001Okay, Lance, John, are you ready? Okay. Okay. I call to order the the workshop for Bullhead City School Board on Thursday, March 13, 2025 at 9:30 a.m. It's close, right? Roll call. Present. Melinda Subraki. Charlene Dia is here. Fred Rushton here. Barb Zerziki here. Um, we have the privilege today of adding a board member and we're going to let Mr. Warren do his job. Thank you. Good morning, Madam President, members of the board, Superintendent Stewart. Honor to be here today and swear in give the administer the oath uh this morning and I just want to share with you in my first couple of months in office, one of the overwhelming questions that I get is how much do you get paid to be a board member? So, thank you all for your volunteer service. Uh,
002you know, we have some districts where, uh, there's a plethora of people wanting to run for various reasons and then we have some, uh, places where they can't get anybody to run. So, my hats off to you. Uh, continue doing the excellent work that you're doing up here and best wishes to you. Thank you very much. Okay, this is Reed, if you will raise your right hand, repeat after me, please. Hang on. I get my old Repeat after me, please. In the state of Arizona, county of Mojave, In the State of Arizona, County of Mojave, I, Judy Reed, I, Judy Reed, do solemnly swear Do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution and laws of the state
003of Arizona and the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona. that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. and defend them against all enemies, foreign and domestic. and defend them against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That I will faithfully and impartially That I will faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of trustees. discharge the duties of trustee for the Bullhead City School District number 15. for the Bullhead City School District number 15. according to the best of my abilities. So help me God. Congratulations. Great job. Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Warren. And welcome to the board. You're welcome, Judy. Going to be an experience of a lifetime. Yes. And when she negotiated her salary for this, we we actually doubled her
004pay. So, she she's she's that that important to us. Thank you. I'm third. Item four, 1.4, school district funding and budgeting. Uh, our superintendent is going to give us a program today. Good morning. I thought it would be easier if I did it from down here than up there looking across. And um uh you guys have asked for it. Yep. We're going to get it in more ways than one. Asked for it. So you're going to get it. Um I'm calling this budgeting 102. I don't know, maybe it's 2011. Whatever. I did the marbles in the jar thing before and I called that budget 101. So uh this is whatever the next step is. So, we're going to talk about uh where do the funds come from and how do we decide what to do
005with those funds. So, I'm going to be talking about uh M budget and the capital budget. So, this is all state money or county money. Jen's going to we're going to tag team this a little bit and she'll talk about all of the grant funding that uh that she manages. Okay. So, let's see. Oh, here we go. So, our goals for today are to provide basic information about public school funding in Arizona, provide basic information about the sources of funding uh for our district, and provide basic information on how uh BCSD decides to allocate those funds. Okay. At any time, stop me if you have questions. Okay. So, funding formulas serve very varied purposes uh uh based on policy. first to fund the basic costs of operating the school. So that means teachers, staff, administration,
006facilities, all those things and to fund specific cost drivers uh for some areas, special education, the size of the school, uh the district size, e all of those things. Those two things together factor into the state equalization formula. We'll come back to that term a little later. Um the funding also serves specific policies like special ed, title one, K3 literacy, community uh donations and approved oh community approved extras. So that means like bonds, bond elections and override elections and also to provide incentives uh for specific behaviors. So Arizona has uh some kind of incentive things like resultsbased funding. Uh performance pay for us performance pay is in our classroom site fund. Uh and I won't even be talking about classroom site fund much today um uh because it's a kind of a separate budget. So,
007the sources of our funding, we have federal programs that Jen's going to talk with you about. We have state funding, so it's the general fund. That means that um sales tax, um any of the other taxes that Arizona collects from us as citizens, ballot measures, so that means bonds, overrides, uh special elections, and state trust lands. And I'm not even going to talk very much about that today, but I will tell you that if you're watching the news, when they talk about Prop 123, uh, and the discussions that the legislature and the governor are having about Prop 123, that is, uh, funding from state trust lands. Uh, we get about currently we get about $140,000 from Prop 123. So, it's a pretty limited amount of money for us. Uh, it does become part of the
008U M budget. Um, but I'm not going to particularly talk about that today. Uh, it looks like, um, Prop 123 will continue to be funded at some level, um, depending on how they how the legislature and the governor work that out. Local local money. So, we have county property taxes. And I would like to point out uh to you, I'm sure you know, but I'd like to point out uh, Bullhead City has no property tax. So, the taxes that support our school district are from county taxes. The property tax that we pay um and not just us, but businesses, anybody that pays property tax, uh that's the primary tax rate. We have nothing to do with setting that. So, when we kind of brag about uh the property tax has gone down for our school
009district, we really don't have anything to do with that. It gets calculated by the auditor general's office and we're told what it's going to be. secondary rate tax rate are those that are approved by election. So bonds. So if you look at your county tax bill, um you'll see a secondary rate on there where we are still paying and will be for a while uh as county uh property owners for the bond that paid the the fieldhouse paid for the fieldhouse and for the renovations to um Mojave High School and River Valley High School. So that was really a a bond that that was uh even at the time the districts were working together as Colorado River Schools that was a bond for crushed for the high school district. We don't have any secondary tax
010rate because we have no bonds and no overrides. Other local thing are donations and tax credit donations and then sale or rental of our property. So before we sold Mountain View to the city, we collected a small rental fee from them uh for that property. Um but we did sell it and so that became a source of of could have become a source of re revenue for us. But if you recall, we didn't do any cash on that. We did inind. So uh no no money exchanged there. We didn't have to put it in the budget anywhere. Didn't have to take anything out of the budget anywhere. Um uh the city did however uh to do things like fix our parking lots uh do that street the connection up to our den project housing um
011and um we're actually meeting next week to talk about the project over here at the middle school uh for the little park. So uh all of those things played in in a way would be considered sale. Okay. So, distribution of funding in Arizona, the green items are essentially uh state uh state tax or state funding, either county tax or state tax. So, the bottom line you're going to see several times in this presentation because that's what factors in to M budget and uh the district additional assistance which is capital. Above that you see a number of blue things and some of them are uh require a vote. Uh the other green things we have the classroom site fund. We have instructional improvement fund uh prop two whatever that says. I'm not sure what that is.
012This graph is from 2021. I borrowed it from another person's presentation and so I don't remember what that one is. But we could also say that that that's like prop 123. It's just some additional money. Okay. Any questions about that one? You may want to come back to it. We'll see. How come federal funds is sort of two different colors? Because it comes through the state. Uh so federal dollars are allocated to the state and then we apply through the we apply to the state for those funds. So I'm thinking that's why it's kind of the two colors. Okay. We don't apply for any of the grants directly to the federal government. We to the state. So the money comes is allocated to the state and then we apply. Great question. Okay. So the orange
013ones um uh are the ones that's identifying for you the ones that require votes. Okay. If we had if we went to the public. So back in the day before there was state the state facilities board to whom districts now apply for funding for new schools or new buildings on campuses and those kinds of things. Uh we had to go out for a bond uh get a bond election approved. Mhm. So, uh, Diamondback School, Coyote Canyon School, Fox Creek, uh, and Sunrise were all funded with bonds, uh, that the district got the voters in our in our district to vote yes to approve those those bonds at the time. Um, nobody, well, districts do this still, but not necessarily to build new schools for big renovations and those kinds of things. Okay, questions about those.
014So, I gave you those because I kind of want to show you what happens uh in uh in real life here. So, um uh district one on this graph really of these graphs is the closest to what we are. So we get the green funding that you saw on the previous two slides and we get some blue funding which is the federal money. Okay, for us the reason district one does not resemble us so much is that the blue section for us should be 20%. Oh. So, of all the funding that we use every year to operate our schools, 20% currently is paid from grants. Pays the salaries for over 10% of our staff. That's significant because when Jen talks to you about the outlook for for uh grant funding for the next year, um
015you'll want to be thinking about that. That means over 30 employees in our district are paid for with federal dollars. District two has obviously uh the regular uh funding the equalization formula which is the green. District 2 also has a very large bond or override election amount of money and a fairly significant amount of federal dollars. District three. You can see it's changed. Okay. But the big thing for you to notice is that districts two and districts three, district three have more funds to operate their schools. And district 4 has a lot of funds um because they draw down a lot of federal dollars and they also have managed to pass bonds and overrights. Okay. Uh so my guess is that district 4 uh has high poverty rate but also has a high tax rate
016and so they could they can get the votes to pass a bond. So you can see that their budget is significantly higher than what we have to work with. Okay. Then you see the two charter schools. The green for the two charter schools is higher because the charter schools are funded by the state at a higher level than the public schools are the other public schools, the regular public schools, right? Um and uh and the those greens and those collars are paid completely out of Arizona general fund. Totally. No county funds at all. Okay? No county funds. In a few minutes, I'm going to show you how if you look back at district one there, which is the closest to us, how that our green gets split between county dollars and equalization dollars, which are
017the state state um revenues, okay? To get us that total green. But I want you to understand for the charters, the total green for them is out of uh state revenues. Not complaining, it's just fact. Okay, Carolyn. Yeah. Now, um, is that for both profit and nonprofit charters? They all get the same amount or is it just the nonprofits or it's for charters. So, if they have a charter then that's how it's it doesn't matter if they're a nonprofit or there are private schools. So, private schools get none of this. Yeah. But the charters, but they do now because of ESAs. Yeah. Okay. Uh so um you know it's important when you're looking at a school district if you want to make comparisons that you check to see is it a public school a regular
018public school is it a charter a public charter school in which case many of the same rules apply as apply to us or is it a private school? Yeah. Okay. Because the funding is different. All right. the public charters are are this represents public charters distribution of school funding in Arizona. Uh we've talked about this before, but it's based on how many students you have in your district. Um and I liked this map. It's the first time I'd ever seen this map. Uh it represents all of the 400 some 454 school districts in the state. And I've circled ours. I suspect that it looks a little different in shape than you would expect because our district goes way north up the river uh beyond way up beyond Katherine. Nobody lives up there or if they
019do and they have kids, their kids probably go to another school. Um uh probably uh Peach Springs or some place out in there, Chloride. I don't know where they go. Um but that's our district. And uh on this on this map of Arizona, and this again is uh 2021, if you notice the little bitty school district that has Is there a pointer on here? I don't know if there's a pointer. You notice the little bitty school district that's dark blue. Yeah, kind of down in the lower central part. Okay, that district has experienced significant increase in student population. Okay. the lighter the blue, it still represents increase in student enrollment but to a lesser degree. And then the several districts that are kind of look white or gray, um those are steady. And then as
020you move into the gold, you're you're looking at significant more significant drops in enrollment. So uh up in the upper right hand corner of the state, there's a a district that's kind of a dark orange. that one has had the greatest decrease in in student population. We're kind of in the middle of the kind of in the middle of the decrease in enrollment. So, what are the challenges? Well, the challenges of declining enrollment, first of all, but the thing is that expenses don't decline just because you have fewer students. Some expenses stay the same or go up regardless, and you have to factor those in. Any questions or comments about this one? Looks like a lot of the state of Arizona is declining. Yes. The aging population and particularly some and if you notice a
021lot of those are are huge districts, you know, geographically huge districts. Um and you can identify the Phoenix area and the Tucson area because those are uh there's a lot of blue in those two areas. What is the blue one that's closest to us? Uh, I'd have to guess. Uh, is that you, Mom? It's a rural district. I I think it has. Is that Parker? Is that Parker? No, Parker. Parker's Parker would be down here. Kind of that. It's like a tan color. It's on down where that big indent is. Yeah. Um, I don't know. Go look at my map. I've got a map in on on my desk of what that is, but it's a it's a rural very very rural. So, it would not take very many kids to show an increase in
022district. Okay. Yeah. And you notice it's part of Mojave County. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I was thinking it's part of Mojave County. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It could be. Yeah. Yeah. You're probably right. It's Yaka. Yeah, it's Yaka, right? Yaka. What is it? Yaka. Oh. Oh, I didn't. So, yeah. Yaka could if three kids three kids increase it dramatically. 50 kids. I was just curious as to why that would be increasing and everything else in Mojave County is decreasing. Just curious. Huge area and low population, low density. So, how do we get uh the green equalization in the DAA funds? And DAA is district additional assistance. I'll say that several times. So, if you now you're seeing that green bar again. So, M is the big piece on the left and uh and there's an
023equalization formula for that and then equalization formula for district additional assistance. Um and for for many districts that's capital money. for us it's it is our capital. Okay, it is our capital and I'll come back to that. So I want to give you some vocabulary here and I have little icons because maybe that'll help you or helps me to have a visual. So enrollment enrollment is the number of students registered to attend our schools prek special prek special ed through 8th grade. Okay. So, that's how many little bodies are enrolled registered to be in our schools. And for us, that's right around 2,200 students. Right around 2 2200. You get that report every uh every month in your board report from Jenny of what our enrollment is. Okay. However, our budget is not determined by
024enrollment. It's determined by average daily membership. And what that means is, and there's an unweighted number for that. So, um, on this sheet, on this in this little packet that I gave you, I'm going to be referring to these things, but they're also represented on the front page of this packet. This is the DSA 55-1. Uh, this is the core of building our budget. And u so I've highlighted in green some of the so that you can follow along a little bit on here what it is that I'm talking about. So average daily membership. So I have the enrollment up there. I have all those little bodies there. Average daily membership. I'm showing you two days. Two days. So some kids are gone on the first day. Some different kids are gone on the second
025day. So the attendance for every single day of the school year is averaged. Okay? Is averaged. Now, it used to be that it was really important that the ADM, the average daily membership, be really high up through the hundth day of school because the following year's budget was built on that data, on those data through the hundth day. Okay. not so significant anymore because every single day in the school year affects how we set the budget for the next year clear up to the last day of school. Okay? So, we want to keep that attendance high as high as we can every single day. And that's why you end up with weird numbers like on this page where you end up with regular education unweighted ADM 1956.2647 students. Okay, we don't have any quarter students,
026but in terms of the averages, that's how that works out. Okay, then you have group B add-on membership. And on this page that you're looking at, it's this big piece here. Okay, this is all the students in various subgroups for which we get weighted amounts of money. So, ELLL, K3, K3 reading, 11 categories of special education. Uh, next to the bottom it says FRPL, that's our free and reduced lunch, and below that is gifted. Okay, so those are special populations that get us a little extra money. Those same kids count up at the top as for their for their daily attendance, but then we get additional waiting for those other categories. Okay, weighted means a support level value that is multiplied by various numbers. So you can see that the range is from oh my
027goodness 7,000th to 7.947. And so I've highlighted here in the center of this first page for you in the handout I gave you all of those various uh uh waitings. Okay. Now in the rest of my presentation I'm going to summarize those things. I'm going to clump them together. I'm not going to deal with all of them individually. But you can see how it plays out here. So the number of students in that group B with all the waiting count down here as 768.897 students. So the waiting for those kids the waiting we ei means that they are equivalent to 700 more students. Okay. Carolyn. Yes. Back to the average daily membership. Um I I understand you know the prek special ed getting 0.5 because they only go a half day, don't they? Yes. But
028our kindergarten students is it because the state does not require them to go a whole day. We only get a half a day for them. It's because the state only funds for half day. It funds for a half day. Yes, they fund for half a day. So when you look at these numbers up here, um and I'm glad you asked that Barb because I would have wanted to come back to that. So when you see preschool D PSD here, okay, we have about 90 students in our preschool program at Coyote alone. Okay, um uh 70 of those kids are special ed. Now they count at half. And you're going to go, wait a minute, it only shows 25. Well, that's because these data are from January 15th. This report comes out the 15th of each
029month, but the data reflects the 15th of the prior month. It's always a month. The data are always a month behind. We have continued to enroll preschool disabled students since January 15th. So, we are now at 72. Okay. So, this number will go up Monday when I can print out the new one of these. It may not go up that many because it will be the data from February. Yeah. Not for March. Okay. See how this gets tricky. Mhm. Okay. So, those kids count only half. And then then in the next one where it says K to 8 and ungraded UEE um uh the kindergarteners reflected in that number of 1930 students, the kindergarters only count as half. Half. Okay. Kindergarters only count as half. We're going to come back to this because we're going
030to talk about the waiting in a little bit. Okay. So the base level amount, I wanted you to have that term. So this is the base level. This is the amount of money that uh the legislature determined for school districts, for our school district anyway, for school districts to use in their budget calculations. So, $5,13 per student. Okay. Where does that show? What? 53. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's not on it's not it's on the next page. I don't have a slide of the next page, but I gave you the whole DSA 55-1 so you can see where I got many of these numbers. Right now, we can flip back to this page as we go through the next part. So, now we're going to start the calculations. Oh, first of all, I'm going to show
031you this page. So, you can see that I've highlighted on the on the screen the things that I pointed out to you in the handout. Okay. Okay, now we start the calculations and this is for M budget. So you ready? There won't be a test. There won't be a test. Okay, so the unweighted ADM, so we're looking at this first row up here. The unweighted ADM times a support level is going to give us our regular education weighted ABM. This one should be pretty easy to follow because you're looking here at these numbers that we looked at for preschool for K through 8. Here is the weight. So, I find it kind of ironic that the preschool kids, the preschool special ed kids only count at 50 50% but then they get weighted again at
0321.45. So we actually get about 65 for them for funding and uh the K8 gets weighted at 1.158. So that gives us our weighted regular ed weighted number 2272.9159 following so far and that's dollars per student per year. Well, that's the number of students right there. That's the number of students. This is students. Student number. Okay. Okay. So, this is our weighted regular edm. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Then you calculate the group B and you do the same thing. You start with the unweighted ADM which is down here at the bottom. and it's 38 51.5221 and those various weights and we end up with this 768 students. Okay, so we have the regular ed weighted ADM that we add to the group B weighted ADM. This is in the third box. Okay. and we end
033up with our weighted ADM. So it looks like on paper for calculation purposes that we have just over 3,000 students for calculation purposes. So in the fourth box then you see that's where that's the number we multiplied times $5,13 and then they let us add the cost for uh the annual audit. It's a funny place to add it but they they had it right there. The $28,800 that it cost us for our annual audit. And so you can see our adjusted base support level is 15,265 plus in this handout that I gave you where I did not do uh did not put it all on the screen. You can see that on page two. You can follow it on page two. We're not done. You see an arrow there. I didn't see the Indian stuff.
034I didn't see the Indian. Okay. So now we take that adjusted base support level and we add our transportation revenue control limit. Okay. So, you see an asterisk there and I have the white box at the bottom that explains how that all gets calculated. Um, and I at first I wasn't even going to do all that and then I thought you might want to know. So, I'm not going to go through what's in the white box, but you can see that there are steps in that and that's on page three of the of this handout that I gave you. Page three of the BSA 55-1. So our our transportation revenue control limit which means anytime it says a revenue control limit it means we cannot exceed expenditures in that part of the budget for that
035amount of money. Okay. So, I cannot exceed $1,74,86529 on transportation costs unless I absorb it in the rest of the budget. Okay? So you add those two numbers together and that gets us what is called the revenue control limit which is 16,19872071 for M budget I cannot exceed that number. So as I build the budget anything that gets purchased out of M the total cannot exceed this number. Okay. So if we buy a bus, is that part of this? No. Bus is in the cabin. Okay. Okay. This is our operating budget. Okay. So if I slip up sometime in a meeting and talk about the RCL, I try not to do that because we are we stream and there are people who watch us, a few people who watch us who are not going to
036know what that is and you're going to forget what it is. Um uh but I think about it all the time. That's all the marbles in the bucket. That's it. When the marbles are gone, that's it. We're done. Can't can't give up any more bar marbles. And I really can't get them any place else. Okay. Put a little asterisk next to that, but I really can't get them any place else. So the RCL plus any carryover I have from the pre prior year's budget plus the little prop 123 which I told you is less thanund it's about 140,000 equals our M budget. So each month when I give you the budget report, I give you that summary page and at the bottom under budget, it's going to total some number like this. Okay, I'll explain
037a little later why I say some number like this. Okay, but it's really close to this. So our M budget is in the range of 18,846,000. So when I'm working in the budget document, there are pages at the back that have calculations and and and all and data and all that stuff and I plug the numbers in there from this from the BSA 55-1 and then it calculates things for me. Carolyn. Yeah. If I I know a lot of districts go into debt and I know the high school district was deeply in debt and I went through that, but uh what happens if you go over I mean literally what you get in trouble. Okay, that's it. But I mean there I know that the next year you have to they they dock you and
038everything like that because we went through that. But I I Judy I it it blows my mind that anybody would do that. I have absolutely no understanding because it was huge of how a school district can be $28 million a year. I have no idea how that can happen. Phoenix area, there's a couple of them like that. Yeah. And there there are districts there are a couple of other districts that are not in receiverhip. We all have seen in the paper about Isaac school district being in receiverhip which means the state has taken over has hired somebody to take over the school district and and get it sorted out. Okay. Um there are a couple of others uh in the state several I don't even know who they are because I hate to say it
039this way but I don't really care. I only care about us but uh in this sense right um that have had maybe a million dollars over you know whatever and so this the auditor's office the auditor general's office comes in and helps them figure out okay what can you do about this? So I remember my daughter was in high school our daughters were in high school when crushed was about $2 million in the red. Yeah. And for the four years that our daughters were in high school, the district had to cut their budget to make up 1/4 of that $2 million. Okay. Hence, they were in classes. Some of their classes had 50 students. I was I remember. I remember. You remember? Yes. Because you do whatever you have to do to cut that amount
040of money out of your budget. And if you think about it, because that's over 20 years ago, half a million dollars was a heck of a lot more money then than it is now, right? And um uh so, you know, those are significant cuts. Um 2 million out of a say a $14 million budget. That's significant. I would I don't I can't even begin to understand 28 million. I can't even Yeah. You know, that's almost double our budget. Yeah. And to be that much in the red, I don't know how you get there unless you just keep writing checks and spending money that you don't have. That's the only way you can get there. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Reminds me of the story about the guy who called the bank and complained. He says,
041"How can you tell me I'm out of money? I still have checks left." Exactly. Exactly. That must be the That must be the mentality. Yes. Um, it's it's kind of like this is a squirrel walk, a bit of a one, but I can see how this happens. So, when my daughter was little, my husband and I both had direct deposit. So, she never saw us put money in the bank ever, right? And yet, we'd go buy groceries. We'd go do whatever. We'd write checks. We'd use our cards. So, she only ever saw us spending money. And she was maybe four or five. And so, she wanted something. Mom, on the way home, can we stop and get whatever it was? And I said, "No." I said, "We don't have the money." And she goes, "Well,
042use your card, Mom." And I said, "We don't have money." And she couldn't figure that out. So, I thought, "Okay, I better have a a a four-year-old level conversation about the fact that mom and dad earn money and it goes into the bank and she doesn't see what goes in there." But that just because I have the card doesn't mean that I can spend what's not there. Um, it's kind of that thing. It's like I still have chess left, right? Yeah. Don't know how we do that. Okay. So, there's that 18 million. Now, we'll talk about capital. This is the DAA and for us that is the capital. It's all we get for capital. Um, and so this one gets this one gets a little tricky because and it's on page if you want to
043follow along all the detail part. Uh, it's on page four. Okay. Now, so this is this is based on the prior year's enrollments. So look at that preschool special ed number that's 18.67 instead of this year's 225 point something, right? However, the K8 and the UEE are higher. They're at 2012 as opposed to 1930. So that probably balances out. The legislature decides each year two things. The second one dependent on the first. Each year the legislature in the budget talks decides are we going to continue district additional assistant funding. They have not decided yet for next year. If they say yes, then they determine the amount of money. Okay, so for the current year it's $54945 and so you can see how that calculates out. So our unrestricted capital UCO is a,116,614.98. Okay. And that's
044a number you have seen a lot since December because this is the well actually since December you've seen it be a little higher because I moved some money from M. The state had calculated at first on this PSA 55 the state did not calculate anything for free and reduced lunch. Nothing. Okay. So when they went back and calculated it in, they have now given us that money into the budget. Okay. So I put it in M. I put most of it in M, but I put some over into um uh capital because we try to replace teacher laptops on a three-year rotation rather than trying to replace 250 or 300 at a time. Okay. And uh and we need to start doing that. So, I moved enough money over to uh to capital from the
045new calculation for M to pay for for a third of our teacher laptop replacement. These are the only two budgets where we can move money back and forth. Now, M and unrestricted capital. Capital. Now, the tricky part comes in. What if the legislature decides this year for whatever reason to not fund DAA? I have to have a plan C. I already am working in plan B because of some other things that happened. Uh but I will have to have a plan C because the things that we purchase from unrestricted capital outlay can only be purchased from UCO. cannot be purchased from M. So to fund this, I would have to move dollars from M over. Okay. So$18,846 subtract a,16,000 and you can see what that does to our MMO budget. Makes it very very tight.
046Okay. Now, we were really good this year because we had two and a half million in rollover. I will tell you we will not have two and a half million in rollover for next year. I think around 2 million rollover, right? Okay. So, we watch what the legislature just is doing relative to uh the the state budget for two reasons. Well, multiple reasons, but in terms of this, two reasons. One is what are they going to do with the base rate at $5,13? The last few years, they've only raised it 2% a year. Okay. And a do they approve DAA continuing? And if so, what's the rate? Okay. two years ago the budget wasn't even set until June 3rd. So I had to present to you at the ear at the 1 July meeting a
047budget for for the you know for the next fiscal year and I had to base it on the information from the year that was just wrapping up because they had not yet decided on any of these things. Okay, they decided and then we did a revision and I brought a revision to you I think in September. Uh which we can always do but sometimes it feels really frustrating because you're building you're building a budget and you know that you know that your the factors involved are not accurate or not going to be accurate in two weeks or three weeks or whenever it is. Okay, you just do the best you can and then you go back and revise. Okay. So, the total limit that we have as a district that we are allowed for the
048current year, the year we're in right now for day-to-day operations and capital, you add the M, you add the UCO, and then when we talk about the budget, that's what I'm talking about is those two things added together. So, 19,962 is what we're working with this year. So, let's review the sources of school funding. Where does that $19 million come from for us? So, I reproduced that one slide here for you to see where I had the things circled. the state general fund and the local primary tax rate. So in the BSA 55-1, and I'm saying that multiple times on purpose because in the future when you hear me say that, you're going to know that it's the document that is the base for us figuring budget, right? For me, it's the critical report on
049page five. Nope, I'm sorry. Page four. Page five. Sorry. Okay. Page five then shows you how it's determined where Bullhead City School District's funds come from and it's based on remember that primary tax rate for the county is automatic. Our assessed valuation for Bullhead City School District. So that means within the boundaries of our district 415,228,000 and change. You see that about halfway down on page five. Oh, right there. Okay. And then it says GPL. Okay. So if you remember on that map, the shape of our district goes way north up the river. into federal land way out there. Okay. In fact, the northeast corner of our our district touches Highway whatever it is that goes from Kingman to Las Vegas. 93. Yeah. 93. Okay. Our corner, one of our corners touches that. So, it
050goes that far north. But it's federal land. I don't know if anybody lives in that piece or not. the people who come to our schools, the students who come to our schools, the farthest north is Katherine's Landing and then up at Katherine Line. Okay, so that's not very far north of us. So, we get some money for all of that area that is not does not have property tax. $68,416. Is that is that because it's federal land? Yes, it's because it's federal land. So, you see that in the middle of page five, right? Okay. So, then they calculate the the uh the tax using the tax rate and it ends up that we get um about uh 6.6 million from county taxes. County property tax. Wait a minute. Our budget is 19 million. We get
051the rest from state uh the general fund 10 almost 10.7 million. Okay. So on this uh on this diagram I'm showing you that there's the big green line. The orange box represents what's paid for out of county property tax and the blue box represents what we get from the state. Okay. 38% from the county and 62% from the state. I I know this is just a snapshot of these these two days, but 6 million and 10 million only add up to 16 million. And you just told us we had a budget of 19 million. Yeah. Um uh yeah. Oh, remember my carryover? Oh. Oh, the car. Okay. Excuse me. Thank you. Sure. Great question. Had to make me think about that. Okay. Had to make me think about that. And one of the reasons that
052I carry over quite a bit is because AAL aggregate expenditure limit is still on the table every year. Okay. And the latest report is that if it's already approved for this year for the current budget, so I don't have to worry about the current budget. But they haven't decided what they're doing with it if they're doing anything for next year. And the estimate is that the aggregate expenditure limit for all of the school public school districts in Arizona is going to exceed that limit more next year than it has this year or last year or the year before. That's good. Last year and the year before it was around 17%. If it exceeds it more, I need some money there. But this might be a way if they don't approve it, it might be a
053way that we end up in the red because that's way over $3 million. So I try to keep I try to keep two and a half in the range of two and a half million not you know that's not encumbered so that we uh can address that if it comes along. So a reminder, the aggreate expenditure limit in 1980, the state passed an amendment to the state constitution that said the amount of money spent by school districts in the state, public school districts in the state could not exceed the total amount. Add all of their budgets together could not exceed some number that was relevant in 1980. And then they built into the formula a little bit of an increase each year. Okay. Uh prior to 20120, that limit was only exceeded twice from 1980
054until then. And each time the legislature, which it can do, can wave that limit for a year. to change it either has to go back to a vote of Arizona voters or some change in that formula needs to happen. So for the last five years each year the legislature has discussed and decided to wave that aggregate limit. School districts are the only part of Arizona government that has that kind of a limit. Um uh the city had the cities had a limit an expenditure limit but it wasn't aggregate. It wasn't adding all of the all of the city's numbers together, right? It was just for the city. And so, if you remember in the election last year, the city had Prop 600 or 601 or something that said we have $40 million in uh in
055this in this pool, this savings account over here that we can't touch because it's over our limit, our budget limit. Can we use that money? And the voters said yes. Okay. It doesn't matter if our district got people to vote yes for us to ex exceed that expenditure limit because it's all the districts. Okay. So, we count on our we count on our legislators to take care of this each year. All right. It's a little bit of a bird walk, but it's going to come up again. So, pay attention. Questions about that? I see blank looks like I don't know what you're talking about. I get it. I get it. Okay. All right. We're going to switch now to uh Jen's part of where does where does her money come from? Where does the money
056she controls come from? Thank you. Thank you. I will never complain about my personal money ever. Really very simple. X comes in, Y goes out. Hopefully we never get to see. I think mine is as complicated as hers. So, all right. So, this is a list of the current grants that we have this school year. Now, the grants do run um they can run 15 months. We try to so it would go from July 1st to September 30th. We try to expend all of the money before the end of the fiscal year, otherwise it gets a little wonky dealing with like two title one budgets um for those three months. So those are those are the current grants we cover right now. So, how do we determine? All right. So, for the first grant, education
057for homeless children and youth, um there's a formula that they use to um create your budget. It's a competitive grant though, so it's not we don't automatically get the money as we do with like title one grants or title grants. So, they first they consider the base $12,000. So, then you look at how many students you have enrolled in your district, right? So, we're in the division one, so we have way less than 40,000 students. So, we that's $12,000. Um, free and reduced lunch, we're in tier three at about 98%. So, that's another 36,000. So, you do the base times three. And then the percentage of enrolled students experiencing homelessness, we were right between 3 and 4% um last year when we applied for the grant. So um so this is what our funding looks
058like. So we have 12,000 for um the size of our district. We have $36,000 because of our free and reduced lunch. Another $24,000 because of how many students percentage of students we have that are homeless. So our budget for this grant is 72,000. Okay. Question. You said competitive grant and I maybe didn't hear you your explanation but what is a competitive grant? Good question. So competitive grant is not so we have an entitlement grant and we have um competitive grants. So entitlement grants are like your title grants. You automatically get those every year. Okay. Money might change who how much they're giving to you but you automatically get those as long as you follow the rules. You get that money. um competitive grants you apply for. There's a rubric based on what your all your
059essays or all the descriptions that they ask for in the grant and then if you're high enough on the rubric scale then they give you the grant money. Is this one of the grants that's been hit? No. In fact, this grant um they've actually put more money in. So, if we see later when I show you what we actually have for this year, it's quite a bit higher than that amount. Okay. H. So now this one is not. So the next grant is our consolidated. So ESA consolidated um is a big umbrella but you you have four grants underneath that. So we have title one, title two, title 4 and then our rural and low income grants. Those are all under the umbrella of ESA ESA consolidated. Um so to it's a little uh more
060complicated but um it's based on like our our free and reduced lunch, our enrollment um how much money we get for those grants, right? For title four, um they have to give you $10,000. So you have $10,000 or more for title four. Rural and low income is not given to every district. We just we're considered a rural district. So we get additional money through rural and low. So for title one, in order to qualify for title one, you have to serve children that are between 5 and 17 years old. So we cannot this money cannot be used for preschool except for our own district. We do have a title one preschool but um in general it can't be used for for preschool. Um we have to have at least 40% free and reduced lunch. So
061they gave us this the budget. Um we have to we put in how many students we have um enrolled as of October 1st. the percentage of free and reduced lunch um students who qualify for free and reduced lunch and then they give you a second total. So if you look at the top for Diamondback uh when we applied last year for this grant um we had 334 students enrolled and at 98% free and reduced lunch the actual number then that they use um for a student count at this school would then be 327 students. So it's 98% of the total enrollment. So down at the bottom, um, say Fox Creek Junior High for some reason always has less free and reduced lunch percentage. So even though they had 464 students enrolled at the time, only
062371 are counted as far as the budget goes. And then Coyote Canyon is not a title one school. So they don't get any benefit from the grant. So the at least 40%, right? Yep. So So when we're hitting 98%, we're actually double what we need. Yeah. To to qualify for the grant. Okay. This is very small, I know, but um after after you're given the amount of money you have, we'd have district set aides. So district set aides are things like um administrative costs which is partially part of my salary. Um instructional like professional development um after school programs uh we are required to have a homeless liaison. We are required to have some money towards um family and community engagement. And um then we also have our preschool that we have in here. So
063you take this big pot of money, you determine what things are district level expenses and that goes on this spreadsheet and then the I guess the leftover money then goes here. So um so based on the number of students that qualify so remember for most schools it was 98% of their total enrollment and then they take the money that's left over from what we take after we take our district um expenses out and you determine how much money per student is allocated to each school. Okay. So we try try to keep it as even as possible. You do have to rank the schools um according to need, but for the most part they're they're paid the same per student. So what percentage of the total that we get is this 1,500? Um I think there's
064about the original allocation was around 1.7 million. So I think there's about 200,000 that's um taken for district. Okay. And that basically pays salaries for all the things that you just listed and whatever paper and pencil stuff. Okay. So then the schools um give me a list. I know we're going to talk about this later about how we determine what to do with the money, but the schools give me a list of what um they would like out of that money and I have to I have to figure that out down to the penny. So when I submit the grant, the expenditures like for Diamondback have to be exactly that amount of money. Now to make this a little we're lucky as of right now, but um every year we go through what's called equitable
065services. So that means I reach out to the private schools in the area. So for the for the longest time we didn't have any um but we now have um Desert Light um Christian Academy and we have Harvest Bible Christian Academy or Harris Bible Academy. So because we could potentially have students that live in our boundaries that go to those schools, I have to offer them a part of our grant. So um every year in January I contact them and say okay are you wanting to participate um in title grants this year. Um so last year was the first year that they actually qualified for the money. This would be year two and neither one they both declined the money. But had they decided they wanted to then um based on what their free and
066reduced um percentages are they would get a piece of um our funding. Okay. Now, Jen, you're saying that we have to give up part of our funding even though we're not getting any money for those students. Correct. Correct. Okay. Yeah. So, in other words, we're paying them for our students to be going to their school. Yeah. are paying any of their low-income students to go to to provide services for them, but they're declining, right? But they are declining, right? Yeah. So essentially, there's no expenditure. No, but it could in the future it could be that. It could be. Yeah. Okay. So the next grant is the IDEA basic and IDEA preschool. And this is based mostly on our October 1st counts of how many students um are enrolled who qualify for um special services but
067this has also has a piece that's called proportionate share. So um the formula that gives us the the money has to do with per pupil. Okay. So if we have a parent who has their student either in a private school or is homeschooling their child who has an IEP, they can come to us and we have to provide services for that child. So currently we only have one student that's um taking advantage of that of proportionate share but it's a bucket of money. So the state tells me every year like you have x amount of money you have to spend in proportionate share. So currently right now that one student receives all of that money for their services. Okay. If we had more parents that came in and said well we also want your district
068to service our child. That money would be then divided between those students. So essentially the one student now would be getting less services if there were more students that took advantage of that. Okay. Um, Kate Hall, our special ed director, does have to do a public meeting every year. I believe she does it in December where she has to inform parents that this is an opportunity for them if they have students who are either homeschooled or in one of the private schools. Bless you. So, the school safety program, this is competitive. So, once again, we have to submit an application. it's graded on a rubric and then determined whether we're on the higher end. We then we receive the money. Um it's set the same amount of money. So that's where sometimes I know uh
069Dr. Stewart asked for more money for our um our school resource officer. So um let's say if we said we're going to pay $50,000 for our school counselor. So right now we have four three school counselors um four four school counselors in this grant. So the first year if we said their salary is $50,000 that's all we get from for the next for the three years of that grant. So when we get raises then um it has to come out of a mill. Okay. Same thing happens with our school resource officer. um that's also the majority of it is paid from this grant, but she also gets raises and um a portion of the money in this grant pays for her benefits as well. So, as we know, as insurance goes up, her cost also
070goes up. So, what we put in the first year of the grant, we know it's going to go up the next two years of the grant. So, and Dr. St gets to figure that out in her budget as well. So, this is for three years. So we're in year two. So we have one more year for this grant before we have to apply again. Okay. Next is title three. So title 3 services our EL students. It's extra money for them. U once again it's determined by the number of e students we have enrolled as of October 1st. Um you if your allocation from the state is 10 thou less than 10,000 then you can't manage your own grant. you have to join with other districts to create a bigger grant. Um so we are the
071lead this year. So um we have Mojave Valley Elementary School District and Crushed that are a part of our grant this year. So they have their own allocation. It's just I have to I manage their their part of the grant. Okay. So uh Oops. I'll go back. So, um it's it's roughly a similar amount of money every year we um because of the October 1st count. So, next year um it'll just be our district in Mojave Valley and um school district will not be a part of our our grants. So, next we have ESR 3 and this is just an extension. So, because our ESSER funds um we weren't we didn't have our DEN project done by the end of the grant, they allowed us to apply to have that money rolled over into a
072new grant that gave us additional time to finish that project. So, we've actually expended expended all the money now. It's all done. So, we just close out this grants and then we're done for the year. Um TSI is targeted support and improvement. So this is a grant that's for our schools who are targeted because of the proficiency and the points for our subgroups. So, subgroups would be um free and reduced lunch, EL students, um students with disabilities, um could be Hispanic or Latino students, students of that have a background of two or more races. Um so that's our subgroups that we have to watch. So if they're not progressing um academically as much on the state assessments, we get targeted for improvement. Okay. So the allocations are based on um school enrollment. So currently we
073this year in this year's grant because it was based off of the results from not last year, the year before. So then the state results from 2020, the spring of 2023 is what got us the grant. Okay. So, Fox Creek um is in improvement for their ELE and for their special ed um and Diamond Back for their special ed subgroups. Now, based on then last year's state assessments, um Fox Creek is no longer under improvement for EL. So, currently it's only special ed and Diamondback is no longer under improvement either. But because this was based on two years ago data, this is the money we have this year. Any questions on how many of these programs are in jeopardy? Um so I attended a meeting earlier this or last Friday um from the community of
074practice which is a committee set by AD to help manage the ESDA grants which is title one title two title three actually is going to be under that umbrella title four enroll income I was told to expect at least a 20% reduction in title one okay so when you consider Our original allocations was about 1.7 million. 20% is a big cut on that. Mhm. Um they said they weren't even sure what's going to happen with title two and title three. Those two could be on the cutting block. So title two is professional development. Um that whole grant is for professional development and title three is our EL students. Title three is what? For EL. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. And those look like they're on the chopping block. They said they're on the chopping block. So
075when my grants I'm usually working on right now. Usually I receive budgets on March 1st. They're due May 1st. Okay. This year um we will not get the allocations for those grants until April 1st. They still want us to submit by May 1st, but they won't give us them to April 1st because the federal government hasn't figured out what they're going to do yet. So the state's kind of guessing um so they feel like they're safe at the 20%. With title one, but the others, like I said, are still in in conversation at the federal level. Is the state talking about taking up that 20%. No, because this is federal money. So the money Yeah, but the state could put that much more in. No, but that's that won't happen. That's not going to happen.
076That won't happen. So, special ed education isn't on the chopping block right now, but special ed we heard was safe. Safe. Okay. Yep. Um, paying for our counselors. And that's safe because that's that's a state grant. That's not a federal grant. Oh, that's a state. Okay. I didn't get that before. I don't believe I said that, but yes, that's a state grant. So, that one is that one's safe as well. And homeless. I'm not sure. However, it's a three-year grant, so we're in year two. Um, so I don't think they will do anything with that grant either. So, this is a not now, huh? Not now. 20%'s a big number. It's a huge number. couple thousand. Have you thought about what we're going to do for professional development if if it does get completely thrown
077out the window? Um yeah, I mean there are some things we can sustain. Um I believe internally we do have some principles, some teachers, instructional coaches that can well instructional coaches would be on the on the on their salaries are paid out of there out of um title one but we do have um people who do have expertise and sometimes we may have to rely on some of our own people. So is out of that out of that money how many employees do we have? Um, let's see. Actually, I know you get part of that or your your funding comes out of that. We have like the the title one teachers. So, we have two teachers at both the middle school and the junior high. We have all of our instructional coaches. Um myself, we
078have partial for one one of our counselors and then we have 12 pair of professionals for title one and we also have our homeless. So we have like 30 people give or take. Um it also pays for after school programs. So we have all of those intervention pieces outside. So Jim and I, we have or charts, right? And to help us keep straight how we pay for things, we call it. So I'm going to kind of flip through this. Anything that's pink is title one. Oh. Mhm. I get it. Um, significant, right? Yes. Is is is our M going to be able to pick up these 30 people. That's plan B and C. That's plan B and C. Plan B and C. Um I will tell you though that um the one thing I will
079insist on Jim's paid out two grants and what's it called? Indirect cost indirect cost from all the I'll absorb her position. Yeah. Well, we can't do this I can't do this with other we've got to have that position. So that would be the first one that I would say we're going to figure out how to make that one work. Um, we've been talking about that IDBA thing because we have about five special ed teachers that were six and the district paid out of that ID IDA grant and if they were going to cut those, we have so many sped kids and in fact I'm adding a sped position in Desert Valley, but that one is safe for right now, right? We can't afford to lose those five sped teachers. So those that would be the
080second group that I figure out how we're going to incorporate that into the budget. all of our speech speech. It's it's a number of things and but that one that one we're not worried about right now. We're worried about the title. Good news. But I will tell you before she attended that workshop, yeah, we were we were already talking about what we needed to do because we had no idea. So the workshop gave her some useful information for us relative to working in front of me for the regular budget. You'll work your magic. Uh, we'll get I tried. There's only so much the magic beans can do. They quit growing after a while. The wand, the magic wand is in there in one of my fake plant things. I may have to get it out
081and use it. I don't know. Call on Harry and ask him to come help you. Okay. So, now it's going to go to how we decide how to spend it. Do you want a little break before we do that? Do you want a fivem minute break? Yeah, let's have a five minute break. Okay. Thank you. do a five minute break and then we'll come back and Okay. and head into Okay. Now, what do we how how do we decide what to do with the money we have? Yeah. Oh, in the refrigerator. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Just go in there. Yeah. Dr. Stewart, we went a little bit past, didn't we? That's okay. I think everybody needed it because um looking at all these numbers and things and unless you're the one talking, it kind of can
082put you to sleep. I get that. Okay. So, how do we decide what to do with that money? Okay. Um, all right. So, we begin with the end in mind. Uh, in there on my bookshelf, I have a big rubber ball and it's got one eyeball on it and it's where I can see it because it is the reminder to me all the time to keep my eye on the ball. What are we here for? Well, we're here to teach students. So, I guess I should have made that a bigger font because to me that's what it's all about. But we also have to have safe spaces for uh for the learning to go on. We have to transport and feed kids. Uh we have to provide instructional, social, emotional support, all kinds of services
083to students. Um and if we're really good, and I will tell you that it is my opinion that this school district has a long long history of really really good professional development. um uh and and it's one of the things that brought teachers to us for many many years and it was the thing that kept teachers here for you know sometimes beyond the time that they might otherwise have stayed. Uh but we also know how good that uh professional development has been. Um uh during those years particularly when we recruited heavily from the Midwest um people would come and stay three, four, five years and go back and we had a number of teachers who went back to either their home district or some place close to their home district and were identified as teacher
084of the year within the first two years. which said we helped a whole lot as a district in uh in helping those teachers be uh not just highly qualified but very uh very good teachers effectively. Um and then we of course engage with the community and uh and parents and and those folks. So um all of those things we have to keep in mind when we're de developing our budgets. Okay. So then we work on developing a budget. And I will tell you that I started on these steps about a month ago and had a plan A and then things started changing. And so right now I'm in plan B and um and as Jen says there may be a plan C. Who knows? Um and that might happen before next week. So plan B
085is what I intend to present to you next week. Uh but it might end up being plan C before we get there. Okay. So first thing is that there are four things that you you concentrate on. hiring employees, purchasing services, purchasing supplies, and then purchasing capital. The first three all are operational spending. Those are the things that we need to have to continue running schools day in and day out. about 60% of most a rule of thumb is about 60% of your budget um M budget goes to classroom teachers salaries and benefits and 20% to the other staff. Okay. So there's in the neighborhood of 80% of your budget um uh going to salaries. We're a little less than that uh but not much. You have to purchase services. You have to have utilities. Uh
086I'm I'm you know I'm afraid we can't operate without electricity and water and sewer and um uh waste disposal and all of those kinds of things. Um and purchase services also include anything that we do that has to do with training and communication and then purchasing supplies. So, uh, a big piece of our supply, uh, budget is for, um, operating our for maintenance of our schools, uh, now that we took that back over, um, and we're repairing things. So, uh, good deal of that. And interestingly enough, some utilities fall under services and some utilities fall under supplies. So uh uh so it looks a little wonky when you look at purchasing supplies uh because some of that is uh is what I consider a utility but the way the state codes it uh is different.
087Okay. And then we have the capital spending. Okay. So earlier when I was talking to you about the 1.16 1.116 million in DAA which is our unrestricted capital that if the state decides not to fund DAA we have so many things in that category that we consider essential that we would have to fund it out of M. So for example uh instructional aids. So, anything that teachers use for or that students use to learn, um, uh, manipulatives, uh, flip charts, believe it or not, they're not supplies, they are instructional aids, okay? Uh, all of our software releases. So any program that our students use, any program that we use here at the district, so like visions for our budget, uh we use synergy for student information, we use um a program for our libraries, we
088use a program for um you know, I won't even use that example because it comes out of food service budget, so never mind. But we have all of these programs that we have to lease every year to use and they're considered capital. Okay, they're considered capital. So then you throw in some furniture once in a while, uh some equipment, buses, um and any major facilities repairs. So uh uh we were fortunate with the renovation of the restrooms in the 200 building that u almost all of that expense is out of M because we have our own plumbers and so they did the work. So all we had to buy were the were the things the you know the the pipes and the fittings and those things which are supplies but we did have to have
089trenches dug out dug out there and so we had to pay for that and that's capital because it's a construction service. So uh so we have those things. So you can see that if we lost that 1.1 uh 1.1 million from DAA, we'd have to figure out how to use some of maintenance and operations to keep those things going. Well, okay. So the first one, remember we have those four things. So the first one is hire employees. So here's our org chart, the big one. I had not done this until recently. Uh, I have the the one I showed you a few minutes ago that is by site and we color code all the various positions and and how we pay them. Uh, but this is uh this is the district-wide one. Uh, the blue
090is considered uh uh instruction and the tan is considered administration. Okay, this represents currently 344 employees. How much? Okay. Give me a second to move that over. A mechanic is considered administrative. Yes. Because it does because that person does not uh his work does not directly involve kids. Okay. So for instance, if you're looking under the schools where it has the three office personnel, those are classified employees, but but we need them to operate the school and so therefore they're uh considered instructional for the purposes of when the auditor general produces those reports that talk about here's the amount of your budget that goes into instruction and here's the amount that goes into administration or into these other categories. But in in Kate Hall's column, there's two office people and but they're not considered instructional.
091No. U because it's the special ed department is a district position. Those are district level positions. So it's kind of like those folks that I supervised up at the top like the business office. Okay. because they don't really they don't the reason she has the three blue ones underneath her is first of all she's got the certified specialist so that's the speech people the and and the people in life academy okay so that's direct instruction to kids uh but the cur office people don't really have anything to do with Okay. Okay. Any questions? I'm hopeful that if anybody ever says to you, well, you know, school districts, in fact, we hear this from the legislature right now. Districts are administrative heavy. Um uh if I took out the positions that I really thought were just
092administrative, we're we're pretty light. Uh our district used to have uh and we had again about a third more students. So, when we had about 3,000 students enrolled, we had a superintendent, we had an assistant superintendent, we had a director of uh we had a director of of uh curriculum and instruction. We had a business manager. Okay. So, we had those four positions. Right now, it's two. Okay. So, and that's not unreasonable given the given the size of our district at this point. But it's also why I would not give up transposition and figure out a way for us to have that have that position. Okay. So where do I start? So I start with this and I know this is difficult for you to read and I'm just I have it there as an
093example but I start with teachers because teaching kids is what we're about. And so I look at our anticipated uh enrollment. I move numbers up. Um that kind of thing. I calculate the projected class sizes and the capacity by grade level. Um the the lines that are green show you our class sizes, anticipated class sizes for next year. The only two places uh where we exceed the target number is first and second grade at sunrise. um and they're at 25, which is one over uh whatever, but not enough to have another teacher at either one of those grade levels. And so we'll wait and see what happens, what actually happens. But you can see that our uh total enrollment is down uh by 110. Our anticipated enrollment for next year is down by 110 students.
094This is simply a projection. However, there's no place on this chart. There's no place on here where I can eliminate a teaching position without having class sizes go at the elementary school go way over 30 or go over 30. And so I can't in good conscience do that if we think we can fund that. And this is based on this chart which uh you all have approved. it's uh in our um I think it's a regulation that we have for our class sizes. So I use these two documents to determine do we need to eliminate any positions? Can we eliminate any? Should we eliminate any? Or do we need to move a position say from one site to another? So, a position that in the middle of this year we moved that was a vacant
095position at Desert Valley, we moved to Sunrise for the remainder of this year uh because the class sizes in second grade were like 28. We've been unable to fill that position. They've still functioned with unfortunately with 28 students in their second grade classes. Um and you can see those numbers. um uh those kids are leaving third grade where we have four teachers and so that's going to resolve itself for next year. Uh but it turns out that I do need that position back at Desert Valley for a sped classroom. So we're not talking about adding any teaching positions. We're just talking about moving some around with the people we have. questions about either of those. Okay. The next thing I look at is everybody else or everybody teachers and everybody else. So I calculate what
096the annual what the cost might be to increase salaries and benefits and we calculate benefits minus uh with the exception of insurance at 22% of whatever salaries there are. So just we just automatically do that. Jen does that for her grants. That's kind of the range where it runs for um uh retire state retirement, social security, Medicaid, workers comp, long-term disability, uh what am I missing? Social Security. Did I say that? I think I said that. Um all of those together run about 22% of whatever the person's salary is. Okay. So that's our rule of thumb. So my plan A was to do an increase in in base for everybody and everybody would also get a step raise but I also do the calculations just for the step raise. So um so I calculate those
097things then I calculate any changes in insurance. Oh and I see when this when this slide translated from what I did it in that the little dollar sign didn't move. So sorry. Uh if we have we always have an increase in cost for insurance. Um the last three years it's been around 7%. Uh right now it's looking like 20%. Oh my gosh. Yes. We'll talk more about that next week. But you can see that that is the main reason that I did a plan B because I was working on plan A to increase the base and increase salaries. And an increase of 20% in insurance is $480,000 compared to what I thought it might be at $200,000. So significant difference in terms of playing with these monies. Okay. Then I review all the positions, not
098just uh not just teacher positions, but all of ours. Anticipate what needs we have and look and see if we have any available funding and other funding streams. And you just heard Jen say that probably not in her funding streams. So we're looking at what money's in all the other buckets. Then I determine if any positions could or should be funded from other sources. So for instance, classroom site fund, remember it's its own budget, right? Currently, we fund seven teaching positions from that budget and then the rest of it is uh either base pay at $2,000 per teacher or uh and performance pay at the end of the year. Okay. Uh uh I've already spoken with the uh classroom site fund committee. U we've reviewed the plan. We'll have a new plan for the board
099to approve for next year, but I've already said to them uh that I'm exercising my um uh authority to increase the number of positions being paid for out of that fund and from 7 to 10. So, we're moving, you remember my org charts that are colored colorcoded, the positions on there that are currently colorcoded for classroom site fund, there are seven of them. There will now be 10. So that's three positions I'm moving out of M to classroom site fund. Okay. So that's what I mean about do I have funding someplace else that I can you know that I can move a position. Okay. So if you're using that money to fund three more teachers, what has to be subtracted to do performance pay part? When I came into this position six years ago, uh
100teachers were getting about $2,500 in the performance pay part. Uh last year it was 6,800. How much was last year? 6,800. Well, 5,800. They had $1,000 for some point things that they earn. That's now going up to 2,000. So they've got they have the 2,000 on base from that fund. Okay. So in in addition to our uh salary schedule, every classroom teacher, so it's important that you know that it's classroom teachers, every classroom teacher gets an additional $2,000 on top of base. Okay? And then at the end of the year, if they h then they can have as much as 2,000 from helping with like um uh after school programs that are not funded otherwise or um events, sponsoring events or uh coming to board meetings. They get a point for coming to board meetings.
101So they're working for 10 points at $200 a point. And there are other ways that they can get those 200 200 or those uh 10 points. So that's a that's 2,000. Okay. And then whatever else is left in that fund gets divided up based on the formula that's part of that plan for performance. Okay. And so last year that was 5,800 bucks. Okay. So yes, that will go down. But of course I've reminded them that it's gone up significantly from the 2500. uh when I came to the when I came into this position, I think at that time there were probably 11 or 12 teaching positions that were paid for out of that fund. Okay. So then we dropped back to seven and now I'm I'm moving it back up to 10. Okay. Okay. So
102then I calculate what the budget needs for employees. So uh on the right you see a piece of this document that I put in front of you. And what you're seeing there represents the columns over to the first column that's shaded. Okay. So this is the these are the columns that have salaries and benefits and you can see it at the top salaries and benefits. All right. So in the current budget salaries 10,789,000 benefits just under $4 million. So it's close to 15 million. Oh, here it is right here. 10 actually the 10 million is close to 11. So if you had 114 million. So 15 million of our $19 million budget. actually drop that back because remember part of that 19 million is that 1.1 for capital. So 18 so 15 million of the
10318 million is salaries and benefits in the current budget. Okay. So that's where I start if if I decide to recommend to you that we need to keep the people in the keep the positions we have. Okay. And recognizing that we're putting people up a step on the salary schedule, it would be really dire if I said to you, no new bait, no raise in base and no step raise. Okay? Step raise for teachers is $500. Step raise for classified employees is 30 cents an hour. All right? So, uh, it would be a drastic thing to say to you, we can't even do a step raise. I don't even want to think about it. But that doesn't mean that we won't have to at some point. Might have to think about that if we have
104to absorb some positions from title one. Okay. It might be an unfortunate reality or I might have to put another position or two over into classroom. Okay. So then the second category is purchase services. So based on the current year trends I estimate the cost for fixed services. So, just printed this out this morning. This is the Mino budget. Okay, 29 pages, 27 pages. And I have here what was budgeted, what we've spent already, what's been encumbered, in other words, it's promised, but we haven't spent it yet. And what's left? Okay. So, I look at this and I will tell you I'm a little bit OCD about this. I don't know what other business managers do. I don't know how they do it, but I literally go through this line by line and project what
105I need for that line for next year. Okay, the first pages are what you just looked at. That's all. No, it's all the salaries. It's not the first pages. It's the first part of any section. I've now divided them with a a yellow line. It's the first section at the first part of any section that is headed by a yellow line. And then the second part is insurance and the third part is benefits. And so I go through and literally line by line do that. And then I go, okay, what do I have left? Then I look at fixed costs. I estimate what did we pay this year for electricity? What did we pay this year for water and sewer? Well, actually this year we only paid for half a year of water and sewer
106because the city paid for all of calendar year 24 as part of our deal with for selling that. Okay. So, I'm going to have to I'm going to have to double those uh for water and sewer for next year in the budget because I'll have to pay for the whole year, right? Um and so we have to we have to make those uh you know I go through and I do all of those fixed costs. Okay. Um, and of course we have things like the alarm systems and the internet dues and fees. All of those kinds of things fall in that. Then based on the current year expenditures and plans for instructional support, I estimate the costs for employee training and other technical services. So technical services include things like uh right now we have
107one live speech therapist and we have two virtual speech therapists. Now uh uh one of one of those positions is paid IDA all three. Sorry, don't even have to look at that one. Jen does, but I might have to look at those depending on what gets cut in those. If IDA doesn't get cut, we're good. Okay. uh physical therapy. We have our own occupational therapists, but we contract out prof uh physical therapy. We contract out eds psych for testing. All of those fall into this. We have to keep them. You know, you have to keep the therapists, we have to keep the EDS psyches. Um and and we contract that out because we can't afford to hire we can't pay enough to hire our own ED site. The the real world out there pays way
108more than we do. So we we contract for those services on a per student basis. Okay. Then I also look at the uh current year expenditures for maintenance and those are on this. They're represented on your sample in the gray column. Okay. And then I have to look at supplies. And if you look at the gold column, you'll see that the biggest supply one is in line 2600. That's operation and maintenance. That pays for all of our custodial supplies. It pays for all of our uh maintenance supplies. Um, it also pays for some of those utilities that I told you for what some weird reason are coded over in that in there. But the rest of our supplies are pretty slim. Pretty slim. And then I do exactly the same process with the unrestricted capital
109outlay uh but in this order. First is debt payment. We have one outstanding debt. It's from a project that started in I think 20134 which was replacing all of the light fixtures in the district lighting with with fluorescent to whatever was the next step up at the time. It's now all obsolete and we're still paying. Um uh so uh I think we have three more years to pay for lighting that's obsolete. Yeah. Uh and then uh all of the we lease all of our Xerox machines at all of our sites. Um that's a really good way of using our funds because otherwise when they if you buy them and then they're you know they have a life expectancy of five years and suddenly then you have to purchase new ones and whatever. So, the lease
110is uh includes not just the machine, but all the toner and and x number of copies. We tend to go over that a little bit, but not too bad. But the thing is then when the when the machine is dated, it's replaced and we're not, you know, we just continue the lease process. So, we're paying a fixed amount every year. It's makes it really easy to budget because we know exactly what it's going to be every year for our copies. uh instructional software. We talked about that a few minutes ago. Uh non-instructional software, so uh short and long-term things, but um I don't know how we'd run our business office without visions. I don't know how we'd manage our student information system without uh synergy or some similar program. And uh so that's really important.
111We pay for instructional aids. So for example, we pay for amplify uh which is our reading program. Uh uh there are uh there are software and and related items for that that we pay each year, construction services, technology, furniture and equipment, buses, other vehicles. I did not print out this page for you. I I would be happy to give it to you. Uh but it's not the kind of detail as this uh for the regular budget, right? But I go through exactly the same process. I look at what we spent this year in each of those categories and then make an estimate of what we think we're going to need in those categories for next year. So additional challenges uh I told you long way back at the beginning that I would come back to
112this um uh current year funding. So it used to be that the budget for the following fiscal year was determined by the ADN numbers on the 100th day of the current year. Okay. So through the n through the 1990s when our district was growing 8 to 10% a year and frequently the growth happened after the 100th day of school but the budget for the following year was determined by that 100th day ABM. However, in the news in the new school year, at the 40th day of the new school year, all of that was recalculated. And so, our district ended up always with a bigger budget after the 40th day of the next year because we got the rest of those kids got counted. Okay? And then the same thing happened at the hundth day and
113so on. That's not the way it's funded anymore. It's funded literally every month. So, every month I print one of these and if there are significant changes, I go in and me mess around in this document, okay? Because literally I could present you a budget revision every single month based on our numbers. We don't do that. I do want I do one in December. I do one in May which is the final revision. That's kind of scary because I will tell you that sometimes things change between May 15th when we file that revised one and June 30, which is the end of the fiscal year. Um I got a little I got a little ouchy about that last year because I thought what's going to happen because I had something came up that I really
114had to move money to pay for. So I called uh I called my contact at the AG's office um uh that I kind of got in good favor with about five years ago. And I said, "What happens if because I have to move this money, we have to pay for whatever this is." And he said said, "Really, really really the bottom line is don't exceed don't exceed this number right here. We know that sometimes things move around. So, as long as you don't exceed this number, you're not going to get in a lot of trouble." So that made me feel better. But literally it is every single month. And keep in mind that the data used for these calculations are already a month old. Okay. And then you heard Jen talking about the data for
115uh some of the grants are based on data from October 1st. Our special ed count for her grant purposes are based on October 1st. So, for instance, our preschool special ed program has grown by 20% since October 1st. Okay. Now, that doesn't factor so much into the IDEA, but it does factor into what we're doing otherwise. Okay. So, that's really really of concern. Um, and then, uh, special ed funding gap, and this is one we keep talking with the state about because we have to provide services for special needs students. That's federal law since 1964. Okay. So, yes, those students are counted in both our regular ADM and the group EDM weights and in the federal IDA dollars. However, many districts, including ours, spend more money on special education than the funding allows. I mean,
116not allows, than the funding that we have for it. Okay? And so Melinda your point earlier of if you raise this what h what had to go down right so um uh if we have to ra if we have to put more money into the sped bucket or partial bucket because it's really part of m but if we have to put more money in that piece if we have to put more money here in this section of this page that I gave you where does it come from up here. Okay. So, it's moving it around. And I'm not complaining. I'm just saying to you, it's one of the reasons that all of our alphabet groups in Arizona for years have been lobbying with the legislature to increase that weight, those weights for special needs students.
117Okay? Increase those weights. Okay. So, uh I'll be back in a little bit, but it's Jennifer to tell you how she decides to spend So by grants again um so for our homeless grants um the the main purpose of it is to eliminate any barriers so any of our students who are homeless they can come to school. So, um, they have to or we have to provide them with transportation. So, if they were attending Sunrise, become homeless, and are living temporarily down at Desert Valley's area, we still have to provide them transportation back to Sunrise. Um, because we want them to at least have some some piece of their life stable in school is going to be what we want to keep stable. Um, so the first thing, um, we look at is a needs
118assessment. So, every spring, Sheree, our homeless, sends out a survey to all of our parents to see what do you need? Like, what can we help you with? Um, anywhere from like school uniforms, sometimes it's just even undergarments, shoes, um, school supplies, um, we purchased tents for people that that were living on their cars and would be better off being at like Davis camp or something. So um a variety of of things we buy um out of this grant, but our first pri priorities are our homeless on salary and benefits. So a piece of it is paid out of title one and a piece of it is paid out of this grant. And remember this grant is competitive though. So we're guaranteed for three years to be able to pay for her a piece out
119of this grant. But next year when we will apply again for 2027, I mean there's always the chance that you may not get that grant. So then it has to be taken from somewhere in another budget. Um we do set goals for um how are our students who are qualified as homeless? How do how are they how is their attendance, their discipline, their grades, their test scores, all how are all those things compared to the general population? And we have to set goals to try to increase that and lower that gap. But yeah, first is our homelessly is installing benefits. uh we are required she has to attend a certain amount of hours every year of u professional development. So like going to a conference or something is usually in there for her and then
120everything else we need to do for um our students. Now if you remember in the first part I said our original budget was 72,000. Uh our new budget that we're working with right now is 101 almost 102,000. So a piece of that is I can roll over money too. So anything we didn't spend last year flows over into this year and then they also usually around October, November their final allocations drop as we call it. So um additional money is added to your grants. So um they benefit you know by having an increase in in funding. Um so title one this is like I said an entitlement grant. So we are given this every year. We don't have to compete to get the money. Um so the whole purpose is to help our students who
121are from low-income families make that academic achievement. Okay? So that's the whole purpose is to eliminate that or eliminate or reduce that gap. Um, everything that we do in that grant has to relate back to the schools and the district's integrated action plan, which is those things that we work on in February when we all go to Desert Valley and we go talk about um our proficiencies and the systems at our schools and like improvement plans for the following school year. So, anything that's in that plan can be funded in the grant. If it's not in the plan, it can't be in the grant. Okay. Um so I already talked about the district set aides go first then we determine the budgets for the schools. So our first priority is salaries and benefits. I mean
122it has to be to retain our staff to increase th you know those interventions for those students. So right now we have um all of our title one staff, our instructional coaches, our preschool program, which is uh three preschool classrooms and two pair of professionals. Um our liaison, our homeless liaison is actually also a piece of our family liaison. Um just about 25% of her salaries for all of our our families in our after school programs are also paid on title one. Um we have a school counselor and then myself as well. So question um why are the instructional coaches included in title one? Because I know you well part of it is it's because our budget isn't big enough in title two for that but it's also providing professional development to teachers to increase
123proficiency for those populations. So it's kind of a No. Yeah. You just This is just the best place to put them. Don't just be honest. Part of it is the best place to put that. Just be honest. That's the best place. That's part of our title one program. So when years ago, and I don't know when this happened. I think I was still I think I was a principal at the time, but we went to rather than targeted title one, which is you only target like your lowest students and those are the only students that get a benefit from the grant. Um so anything you purchase could only be used like in that classroom. Okay. Our district went schoolwide title one. Yeah. So when we went school Y title one that means that the money
124can be purchased to benefit every single student in that in their schools. So that's another way that they were able to do that because that person is part of the title one program. Our our instructional coaches are part of title one. They also manage right now um they manage the title one program so they keep the data. So the instru instructional coaches manage title one. Yes. Okay. at the school site. Um, what kind of afterchool programs do we offer? Um, we right now are offering two days a week for an hour after school at every campus. Um, and it's to target our our lower performing students. It's titled math and title reading. Okay. Are they well attended? Not really. Elementaryaries are a little better. um once you get to the junior high they're not very
125well attended at all. I'm just looking for 20%. Of course you are. Yeah. Uh this year we did drop transportation as well. So in the past we also had 21st century grant which we don't have right now. Um so our programs were really big our after school programs and we provided transportation. Um now we do not provide transportation and that's a piece of probably why some of our families still come um if they don't have the transportation to pick up their students after that hour. after school. Um, our homeless students are the only students that we're required to provide transportation to if they're after school. Okay. Carolyn, um, she she's very important. Okay. There's no there's no question in that. But does the 22% increase that you figure for every employee, is that part of
126as part of the M, is that part of Jen, too? Well, she has to build that in for her for the people paid out of this out of these grants. The 22% comes out of that budget. Oh, okay. All right. That's I was just Yeah, and that's a great question. So, that the difficulty is is our anticipated 20% less in say title one, but a 20% increase in insurance until your money is goes. You're looking at 40%. There's actually a 402% yeah 42% deficit problem um roughly I mean because insurance is what we figured it went from around 14,000 a person and next year we're looking at about $16,800 a person for insurance so that's a okay you know just being honest about this we're losing 20% and then you're important I'm not I'm not
127denigrating your job at all. I'm just saying and then we lose another 22% of this amount of money and it's No, you're not losing it. It's already built in. You're not losing another 22%. Because that's the benefits you're losing. Yeah. But that would be the increase for next year. Yeah. So that's what she's talking about. So like Yeah. a year where you would have been paying more than $1,000 for insurance. You're not paying another%. Yeah. Of this much of this money, right? But the 22% is how we calculate the rest of the benefits. She's already paying that's not going to change that much. But that's this year. Yeah. I'm looking at next year when the 22% for like um social security and it's already figured in here. Yeah. It's the insurance that's it's just the
128health insurance that All right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And Okay. I'm sorry. I I stopped you. I stopped you from doing your thing. So, go ahead. Questions are okay. Um that's what we intended for you all to ask questions. We also in title one pay for a lot of intervention materials and pro like intervention programs like um brain pop some amplified programs. um Amira. So just like tier 2 instructional programs that we use and then once again that anything that's left over from things we have to have to operate the schools tell me what they want to purchase. So our original um allocation you can see was about 1.7 million. Um we did get additional funding um because of unspent money the state had not spent. um they gave us an additional $200 plus,000 270
129or so thousand dollar um for the rest of this year. So that doesn't help us with salaries and benefits because the grants only for this year. But what we haven't did decide to do with that money is a lot of the intervention materials that we can purchase. anything that's physical materials that we need um for tier two and tier three instruction um Chromebooks and those kind of things are we bought about a thousand Chromebooks with the esser money um back in 20 the fall of 2020 I believe um and they're all getting to the point where you can't update them and then none of our programs will work on them if that happens so we're having to replace some of those as well so I'm trying to make use of that money before it goes
130away. Um, title two is um, professional development. So, we do have a piece of um, an instructional coach that's paid out of there and a piece of my salaries out of there. So, currently mine is title one, title two, and um, indirect cost is what pays for my salary. So, but we have a um, instructional coach that's partially title one and partially title two. Um so but the rest of it is in right now is instructional empowerment as well as sending teachers to different conferences. We've sent PE teachers um to PE conference. Um art teachers have gone to an art conference. Um some materials that we use um like programs that we use for professional development. We have a program that we use for our pair of professionals that has a whole library of things
131that especially Kate uses to um train her pair of professionals. This this one is not uh competitive. Nope. Okay. But this is one that may go away. Yeah. Yeah. Title four. So title four um it's kind of the well-rounded grant. So we are required to have at least 20% of the money for safe and healthy. Um so um we a lot of like our training for CPI um our teachers and our our paras and our administrators get trained um for CPI which is an intervention for for students um who have more extreme behaviors. So that pays for that. uh well-rounded would be like after school program um steam camp so summer school is paid for out of here and then just a piece of it has to be for the use of technology right now
132we use that for some things that Bangley uses as an instructional coach um for technology um we're not allowed to do any more than 15% for things um technology things like computers or infrastructure so uh we do have a school counselor that's paid partially out of title one and partially out of this grant. Um so she her salaries in there for summer school and CPI are the huge things we do out of there but we also are able to buy u materials for art, music and PE out of this and this is one that's going away. Could be. Yeah, it's one that's up for consideration. a little bit all she gets out of 113,000. Yeah, we can get a lot but but yes, a lot. It's not there. But we'll have to get creative. So
133the CPI training, we're lucky because um Chris Roy and the pins at Sunrise and Kate Hall are our trainers. So really what we're paying for out of for CPI is paying the teachers to come in on a Friday and Saturday to get trained for the staff. It's not just teachers and for the um workbooks that they use at the training. So if we lose this grant, are we still going to be able to fund art, music, and PE? Oh, yeah. Because this is just resources. This is resources. So like m um music and more extra paints and so the the purpose of the grants is to do things that are over and above what the normal school budget would do. Oh okay. So materials we wouldn't be able to purchase otherwise. Then we have rural
134and low income grants. This is kind of a bonus grant because there's not a lot of strings to this grant. Um it's a little more flexible. So right now we do have after school program in there um which is nice because we can offer some of the enrichment things. So title one can only be tutoring for math and and this grant we can use to do like we wanted to do um a sports thing or art or something after school for kids. um kinder camp which due in July and that's eight days of kinder camp the summer school and then we do buy additional things for our science classes and for our gate teachers out of this program and then the instructional resources right now with that we anticipate completely out of this grant and
135then PBL project is um used more by our gate teachers it has units of study in there for like hands-on learning for again the science and gate re resources is just above what would normally come out of the M budget. Um the problem is that science can get expensive. So I mean this is refurbishing like all the kits that they use in their classrooms to do experiments and things. Um and then I know for the unreal budget the gate budget is very low. That's really low. So, um, gay teachers won't get a whole lot extra on their So, this does help them be able to do extra things. Um, and then we have special ed. So, there's two special ed. We have the basic, which is for kids who are um, like five and above,
136and then we have preschool, whoever kids up to five. Um, but the expenditures have to be over and above. So, Caroline has to guarantee an M that she outspends at least the same amount like this year as she did last year. If she does not, then this grant goes away. So, we have to make sure that those expenditures stay in M. This grant is supposed to be over and above what we can do in M. Okay. Well, it kind of sounds like we're adding kids at this level. So that's not a problem. Yeah. But we have to ask like if we didn't have special needs kids, would this still exist? If um do kids who do not have disabilities also have this expenditure in our budget and then is it documented in? So those are
137the three things we have to consider when we purchase anything in this round. So it's a lot of salaries and benefits. Uh right now we have a few students who are in homebound instruction either because of health needs or because of behavior issues. Um so we have teachers who go outside after school to to work with them in their homes. Um the proportionate share piece is the piece for parents that have students in private or home school that we um support. And then professional developments and resources and supplies or special um the school safety program. This is the third year of that or three-year program. We're in year two right now. And this is our four counselors and our school resource officer. And that's clear. Like I don't have a choice what I put in
138there. That's the only thing I'm Do we only have one school SRO? SRO now? Yes. For all the schools or just um so that SRO has to be at Fox Creek. Okay. Okay. But the city does have another SRO that we share with all the schools and then like oh yeah. He's new this year. is a new but his office is at full middle which is nice. Yes. Where are we in this grant? Are we in the first year? The third year two for us. So we have one more year with this grant. Okay. Okay. And then title three. This is another one they said is kind of in discussion for next year. Um so this is over and above anything else we do for any other student. So this is only for our English
139language learners and we are required to have professional development for our teachers and we're required to have family engagement. So those are two things that have to be in this grant. But we also purchase um supplies for our classrooms, supplies for parent night. Um there's some other things that come out of that. So on the bottom, the 29,000 uh dollars is what our money is. That's what our district has for title title three. The 47,000 is what the total grant is. So that's the portion that um Mojave Valley Elementary School District and Crush have. And you said that we were next year was just Mojave Valley. Just Mojave Valley next year. Okay. So Crush is getting their own. Precious is having to join another. Okay. There's more to that, isn't there? Oh, yes. And then
140our TSI grant, that's a competitive grant and it's based on what your your student proficiency um of your subgroups. So, those are the EL special educ lunch. um you're spanning for Latino students or your students with two or more race are identified with two or more races. Um so if they're not meeting the proficiency um we get we are eligible for this grant. So it has to be evidence based items that can only be used for those school sites. So currently um we have extra hours with IE that are training at those schools. That's what this In the past, we've done like school specific training. Um, we've bought instructional programs in the past with that as well if it supports that. And we're in second year in this one. This is year to year. Oh,
141year to year. Okay. And as of right now, I have heard nothing about any of these grants. So, I did meet, let's see, it was February February 25th. So, at the end of February, we met with our specialist at Fox Creek because they're under improvement for um the special ed department with our students and she mentioned nothing about grant. So, I'm not sure that this is going to even be an option for I mean, you don't want it to be an option. You want your students to be proficient or or meeting the minimum standards. Um but um right now it's not an option. So, I really like your question about art and music and PE um because those are special programs uh you know not just electives at the junior high level but they're special
142programs at the elementary level. Okay, so remember when I was talking about uh the um classroom site fund funding 10 teachers. Okay, for next year they're funding all of our art teachers and all of our music teachers. When the classroom site fund, which is otherwise known as Prop 301, was passed what, two, the year 2000 or 2001, whatever it was, to pre to give this additional funding for teachers um uh intended for teacher salaries and whatever. um uh the teachers in our district, this is institutional memory because I was a principal at the time, but I went to my staff at Coyote and I said, and the other principles ask at their sites as well, okay, do we want to when we set up the plan for using the these funds, do you how do
143you want it to go? And my teachers uni unanimously said, "Do whatever it takes for us to be able to keep art, music, library, and PE as classes." Because that meant then that teachers had a prep period every day, which became really instrumental when we started working on improvement of instruction so that grade level teams could meet together. And so from the very beginning, this district has been very committed to keeping those programs because we know that many school districts dropped art and music and PE. And in fact, when when our folks were working on the of the site improvement plans, the action plans uh last month uh and we shared data with them about the um state testing results. Some of those data are broken down by which schools had PE, which schools had
144art, which schools had music. Okay? And um and so happily we're amongst those who do keep those. So if I were not to move those three additional positions over to uh over to classroom site fund, the fallout would be increased class sizes. And for me, a target is to keep class sizes, regular class sizes within those numbers, those capacity numbers that we talked about. Okay. Um, if we need in the in plan C, if we need to move more positions over there, if we need to move PE over there, I will not hesitate to do that, uh, because that benefits every single classroom teacher in the district to keep their class sizes down. Okay. So, u uh so that leads me to uh u my next to last slide. So, part of this conversation today
145is for you to understand that Jen and I braid the funding any way we can. Okay? Any way we can to make best use of whatever funds are available. So, when she has a grant that says she can only spend this amount to this penny, right? um or she has to make sure that it's it's balanced amongst the schools or whatever the rules are for those. We figure out how to pay part of it out of M when I can or she even braids together various grants. So for instance, her position is comes from two grants plus the um uh what's that called indirect cost indirect costs. So every grant allows you a percentage of money to set aside for administration. It's called an indirect cost. Okay. So, her salary is paid out of indirect
146costs that really came from probably multiples of her grant. And I've given you four examples here of of positions where on that org chart because she and I use that all the time where we talk about, you know, and we show people. Okay. So Tanya HGY who is an instructional coach at Fox Creek. Okay. Um 40% of her salary is paid out of title one. 60% is paid out of title three. Title two. Okay. So she's braiding her own grants to cover those positions. Okay. Uh Casera Mock who is in our business office. She's our purchasing agent and she also works uh does um the clerical work for the food service for our part of the food service. We're paying her out of three budgets. Okay, we're paying her out of O1. And I will
147tell you when I develop the O1 budget, I do it with her entire salary in there. That's one reason I end up with some carryover is because I budget her entire salary out of M even though her entire salary is not paid out of M. That gives me cushion, right? That gives me cushion. Um, part of her BA salary is paid out of food service. That's 510. And guess what? she gets some of that uh indirect cost because she does the purchasing for Jen's grants for all those grants. Okay. Um uh Nancy PK is one of our counselors. So, uh she's paid partly out of uh the the safety grant that Jen just talked to you about, but guess what? The salary was determined for year one. We gave salary increases this year. Remember, we
148raised salaries. We raised the base and people got a step raise. Her grant doesn't cover that. I cover it out of M. Okay. Um uh the resource officer, uh Barbie, you were asking about the resource officer at Fox Creek, and that's the one paid out of the grant. Fortunately, we have a great relationship with the city and get the second officer that we share with other schools, but he's dynamite and, you know, is doing all the doing all the good stuff. And they actually have moved his his office is next door. Store. Yeah, I see the car. No longer at the police department. Yeah, I see the car over there. He doesn't even have an office at the police department anymore. Um because he's, you know, he's essentially uh essentially our officer uh that they're
149paying for. But the officer at Fox Creek, her salary was based on year one of that grant and she's gotten raises and whatever. We pay the difference out of M. Okay. We pay the difference out of M. Heidi Borup's a kindergarten teacher and you can see that she's paid out of this year is paid out of a grant. Uh 475 is early literacy. early literacy an early literacy grant and uh and then partly out of uh out of M. And so you can see the percentages there. So we braid the budgets together. We talk all the time and as recently as yesterday, Jen was uh setting up getting ready to uh set up the contract with Panorama that we've talked about before that that blends all of our data from all of our various student
150data sources. Okay. and um and the grant can pay the majority of it but not all of it. So I will build $6,922 into M. Actually take that back. It will come out of UCO because it is a program. So it has to come out of capital. Okay. Um but we do this all the time. It's a good thing our offices we can see each other across the hall because we're talking about these things all the time. Um, and then we also braid things that are not necessarily people. Those are salaries and benefits, but our programs and our professional development where we where we put funding together from multiple sources to pay for things. And there's the example of paying. So, um, uh, your questions led me to think about a couple things that I
151hadn't mentioned earlier about, uh, about how we make this work. So, any other questions? Maybe more than you wanted to. A lot of information, that's for sure. It's a heck of a lot of information. Yeah. Um, and um, and I will tell you, I love the challenges. So, uh, to me that's part of the fun is figuring out how to make this work without a magic wand. And it will it will all it will work. We'll make it work. Okay. Any comments, commendations for Thank you, Carolyn. It definitely you you showed us a lot, but you put it in language we could understand, too. Good. not just, you know, all these things and nothing makes any sense, but if I'm breaking it down, you did an excellent job. Thank you. Thank you. And if I
152use any of the acronyms in our regular meetings, because I use them all the time, if I if I use them and you don't remember what it is, don't hesitate to ask. And I appreciate Jennifer doing the same thing. Not only you, but Jennifer did the same things with all those grants. And thank you very much for answering my questions. I appreciate that. Um, thank you both of you. Both of you. I need a motion to adjourn the workshop. I make a motion we adjourn the workshop. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I, Melinda Saskki. I, Charlene Diaz. I, Fred Rushton. I represent Ziki. I, Judy Reid. Yay. And, Madam President, if you want a break before the meeting, I was going to say, could we take a could we take a little
153break? She had lunch. Oh, okay. Thank you. Do we need to move that or is that just okay just to say five minute or 15 minutes or whatever? Yeah, it's up to you what you want just so that we have lunch which would take more than 15 minutes. I always do a specified time. Okay. Specified time for when you want to start the meeting. 30 minutes. 30 minutes. 30 minutes. 12:40 for what? Be back at 12:40 for this uh open meeting. Yeah. 12:40. Okay. Okay. On your mark, get set. I'm calling to order a special meeting of Mhead City School District Board on Thursday, March 13, 2025 at 12. [Music] Roll call present. Charlene Dia is here. Fred Rushton here. Barb Zarziki here. Judy Reed here. Would you stand and say the pledge with me?
154I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, we have no citizens present. I need a motion for the adoption of the agenda, please. I make a motion we adopt the agenda for the board meeting. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I, Melinda Subraki. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. I Barbber Zarziki. I Judy Reed. And I know I've said asked this before. Can we do all these at the same time? No, no, you have to do them separately. Sorry. Item 3.1, CD GCD, professional support staff, vacations, and holidays. This is our second reading. Can I have a motion to adopt? I'll make a motion to adopt GCD professional support
155staff vacations and holidays. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I, Melinda Sabraski. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. Hi Barbara Sarzuki. I Judy Reid. Item 3.2 IC. School years. This is our second reading. I guess I should be asking for discussion. Is there any discussion? Madame President, I also would point out um uh Mrs. Reid, did you get a chance to look at these? No. Okay. So, you might want Cass to at least pull them up. And I Oh, you didn't make the Oh, you didn't put the links. Okay. Sorry. Just when are you starting and when you're ending? That's all I would need to know. So, Oh, okay. So, on this one, Judy, the thing that we changed on here is that the we have 150 days of school and the policy
156read 180. It was still it was outdated. Yeah. So, all we did was made the change. Okay. Okay. Thank you. We're going to do that for all of these. Uh, if I can remember what the changes are. Okay. Do I have a motion to adopt, please? I make a motion we adopt the uh the school school year IC school year. I'll second the motion. All those in favor? I Melinda Subski. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. Hi, Barberski. I Judy Reed. Item 3.3 ABA Community Involvement and Education. This is our second reading. Is there discussion? I all I know is that this is one that had changes in it that the ASBA recommended. Do I have a motion to adopt? I'll make a motion that we adopt ABA Community Involvement in Education. I'll second the
157motion. All those in favor? I. Melinda Subraki. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. Hi, Barb Zarziki. Hi, Judy Reed. That's okay. Item 3.4 for abba parental involvement. Do you know anything about this one? Uh I just know it's another one of the ASBA ones that um uh changed a couple of things. It actually, as I recall, for both of these um that it simplified the language. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I remember, too. Yeah. Okay. Do I have a motion to adopt, please? I make a motion we adopt the ABAA parental involvement. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I Melinda Sabrasi. I Charlene Diaz. Hi, Fred Rushton. Hi Barb. Hi Judy Reed. 3.5 AC non-discrimination and equal opportunity. This is our second reading. Questions. Do I have a motion to adopt? Madame President, I
158move we adopt policy AC, non-discrimination and equal opportunity. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I Melinda Saskki. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. I Barb Zerziki. Hi, Judy Reed. Item 3.6 ACA sexual harassment. I don't remember anything about one of these um this both of the this one and the next one both were some changes from ASBA. Um once again simplifying some language and uh uh clarifying language. I mean, it was not they were not huge changes. No, none of these were huge changes. The next one I'll say something about, but this one is pretty much just a simplification. Um, do I have a motion to adopt? I make the motion we adopt ACA uh sexual harassment. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I, Melinda Sabraski. I, Charlene Diaz. I Fred
159Rushton. I Barb Zarziki. I Judy Reed. Item 3.7 ACA title nine sexual or sex discrimination. Uh madame president and board members this one uh if you recall we did not change uh this policy with the federal changes in uh in the title 9 law uh for 24. So we kept it with what had been for from 2020. However, there are new sections in this that delineate the roles of the people uh who who are investigating or might be investigating um uh uh Title 9 sex um sex discrimination things. So, um this is actually the version that was recommended by ASBA, but it's got a lot of changes that make it much more clear to the public how we handle u those complaints. Do I have a motion to adopt? I'll make a motion to adopt
160ACA Title 9 sex discrimination. I'll second the motion. All those in favor? I Melinda Sabraski. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. I Barb Zarziki. Hi, Judy Reed. Item 3.8 AD, Educational Philosophy, School District Mission. U Madame President this is um one that we're um that you will be deleting and that is because the elements in this one were incorporated into ABA and ABAA above. So do we need a motion on this? You need a motion to delete. Yes. Okay. Do I have a motion to delete, not to adopt? I'll make a motion that we delete um ASBA educational philosophy school. Oh, AD. Excuse me. I'm looking at the second one. AD Educational Philosophy School District mission. I second it. All those in favor? I. Melinda Saskki. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. Hi, Barb Zarsiki.
161I Judy Reed. Item 3.9 J I I student concerns, complaints, and grievances. Any discussion? Do you have anything else? Um, this one uh incorporated uh some specifics about um uh any complaints and concerns that had to do with uh as I recall had to do with ACA. So it it just it increased some of the information for student students who might have complaints. Was this was this the form? No. No, we haven't brought Yes, but um uh Cass doesn't put the the the regulations and the exhibits on the agenda until after you've approved the the policies themselves because I remember seeing a form when I They're down below. Yeah. Okay. They're down below. Thank you, Jen. or not Jen Cassie. I need a motion to adopt I I adopt uh J11 student concerns complaint I
162make a motion to adopt J is that I I it's I uh student concerns complaints and grievances. I'll second the motion. All those in favor? I Melinda Saski. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton I Barb Zarziki I Judy Reid. Moving to new business 4.1 proposed salary schedules for school year 2025 2026 one oh my goodness I know but I had I thought I attached all of them no you didn't Oh my goodness just the one so can we approve the certified yes you can well this is the well I need to we need them approved because we're going to approve uh I'm asking you to approve contracts and those things. So, okay. So, let's let's look at the I'm sorry that I did not attach them. I usually attach them myself. Um so, this is
163uh this is identical to uh the current year. This is for the certified specialists. So, coaches, principles, uh directors, counselors, therapists. Okay. Um I meant to attach also the teacher salary schedule and the classified teacher the classified schedule salary schedules as they were this year. Um the reason for this is um as I said I had earlier I had plan A which was to uh increase base move base up a step and uh and then of course the step raises. Um, but until I get a chance to completely work through every line of that budget and figure out where we are and what might happen or have a better idea of what might happen now, we have a better idea with the grants. Um, I'm proposing that we start um that we offer contracts and
164work agreements to employees for next year with the current salary schedules. C, will you go back to the way the uh thing is worded or go back to the agenda, please? Uh okay. So my recommendation is for the same salary schedules that are in place for school year 2425. Even though we only attached one of them, they're all the same. The ones I was proposing are the same. And I think you could approve them even without the attachments because there are no changes. Um somehow I figured that's what was going to happen. And so I got into last year's stuff and looked at it and looked at it and I think there and if you recall we increased space by $1,000 for this year and people had a step. Uh there will be some information
165that I share with you next week that kind of mitigates this step. But of course, the whole idea is we do this for now so that we can offer contracts that we have to have put out after March 15th and work agreements. And then once the budget gets worked out and the legislature does all of its thing and we find out because remember I'm building that budget on the $5,13 which is this year's, if they increase it by 2% that, you know, that increases it some. Um, but I'm building it based on the current the current funding. Um, and so my hope is that um that in August we'll be able to uh talk about a step, you know, not a step, talk about raising the base uh for everybody. This is not a new
166thing. We've done this in the past. We have um and it's not, you know, it's not the most desirable, but it's um at least it gets us started with folks. Do I have a motion to approve salary schedules at the current levels? Madame President, I make a motion that we approve the proposed salary schedules for school year 2526 as presented. I'll second that. Including to include the attachments that were not present. Thank you. You're welcome. I second that. All those in favor? I Melinda Saski. I Charlene Diaz. Hi Fred Rushton. Hi Barb. Hi Judy Reed. Item 4.2. I thought this one was very interesting. It is interesting. Um because I remember when I retired, you had to stay out a year before you could come back. You can work less than halfime. You can work
16719 and a half hours a week uh for a year before you can work full-time again in a government position. So, um uh we have at least one teacher who uh actually has been eligible for retirement since November. Um, she started talking with me about this last year. And then, of course, talking with her own financial advisors and whatever. And I said, "Well, it would be cleaner for everybody if you, you know, if you waited till the end of this contract year and and then did it." Um, and what this does is it allows it allows us to keep a very highly qualified and successful effic effective teacher um uh full-time for next year um you know, for a couple years. Well, then she can go back on a regular contract after next year. And
168that's why this is only uh only good for one year. So um uh we have contacted um uh ESI and u of course they do this um kind of thing. We've just never done it as a district before. Um I intentionally wrote uh these this agreement, excuse me. I intentionally wrote it as certified employees so that it could be uh so that we could do a similar thing for an administrator or for any other certified specialist in our district, not just for classroom teachers. Um uh the example that I had said specifically said teacher and then there was a separate one for administrator and then there was a separate one and I thought nah let's just do it for anybody who's certified um because you know we're going to treat it the same way anyway.
169Mhm. I can't see any teacher working only 19 and a half hours. No, no, no. It doesn't benefit the teacher and it doesn't benefit it certainly doesn't benefit our kids. Um so, um uh um it's kind of fun to to offer some a new approach. So, are we asking to approve this or we just Yes, I'm asking for you to approve me uh to contract with ESI to set up this program. uh and and uh so then um in the list of teachers that to whom we're offering contracts, this individual would be in that list, but then would choose to resign for the year and we would contract back. So they resign for a year. Do they have to wait a year and then come back? They can turn around because what we're doing is
170we're hiring them through ESI. So they're not working for us. Directly got Okay. If they were working for us directly, she could only work 19 and a half hours a week, right? Okay. But because she's going to be working for this outside agency, and this is the same agency that we contract with for substitute teachers. So, um she works for them. Okay. And uh and you know, we'll be here for us and then a year from now we could if everything else is equally good, then we would offer her a contract again. Got it. To stay with us. So there's still that year where she's not working for us. Yep. There's a year she's not working for us. Got it. Um, do I have a motion to approve? I have a question. Okay. Clarification. So,
171the intention is to allow a teacher who's eligible for retirement to retire while inflicting their retirement and then also continue working. That's how I work, right? That's perfect. I just Yes, you are. It's just that for that year they're no long she's no longer working for us. Correct. I Right. I got that. She's an independent contractor. I can't hear. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. Madame President, I make a motion that we uh approve this proposal for uh allowing Dr. Stewart to contact these people regarding the rehire uh the retire rehire proposal and allow her to conduct business with them. Okay. I'll second that motion. All those in f in favor? I Melinda Subski. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. Hi Barb Ziki. Hi Judy Reid. Item 4.3 offer contracts to certified employees and work agreements to
172classified employment employees for the school year 2025 2026. um gave us a whole list of people and these are the people who have are currently said they want to come back. Well, they either have or they haven't but we still are offering them the contracts. Anyone for whom we are have non-renewal has either been you've either already uh handled that or we'll handle it in the next item on the agenda for non-renewals. Okay. Do I have a motion to send out contracts and work agreements and work agreements? I'll make a motion to approve um contracts for certified employees and work agreements to classified employees for the school year 2526. Um per the list we we have. I second it. All those in favor? I Melinda Sabraski. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. I Barb Zarziki.
173I Judy Reid. Item 4.4 recommended non-renewal of certified contracts. Madame President, these are teach three teachers who were on improvement plans uh who did not meet uh the improvement plan goals and thus we are recommending them for non-renewal for school year 2526. Were they given uh I wanted to say tutoring but that's not the right word. Yes. Coaching. Yes. It was part of the it's part of the improvement plan. Mhm. And um uh they had 45 school days which is equivalent of a quarter of the school year to uh to meet the goals of uh and um yes there's always there are always lists of of uh resources both human and otherwise to uh help them and extra coaching. If we do this now is that going to make them worse than they are now?
174for the rest of school, for the last quarter. Part of the conversation that we have with with uh these folks is that um we expect them to um continue to give us their best uh for the remainder of the year. Okay. Um and if and if there's if there are any kind of uh undesirable behaviors um uh we would take other measures. Okay. Now, if they were to give us their best for the rest of the year and basically meet the improvement plan that we had put forward for them, would there be a chance for them to be rehired? No, because we didn't continue. We can always we can always continue an improvement plan, which we have done for several others who were on the improvement plans um whom I'll give you an example. A
175couple of the people on improvement plans are first year teachers. Yeah. Or first year with us and um and they got close. So the principal said, you know, they're making improvement. They're working with us. Um uh and especially if they've only been with us this one year. Um uh you know, we we're we're willing and really want to continue to work with them. So we have several people whose improvement plans have continued. In other words, so they have a new 45day plan to work on and of course that takes us to the end of this school year. So, um we have several people in that in that circumstance. Um these are these are folks that the principles felt um we're not putting in enough effort, we're not doing and not making enough progress. How long
176have they been with us? Uh don't quote me. I think one or two years. because they were up. Oh yes. Okay. So, oh yeah, two of these people were in in their third year with us. Third year. And uh had applied for uh had asked us for ex you know uh letters to extend them uh for two more years and um you know by year three we're expecting by year three we're expecting people not to be on an improvement plan. Yeah. So these are are out of country teachers basically. Right. These happen to be. Yeah. Okay. Do I have a motion to recommend non-renewal for of the these three certified contracts? I make a motion for non-renewal of the three certified uh contracts. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I Melinda Subski. I
177Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. I Barb Zarzuki. Hi, Judy Reid. Item 4.5 ACR, non-discrimination, equal opportunity. When I looked at this last night, it didn't seem that just it's just some terms. It's a it's a regulation and they've just changed some grammar and some vocabulary, I think, or word choices. You know, I think sometimes when they do this, it just depends on who's the person reading it. Mhm. Sometimes it doesn't change doesn't change it. No, it may also since this is based on federal law though, uh some of those word choices may have to do with changes in the wording in the federal law. Yeah. Okay. That's information. We'll talk about that next. No, this is this is one you can vote on. It's a regulation. It's not a policy. It's a regulation. So, you
178should It's an R. Yep. It's an R. Okay, I get it. I need a a motion to approve ACR non-discrimination equal opportunity. I'll make a motion that we approve the ACR non-discrimination equal opportunity. I second it. All those in favor? I, Melinda Sabrasi. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. Hi, Barb Zarziki. Hi, Judy Reed. Now, the next one is just Okay, this is just this is the these are the forms. This is the form. Um, and I think we put this in because we didn't have it in in approve an approved form. So, um, exhibits usually an exhibit is a form of some kind. Um, and uh, and we have found that in some cases we've not put them in and um, so we're trying to be consistent. So, do we need a motion on
179it or is this just information for us? No, you need a motion. Um, I need a motion to approve ACCE, non-discrimination equal opportunity. Madame President, I make a motion we approve exhibit ACE, non-discrimination equal opportunity. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I, Melinda Sabraski. I, Charlene Diaz. Hi, Fred Bart. Hi, Barb Zarziki. Hi, Judy Reed. Item 4.7, ACR, sexual harassment. This is same thing again. I didn't see any changes. No, it's it's uh it's the legal stuff. Um Oh, it won't be on here. On the policy, if we'd scanned to the bottom of the policy, ACA policy ACA is essentially based on title 7, federal title 7. Um ACA, yeah, ACA, the one that's title N sex discrimination is based on title n law. And so part of what they've tried to do
180with these two uh is is to make it more distinguishable so that you know which one is just uh any kind of sexual harassment and which one is discrimination under title nine which has its own whatever. Title 7 was approved in uh is based on civil rights act of 1964. Uh, title nine uh is based on um federal law in 2020. Okay. Do I have a motion to approve AC sexual harassment? I make a motion we approve ACR sexual harassment. Go ahead. Ladies first. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I Meinda Saskki. Hi, Charlene Diaz. Hi Fred Rushton. Hi Barb Zarziki. Hi Judy Reed. If you go ladies first, you'll never get a chance for this. I'll be fine. This is the form that goes with ACA, right? It looks very similar. Yeah.
1814.8. I was I was That's why I say this doesn't look anyway last night. ACA E sexual harassment. Do I have a motion to approve? Madame President, I move to approve ACAE sexual harassment uh the complaint forum exhibit. I'll second that motion. All those in favor. I Melinda Subski. I Charlene Diaz. I Greg Rushton. I Barb Zarziki. I Judy Reed. Item 4.9 AC A title N sexual discrimination. This one had a lot of stuff. This is the one that um uh where even though it is very much like the policy and the regulation that we had before um they've cleaned up a lot of things and and u made sure that it does reflect actually uh title 9 2020 and um uh so yeah there are quite a few edits on this one. [Music] Um
182this is this is not second reading because there's so many things that are it's it's a regulation. You can just approve it. Oh, okay. Cuz I it's our regulations are usually our procedures for doing what what a policy says we need to do. Okay. And this does very much follow the procedure that I use when I'm doing Title N. Okay. Do I have a motion to approve ACA-R? I'll make make a motion to approve ACA R Title 9 Sex Discrimination. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I Melinda Saskki. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rashton. I Barb Zarziki. I Judy Reed. Item 4.10 10 convene to executive session for superintendence midterm performance evaluation and review of contract for school year 2025 20226 pursuant to ARS 38431.03A1 03A1 discussion or consideration of employment, assignment, appointment,
183promotion, the motion, dismissal, salaries, disciplining or resignation of public officer, appointee or employees of any public office except that with the exception of salary discussions, an officer, appointee, or employee may demand that the discussion or consideration occur at a public meeting. Um, do I have a motion to go into executive session? I make a motion reconvene into executive session. I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I, Melinda Sabraski. I, Charlene Diaz. Hi, Fred Rushton. Hi, Barb. Zarziki. Hi, Judy Reed. We are in executive session. Item 6.1, reconvene into public session. I need a motion to reconvene into public session, please. Madam President, I make a motion that we reconvene into public session. All those in favor? Whoops. Did I get a second? Not yet. Second. She second. All those in favor? I Melinda Saski.
184I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. I Barb Zarziki. I Judy Reed. Item 6.2 action resulting from executive session. There was none. 7.1 future topics. Um I would like to have it's already on the agenda. It's already in the workshop. What about uh comparison of scores and testing and data? Yes. Well, that I mean I know there's What do you want specifically related to this? I would like to see I'm Charlene. Um cohorts together. She's already working, you know. And I know they aren't going to be real cohorts because we don't have real cohorts, but you know, sort of. Well, you sort of do sort of to kind of I would like to see them and then I would like to to firmly ask that there be no um obiscation. No devastation. Obuscation. Yeah, that's what
185I meant. I did use the right word. You did. I may not have said it right. No, you did. She just didn't hear what you said. Um or gaslighting with this. We don't do that. Well, sometimes it seems like it. So, just be careful the way you present it to me, please. Um I'm not I'm not being nasty or anything like that. Just please do it straightforward as possible. uh cuz I have some real questions and some real feelings on it and it's going to come up with a vote in the spring on whether we stay with EI. It's going to be next week. The vote's going to be next week. Okay. Because it's part of the budget discussion. Okay. So, if I don't get a better feeling for this and I'm looking at Jun
186Jennifer because I know you do this stuff. Um I I am not favorable. So just be give me the stuff I need to make my change. Okay. We have we have some data just mathematically. We have some we have some data for you. Um um because we don't have the resources to do some of this number crunching. Um but IE does the people associated with IE. So it's not that IIE is trying to make themselves look good. It's that they have they have the ability to crunch some of the data. I would much prefer you guys just having straightforward conversation and leave EI out of it. Well, I'm not going to leave this data out of it because it's too impressive. So, and it's not it's not that they're trying to buy us anything. They
187already know we're cutting some some things. So, that's not the issue here. The issue is we want data too and we wanted data that we did not have the ability to collate. So we're going to we're going to share some of that data but we also are going to have in the workshop we want the principles all five of them are going to do for you the presentations of that they did for us of what's been going on this year so that you can see what's going on on their campuses. Well and that's good stuff too. It's them talking, not us. That might be fine, but that's not what the public sees. Well, then we need to have the public see the the other data. All right. So, and we'll do that. Okay. So, and
188we've got build in it's all part of budget because we can't we can't you know you heard in all of those things that that we have to prioritize but we have to keep in mind I have to keep in mind for me for sure um the kids first and the you know and how we're getting them how we're getting them where we need to be. So I'm not trying to be I'm not trying to be argumentative here. I understand what you want. You want straight data. Um but we have to be able to interpret those data in a logical way too. So, um, Jen's doing the cohorts for you. Yeah. And, um, um, I'm still going to share that this year data and we're going to see the principles on next Tuesday, next Thursday's meeting.
189Yes. They're going to each one is going to present. They've got about seven minutes, I think. So, the workshop needs to be well, they're will an hour at least. their data would would their presentations give us hard data or is it just going to be they're not going to give you a lot of hard data. They're going to show you the process that's that they've been through this year. Desert Valley has had hard data and Desert Valley has hard data. You could ask we can ask for the other from the others as well. What they're what they were doing originally was presenting to you. We wanted them to present to you what they presented to us for what's been going on this year. And um and then because of some of the midyear data, Desert
190Valley wanted to add their data. We can ask the other schools to add theirs as well. Okay. Data. Okay. Um I want to compare numbers. I I've been an educator too long and we have a tendency to say to be positive to do the right things and do all those things. So I'm what I'm saying is I just need something concrete. Absolutely. And I don't need an observation. I don't need that. I need quantitative rather than qualitative. Well, you're going to get some qualitative, too, but we'll make sure there's quantitative. Okay, please do. Um, any other kind of questions that we might have that we'd like to have answered? No, I want I want to see the quantitative data because what I've been seeing I haven't been mathematically is not making sense to me. So,
191I I'd like to see some better quantitative data. And let me tell you something, she and I have not talked. No, but being we don't talk being the math mind person, I I want the math figures, you know, the the other doesn't mean anything to me. Math I can read real well. I think the only thing she did ask me for were the scores that we got in June and I told her that that was on board docs and she that's okay. Um it will be um just I know you're not you're talking about future topics but so our intent was to have at the workshop have the princ principles do their little presentation. Jen and I have some data then to share with you. So that's probably going to be a little over an
192hour for uh for workshop. So it still start at 5:30. Just understand that it's going to be a longer one and and we can set the board meeting the board meeting time say for 6:30. We can always start later than that. Yeah. Um, but we want to give you a lot of information, but then the meeting itself is going to be meaty because I'll have I'll have a won't be a proposed budget. I'll have a draft budget for you to look at. And uh and then uh I have another um I talked some today with you about classroom site fund. Um uh but I have another budget that I didn't know what it was and how to use it and I'm going to share that information with you. um and some decisions relative to that.
193Um we have some other things on the agenda. So um it may be it may be a little lengthier meeting than usual. Fine. That's but meaty stuff. We've been here. I know this is the longest meeting we've had since I've been here. Welcome Judy. Yeah. Is that all for me? It totally gets easier from here. Right. We had a wonderful lunch. So that sounds good. Did that mitigate the time some? That makes your valuation better. Yeah, I'll cook more often for you then. And I'd just like to offer an observation too. I um not being an educator and and looking at the data that Madame President is referring to. I I can understand and have felt some of the same feelings I think that both Barb and and Belinda have expressed. But the one thing
194that sticks out in my mind is that one day I went over to middle school and I got to spend about 15 minutes in I think they were fourth graders, a fourth grade classroom. And I went in there and I saw this chaotic flurry of activity. And when I looked past it, what I saw was I saw the teacher coordinating and observing and directing. And I saw the students engaging with each other. And there was one girl in particular, tall, very pretty, tall girl. somebody at the next table was having an issue with something and she understood what they were talking about. She left her chair and she went over there and she spent a considerable amount of time trying to coach this other student till they got it. So maybe from an analytical data
195perspective, I totally understand. And I have those same reservations because seeing there's far too many students to the left of where we want them. Far far too many. And I don't think anyone argues with that. But I don't think I've ever been in a classroom where I've seen that kind of engagement. and student peer-to-peer help. And so if that's what IE brings uh or yeah, if if that's what they're bringing, maybe there is some value to that that is is not quantitative but qualitative. I'm I'm just offering that. And if you have a chance, maybe uh and I know you've been in in classrooms. I've been. Yeah. Not not so much in the last two months, but yeah, I can get back, Fred. I will get back. The other thing I would like to I
196would like to have on future topics. my classroom always was Galileo cuz maybe Fred's right and we are not evaluating things the correct way. Those are the data that I'm going to share with you. We maybe but compared to national data we're going to we're going to compare it. We're going to show our data to compared to national the I'm I'm thinking that the Galileo may not be the the instrument we need to be using. I don't know what's out there, Jennifer. I do not have a single clue. But maybe Galileo isn't the instrument we need to be using because if Fred is right and this is one incidence and I saw a couple Mhm. when I was over earlier. Um I saw a a good science and I saw a good math. um you
197know so Fred's got a point but this does not the data that you're showing us is not good. Okay. So maybe if you would bring us some other way of evaluating what the kids are doing. And well, some of it, Melinda, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I I think part of what you're talking about, and it's not so much with math, it is as it is with ELA, but one of the things that we realized recently is that um uh our K through2 people have not have somehow or other made teaching foundations of ELA, of language and reading and that stuff, um kind of secondary to the process, the new processes that we're trying to institute and and so um I I actually met with the with the elementary principles last month and directed them
198to reinstitute for reading for language ELA K through two a very specific structure for that ELA time so that we can make sure we're doing those foundational teaching foundational skills because let's face it reading is not reading is not a a human a hardwired thing in humans. It's not hardwired in our brains like oral language and uh some other things. So you have to be taught it and you have to learn it and somehow or other those things were weaker. That's part of what we were seeing with dibbles and that's what led to this direction that I gave them um to reinstitute and we made it very specific. must have these pieces. Your your ELA t time must have these pieces. You'll still see the conversations because those need to take place also, but but
199you don't learn to read with a conversation and you don't learn to read by listening to somebody else read. So, we've instituted some things particularly K through2 because if they don't have it, it's not going to happen in third grade on up. And um and that was part of where our analysis led us with ELA. Um uh we don't see quite the same thing in math, but we also we didn't we didn't want to hit them with too many things at one time, but the ELA for sure. So we've already take action taken action relative to ELA, which will affect both Galileo and Dibbles for them. So uh we're not just sitting on our hands and I'm I'm not trying to be defensive here either, but I want you to know that we are being
200proactive. And Galileo may not be our best tool, but man, we've looked at lots of tools, haven't we, Jim, over the years? Yeah, because there's only certain programs we can use. It has to be approved by state. Correct. In order to do the benchmark. Oh, it doesn't have to be. Oh, okay. And no, but you want it to be aligned with state standards. So, that restricts it some, you know. I mean, you've got to find a you've got to find a tool that aligns. Well, if and so we may have to look. Somebody would just look at it. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I know I mean Galileo has been around for over 20 years and uh I don't know. I used to I mean I had Galileo for last 10 years I was teaching that I
201used it and stuff and the the way we seem to be using the Galileo now and the way we used it back then is just so totally different. I felt I had much trueer knowledge of where my students were when we the way we were taught because I was one of the uh teachers that when we first brought Galileo in, I was a test teacher for a year with them and stuff and the way they had us set it up and stuff just seems so much more logical and gave us to me tour readings what we get this now with it. Okay. Okay. Thank you. some food for thought. Got it. I've got my list. Um item 7.2, upcoming board events. I don't think we have any. Do any of the schools have any programs
202that Not right away because we're going into testing. Yeah. Yeah. State testing doesn't start next week, but it does start the week after. Is there a board event that we should maybe put in there? Like uh something for the teachers? Cassie's going to have something for you, I think. Not this meeting. Not next week, but April for about appreciation, which you directed her to. Yeah. Yeah. Go work on that. I'm just thinking snacks. If you're going to be testing all day, some snacks. Oh, I see. in the in the workrooms or something like that. Would that be something you guys They would appreciate that. Yeah. Just a box of potato chips or something. But you know, but I'm just thinking something to say thank you for doing all this and it's pain in your beehind
203to do all this testing because it it's not it's sort of anti- teaching. Yeah. Yeah. And that's hard for teachers not to do. So, if we could do something simple since we're going to do a big appreciation and Cassie always puts together a good party. We'll see what she can think of before next meeting and you can decide. Yeah. 7.3. Date, time, and location of future meetings. It looks like we're stuck with next Thursday, March 20th, 2025, starting at 5:30 with a workshop and meeting at you said 6:30. I'm thinking 6:30. Okay. So, we're coming at 5:30. Yeah. the board meet the regular board meeting. Okay. Is there anybody with a conflict? No. As long as we start at 5:30, I'm fine. Okay. Because foundation ends about 5, so that gives me time to get
204over here after that one. Okay. If you're a little late, we'll expect you to walk in quietly. I mean, I can't make a grand entrance by late. Fashionably late. I mean, come on. Okay, last thing. I'll be dressed up for the picture, so I should make a grand entrance. Last thing with an order. I need a motion to adjourn this meeting. I make a motion to adjourn this meeting. All Is there a second? I'll second that motion. All those in favor? I, Melinda Subaski. I Charlene Diaz. I Fred Rushton. I Barb Zarziki. Hi Judy Reed. We are adjourned. Hey, thanks all for Thank you for everything you did today. Very late evening. Thank you, Jennifer. I hope the time late. It was