001okay we'll call this meeting to order and we'd like everyone to please stand in courtney hoffmeier our junior high principal is going to lead us in the pledge of allegiance indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right this board meeting is a kind of a special board meeting because we get each each department head uh going to give us a review of what's up and coming and what's happened in the past we'd like to excuse diana butler tonight she's not feeling well and margaret gabby is taking care of her daughter-in-law whose husband is a pilot in the air force and has been called out and she has had knee surgery so she had to go take care of little kids so she won't be here tonight so i guess we'll start with transportation denise
002hall good evening can you hear me okay you have to talk right into it i have to eat it good evening gotcha governor good evening governing board and the staff and community it's good to be here this evening um introduction i am denise hall i am your transportation supervisor this is a coveted picture that we took and we had a lot of fun doing this this is uh some of our bus rules that we implement on the bus following the driver's instructions keeping hands and feet objects and sell to self and inside the bus unless otherwise instructed sit and seat quietly with arms and legs out of the aisles no vulgar or profane language and gestures or harassment put litter and trash cans and that are provided for you no eating or drinking on the
003bus behave in a safe and orderly manner at the bus stop riding the school bus is a privilege these are the precautions that we take daily to sanitize our buses daily disinfecting leave windows open take drivers temperatures daily and mask wearing encouraged bus evacuation drills we have to do this twice a year on campus as per dps and training provided annually did you know that it takes 60 seconds to have a bus fill full of poisonous fumes when it was lit on fire or catch caught on fire we practice getting students out in under 60 seconds how to get out with all of the emergency equipment how to walk not panic and leave all belongings on the bus and how to take care of the driver if incapacitated and how to stop secure the bus
004and turn it off this is a task and a huge part of our year we test them all throughout the year and we have actual evacuations on campus twice a year disaster evacuation plan we keep buses full of fuel we go to specific evacuation sites depending on location we have all of those secured all the drivers know where to go they also know um the back roads if need be all of the county roads all drivers are willing to serve always throughout this whole pandemic our drivers have always come and rose up to the occasion and has showed up to work and done it proudly drivers notified in group techs within 15 minutes of campus winter driving this is a big part of our year that we do safely the part of the job is
005very tedious and when our kids are we need them to be the best and really obey the bus rules because they all sense the importance of the situation annual training requirements we undergo random drug screens and breathalyzer testing throughout the whole year we have cpr first aid training we have a six and a half hour refresher training we have a ppt which is physical performance training and the department of transportation physical that we have to pass 2001 inspections our fantastic mechanics spent three weeks getting all the buses ready for inspection that happens every year around june we had two majors and one minor which is really good all of which was fixed within with the inspector was still there and was signed off on them mechanics did another fantastic job this year this is uh
006some of our fun things that we do off on our off time we have an annual maintenance and transportation camping trip we enjoy it very much and need that time away our elementary open house we take questions and meet the students and their families so it'll be easier for the first day they ride the bus share time and locations of stops notification of changes meeting bus drivers that's really important for the kids especially those who have never ridden the bus reconnecting with the students and their parents this is some of the things that are going on here at the transportation we have a new catch base income underneath there the tank is getting a facelift we're working on new fuel tank pumps they haven't been um replaced since we installed them in 1993 and the
007fuel tank has been painted for a nice update our transportation goals this year is no accidents we want to be accident and injury free teamwork save money that's difficult and everything that is raising all the prices are being raised on everything that we've done and trying really hard to get some things um and get the shop up to fire code to end this with a little humor we are going to sit here until all of you settle down and don't we don't care how long it takes thank you very much from your student transporters thank you thanks denise i have one question do we have do we have the capability to evacuate every student on a bus from the school if we had to yes okay great that's awesome thank you very much this is
008excellent okay our next uh would be our facilities director jeff hickens now let's hope the lights don't go out yeah can you guys hear me okay so i'm jeff akins um the director of the maintenance custodial department called facilities we maintain the facilities we clean the facilities we take care of the grounds set up and break down for all of the events throughout the campuses let's see if i can figure out how to use this okay here's just some of our crew here i could stand here tonight and talk about these people and all they do until midnight um amazing crew that i've had over the last 12 years this is my 12th year at the blue ridge school district but anyways that's just some of them right there um staffing levels uh we have
009main we had uh six maintenance personnel and 14 custodians uh just recently dr wright and brenda were able to find money to to hire a few more which i'll talk about in a few minutes the way that we've gotten by was such a small staff through the years we used to have about 10 to 12 more staff than we do now is again dr wright and brenda were able to find some funds for us to be more efficient such as carpet cleaning machines tile floor scrubbing polishing machines bathroom locker room c3 cleaning machines a lot of equipment has made us much more efficient so we don't need the additional personnel that we used to have three new mowers for the fields and the playgrounds new grass catcher that's coming in any day that will will
010allow us to pick up the grass on all the fields about 10 times faster than what we currently have a new self-driving field lining paint machine that was an excellent investment that took us from three guys doing field lining down to one guy and at about probably four or five times faster that's just some of the things we've done uh at approximate cost here 300 000 dollars so let's go to the next thing new staff positions again thank you dr brenda school board for all of your support we were able to add a seasonal groundskeeper mower that's been huge we had a 30-year bus driver named lance pinrod that came on board and he does our seasonal mowing from april through october that's been huge for us two new custodial positions and two new maintenance
011positions recently and thank you very much and the crew thanks you let's see what else do we have here there's just some other pictures of the crew doing some of their jobs around here from the floors to whatever maintenance and repairs need to be done in these these facilities vary from 1965 all the way up to what we call the new school is 13 years old over on porter mountain so we've got 1960s buildings 70s buildings eighties buildings nineties buildings and a two thousand eight building that we have to maintain about a half a million square feet total 2010 2021 smb building renewal grant projects so for big ticket items that cost us lots of money we apply for grants with the state um these are some of the grants that we have gotten over
012the last 10 11 years at the high school we've gotten about two two million four hundred forty one thousand thirty four dollars in uh grants high school east over nine hundred thousand junior high school over seven hundred thousand multi-purpose center um you know 264 000 approximately so for a total of 4 million 331 477 the sfb has assisted us through a grant program in doing things like roofs and major repairs like that what we're currently working on are more sfb grants and this is a list of them here the ones in yellow up there have been approved are in the process these grants take from the the first day that you start the grant until the end of it it usually takes about two years so if we're looking at a roofing project which we
013are right now in the high school all the high school gyms are getting reroofed that started a little over a year ago and it will probably be under construction next summer so about two years per these large grants this is what we've got up there the uh all-campus concrete we've got lots of old concrete issues that are cracking and we got that underway elementary school waterproofing roof repairs we've got issues over there that we're working on high school maine and old campus gem re-roof that we're working on elementary school interior floor foundation repairs main campus hvac replacements we've got 10 of those underway right now high school drainage issues domestic water pump house renovation high school kitchen suppression system code upgrades junior high boiler replacement elementary school fire alarm repairs and i could put in
014probably 25 more tomorrow but it's a lot of work managing these things and getting to the end result i believe that's it so thank you for your time i have just one compliment he's an excellent job and he's retiring next year and we're so sad we can't keep you right i know june 30th will be it but i appreciate it thank you is it easy to get money from the state no it's very difficult it's very difficult it's harder than pulling teeth right lots of hoops to jump through well you do a great job thank you very much thank you jeff hello jeff yes also i wanted to compliment you on the upgrade of the signs out in front they look excellent okay thank you thank you very much appreciate it [Applause] okay next we'll
015hear from our elementary school principal ryan grace good afternoon y'all i wasn't here last year to know how a lot of stuff went but i was here for some of the really important parts and i'm exceedingly happy to be here now i want y'all to to know that ryan's father graduated from blue ridge in what year 19 1980 1980 and my aunt in 1981 in 1981 so he's coming home we're glad to have you absolutely like i was telling mr aikens now i get to go home at the end of the day sit on my porch and listen to bugle and it is one of the best things that uh i've ever experienced i get to have my daughters in my lap we listen to him for a while every day it's great um so
016our spring open house this is a couple pictures from that we had to do it a little bit differently than we normally would than having people up and down the hallways we had 322 families in attendance which was the first event that we got to have last year um our back to school night we had 598 families in attendance come to back to school night so a huge increase there as far as that goes right now at the elementary school our enrollment is 853. we're well over a hundred plus gained from last year which is is really big we got a lot of people that are coming home to blue ridge and and that's great to see i was here last year to work on our school improvement plan as as the acting dean or
017the interim dean of students and so these are our campus goals and i wanted to kind of go over them with you all the professional school day last year as an elementary teacher it is very difficult to get people to understand what it's like in the day of an elementary school teacher if you don't get a break um because we don't have the same kind of prep there is no passing period you know where i was at a junior high in the classroom to high school you get a passing period you switch kids and you at least get you know five minutes where you get to stop talking um at elementary school our teachers last year they put in the work and they had kids from 7 15 in the morning until 2 o'clock in
018the afternoon at non-stop other than a lunch and that was if we had the duty to cover lunch otherwise they stepped in and picked that up too so one of the big things that i wanted to make sure that we had for our teachers this year was that we gave them that time to collaborate with one another to work together to to better our students education to allow data to drive our instruction and we've been able to meet that goal and we continue to improve upon that one every chance we get so i meet with our teachers we have a couple people that meet with our teachers and discuss with them you know what's the need and how do we fix it um our statement number two is that we needed to have increased communication
019with parents and guardians in the community and so far this year we've we've greatly increased our social media output what we're putting out from the elementary school we've brought other campuses involved to to make it feel like we're not a satellite campus that we're not just over there on porter mountain that we are part of it and so every friday we have a different group from the high school come and open doors at student drop-off we've had the band there playing so far we've had the football team the volleyball team the boys and the girls soccer teams they were there opening doors in their jerseys the little kids just eat it up i mean they they love it as well as a newsletter thank you and it had over a thousand hits on it as
020well and so we'll we'll continue to put out information you know through every possible outlet that we can and then our our last one for statement three was that our teachers needed time to work with other teachers to grow to do to have some professional development and so uh i've been working with mr pico who's not here tonight to secure funding to be able to send some of our teachers some professional development that we need we're working on the days after our fall break will be a professional development day and i think each campus has a plan for for that day so that we can continue to grow teachers and give them the support that they need because that was one thing that in the classroom i knew that i wanted and when i talk
021to teachers here it's the same thing they want they want support and they they want to grow and continue in their craft so as far as as our goals go adding back our specials was a really big deal it gave our teachers a chance to you know have a little bit of a break and work with her with their teams it also gave our kids a chance to become more well-rounded so we do have stem we are now part of avid district-wide so the avid program that's at the high school we carry it down to our campus so our sixth graders have the avid class in their elective wheel like the junior high does and then our lower grades they see avid implemented in a couple different ways district right we also now have two
022pe classes so our students get pe twice a week instead of just once a week that was something that that i felt was really important getting our kids up and moving to use some of that energy as well as just increase their overall physical health and then we have we've added a second counselor she's there part-time three days a week to work on our social emotional health i didn't know that a lot of people thought little kids are resilient and they can work through it some of our kids they were at home by themselves through the whole thing and and they need someone to talk to and so we we've uh with dr wright's help we've been able to secure another counselor to come to campus and and be there to help kids and so
023we have two on campus um one full-time one three days a week so and then we have a kindness campaign that is now well underway uh on campus and and hopefully we'll be able to connect it to the junior highs and i know the junior high council has been helping sending out a lot of stuff as well our first day of school we we didn't have parents come into the building and so instead we set up photo stations on the side of the building and we had kids from kindergarten to sixth grade that took pictures of their first day the feedback was great parents loved it it slowed us down a little bit as far as getting kids dropped off and out of cars but it worked out perfect so that is something that we'd
024like to probably continue moving forward and i've talked to all of our team leads about having our grades actually design the banner that would be behind that grade level for the next year because we can make those in our stem classroom so that would be another project for our stem to do as well so um that's the elementary in a nutshell so far this year thank you mr grace yes sir i've had nothing but high praise for the things that you're doing especially those uh posts about what kids are doing in a classroom people love to see the kids learning in the classroom and i get lots of compliments with that so good deal thank you we have we have a lot of great things going on and we just needed to show them a
025little bit more yeah people are excited yes sir even even me grandpa and grandma we really love to see it thank you very much see our next uh presenter will be our junior high principal miss courtney hoffmeyer good evening so i just want to go over i'm going to do a quick recap of last year so that we can kind of lead into where we are this year um so just going over quickly our transition from online to hybrid to in-person um our social emotional wellness our professionalism and gratitude for the staff at the junior high and the accomplishments that we saw and then lead into where we are going uh 21 22. so we had i mean as everybody is aware this is just really reminding us of of all the transitions that we
026made last year and all the all of the asks that we had of our students so starting with online learning that was a huge adjustment and and parents and students and staff jumped in to make it the best that they could and then moving into hybrid learning with half on campus half at home another adjustment for our students we were very grateful to have students on campus but it was still it was a difficult transition but again parents and students and staff all worked together very well to make sure that that that it was it was successful for the kids we had new technology that was introduced last year and the students what we found were it has been amazing to see the change in students and how comfortable they have become in reaching out
027to teachers and counselors and principals email just to let us know if they what's on their mind and if they need help with something so that has been it's been wonderful to give them that technology and and let them have that avenue for communication and then coming back with our with everybody in masks and students obliged they i mean they did such a great job uh making that transition as well and then finally our final lap where we celebrated a difficult but a successful year with our students and that one was especially meaningful we had a retirement for mary lee cox last year so she is leading that final lap and that was that was probably one of the most memorable memorable final laps just ever there was so much uh i think probably relief
028that that year had been over and that we had gotten through it together but then just so much hope for the next school year as we were moving on but we also had a lot of accomplishments last year that i just wanted to make sure that we emphasize we had our navajo county spelling bee champion jack woods our physics and engineering club ranked top 20. last year earning 63 000 in new technology and equipment our eighth grade girls won the white mountain league championship and we received the sportsmanship award at the junior high uh for the year as well so that was another huge accomplishment and we also had we just there were a lot of social emotional uh supports that we needed to put in place last year because as uh ryan said mr
029gray said that there are a lot of kids that were at home and were trying to figure some things out on their own one of the things that i do want to thank technology for we have a social sentinel which is a program online that alerts us to concerning vocabulary in emails so we could flag different words that students were using in their emails and that helped us out a great deal it helped us to be able to intervene when students were having a hard time either with somebody else or if if we were concerned about their wellness so i want to thank them for that we also continued while we were online and in hybrid we had daily announcements that were posted online for students so that we could stay connected to them and
030we continue with those daily announcements you know we have our daily announcements at school this year as well so a lot of things were put into place last year that we knew would help us this year i also wanted to just mention the junior high staff they're incredible just they stay engaged they keep the kids involved so many different just positive things going on in the classroom and finding creative ways for the kids to stay engaged in their curriculum so moving on to we also we we realized that we were going to have some learning gaps after uh last year so this is just a kind of a comparison this shows you the 2019 azmerit results that we had and if you take a look at this that'll just kind of show you that we
031were really pretty even with the state as far as our as far as our achievement and then if we when we move into 2021 we see a bit of a gap and we anticipated that that gap would be there so we did see a gap between eight and ten percent in each one of our categories from um between ela and math so knowing that we have that we just there are a couple we put some goals into place so that we can meet the gaps that we have so our goals as a district we have four of those goals increase student achievement address the social emotional needs of our students establish excellent customer service and manage a safe and healthy learning environment so i really just want to focus for just a moment on those
032top two increased student achievement we do have some things in place this year knowing that we have those gaps we just kind of broke it out into what were what we are doing to help identify those gaps and to narrow them so we have more frequent data analysis and monitoring and remediation efforts going on we've actually added a position in math for math remediation we also have our title one reading and math classes in effect so that we can help target those students who are really who suffer the biggest gaps and close those gaps in our achievement more professional development mr grace also talked about this just giving teachers more of an opportunity in professional development to find different strategies that work in the classroom that are research-based practices and just keep everybody on the
033same page we are working on vertical alignment from kindergarten through 12th grade so having that vertical element we try to have transition between sixth grade sixth and seventh grade and eighth and ninth grade we're trying to incorporate more of those teachers to come together um in in professional learning communities so that we can also figure out those gaps between before k-12 and also being proactive with students who have a history of our excessive absences we had that quite a bit last year students with absences we've recognized those we're targeting those students just to make sure that we can keep that we can keep that in mind and then our social emotional needs of our students as well as our staff we do have we are very lucky to have miss montoya on miss montoya wright
034on our campus uh she is a blessing for our students she does work very well with those kids we have a list of students we well with 300 we have 300 students that we want to make sure that we are we are addressing all of those social emotional concerns that we have with them um so again we have some different things in place for that social sentinel is one that helps us out but we also have social emotional wellness trainings that are going on miss montoya wright is also she provides us with both youth and adult mental health trainings on our campus throughout the year so that we can help teach people how to help others and then address our staff questions and concerns promptly as they come up and also provide them with the
035resources that they need to be successful so that is our focus this year we have more as well as internal external customer service and managing a safe and healthy learning environment um one of the things in a safe and healthy learning environment is just making sure that we're addressing any bullying and hazing that comes up we do have a full student assembly that we we have right at the beginning of the year to really outline with them because sometimes they just don't understand that some of the things that they might be saying or doing are considered bullying and hazing so we try to address that with them right at the beginning and give frequent reminders to them as the year goes on this is just some information for our safe spaces and the free mental
036health first aid certification for adults and i have more information if anybody is interested in that and you can also email ms montoya for more information on that we are excited about this school year uh we're still early into it but we have a lot of things going on we have a ton of kids that are just super excited about being involved they want to be involved in clubs they want to be involved in sports and so we just want to keep encouraging them to stay involved thank you [Applause] courtney i have one question numbers-wise did we maintain what we had last year do we increase or did we go down we maintained we maintained we we are at the end of 2019 um at the end of 2020 we had 321 uh 316 students
037we had i think it was 308 at the end of last year we are at 300 right now 297 i think is our number right now all right thank you thank you great thank you okay our next presenter will be our high school principal mr lauren webb all right thank you so similar to the other two campuses that have already got given their presentation definitely last year was a year of change we made the best of what we could and the situation that we dealt with and and we came out positive our students you know they they had a great year even all the things that they had to go through some of the highlights that i want to hit on are some of we did resume the state testing we had a year where
038we did not do the azmerit or which changed to the azm2 so last year we resumed the state testing and we the high school was able to close that gap that we had previously with the state and how our our students scored so we had a continued academic and extracurricular success our ap program is very strong at the high school and very proud of what our ap students and teachers are doing with with that class and the the different classes in the program there and then finally i'm going to hit on some of our ccr our ccri points which is college and career readiness index with a state assessment when we switched to the azm2 in 2019 when we had the the azmerit scores for ela we were five points below the state average and
03919 points below the state average of math so we made some adjustments in our classes we had our 10th graders for year raw year-long math and english and i was able to you know sub we still had some classes that were a semester long class if they were in advanced class but most of the student 10th grade students did year-round ela math at the end of the year when we did our testing with the azm2 we narrowed that gap where last year's results were only two points below the state average in both ela and math so that was a great growth that we were able to see there and we hope to continue to to see that actually close the gap and actually move ahead of where the state is on those scores extracurricular success
040we have continuing you saw some pictures with courtney and some of the fab lab the physics and engineering club they continue to be successful in what they do mr woolridge has a great program down there so they also won two more competitions this last year the innovation award for the solar go-kart team they went down to tucson participated in that event and the innovation award was a safe functional and more innovative than others that they had seen in that competition and they also had the solar efficiency award of how the input with the sun and output of the the machine that they were using they also submitted something with the nasa human exploration rover challenge previously they had won for the drive train in years past this last year they won for stem engagement so
041again national recognition for their programs that he's doing with our music programs continue to receive superior ratings and with also just things here locally and then world strides they were able to not last year but the year before go to florida and participate in the world strides music festival they receive superior ratings there they continually receive superior ratings when they have large group festivals so we have a lot of kids that are involved in some of the extracurricular activities not necessarily the athletics but they have other options that they can participate in at the high school so we encourage the students to to be as involved as they can and that's what the picture of the solar gold cart that they took down to u of a athletic success is last year we had state
042championship team in the boys soccer a lot of different accolades that that went down the list with coach of the year conference player of the year and then they also had conference first team all conference players in the girls soccer program they had um one all-conference first team player and then two all region first team players and then look at the football they were co-champions last year and then several of the student athletes were team on the recognized for their all region first team and then we had coach of the year which was a great recognition for coach london on his last year you know here at blue ridge before we brought him back into the weight program but he retired and it was nice to be able to send him out with a region
043coach of the year and then his son pj was player of the year more of our athletic successes girls volleyball again we had some of the girls that were recognized on the first all-region team and then boys basketball we had one all region player baseball we had a couple that were on the first all the all-region team and we also had a region defensive player of the year softball we had recognition of couple girls on the team there the last recognition is the this was compiled by the sports 360 az and they do a tally of those students that are student athletes with i think a 3.8 or higher gpa as far as the all academic team recognition is this is throughout the state so we had two in in football six in volleyball and
04412 and cross country and they only did the fall sports they didn't do the spring sports but it's a great recognition to our our student athletes and how well they perform in the classroom our ap courses so this year this last year we were able to pick up two more courses so now we're up to 11 ap courses we had 73 students enrolled in ap classes and i when i looked at that number i wanted to take it into a deeper dive we there were 73 students but their actual total number of ap classes that they took throughout the year was 180 so you have students that are taking more than one ap course at the end of the year they had 108 exams when they can take the ap exam to see if they
045qualify for college credit the average score of our students that took the ap exam was a 3.1 or higher if you have a 3 or higher on those then you're able to get college credit so 69 of our kids that took the ap exam had a three point at a three or higher and so that's a total of 75 credit college credits earned so ap is your advanced placement this is a nationwide program and they have established curriculum that is the same no matter what school you go to and at the end of the course you take a end of the course exam if you choose to and if you have a score of three four or five then you can get college credit and that college credit goes with you in most cases to
046whatever college that they decide to go to and finally in our college and career readiness index 97 courses now this is just focusing on our seniors 97 of our seniors passed a college level math science social studies or foreign language course and then so that includes our partnership with npc our dual enrollment classes talent classes or it could have been with our ap classes that are here on campus the next one were 98 of our seniors passed a cte course which they got college credit and they can earn it with an a b or c with mpc so those would be excuse me something like cabinet making they can do that for dual enrollment and get college credit for that within a cte class there's multiple classes that they think you can do there so
04798 students got a college credit for that one and then the industry recognized credential that would be if they have the welding certificate that they can go through and get that that certification there's a multiple list of different certifications that our students can get so we had 30 seniors get the certification or license through that cte program and then the technical skills assessment is a more defined level like if you take your sports medicine class you take the end of the course if you take all three years of sports med at the end of that you take the technical skills assessment and then that would the the end outcome would be your sports trainer certificate for that tsa so our seniors did a great job this last year even though it was coveted it was
048in a new environment they had a year and a half of craziness but they still had a great year and a lot of successes so we're really proud of our seniors last year point courtney pointed out some of our district goals same thing that she was demonstrating we do have the first goal was the increase in student achievement we have the avid program which will hit all of our kids even though it specifically will want to focus on helping kids make that determination that i you know what i can do this i can go on to the next level in college some of our kids may not go into college they're going to get the tools that they need to be successful and so all of our teachers are going through the professional development and
049training so all of the students will be able to benefit from the the skills and goals that they would get in the avid program and that also helps with our tsi our targeted school improvement we have students that are again our english language learners our special ed students and our native american students who the state have identified we need to focus on these groups so we're doing that focus through the avid training and teachers are learning the tools and the things that they need to do in the classroom to be able to help those kids make the growth that they need social emotional needs with the thank with the help of the board and dr wright we're able to increase our student support positions we're able to bring in some more help up in the
050front office at the high school so our excuse me our numbers at the high school we had 680 students last year this year we're at 740 so we do have a big year population and we're seeing the the needs that the social emotional needs of our students say there are higher and they're coming in with more severe problems and so it's been helpful having more support up in the office to be able to work with those students as they bring those those concerns and those different situations that they experience at home at school wherever life brings those problems there they're able to come in and get some support and help for that and the other last two we definitely want to continue our efforts in improving the customer service and how our our front staff
051the teachers everyone has that interaction with our customers and that's the the students and the parents so we're working on those and also doing our part in managing the safe and healthy learning environment and a lot of that goes with from the beginning with the bus drivers to maintenance and then our part in the classroom to helping give the kids just a safe place to be and that's it on the high school yes sir yeah for sure so two years ago we had gretchen knox she was an appointment to west point academy to to air force academy and so we had you know she was actually um won our valedictorian and she was a you know she was a state she went to state for the first year for a female wrestler so and she
052did great academically so here's a indication of how well a kid can do and then she got the air force academy appointment last year we had michelle basinger who was a west point academy appointee so two years in a row is pretty rare to have from a small school so we're really proud of our students and what they they can accomplish here [Applause] okay our next presenter would be for special ed and that's rebecca frase good evening and thank you board and community and staff for the time that you've allowed us to to brag about ourselves luckily i'm fortunate enough to work with three wonderful prince principles who are guiding their schools incredibly and all of my special services students are affected by that wrong one there we go so from the office of exceptional
053students we um not only do students with disabilities we also are the umbrella for the gifted students so any exceptionality so here's our covid i happen to share a a campus with our developmental preschool so it's easy to get some pictures and they're so small it doesn't always show their faces so the confidentiality is still maintained so during coveter after with the huge lockdown we started to come back we played outside instead of on equipment with pool noodles and balls we wore our masks and we still attended to these kiddos and sometimes we learned outside developmentally this is a good trick too because occupational therapists would tell you to begin writing in this nature is a good idea so we would take our little ones out there and and do some fun stuff with them
054we even zoomed our meetings and i remember you know making our jokes about we felt like the brady bunch it was a good thing we zoomed our meetings we kept up with every iep meeting even though sometimes we were closed sometimes we couldn't have the parents on campus but it kept up the communication with those families and it also kept us in compliance with state and federal mandates here's a graph that is difficult to see and i tried to change it a couple times this graph really represents the different disabilities and it starts with specific learning disabilities and then on the bottom of that is orthopedic impairment um ironically most districts and this these are national numbers most of our students come from these speech language learning disability other health impairments are most of our
055students ironically when you look at other health impairment sometimes that comes with a lot of behavior and the state doesn't always recognize these categories when it comes to reimbursing us into the individuals with the disability education act grant they more so will pay us back and reimburse us on these categories down here of whom we have very few kiddos these are your multiple disabilities sometimes your autism and things like of that nature but those kiddos with behavior we still have to have staff so we still have to pay out as a district to make sure we may maintain safety with all of these students right now at the elementary school we're down two special education teachers at the high school one and i think that we do pretty well at paying these individuals but they
056just aren't coming and so those are still posted i know mr grace and i have reached out to colleges trying to find someone getting ready to finish their student teaching or others that are in the educational field that will help us out a little bit this is something that we achieve at the end of special education is that the kids learn to be self-advocates that they learn to be confident in what they can do and that they can be successful in life and so we teach them about overcoming embarrassment accepting help and relying on your advocates because and we introduce them to community advocates vocational rehab post high school that will help them gain employment or education for their education if they choose and so what's next the next focus for this year is going
057to be in gifted accountability we do have a good gifted program in horizons but i as a director really don't know a whole lot about what's going on and we need to make sure that those are meeting some state mandates i just found out that um much of the testing that they used was out of date so we replaced all of that because we can't use out of out-of-date cognitive assessments 504 also now falls under my umbrella which is much like a special at iep but it's more on the medical part for kids with diabetes and other medical issues and so we're learning a lot about that right now taking some training to make sure that we're using best practices in that category as well this year is our first year of self-monitoring usually we
058have the state come in and monitor our special education files for compliance and it's a tedious job as they make sure that we've dotted every eye and crossed every t this year i get to do it myself which means i get to pull 30 files and try to figure out what the state wants because they change it every year and make sure that our documents are in compliance then the state will come back and take a handful of what i've gone through and see if i'm lying or keep me accountable so far our monitoring has gone fairly well and so we're hoping and praying that this year's as good as it has been and that is all from the special ed department thanks [Applause] thank you sometimes i know that job can be almost overwhelming
059but thank you excellent job thank you the uh i think it's appropriate we give all these guys a round of applause right now if you don't [Applause] and a great big thank you again from the board uh for the hours and hours that you spend in in taking care of your jobs and responsibilities appreciate it so much this school would not be what we are without you we can't operate without you and thank you very much very very much okay the next item on the agenda dr wright you want to take over its recognition of our semi september vr star award yes uh courtney can you come up and talk a little bit about heather fuller she is our br star for this month and um she's been under the weather but working and so
060she's excused for tonight we'll get her plaque tour soon yes thank you i would love to talk about heather she is incredible um miss fuller has she's been in the front office i think she's worked for the district about 10 years is that 10 to 12 years she's been with the district for quite a while um and she just knows the community she sees people coming in she recognizes them and every and they feel they feel like they have found a friend when you know they see an old friend when when they come through our front door she's just very welcoming she also helps our we have a new employee in the front office as well and she just helps to guide her she is wonderful to all of our staff members and she just
061stays on top of everything all the time so i'm just um we're super happy to have heather and um and blessed uh so thank you for that recognition i think it's very well deserved we'll make sure we get her picture and her award right all right thank you okay board the next item on the agenda that we'll be voting on is a consent agenda and the consent agenda is in is an accumulation of items like payments of materials equipment salaries and services in reviewing the consent agenda is there one particular item or a particular group of items that you would like to with withhold and draw and vote on separately is there any discussion regarding the consent so if there's no consensus i have a motion to accept items uh item number two which is
062a consent agenda which consists of items uh 2.1 through is it 2.13 so i have a motion i have a motion from jennifer chuck ii all in favor that would pass unanimously okay the only other item we have left on the agenda is a superintendent's report dr wright will turn some time to you and thank you and i'll ask the the mr president if i have some latitude when i'm discussing curriculum because there's a couple of adopted school board policies that involve curriculum and i can probably share some light the ones that we the the 59 pages that we had to read yeah the uh what i want to do is i'm going to talk about the district-wide effort to align the curriculum and i'm asking for some latitude with your permission i'll proceed so
063before i get into the alignment of the curriculum the board did a couple things night one it adopted a regulation under the regulation i-h-a-m-b-r and that's life family life education what they had required is frankly a lot more investigation and transparency and involvement from the community boards are not required to adopt this regulation our school board adopted it our philosophy has been if there's something that's more inclusive that involves the community and should we will even if it's more time consuming what the board adopted tonight under the family life education in a nutshell sex ed requires an advisory committee to be established that advisory committee is composed of stakeholders inc including community members teachers students and a board member these meetings must be held in open meetings they have to be noticed two weeks in
064advance and then whatever is going to be taught with this committee is going to eventually agree on which the school will present and the committee can give feedback and the committee's got to decide what it is that they want to present that has to be sent to the board for a 60-day review and it's going to be put on the website it's online and in person 60 days before the board decides so if the impression is that something was passed you didn't have an input that's not true it's just the opposite the board has left right after that 60 days there's another hearing another public hearing isn't there where that's discussed and then it's that has to be a week before the board meeting two weeks before weeks before so there's a ton of discussion
065we won't begin this process the entire course is about uh one quarter and so likely given this the flow of the year it's probably going to happen in the last quarter of the year which is really what april may and so uh the discussions will begin in november or december the committee will be formed any of you here that have an interest let us know if you would like to participate the committee needs to be uh representative of the demographics in our school and area which it will and then it'll it'll it'll take time i've had the good pleasure of probably organizing and leading a half a dozen of these last seven years accurate description and what i found is it's a great opportunity for the community to learn more about what the schools are
066actually doing than what you might read on social media and for instance i've heard an an elderly gentleman say that a kid got expelled for saying god bless you when someone sneezed that's never happened in the history of blue ridge and never would in fact there's a moment of silence for prayer we say the pledge every day and i've been told 100 times we don't we do we say the pledge so if you want the information my office is always open i'm available for discussion but in this matter and these important matters the board's approach has always been let's get them community involved it takes more time far more time consuming but it also i believe as does the board if i might speak on their behalf an inclusive process is far superior than something
067that just passed in midnight so that's our approach the second one would be sensitive information the statute has been passed by the arizona legislature that essentially prohibits the following it's teaching that one race or ethnic group is inherently moral or inherently intellectually superior to another with another race or an individual by virtue of their race or ethnicity or sex is inherently racist sexist or oppressive whether consciously or unconsciously an individual should be discriminated against and receive adverse treatment solely because of their race or their ethnicity it goes on what what this is is elements of what commonly is probably referred to as critical race theory um a statute has been passed that prohibits that now does that mean the discussion of race isn't going to come up of course it will yeah the the civil
068rights movement happened it's a part of american history it happens there it's it's talked about um the civil war happened slavery occurred all those things but this is a statute that the board has adopted by policy and it's a statute so it's not a suggestion by the way all the stuff we accepted 99 of it are statutes that we're going to comply with the board is saying yes we will comply and so the next one says an individual should feel you cannot teach this an individual should feel discomfort guilt anguish or any other form of psychological distress because of their individuals of their race ethnicity or sex and uh the next one is that a meritocracy which it means being promoted based on your merit or what you've done such traits is hard work and
069work ethic are racist and sexist inherently so these are the core of what the state legislature believes is associated with critical race theory it can't be taught so that is i uh school board policy i am as in mary be as in boy and that's uh controversial teaching i we have all of this will be on the website all these policies now that they're approved will be on our website and they're open to review if you want kind of a a quick sheet i can make a couple of copies of whatever policy you want leave me your address let me know what board policy or issue it is that you have an interest and i'll get that sent to you i'm also willing to visit with you after the meeting tonight if you have specific
070questions and then next we're working on curriculum ryan courtney and lauren have been working and rebecca by the way with our exceptional students have been working all four together to make sure that our students at the very top high of the achievement their needs are met like the young lady is going to west point our should our kids should be able to qualify to go to west point if they want to and then the students that are really struggling we have students that are not they don't touch they don't talk they're they can't move we have them all over the spectrum all those children are important to us and they all have distinct needs and our goal is to meet everyone's need and they i'll add that public schools are probably doing the best job
071they have ever they keep getting more and more mandates that are unfunded and are struggling just to make everything work if you think about the the last summary i sent to the board we're we're working through about seven major issues right now so curriculum alignment has to do with our first goal which is increasing student achievement we want to make sure we're teaching at this at the next grade level so to put it very simply sixth grade the curriculum should align with what they're going to get in seventh grade so they're prepared seventh and eighth and all through the the whole spectrum that's a vertical alignment horizontal is all the grades should be teaching the same core subjects and also principles within those subjects so that's curriculum alignment it's a ton of work i think
072last time i checked there's 750 standards that you're supposed to teach these kids in 182 school days it's a tall order and by the way they come to us in all shapes sizes and from every demographic group and so it has never been more difficult i've never been more proud of a group than i am of our teachers administrators the last couple of years they've been put in an impossible position and we have not had one teacher quit because of covid we have not had any of that we have had uh teachers show up and put themselves at risk if you remember 18 months ago we didn't know what to expect but our teachers working very hard to support all of these kids i'll also add our schools our buses and food program have delivered
073a half a million meals in the last 18 months one half million if you include us with show low we've been we've still served over a million mills between show low and blue ridge and denise's school buses going around dropping off those to kids that are otherwise would not be fed that's a pretty it's a pretty big order so yeah we we have all these other things that we're doing and by the way you need to teach the kids so we're talking about the curriculum a little bit today and that's an important the alignment is going to be a year-long effort from our four principles sped and campus with a team from every campus and then we've also will create a committee as well we involve the community that's always been our way we'll continue
074to do that on uh does the board have any questions on curriculum alignment or comments okay i have so many notes over here i've confused myself okay the next one is the girls and boys athletics our teams are off to a strong start blue ridge has had a long standing tradition of outstanding athletics and i'll say extracurricular including our music programs and we're off to a strong start the covet update is this uh the numbers in our area snowflake show low pinetop lakeside are the highest around they're starting to level out thankfully our hospitalization rates are very high it's starting to level out the we're having cases every day at the schools we haven't had what's constituted as an outbreak yet but we are getting very close to having to implement stage two so if
075i'll just if i might remind the board our objective is to keep our schools open we want to have a place a safe place for kids to go stage one is school as usual as usual as the new normal can be stage two is you're still coming to school they're being fed and they're being supervised and we're providing group instruction because we're going to be out we have teachers yesterday we have today we had nine of our elementary teachers out yesterday i think we had six at the junior high and an equal number at the high school there comes a point where you don't have enough teachers to have normal whatever normal would be a customary class those kids will still come to school they'll still get fed but they'll learn in groups and learning
076labs and we'll do our best to keep the classes open when it comes to the point we do not have enough staff to maintain that level of instruction then we'll go remote learning only that's the third phase god forbid we have too many people sick and we can't support instruction we would have to have schools closed that's the last option and we hope we don't have to exercise either three or four these phases are also on the website if you just log on to brusda.org you'll see an announcement in it and it'll review that for you my county call what the county is tomorrow 11 11 a.m last week we saw a little bit of a dip and we're hoping to see if that trend continues we're hoping to make it to the fall break
077which is a week first week of october and then be able to come back and finish our semester uh i don't have any other information other than that uh mr president if the board has any other areas in these that i might address i'd be glad to do so another question is chuck jennifer concludes my report thank you in there all right well thank you thank you for attending us today we are not having call of the public right now because of the uptick in covet so we kind of keep our crowds down a little bit this is on youtube you can go to br and uh get uh information rotha off of this meeting you can watch this meeting again on our youtube channel so if there's nothing for dark to write we'd have
078a motion to adjourn a motion from chuck a second from jennifer all in favor thank you very much