again for putting that together and actually thank the food services that's an amazing thing we've always carried a negative balance for years and years and years and now to have a positive balance here with all the food that they had to take care of this past year is an amazing feat that they did so anyway can we have a motion to accept the annual financial report for 20 and 21. have a motion from chuck second from dan all
014in favor unanimous jennifer all right next item on the agenda is a superintendent report dr wright will turn some time to you absolutely thank you a general update we'll start with a covet update uh we have had the benefit of having kids out for the better part of 10 12 days now with the weekends 13 or 14 days we were getting about one or two cases a day through the last three or four weeks in our in our immediate area the cases are much higher percentage-wise than they are anywhere else in the state right now and just because we have a lower level of percentage of people that are vaccinated our area is like 40 vaccination versus some areas the surrounding reservations are as high as 80 80 85 90. and so we're feeling the
015effects we're seeing a sharp increase and has continued to grow last week all of our numbers are a week old so i can tell you two weeks ago we had about 340 cases last monday tuesday and wednesday in those three days we had already 130 545 so it appeared that the slope was continuing to increase uh i will meet with the county tomorrow on a call to find out where it's at or hope is it's finally going to start to level out i don't i think we'll see another increase this week we've had to cancel the round valley game because of the number of coveted cases on the football team and frankly we we wouldn't have enough kids to play we play kids on both sides of the ball and so if you lose four
016or five or six it's like losing 10 or 12. so it is still very much present we're doing the best we can to take reasonable measures our objective again is to keep our schools open we've had a fourth staged approach if you remember we're still in stage one stage two is providing supervision and meals and instruction in groups we've come near having to do that because the number of teachers we've had out or other support staff we haven't put in stage two yet but if we have to we can still keep schools open in stage two stage three would be online only and four would be you have too many that are sick to do it hopefully we're not going to get to the stage four and maybe not even stage three and with a
017little bit of luck we can avoid stage two but our principals and support staff have done a wonderful job of keeping the operations going our teachers have well as well are helping each other out and covering for one another and on their prep they're teaching to keep things rolling and we appreciate their efforts as well so that's sort of the cova conditions our athletic teams we give you a brief update with the girls volleyball team in the hunt on the 3a east boys and girls soccer are still in playoff contention the boys football team before coming out of this last was ranked tied for second in the conference and the conference 3a east is the best one in you know it's the best conference front top to bottom in the state our uh students boys
018and girls in cross country are remaining competitive we still have chess tournaments going on and to say nothing about the fab lab and the other co-curricular activities we have going so we're we're proud of the effort and progress we're making despite some of the hurdles that we're having to overcome because of uh the covet circumstances we're still having some really good results we're grateful that the kids are back in school and are socializing we've had a couple of music productions that we've had our fall production for junior high and high school was conducted two or three weeks ago they did a really good job and so we're we're fully operational and open and we're we're doing our best to keep everybody healthy and safe i don't have any other updates but i would be open
019to answering any questions the board might have mr president do you have a question jennifer you'd like to ask no not at this time thank you all right thank you dr wright the only announcement we have is that the next board meeting will be november 9th 2021 at 5 p.m in this location hopefully we'll be able to move back up on the stage and put people closer together and have a call to the public at that time but until then we have a motion to adjourn i have a motion from chuck a second from margaret all in favor aye all right thank you