001i'd like to welcome everybody to this uh special stakeholders meeting um my name is david merrill i'm in a part of the school board is chuck waldo he's also part of the school board with this is not a board meeting this is a explain what type of meeting this is thank you this is a committee meeting committee meeting by invitation to stakeholders throughout our community right and this is regard to the essr 3 funds which is a substantial amount of money that the school district could have so appreciate any input that's what this meeting's for thank you thank you for coming i'm going to remove this mask my glasses don't fog up and i can actually read the words here on the page thank you for showing up incidentally we've invited about 80 people and
002so thank you for making the effort to come here what i want to do today is i want to introduce you'll hear acronyms a lot we're going to try to stay away from acronyms of which you're unaware so the first one is esser and that stands for the elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund and what that is it's federal funding that's coveted related to make up for the expenses incurred because of lost student population in the state of arizona and in other states when the student population drops so does the funding most of the public schools throughout the state suffered a reduction in enrollment therefore they suffered a loss of income schools that went online were penalized as well and so there's there was less funding for schools that went online so these funds
003have been provided to make up for the loss of learning and also the other needs that have surfaced now this is a very individualized approach that we've taken and that is required in order to have a well thought out plan i'll tell you that our administration teams and departments have been working on the plans for the individual campuses for about six months each of the principals will briefly review what is called a fish bone which is a complicated series of diagrams that maps out the steps that we're going to take to meet the needs of our kids and so there's a couple of needs that are obvious one of which is learning loss students went fell behind and in most cases if the students come from a low socio-economic environment and they have one parent
004that's working all the time and they're left at home the self they've suffered the most and even kids with both parents at home and both working and working normal schedules in higher socioeconomic classes probably still suffered learning loss so i don't think people are going to argue that kids haven't fallen behind we recognize that i want to make it clear we don't intend to make up for that learning loss in a single year that's going to take a period of time it's going to take some time we think within our planning probably the better part of two years and so learning loss is one and this grant at least 20 percent of these funds must be associated with making up learning loss within our planning it it'll exceed that the other thing that's obvious is
005student suffered emotional stress from it disasso being disconnected from their peers having to learn remotely there's a lot of different personalities i mean i can think of of my four kids two of them would have thought it's the best thing in the world that happened because they're anti-social and the other two it's the worst thing in the world because they are social butterflies so it depends on personality but kids generally from a social emotional standpoint suffered and so we recognize that we have implemented within our plan student support megan penrod megan will you raise your hand for me please you probably all know who megan is is the director of student support district wide she's paying added emphasis to the high school because of the population the number of sheer number of students that we
006have we've also hired counselors at every school we have student support at every school and we have counselors at every school our hope was to hire even a couple more and in this plan i think we've we've provided finances to hire two or three additional counselors if we can find them in order to make up learning loss and to meet the needs of our kids we've decided that we need to have as small as classroom as it is practical at the elementary level our targets are depending on the grade level but the lower the grade the smaller the classrooms ideally where the classrooms start to exceed those numbers we want to add an instructional aid we've had some success in doing that in uh years past some of these classes in the second third and
007fourth grade have been as high as 26 28 and in fifth and sixth grade as high as 36 and 38 right now our largest class i believe is 30 and that's in the sixth grade kindergarten ideally is about 20 we're at about 24 and those are 98 percent or 99 local kids uh kindergarten is hard to plan for because you just don't know who's going to show up first second and third grade those classes are small smaller than they have been in the past at admittedly at the high school and junior high they're higher than what we would like but they are still manageable i think that's a fair representation of principles is that true okay the other thing i want to emphasize is that this is an ongoing effort the esser grant is a
008substantial grant over the seri over the period of about three years the district will receive in excess of five million dollars and that grant will be spread across three years and you might have heard stories on the news about well what are we going to do when that runs out in the covet calendar six months is long-term planning there was a time where one month was long-term planning things evolve this grant allows for the rewriting or to rethink it to re direct resources as needed it gives a lot of flexibility so mr pico is building the framework with the uh support of the rest of the administration team and directors he's building the framework for this grant to meet those targets that we're talking about the framework that he's building will also support the goals
009that'll be spoken of briefly in the fishbone activity as well there are three specific subgroups that we have targeted already to try to provide additional supports and one is our students that are in the special ed programs two is english language learners and and three is our native american students that require additional support if they're not at grade level or they're below or far below they receive additional support this plan also contemplates the average student and the highly performance student like the one we have going to columbia right over here it'll it'll account for all of our kids all the students let me look at my notes here really quickly i want to make sure before i turn it over to our principles to give a brief explanation of their fishbone i want to make
010sure i've got i also want to add a critical part of this plan addresses the safely reopening of our schools it's extremely expensive to disinfect in your facilities daily that i mean we would do that maybe three times a week or twice a week we're doing it daily we've added two positions in facilities and maintenance in order to facilitate that we purchased a lot of equipment to make that job a lot easier to disinfect in the facilities and we provided over time we'll continue to do that there's also heating ventilation air conditioning hvac units are going to be replaced with some of these funds to improve the learning environment and the air quality where those are needed we're also working with the state facilities board to replace another 11 or 10 10 to 12 units
011in multiple locations another element of this grant is we have the ability to provide funds to our teachers and certified staff primarily teachers to retain our teachers and so we can have retention incentives we can have higher incentives to attract new teachers so thankfully we are only too shy of the two two positions shy of our target of the teaching positions that we set out to hire we wanted to have three additional teachers at the elementary over the level of covering every class at the capacity levels we were able to find one over the other two were still making an effort to find and we've had to admittedly get creative at the high school level too we're using some ins teacher led instruction online one class the junior high in english and a couple of
012classes at the high school so in order to discuss this further i want to turn some time over if you give us a couple of five to seven minutes if you need a little more and you can have some questions answered if you're done we'll start with the elementary school go to the junior high and then we'll end with mr webb and then we'll have a mr pico introduce some information and after mr pico's then we'll have a q a this is ryan grace mr grace is our elementary school principal all right i think i got everything turned on um so essentially there previously referred to as fish bones because that's what they look like it's just a problem-solving strategy each campus will have three of these to kind of go over with you these
013are developed from our campus needs assessment which are built through teacher input so teachers had input into the campus needs we looked at those we went through all the different categories we go through wherever the lowest areas are at and we build our goals for the next year so essentially on the far right you have our needs statement which for this one which was our first primary need was a professional school day needed to incorporate preparation time and appropriate planning during the school day last year due to covid we had to close down our specials at the elementary school our teachers were with their students from 7 10 in the morning to 2 o'clock in the afternoon they had a 20-minute 25-minute lunch somewhere in there but they had to do all of their planning
014all of their collaboration outside of the school day so we were able to this year add back our specials plus an additional special which gives our with our greater numbers we can have more kids go to specials so that our all of our teachers have time to collaborate as a team daily it's not a huge amount of time every day it's about 30 minutes every day but over the course of the week it's far more than than they had available previously our second primary need was that professional development needed to be built into the calendar um with covid last year and being out we were not able to offer professional development at the level that we wanted and so whether it's self-selected or pre-selected professional we want to make sure that we have that to
015be able to offer two teachers we're using friday afternoons we get out early at noon on fridays we'll be using friday afternoons to work on professional development as well as uh you know take care of some staff housekeeping that kind of thing that needs to happen but we will be able to offer more in-person professional development both from our own teachers that express interest in giving professional development to their peers as well as pulling other people in to train on some of the programs that we already have such as lexia and our title reading programs that kind of thing our third primary need um we have a lot of very involved parents and we wanted to try to bring that back we were unable to have large gatherings last year and so family involvement nights
016are a big part of what we want to do this year we are currently working on getting quite a few of them planned curriculum night math night science night we had back to school night this year we had almost 700 no sorry almost 600 families that signed in and that would be without an overage we had 598 signatures on paper for families which tripled our spring open house attendance um so that was that was quite quite good to see but we'll be getting those calendared well in advance this year so that people we can advertise to them people can take part come in see what their kids are doing in class outside of just you know the typical parent conference days any questions on those all right i'm going to go ahead and pass this
017off to ms hoffmeyer hey courtney let me give you a microphone thank you sorry i'm courtney hoffmeier for those of you i i haven't met our some of ours actually mirrored some of the elementary goals as well our first needs statement talks more about increasing communication between staff family and community community we saw the need to make sure that we are sharing out all of our goals that we have for all of our students among all of our stakeholders so that we can help all of our students students achieve at a high level one of the are there are a lot of pieces that go into this identifying key data points identifying the needs of all of our students whether it be emotional needs academic needs family needs just making sure that we we are
018all communicating about the needs of all of our students offering support to all of our students um we have also we have especially after last year we identified the need of making sure that we are providing as many mental health supports to our students our staff and our families as well so there are a lot of those pieces that are going into that our our second goal is to develop the research-based professional development so that we can stay all on the same page as far as what kind of practices we want to see in our classrooms what kind of practices we want to see in our curriculum and our instruction with our students we do want to develop we can implement consistent practices and include differentiation for students with diverse learning needs and that can
019be from students who are needing extra support either students with disabilities to students who need extra engagement more challenges so we are recognizing we just have a we our students run the gamut from so with so many different needs we want to make sure that our professional development is um targeted so that we can meet the needs of all of our students and our final need statement mirrors what elementary school was saying as far as our student data assessment our research-based curricula so this one is very similar to our second goal with our professional development we are implementing avid this year at the junior high level and this is going to be something that's going to help us help students learn to achieve with rigor with extra rigor be able to advocate for themselves break
020down barriers whether they be they be social emotional barriers academic barriers but figure out how to overcome those uh those obstacles that they have so our our overall goal is we just want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to help all of our students succeed at every level academically socially you know as much as we can for their success any questions okay and mr webb is next all right so the you're going to notice some similarities between all three campuses probably because we have similar populations and similar needs come up as we do this one of the things that we've noticed that we need to improve on is to make our communications more readily available to all of our stakeholders to whatever language they speak at home hopefully we can have
021that translation into their native language so they have a better understanding of what's going on at the high school so we're trying to figure out how we can do that more effectively the school website we've done some changes to our website over the years and we're we're making progress there hopefully we can still work out some some things where parents maybe run into frustrations with navigation on the website if they need to find that information they can find it easily those are one things that we we want to make sure that we can do our part in making that information available to parents and also to students where the state has identified the high school as needing to focus on three subgroups within our school population those are students with special needs our english language
022learners and also our native american students so we've looked at things that we can do within the school to help all of these different subgroups but as we as we're doing that these tools that we're using and and learning they're great for all students so courtney mentioned the avid program and that's going to be helpful to all of the kids and i'll get into that a little bit in our next one this one again it's connected to the last one with providing training and information to better understand our different cultural needs if we can help our teachers understand where the kids are coming from and the experiences that they are going through at home that will help them make the connections to those kids in the classroom and hopefully the kids will be able to
023have a better desire to contribute more overcome those barriers that maybe are in their own lives to be more successful and then they're going to be able to take that whatever those tools are being taught to them and apply it to their own learning so they can be able to be successful the last thing is talking about how we can improve our opportunities for teachers with professional development it's similar to the elementary and also the junior high we perform a needs assessment what the teachers want to focus on for professional development we will give those teachers we want to we have teachers within our staff at all three campuses that are experts in certain areas so if we can utilize our own experts to reach out and to teach their colleagues it's going to be
024more meaningful to the the teachers as they're learning that and it's also something that's directed to what they need so we have that line but then we also have the avid so the the ways the different things that courtney was explaining we're going to do that at the high school too um and especially with when they're in the high school we want to make sure that the the kids there's a large group of students who for whatever whether it's their own thinking whether it's their family you know parents may be telling them whatever their experience they feel that they can't be successful in college or have a future in college or life after high school wouldn't include you know more learning opportunities so that's a big part of avid is trying to push those students
025to make that connection like yeah i can i can do this i can be successful i probably can take these college classes we have several we have so many for our school and the size of our school we have so many opportunities for our students to be able to take community college classes whether it's through our talent program whether it's dual enrollment whether it's navit compared to any of the other schools up here on the mountain and schools our size we have a lot of different opportunities want our kids to be able to take that next step and to be experienced in college classes and hopefully with our avid program we're going to bring some of these kids who never thought this was a possibility and help lead them to that so those were our
026three needs test need statements and what we're going to be focusing on at the high school any questions there okay mr pico's up next thank you for being here thank you all of you for being here and showing an interest in what we're doing you ever spent 5.2 million dollars before it's really a challenge it really is i want to uh complement our principles they're showing you just the basic surface of what it's like to develop a school plan i start bugging these guys about january some of them run from me some of them hide and we find them anyway out of benevolence dr wright sent me home for a year to work from mesa and work with our principals in terms of getting these things finished and so this is just a fraction of
027what they have to do to do a school plan so after they do this and this ties back into the sr3 after they complete this plan they have to go into the department of education's website and they have to create smart goals and goals and how they're going to accomplish those things and then not only do that they have to go through and they have to fun tag every single one of them and so it's a it's a massive collaborative effort between the principals myself and other school folks that uh that we get that done and so it's and so it works out pretty good it works out really well these three principles have been absolutely phenomenal to work with they make themselves available they make the time for it they get involved in it
028and as they're doing these plans mind you they're running high schools they're running junior highs they're running elementary schools and the environment in which they did it in was a covet environment and it was new to all of us we weren't quite sure we learned the word zoom meeting these principal talk these principles talked about the target assisted grant and the targeted assisted grant did identify three subgroups that fit right into the framework of the sr3 grant the sr3 grant is an emergency fund grant to open up schools to make sure that we open up in a safe good and clean environment i always have looked at this grant as i've started it and thank you dr wright and brenda for trusting me to to plow forward with this grant but i look at it
029as a capacity grant i look at it how can i give folks at blue ridge unified the capacity to do what they need to do in order to safely open schools and and allocate resources where they will best utilize programs for social emotional health programs for clean air with hvac programs where we may purchase a vehicle or two where we can practice safe distancing the luxury and the freedom of hiring staff members to reduce class sizes the opportunity to work with social emotional professional development folks that will come in and work with us and work with our teachers and so the framework of the grant encompasses all of those things and so it's not me sitting in my office all by myself with my hands over the grant i constantly probe my principles like i
030probe my directors i probe my my maintenance guy jeff jeff akins who's done a great job helping me with the needs of what the schools need as a federal programs director i don't have a clue about hvac and the needs that go into what he does and so the effective and the deliberate uh association and the correspondence with these directors has been absolutely incredible it's taught me a lot about opening schools it's taught me a lot of interesting things about how can we bring our children back and how can we make it safe how can we move forward education how can we fill in these learning gaps that we have and so that's the whole impetus of the epi the the yes or grant probably the biggest challenge of the grant are the percentages that
031the state is requiring so the state is asking us to do twenty percent of our s or grant towards uh learning loss well that twenty percent equals about one point uh one million four dollars is about what it comes out to if i if i recall the math and of that hundred and f of that one million dollars only a percentage of what i put in the grant can is applicable to that twenty percent based on our free and reduced lunch rate and so the math that goes into it is a little bit uh is a little bit complex and it's a little bit trying but there's always plenty of support for that i'm going to look at my notes here just real quick and see if there's anything that i've left out so one
032of the other fun things that we're going to do uh with this with this money is there's two one percents in there one of them is about summer learning or enrichment and basically what that is is extending seat time or extending learning time and what i've tried to emphasize and what i've tried to collaborate with my school leaders is if you're going to use a specific math program monday through friday during the school year and we're still not getting where we want to be why then will that same program work in the summertime and that's where differentiated education comes to pass is making sure that when we when we do extend seat time that we're extending it with maybe something else another idea another platform collaboration plc's where professional learning community communities where our teachers
033get together and then we study that that type of stuff our comprehensive after school programs we're still lightly treading that era as we as we work with covid and the safe returns of our school our teachers are who we rely on heavily for those types of activities and when our teachers are done after an eight-hour day some of them it's very taxing on them to ask them to continue i just want all of you to know and i know i have a lot of teachers here our teachers are phenomenal they jump on board they roll up their sleeves and they and they really do a great job helping kids it's about kids it's not about us it's all about these kids and serving their needs and helping them make up for that learning loss uh
034the conclusion of the yester grant is an 80 of discretionary funds meaning that we can really we have a lot of latitude on how we can spend that money and peter lang from the state of arizona and the arizona department of education is the overseer of these funds they've been wonderful to be able to call to email to get questions answered this is if uh if i get anything across to you today understand this is not just brad pico writing a grant this is a community of educators writing this grant i may be the guy physically typing it into the computer but let me tell you i get emails from great staff members that are helping me out with information that we need in regard to to to getting that grant finished and turned in
035so that's roughly the framework of the grant it's a capacity giving grant to help us make up for learning loss requires an element of safe return of kids in school and once they do return to school how will we keep them safe and through the collaborative effort from dr wright all the way down to the rest of us it's just absolutely it's phenomenal we have great systems in place and we have a great relationships with one another in terms of of working together to give others capacity do we we want to save time now to answer specific questions or general questions or anything related to this grant or that the way it's being directed or any specific needs for which you have concern comments ideas mr butterfield will blue ridge get the same percentage from
036like what they got for one and two will they get the same percentage for three the percentage breakdown is a little bit different and so based on the volume of money that you get it's just like what we call indirect cost when you have a bigger percentage of money being given then the allocation becomes it's it's it's it's weighed a little bit differently but we're truthfully we're doing well with what we're get we've been getting actually about another question i'm glad to bring the mic over don't be shy ideas questions comments anything yes ma'am we don't pay back this grant money no ma'am okay the only time you're you're found paying grant money back is when you don't use it properly so the answer is no we we're not paying back this grant we'll do
037it right there there's rules there's rules affiliated with every grant sr3 is incredible because there's so much flexibility when you go down into title one and we're managing probably 17 grants besides this granted to say all at the same time making that juggle and each one of them has a compliant issue and at the same time you just have to make sure you're compliant and luckily most of the compliances are the same some of them are a little bit different yes sir mr waldo is the money for this determined by enrollment of the school district it is it's a ppa it's a ppa and it's also based on adm well ppa per pupil allocation so in a grant a couple of things that they begin to look at they look at your free and reduced
038numbers in that percentage which plays in tight in this grant which is really for me it's a little bit aggravating that they would do that to us because it lessens the 20 percent that i'm writing in based on my free and reduced number and i know that's it it kind of gets a little bit foggy there but it's a challenge i mean i wish they would just say okay it's a straight 20 no problem learning loss we can do that but then they're going to take the 20 that we do push in and a percentage which ours is 58 percent of free and reduced has to come back out and then so you have to continue to add those funds does every school in this every district in the state get this money to my
039knowledge they do or they're offered that money you don't have to take the money but but to my knowledge they are be foolish not to i couldn't agree more yes sir in regard to the board timelines when when does the board have to make approval of this and when does it have to be submitted so so the grant has to be submitted in on the 23rd of august and so then we'll have a three-year timeline to expend those funds to draw down that money and so to dr wright's point it's a it's a continually moving it's almost a draft because anybody that's been in education long enough you realize education recycles itself so what we're doing today may be different next year we may have a different clientele and so education changes so programs that
040principals have written in their plan may need to be modified they may need to be adjusted we may use a different type of a curriculum and so those grants can be amended and that's one of the jobs that i've been given is to amend those grants to give capacity and for kids for principals to do to change so it is it's right away that these these funds are going to be going answer your question mr merrill when does the board have to do approval on it how many days prior to the submission um i i don't know the answer to that question that's a good question i know i know more about the timeline after the grant is written and submitted what has to happen so does anyone go to the county also let me
041ask brenda brenda does this require specific board approval okay just it requires um submission on time and then we'll we'll do a probably do a quarterly review of so we don't defense the board doesn't necessarily have to approve this no sir okay that was a question thank you so yeah as long as the grant is in on the 23rd they may not approve the initial grant most grants are rejected the first time around but the nice thing about when they approve it the first disapprove it the first time they'll make you a list of what you need to go in and make corrections on you go back in and sometimes that takes a week sometimes it takes two weeks but you go back in and you and you correct those those errors when they were
042talking about avid avid is a professional development community that's supported by the target assisted grant it's one of the only organizations that's supported by that and so the action that we take with them is deliberate and it's meaningful not only has it been effective with the junior high and the high school but we've now introduced it to the elementary school and they're using it the funding is a little bit different i've had to shift the funding from the target assisted grant which the elementary school is not part of and take them in on a title too which will cover that funding and so we're able to do that and i will speak highly of our native american group and our uh in our eld group have all shown improvement and they've shown enough improvement that
043pretty soon we we're were right on the verge of getting them out of this this bottom percentage until coveted mr pico i want to add the avid program as he had mentioned is elementary junior high and high school and it's designed to provide additional support and mentorship for all kids and so we recognize not all kids come from equal homes but we want all kids to have equity and standing so this provides tools for them and mentors for them at a very early age they start talking about success and what does that look like and what do you need to do and so we've we've pushed that all the way down to the elementary level it'll be a continuation all the way through high school are there any other questions relating to the grant or
044the purpose or just comments or anything that we can i might be at address for ali yeah i'm not sure if i just missed this before so do you reapply every year with a new plan like this this one obviously is stretching out over the three years but you talked about like reassessment because of changing needs so will you apply again next summer with like so so that's a that's a really good question so let me just give you a quick example to answer your question so i wrote in school counselors for three school sites when i wrote their salaries in i said i i used a narrative of to the effect of this salary is effective for three years and then i put the entire sum so what if you know a lot happens
045in three years a counselor may leave then i go back in and amend the grant so the only thing that has to be approved again would be all the amendments that i make to the grant and when i say i make them it's a collaborative effort of of a principal may say hey we lost this teacher we don't have that kinder teacher anymore then i go back through and i amend the grant and make it more current and applicable to what we're doing now does that did that answer your question miss brandon thank you sorry i probably gave you too much information i apologize yes ma'am let me get you i have a question regarding the native american population how are the support services being identified and who's part of who is a part of
046that conversation so that's a really good question and the native american population fits right into our tsi or our school improvement grant and the answer hovers over that particular grant there's a lot of similarities in that grant and so i myself who in the native american liaison for the district work with my principals when we create school plans that population is identified as well as our sped population and our eld population so they're they're accommodated for it just as everybody else is accommodated for and if we see special needs if the principals voice certain concerns then those are the types of things that we put into our school plan that they put in their fish bone and that we move those plants forward i would add there's always an effort to to make an outreach
047to officials at the tribe to come in and participate we always extend that invitation we're interested in their feedback as well and receptive and open to it very good any other questions if not i thank you for your time and and i recognize about a third of you the same third that always come no matter what we ask for i appreciate you taking an interest in your community and the education of your children i i too wish to recognize and and frankly i'm grateful for this admin team that are working tirelessly to meet the needs of our community our finance teams and our technology teams are here saturday and sunday working 10 to 12 hours both days to make sure we had computers and finances and if you drive by here very often brenda's cars
048here at nine o'clock at night and we're doing what we can every department is short-handed but we have what we need and the reason it works is all these folks work together from our transportation to our food service to our facilities directors to finance they all work together they're working tremendously hard you have top-notch principals i'm proud of all of them and their administration teams and our teachers we have some of the best teachers and uh our outcomes are demonstrated by that i mean find another school that has sent kids to academies from this mountain two years in a row find another one to have kids going like this young man is going to colombia the kids that don't want to apply themselves their opportunities are here our math departments are emerging as some of
049the finest and i'm really excited about what the future brings our teachers work very hard and we appreciate them we recognize their hard work and all of our support staff it's been a very difficult 18 months and this year is not going to be easy but we ask for your patience and understanding we're doing our very best to keep our schools fully operational and we have plans in place to flex as we have experienced shortages in staff due to this covet disease uh if there are no further questions mr merrill we're done and we're ready to adjourn unless you have anything else you'd like to add no i would just add my uh thank you to everybody especially those those of you that have come today and i know if you didn't voice a question
050you had a question i hope that question was answered so appreciate your attendance here we'll take about a five minute break we'll go offline and then we will start our board meeting at uh uh 5 45 and we invite you all to stay for that board meeting might be a short meeting there's not a whole lot on the agenda today thank you very much