BCSD Town Hall 04/21/2022

001all right welcome ladies and gentlemen my name is larry tunforce i'm going to be the moderator for this uh town hall this evening and we're going to start with a pleasure allegiance to the flag so please stand in in the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for uh the president of the board cory burgess is not here this evening but he is on the telephone and he will be participating uh amanda amman who is the clerk of the board who will be running the meeting you might say uh we're going to start with dr carolyn stewart our superintendent who will give us a background on how we got here uh just to again let everybody know this is a done

002deal this is going to happen um this is not a night to give us 10 reasons where they should spend the money somewhere else it's not a night to sit back and say this was not a good idea the idea has already passed and they're moving forward so tonight is information and opportunity for you to ask questions for you to bring input and we'll start with dr kailan stewart thank you larry it's on i have i would like to give a little timeline for folks who are not aware in 2019 and 20 mr burgess and i had a conversation about we were just talking about good things for the district i had just come on board as the superintendent and one of the things that he talked about was retaining recruiting and retaining teachers and

003said something about housing and of course we kind of chuckled because we knew that that probably was not going to happen in our lifetimes in 2021 and even since then we have regularly lost employees we've lost some folks that we've recruited to come work for us because they could not find housing and so then they withdrew from their contracts we have lost employees who've been working for us because uh they're the homes that they've been renting have been sold and they have been displaced so in march of 21 i started googling to find out about teacherage because we knew we were going to be getting s or 3 funds and we did not know how many funds how much that would be i was also kind of lamenting and complaining on the at the chamber

004of commerce government and business affairs committee i'm on that committee and about the fact that we did not have enough housing and that we were losing employees the conversation then was we can either continue to complain about it or we can think about possible solutions so as a result of that and in that at the end of that meeting karen summit who is the chair of that committee after the meeting put together a bridge to bridge task team to help with this process and so from the very beginning there has been a conversation about a partnership a public private partnership and that continues in april last year we learned what our funding was for sr-3 it's 10.3 million dollars over 10.3 million dollars and and we had some rules and regulations we had to follow

005which i will go over in a minute we had meetings with stakeholders and this the bridge to bridge task team went and looked for various properties to recommend to the board for this for this project the board ended up selecting a property that is undeveloped and there is a photo on the wall on the north side of the room where the property is they wanted this because they wanted to create a neighborhood not take something that had already been designed and try to create a neighborhood from that but to start and create a neighborhood from scratch the district could do this purchase this property from unrestricted capital funds because the price was less than 250 000 and the board could decide to put houses on this property because we're considered a rural district by federal

006law and the district the district board could say that it's in the best interest of the district to have housing for its employees since january the team has continued to work with us the renderings that you see on the north wall under the photograph to the right and left of the photograph were donated to us by a local architect so that we could go to the city and talk about the zoning issues the the items between the two renderings are simply things that we have looked at in the past uh in all of these discussions none of those are actual things that we're going to do is just that we were continuously looking for various ideas of what we could do with this we did in fact meet with the city on monday to determine

007what we could do to to move along with this project and we will be applying for multi-family housing zoning for that property right now it is zoned as single-family dwellings so what you see is renderings are just that they're just ideas but it gets us far enough along that we can talk with the city about the zoning for the property and then move forward from there i have this up so that you know we had 13 stakeholder meetings we had a housing task team no the housing task team is that one from the city but we had educators and coaches and parapros we had a team for english language learners we had a stakeholder group special ed homeless transportation technology food service maintenance and custodial and and health and mental health so we had 13

008stakeholder groups who met and came up with many many recommendations when we met with this group we had to follow some guidelines sr1 and sr2 funds were emergency funds and so the federal government waived all of the usual typical rules that apply for use of federal funds for grants and they have a lot of rules ordinarily for grant funding but for those two those two funds uh grant funds they just waived all of those so we could pretty much do what we needed to do with those as long as we were addressing things that were a result of the pandemic it had to be related somehow to the pandemic so the sr1 funds were very much used to backfill our budget pay salaries to keep our people employed during the covid the initial part of

009kovid and you can see over here on on the wall where it says sr2 esser 2 started pretty much this year last year and this year and you can see that of the 4 million dollars that we got from sr2 over uh it's over four million 4.6 and over 4 million of that went to our employees 17 teachers who are employed this year in the district would not be employed this year in our district if it were not for s or 2 funding and that will continue into next year from sr3 funding so you can see that from s or 2 funding almost all of those funds went to teachers and other employees either as salaries and benefits or as a professional development and we managed with some rollover because we didn't use it all

010to purchase half of a bus and then we had money for the other half of the bus from another fund so we could do it that way sr-3 on the other hand is considered recovery funding and so the federal government put all of those they took away those waivers so there were a number of things that we had to do with these funds so on this graphic that i have on the screen for you the things that are in blue are things that we had to incorporate into our proposal to the arizona department of education so across the top you see learning opportunities and continuity of services a minimum of 20 percent of the esser funds must go sr-3 funds must go for that and that is in the federal regulations the state submitted to

011the federal government the state's plan for how the funds would be used in the school districts in arizona and part of the state's plan was that after that 20 percent we needed to consider three other areas one is social and emotional well-being one is safety and health and healthy environment and the other one is educator recruitment and retention so when i met with those stakeholder groups what you're seeing here on the screen is exactly what i shared with them the other requirements are on the left hand side we had to have stakeholder involvement therefore we had those stakeholder meetings we have to have equity we have to show that we are spending these dollars equitably across the district we had to have a program or project evaluation built in and that piece has since been

012withdrawn but at the time it was part of this plan and we built it into our our initial proposal to the arizona department of ed and we do have to have plan updates every six months so the things that are in blue on this uh chart are the things that we had to incorporate into writing this grant i'm going to make the screen a little smaller because i want you to see i want the view a little smaller because i want you to see that when we had the stakeholder meetings we were not just considering what to do with s or three we were also talking about the fact that we can incorporate some things that we need into the proposals for other programs so you'll notice light green columns on the right hand side

013those light green columns are all federal programs from which we receive dollars in our district those are ongoing programs we apply for them every year we have to write a proposal mrs lot who's sitting over here in the front row is our person who does that and right now she's in charge of about 15 grants so when we were looking at the information from the stakeholders and their uh their wish lists we were also looking at where we could put some of those items in some of these other grant proposals not just in esser but the two dark green columns are what we call soft money these are federal grants but they have a deadline and when the deadline is passed the monies we don't have the money anymore they are soft money finance 101

014for superintendents and business managers is you do not use soft money for salaries and benefits or for anything that you cannot sustain with other funding when that funding runs out so that's just kind of a quick glance at all of the things that had to be considered i know you can't read this it's too small the summary for this chart are the charts on the wall over here on the left and i would be happy to provide this this information to any of you it's public information at this point i just didn't prepare enough handouts for folks because it's about six pages and i didn't know how many people we were going to have but i would provide it for anybody who asks the summaries are over here on the wall where you see s

015or three the three s or three things and you see only three because we wrapped a lot of the social emotional well-being pieces of this grant proposal into the other into other elements so if you just even looking at this without being able to read it you can see the lists of things that fall under each of those categories that we have things in in all of them so you can see that under learning opportunities and continuity of services we have over 2 million dollars in salaries and benefits and we have learning tools learning tools can be lots of things but a lot of it is technology for us and professional development so you can see that 29.49 of this grant is going toward salaries benefits and programs that benefit our teachers and employees we

016have a whole list of learning tools we have professional development a lot of it and then you can see some things here where we've rolled in some social emotional well-being because we know that both our students and our employees have issues from this 24 months of tough times so we're trying to be very supportive safe and healthy environment this is where we are putting a good bit of money into upgrading the systems in our district so for instance 50 percent of the hvac units in our district are over 20 years old we replace them uh through the state facilities board when they go down but we'd like to get ahead of that process when 50 are that old we know that the state facilities board can't keep up with that and then for educator educator

017recruitment and retention there's a good bit of money here for our teachers this involves contract signing incentives that we will roll over into next year so for people who worked with us this year signed contracts that's the teachers they had a 2500 signing incentive so in in june right at the beginning of june those teachers who have been with us all year will get that 2500 the same will be in place for next year we have the state is requiring training for dyslexia for our teachers and so we will be using esser funds to pay for some of that and that's for two years it's over two years and then um the benefits that go with those things so that's not mine one other thing i would like to share with you because i know

018it's questions that will will relate to salaries and benefits i'm going to give you school finance 101 as quickly as i can right here so in arizona there is a funding formula and in its simplest form it is the weighted student count so how many students were enrolled in our schools last year and some students carry some extra weight because they are students who require extra services so for instance some of our special needs students some of our homeless students there are a number of categories that get added so that's called the weighted student count and that is multiplied times a base rate so the legislature says to school districts you get this many dollars per student so you multiply those dollars times the weighted student count and you get the budget for maintenance and

019operation that is our main budget so you see that bucket of money there for this current year that equals about four a little over 14 well almost 15 million dollars but it is a bucket of money and it is that's all we have we cannot overspend it we cannot change it other than if there are some adjustments made during the year if our enrollment goes up but it's based on the previous year we also get some funding that's called unrestricted capital and once again it's the weighted student count times a base rate so below where it says stu school year you can see that the the base rate for this current year is 4 45 dollars and some change and the base rate for unrestricted capital was 450 and some change per student so that's

020how we calculate right now the legislature is talking about a two percent increase in base rate for next year they haven't decided on a budget but that's the conversation that's going on right now and so you can see what the amount would be for next year i want you to understand that we have a whole lot of other buckets remember on that other chart where there were the light green columns those are some of these buckets they all have their own budget the only two buckets where we can move money in any given year are these two buckets up here we can move with board approval we can move money from mno to capital and vice versa all of these other buckets of money cannot be moved anywhere else you can use the money in

021the bucket when the money's gone too bad you're done okay so esser3 is one of these buckets and we can't roll the money into anything else we can only use it for the things that it is intended one of the questions that has been asked is why are we not making competitive salaries well we know how many people we need at any given time to work with our students and drive our buses and those things and that most of that money comes out of this bucket you can only pay salaries for so many people so you can either increase salaries and decrease employees or you can have salaries and more employees somebody recently asked us about well we keep losing teachers to california particularly to needles because it's just down the road it's pretty easy

022to drive down there here's the difference now i don't know their rate for this year but we met we had a meeting last week and this superintendent for needle school district was here and their per student funding for next year is 15 almost three times what arizona funds for our students so their starting salary for teachers is sixty thousand dollars they pay not insurance not only for their employees but for employees families to the tune of twenty plus thousand dollars a year they can do that because they have the funding so that doesn't mean they don't have to have a budget they have to have a budget just like we do it's just that their bucket is bigger than our bucket so i wanted to share that information because i think that will help people

023understand a little bit two things one is we don't want to pay salaries and benefits out of soft money when the money is gone in two years it's gone and if i can't sustain positions and salaries from this bucket then it means either employees have to go or salaries have to go back down and we would not ever want to do that to any of our employees we wish we could compete with california and nevada we wish we could it doesn't happen when you don't have the money in the bucket i thank you for listening to the explanations if you have questions for me later in the question and answer i will be happy to do that but for the most part i think you need to hear from the board thank you amanda actually

024our first uh cory are you still with us yes i am okay mr burgess is um gonna discuss property and project that's his um area that he has so mr burgess thank you for your time uh some of the questions that we have had is where is this property located it is on cali dave ricardo west of val vista and the type of housing we're planning on building at this point is thick built homes finger units with carports we're looking at an architectural design that will give us a neighborhood layout and some of these units will have yard space amenities we're looking at providing is that neighborhood environment ada accessible units at least one unit available for emergency employee situations pet friendly having landscaping appliance included and even some of them moving ready when we

025were asked who would lead this project bullhead city elementary school district chose to hire a construction project manager to oversee not only this project but some other capital outlay projects that we're working on uh this job has been posted and we're in the final processes of completing that we currently do not have a developer who is building these harms we are still in the uh early stages of this but when we do get to that point federal grants have very strict guidelines for procurement and service for services and materials we will put out service requests for the projects or we may select a developer from the cooperative purchasing contracts our timeline for this project we're looking at may of 2022 to begin our architectural engineering designs by june infrastructure work begins for our utilities and

026hopefully by july of 2023 our phase one will be remove and ready miss amen back to you awesome thank you mr burgess if you have questions on property and project when it comes to it we'll have mr burgess address those for you next we have tenants ms charlene diaz okay so the biggest question is who is eligible to live in these housing in this housing housing units and it's any employee that is employed by bullhead city school district be it the superintendent the principal uh a paraprofessional custodian bus driver if you're employed by us you are eligible to live at this unit um it can at this point we don't know how many units we're going to be able to um build and so at once we know that we'll be able to have a

027little more um understanding of of how to choose people to to live in those units whatever um the units will be available to families it could be available to singles if you're if it's a three bedroom and three single people want to live share and live in one unit they can do that um so it's available to any makeup of of people unfortunately the house this particular uni uh housing unit is not available to other school districts it is only bullhead school district and it's not available to other essential workers such as firefighters and police officers they have to be an employee of bull hit school district okay there was a question about how if this is going to be a benefit for teachers and it's going to affect their taxes no it's not it's

028it is no different than renting a house or an apartment from a a private landlord you're renting a a unit and that's it it's not going to affect any employees taxes and if you have any questions it's pretty simple uh if you have any questions i'll be happy to answer them afterwards okay um i'm up next i have leasing i know leasing's a little bit further out that's actually when we get prepared to get our agreements together what exactly we need to have in those agreements some of the questions that have been brought to us already are what will the rent include our discussion has to include in the rent not only the occup occupancy of the home but a uh one car garage kitchen laundry appliances we're going to include the electricity and gas

029if applicable water sewer waste disposal and the wi-fi that way it's one whole charge for everything at the same time there's no individual expenses they'll understand exactly what it would be we had asked how we were asked how it will compare to other housing area in the area how will the district pay for the program administration maintenance operation and long term and if there's a profit where does it go and that seems to be a really important question that we have that one asked quite a bit um since it's paid for um ahead of time with the sr3 fundings the expenses utilities the fees for the management firm everything when we have the rent that comes in that will be going in the teacher teacher account that will be used to take care of those

030expenses so um let's say that i'll just say a toilet breaks um and it needs to be replaced it would be that money that is used to replace that not anything that comes out of our our mno or our unrestricted capital or any other buckets for that matter it would be self-funding at that point when they talked about the cost how much would it be we've done some research there's homes that are if you can find a home for rent in this area they are kind of pricey right now i looked just today and found a home that was just under 1200 square feet for just over twelve hundred dollars a month so the idea with this is that the rents would be similar in projections to district districts across the country and hopefully be

03120 roughly this is just a number we're working with um less than what it would cost currently out in um in the in in the just general general public for them to to rent so we're trying to make sure that it is workable for our employees what will this look like with the district as a landlord well we wouldn't technically be the landlord we'd actually hire a property management company and they would service the teachers account in which rents would be deposited we were asked will the renter be charged for repairs that will depend um when we get there there's some lease agreements that we've been looking up with similar to moving into any apartments or any houses that you may rent there's you know if there's a damage you would do an assessment just

032like you would most places where you you know you kind of do the walk through and you mark all the boxes so this is a sample that i had found when you do the premises and the content stuff like that like you would do in a natural rental of a facility would be things that we were looking at doing um is there a time limit for staying is this temporary or permanent i know that was another big question that was asked um and and this is not to be considered permanent housing for anyone however the board has not deter determined a definition for temporary at this time so the number of units available in phase one will really be a factor for us so if we have five to ten units in phase one we

033obviously aren't going to keep renewing we want to allow other people who may need that but if you're somebody who's currently in the facility and you still need the facility there's still that need that's something to take into consideration um terms of lease again it would probably be more of just year to year at this point kind of we're looking at july to june like what your teaching contract would be or other employees contract would be it's usually based on a school year i think those were the main ones that i had again i'm leasing so we're working on leasing we're gathering questions um if you have other questions when it's my turn i'm going to gather all those additional questions so as we get these and we get closer to that time it's going

034to help us determine what we need to include in these leases as well not just us doing research on teachers and finding what we can find it would help us to have what you know and what you can let us know needs to be in there as well next we have funding with mrs annaboyd hello okay uh so i'm going to cover funding overall it was pretty much covered in one of the slides there and then i'll talk about where we go from here in regards to the funding um so we all know that or if we've been paying attention we know that we spent 150 000 to buy the land it was five acres which is uh i guess pretty decent i don't i don't know i don't buy land so but i've heard

035that was a really good price um we have 2.5 million of the sr3 funding so when we build this that is our budget like that is like cut and dry we are spending only that amount we are not going over that amount unless of course we have donations in kind where we can actually like someone donated the architectural plans if someone wants to donate things and things like that then that's the only time that you're going to see above that so there's not going to be anything extra we are going to stick within those means if we have to cut things or whatever like that and then that goes into um what happens in the future in regards to okay now that we have these built what if we can only build five or ten

036units all right so i did look at other properties and teacherships that have been built and there's quite a few of them out there where they did them in phases because they didn't have the money or couldn't get the loans uh in order to build um as many as they needed to actually sustain their population and so they did them in phases and used the money and the profit that they would get if you will profit from the rent that was paid in order to eventually build more teachers okay um for property tax it's a it's a school property so as far as i know right now we don't have to pay property tax that's what was given to us is that there is no property tax so we don't have to pay that um

037let me make sure i have everything okay so a few things on the funding to kind of understand with what's going in there and i did a lot of research and i looked into a lot of other housing developments almost all of them were built with grants and loans or with loans that they had to pay back and so the rent a lot of times had to be substantially higher in order for them to pay back those loans and to be able to maintain the property many different affordable housing units can go as low as 700 and i would definitely want to push for something lower or not lower than some but you get what i'm saying lower than what a lot of other places have been doing because they were doing it because they

038had a loan to pay back we don't have a loan to pay back so everything every penny that comes in for the rent can be used to sustain the property to uh to uh fix things to do any of those kinds of things and then eventually to build more housing units so that eventually you have enough to to have enough for your population um one of the really good things that i have found with being fully paid that it does allow us to get a place to where the rent is low enough because i know that amanda had said about you know we're not sure how long we would have them in the house but the whole point of it is it's at the first at the beginning when you only have five or ten

039units it's kind of like emergency you know what i mean mojave high school lost several teachers this year because they couldn't find a place to live like the rent went up or somebody decided they're selling the house that they're renting and they could not find a place so they left and we had to replace those teachers and i think even one of them didn't even get replaced all the other students had to go to different english teachers because we could not find a replacement um and so if the if it is low enough that they can save right that was one one school district i can't remember which one i had the paper no i don't have the paper anyways where that one of the things they found was a lot of people uh could

040stay well they had like 77 units so they were able to do this a lot better with just 5 or 10 units but people would save and they would be able to put a down payment on a house and i could tell you right now as someone who does rent i cannot save enough to put a down payment on a house because my rent is too high to do that and so a teacher might come into this area they're saving a lot of money uh to to stay here and eventually could put a down payment on the house and that would is what i would hope would be the goal and so everything in this is can be funded simply from that so i just wanted to say that extra little things and then so

041if you have questions that's me all right in our last area we kind of had some questions that didn't quite fit into each of these little categories so we have other in that category is mrs sobrowski i want to i want to reminisce a little bit when i moved here to town in 74 there were two places for me to rent one was wing foot cottages over behind um swanees where swanees is now it was swanies wasn't there and uh a trailer a single wide trailer down here on coronado boulevard my dad almost didn't let me stay because there was no choice and if i hadn't been so forward and say dad this is what i'm going to do then he probably would have taken me home and we would have looked in a job

042and i'd been i'll be i would be down in scottsdale somewhere at this time but i am very happy to be here one of the things that happened to me is what could happen using our units i ended up with this the federal government wanting to build houses here because we were so rural and you got to remember back in 74 hancock was was only paved down just so far and the rest of it was was all gravel and that's where i lived so basically i saved enough money to get into what was called a farm home loan which was basically a federal government loan that kept my rent very very low and very reasonable until the school district jacked up my salary to the point where i ended up paying wherever what everybody else

043was doing so what i'm hoping for this teacher is that given the 20 that we're going to try to keep our housing a little bit lower that that 20 percent can be used to get into your own place and if you have teachers who actually buy their own houses then you have a permanent resident of the area and i think that's what we're looking for because that's real teacher retention is when you get somebody to say and commit to having their family and growing up in bullhead city so that's where i'm at but we had some interesting questions like were there similar projects located and where they what are the pros and cons they are all over some of the more interesting ones come from the east coast they started small they started with 12

044units they went to 74 units then they went to a whole bunch more units until they they've actually created their own little neighborhoods so this is possible they are they've been on the indian reservations for forever i can remember applying to chin li when i was first getting into teaching and basically being offered housing on chin li or at shin leaf so i would it was cheap it was cheap um so i'm thinking that that those kind of things can happen the occupancy for the the ones that are currently running i have a 9 85 percent plus number down here but there are a lot of them with waiting lists they actually if they have 77 units they'll have 66 on a waiting list so these are not going to be houses that are just

045used for one year and abandoned the next time around by the school district because we will be using these over and over and over again to create this atmosphere that will keep our teachers here to make them permanent residents of bullhead city um i think they're very successful i was very disappointed i will say that i couldn't find any hard data on whether it kept people involved but there was a lot of what are called ancillary ancillary data which is data that's just word of mouth type stuff this basically says i'm really happy that i have a house to live in that i can save money or i'm really happy that i have a house that's next to an another teacher so if my kid forgets their lunch i can take care of that um

046[Music] there's a lot of that ancillary stuff there is no real hard data and i'm not sure exactly how you would actually create that hard data but there is no number that says yep 75 percent of the people stay around for for years the best i could get was that there was one group or one school district that had 77 units for seven for five years they upped it for ten seven years and they've been filled for that whole time people don't move in and out of them it's sort of like a regular housing if you're a real landlord the other question that was interesting is has the district thought of hiring a contra or contractor or hiring a communication person to assist we have one we have one um lance ross in the back

047of the room is the is the information officer for bullhead city and he does a really good job he's had the stuff online he's had the stuff in the newspaper um the gentleman from the the paper is always here at school board so we have several outlets to the public if the public uses them um twenty percent that yeah this is a good question what breaks do those of us who have lived and worked here for years and not gotten very much pay increase received since we we do not have the housing option i think mrs stewart basically explained that earlier there's some bonuses that you get 200 or 2 500 god what you know as a as a retired teacher i could really think about how about about that much money coming in for

048just signing up for another year so again these people are taking getting taken care of at the same time [Music] will they receive a housing stipend no they're basically going to be just like the rest of us we pay mortgages or we pay rent or we pay somebody to stay where we're at so that's about it [Music] could we provide the rent assistance no that's considered a gift and we can't give tax funds we can't give those funds out as gifts some of the rest of the questions were interesting somebody actually said how does the public stop this from happening it's not it's not going to happen mr tuneforce told us that at the very beginning of this meeting it's not going to happen this is in the works it's going to happen now what

049we have to do is a community is to get around this and make it into a community for teachers and for public or public school employees okay i think i'm finished awesome thank you mr toonforce all right you've heard from our board and our superintendent now it's your turn this meeting is being streamed and it's also on zoom so we're going to ask everyone to come up to the microphone if you want to speak raise your hand i'll point to you in a minute and then we'll have you come up to the microphone here's the fun part you're going to have two minutes the board made this decision before we got here i have a timer when it goes off you're done so at that point in time we'll ask you to sit down and

050let the next person come to the microphone please state your name when you come up only because if you ask a question the board would like to answer it and identify you by name hilda you want to go first hi there i just have a quick question um it's national fair housing is this on yes it is okay it's national fair housing month as we've been told over and over and um i was down in phoenix i just got back ran over here and we had a presentation by the director of the arizona department of housing just about these kinds of things and i asked him specifically about this with the school and he said quote if you take any federal funding you have to abide by every fair housing um requirement and you cannot

051pick and choose who goes in there so i just wanted to let i made him repeat it twice so i just wanted to let you know please if you need to get a waiver have you talked about this with anybody or or is the director of the housing mistaken about this the information that we have is because it is on school district property and it is teacherage by arizona law teacherage is housing for school district employees with federal funding yes okay double check it absolutely specifically asked him about this situation absolutely and we've had long conversations with we had long conversations with you with our attorneys to make sure now the piece of fair housing that we would absolutely make sure that we abide by is that a percentage of these units would be 88

052you know they would be accessible because we have employees that you know we wouldn't want to do that i have another question in my two minutes i spoke with you several months ago and i asked you you didn't know the answer i'm hoping you have the answer now if the tenant doesn't work out in the school district is here for he or she afforded all the same rights as regular tenants that's part of the fair housing are you meaning like if they're if they're okay yeah for whatever reason it doesn't work out do they you have to give them the same kinds of things that you have to give to other tenants regular people have to give to tenants they'd have a they'd have a you know a termination date you know when they would

053have to move in those kinds of things in terms of the others i'm not sure we haven't addressed that with the attorneys at this point but we would certainly make sure that we did we don't want to do things that are illegal next hi i'm nan nichol i live in port mojave and i just had a question being i was a broker in california the fair housing law were very strict at the time and the last time my license expired was in 1999 and we know a lot of things have happened since then it to me it's a lot stricter and all these things under the fair housing discrimination and renting or buying a home getting a mortgage seeking housing assistance or engaging in other housing related activities if anyone feels that these things have

054been mishandled they actually have the right to sue so i'm very concerned that we would have a situation and hopefully i'm wrong that someone would say i was discriminated against because of whatever they they just there's all these reasons why they can say they were just can they speak in the microphone sorry and so i'm just worried that uh this might open the door to the lawsuits and things that maybe haven't been considered but maybe with the other ones they've already considered this you have a track record i don't know but i am concerned about that and i'd like to know that you folks feel have a good reason to feel comfortable that's a great question thank you thank you thank you who wants to tackle that question well i don't know that we necessarily

055have the answer to that because that would be something that would go along with our leasing and making sure that we have it spelled out to where we're not um you know discriminating against anybody for any reason so but that's definitely something that we've got wrote down that we can look into and speak more with the attorney when we look at the verbiage and we look at the things that we're going to do to put in there to make sure that we are following those federal guidelines and not not discriminating amanda i believe that dr stewart has had conversations with at least one school district that has a teacherage where they have have experienced a lot of this stuff a lot of these a lot of them and that they will be able to give

056her the guidance so that she'll bring it to the board absolutely we actually i had a 45 minute conversation last week with the person in charge of the housing for la unified school district and and as anna said their housing was all funded with loans and low interest loans and those kinds of things and and so you know he talked about the fact that they had some issues with the fair housing that they of course had to do relative to the loans so um and he he'll be available to assist us with any ideas but we'll be looking for anybody who's doing these kinds of things so we don't fall into any of the any of the pitfalls that they might have had we want to make sure that we're avoiding those uh right up

057front and and [Music] the number of houses that we actually can put say in phase one it's going to determine a whole lot about how that selection process you know our pi our pi in the sky dream is the 20 and and so you know how the board decides um uh that process when there are 20 is very different than if you only have five units but it's also a matter of having that having that property management company because they're going to have to follow some of those some of those guidelines so this those are excellent questions for us to follow up on thank you come on up john you brought up a good or everybody here it's a tough deal to do well i think the young lady on the federal issue brought up

058a pretty good speaking of the microphone pretty good point i think the young lady brought up a good point excuse me about federal and if the arizona gentleman in real estate doesn't recognize the teacher clause that you've said are we sure that the feds are not going to come in with that with lawsuits and everything else that could be levied against us but if arizona doesn't expect that doesn't recognize it how do we recognize it so it makes sense what i'm asking and you guys have policy and procedures for teachers that don't pay you know they're going to have family problems they're going to be behind on the rent they're not going to pay the rent all kinds of divorces you have policies for that are we picking up the tab when they can't make

059a payment we eat the taxpayers anyhow some policies like that should be pretty uh pretty stringent okay so adding in some definition some information on policies if there were someone to have a divorce or split or can't pay or something happens okay i got it yeah i can i can also well i can also answer that because uh the practice in any place where this occurs is the rent or the payments are taken right out of their salary before they get their check and that just that just complicates the issues with them now you got kids that don't eat blah blah blah i i think that's kind of a problem i don't think you want to get involved in so that's kind of similar to like insurance like our insurance comes out before we get

060our paychecks so i already know like that's coming off the top um so i do know like things like that are already built into our contracts like if you do a scholarship if you do river fund if you do mojave high school scholarship tax credit we sign up and so we know what comes out of our paychecks um ahead of time so like i know that i would then be able to go okay that much is is that you brought up good argument we're not paying enough or we're not paying enough salary and now we're going to start to take away because i just think you're going to open it well terrible work environment well to point out realistically one we are trying to make it affordable and i would definitely fight to make it

061as affordable as possible but uh also if they didn't live with us they would have to live somewhere and they would have to pay rent somewhere so somewhere out there they would have to do that i know i know but arguing the point you start getting them fist fights with your employees because they can't play no because they've got issues you know beyond their control yes and they would get in that with whatever wherever they would be living like like let's be realistic they would have issues with wherever they're paying a lot of money for well it could have been solved prior to yeah and the idea behind is where the money goes would go into there and if there was an issue or like i said a toilet broke or something it would come

062out of there it wouldn't come out of the taxpayers it would come out of the tetragen account that would be with the property management today we have to look at the future thank you ashley hopefully i'll be able to send them to caroline and actually get the answers this time um because i didn't get them the other day i can't hear you ashley can you speak into the mic please yes of course i can um so she had mentioned that they're going to be having these individuals get their paychecks taken out is that is that have you gone through the legalities of what that's like on being able to take somebody's paycheck for the cost of rent having lived in teacherage in my past no i'm asking you if you of course it's legal through

063it no i haven't we haven't had a teacher age so we haven't had lawyers yes your and not just your educational lawyers i'm talking about real estate lawyers no not resources haven't gone through any of the legalities for leases or what is going to happen so she says oh well it happens everywhere where but the fact is if a an employee is terminated how are you going to are you going to let them live out that lease no probably not that will be a bored decision okay but how are you going to throw them out of a leased home that would have to be part of what gets developed if you ask that question we're going to have to look into it if you have more questions you i'm just saying so i have my

064two minutes yeah you might you might get my job yeah um no and i think that i i feel sorry because our our government constantly makes decisions without making getting information first and knowing exactly what they're going to do and how they're going to do it you guys don't even know how much this is actually going to cost cost inflation is going up the roof it's crazy have you even do you know exactly what per unit is going to cost two million and whatever dollars we're going to get whatever we can get with the money we have asking a specific right do you know how each how much each unit is going to cost estimate yes one in a conversation 200 a square foot or slightly over that so whatever it is that we can

065get for the amount of money we have is what we would do in phases right but your whole spew in the in the beginning was 20 20 units correct that was our dream yeah i mean and that's the phase of through phase four we know we can't do that at this point i just think it's irresponsible thank you very much okay thank you sir i apologize for my appearance i just came from football practice not exactly board appropriate but that's okay so quick questions um so first i'd like to point out these are there is no loan right you're not borrowing funds and because there's no property taxes let's say worst case scenario not a single one of them is rented it still doesn't cost the taxpayers anything correct that's something i think the public

066needs to be aware of worst case scenario nobody rents them there's no loss there's no taxpayer responsibility we're not on the hook for anything because they're paid for in cash and there's no upkeep right correct so keep that in mind taxpayers that there is no way for this to come back on us as a taxpayer guys guys that's the first thing so that's worst case scenario now my next question is a little more complicated as far as best case scenario best case scenario they're all rented we have phase one two three seven fourteen you know and everything's wonderful and now you have 300 homes i have no idea right at some point you're going to say enough is enough and because we know how real estate works you're going to have quite a bit of

067money coming in and that money isn't going to building more units and it's more than enough to pay for the maintenance of those units what do we do with the surplus does that mean the rent gets just cheaper and cheaper and cheaper or can that money spill over into some other district it can't it has to stay with the housing development so then i guess i know this is probably 20 years in the future perhaps but when that comes to pass and the school district is flush with money for money that they can't use in their district what do we do with the money yeah that's a fire that's a dream it i bring that up anybody who understands real estate and follows guys like grant cardone follows guys to understand real estate that is

068a potent you have you as a school district has the greatest advantage ever of at this moment free money from the government and no property taxes it's a given that you're going to get make money it's it's undeniable that the district will be fine because it can't go bad i think the school the employ the taxpayers need to understand that the numbers can't be against you so when it goes well what then i'll sit down and listen to your response one thing one thing i can say is there was one housing district that i had seen that was a teach that had a gym and it had a pool and it had two playgrounds and it was fully fenced with security and it had over a hundred units and almost the entire teacher population lived

069within that community so i guess that's what we could do it's a dream okay thank you we have a zoom question i have to work with what i have done if the rental payments will be automatically taken out of paychecks will it then be out of pre-tax dollars that is a definite advantage over the employees who have to pay their rent mortgages out of after tax dollars and that's a good question and dr stuart just said it it cannot be it cannot come out pre-taxed it's just like when you when any of us sign up for river fund or any of those things that the taxes are already determined and then the money comes out so it cannot be true it cannot be paid pre-tax other questions right so i know i only have two

070minutes your name first ava um but i will speak to what would be lost if this is not successful and it would be your initial buy of the land for the 150 which i would like to know what else you could have done with that money because it was part of your unrestricted capital budget which could have gone to the teachers i would also like to know or understand better what you are doing for other staff members they are feeling like the ones who would be getting this housing would be getting more than they are and even if you get to that twenty percent which would off of let's say a twelve hundred dollar rent that brings it down to nine hundred and sixty dollars the twenty five hundred dollar incentive bonus that you spoke

071to ms swarowski was only instituted for this past school year and i know that because i was a previous employee and i signed on for that because of that bonus now i left the district so i'll be obviously i did not get that but that 2500 bonus is not a mainstay as far as my understanding and so that would not be in place of well we're not going to give you a housing stipend but you get a ha you know you get that bonus at the end and that's also before taxes the 260 dollars that would be that 20 number off of a 1200 rental idea is 2800 plus and that's not before taxes that's like the real deal 2 800 so there's a large discrepancy there and i do think you guys have to

072consider if you're really gearing this to say yes this is for the retention of teachers you're not paying attention to the staff that is here in your district right now in my opinion and i was one of your educators and i say that from experience and i say that from the heart this project is not retaining the teachers you're about to lose and i would like you to really consider that yeah mr burgess are you still with us still here do you i mean do you want to answer any of these we keep popping i forgot you were there for me i would like to to address the one that was just given from ava okay i understand that we're not able to help every single teacher but just because we can't help everybody doesn't

073mean we don't help anyone we're doing the most we can with these funds and as mr beck said this is a winning proposition for our district there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered we are working on that but we are absolutely heading in the right direction and mrs browsky had an excellent point when she said earlier we need the community to help us in this program to make it better we have an enormous opportunity here that i never truly believed would be possible but now it is if we get everyone behind this program this could be absolutely phenomenal other questions well i'd like to just one more follow up on that i mean to talk about what we've done for the staff now and i understand that the 2500 is

074unsustainable maybe maybe for the future and it's currently a signing incentive and the risk compensation we've done but we've also hired 17 teachers 17 positions two years ago we also hired 16 coming into the next we've been able to hire aides and all different people sent to pd's and by curriculum and supplies that we never would have and we have where we've spent what four five and a half million dollars just on salaries and benefits alone not including all the other things that we have done so we have actually we've done a lot for the staff as well and then this is just another added benefit that we can try to help somebody and and i like what mr burgess said where he said we'd like to help somebody like we we just really want

075to try to help somebody in our district and if that could be one and maybe it's someone who falls on hard times and they need that opportunity to have someone be there for them and have a place for them this is what we need we need them to have that opportunity so we don't lose them like mrs boyd said we we had someone leave that semester we had to divide up those classes i know it's happened at the elementary where classes get fuller teachers you know have to absorb those extra students because somebody had to leave due to housing and then or we have long-term subs teaching our students which is currently what's happening because we it's hard to find those applicants when you they leave mid-year and don't have a place to stay so

076i know that's difficult teachers teach it on their preps yes yes i i think we saw a hand in the back right would you like me to get to the mic there you go so i came here um really kind of upset by this whole thing when i saw it on facebook but i got to say your presentation answered a lot of my questions i have worked for jobs where my um rent came out be you know taxes were taken out and my rent was taken out um you know you're not always going to make everybody happy a hundred percent of the time so i kind of haven't always disagreed i haven't always agreed with this board but i say this has to go forward if it helps five people if it helps to some

077woman who ends up in domestic violence and needs a place to go i think that having that available as an emergency place to go and still keep her teaching job i think is a bonus so i'm just going to say go forward and have thank you thank you thank you and what was your name i'm sorry oh i'm brendan hi brenda sir good evening i'm i'm a teacher so i don't think we'll have a problem hearing me your name your name is a couple things you're not very short-winded so i'm going to say your name please my name is bill earnest and i teach right next door at bullhead city middle school fifth grade okay okay um i got a question in reference well a statement first to the gentleman that spoke to about there's

078no loss the whole goal of doing this is teacher recruitment retention could you please speak into the mic the whole goal of this project is teacher recruitment and retention if the units sit open sure taxpayers aren't anything but we didn't solve a problem either right and it was a waste of time waste money and a waste of effort okay so there is a loss there um you spoke about the teachers living in the apartments till they got the money together to buy home well if they're not making enough money to pay that apartment payment how are they going to afford a home would be my next question okay which seems kind of logical to me we're hurting for money and the third one on this document you shared earlier when i looked at the totals

079for a home the home building process it came up to three million dollars not 2.4 i'm kind of confused i was looking for clarity on that okay i can answer that one originally we were talking 2.4 and then as we as with anything in a grant and you start looking at okay well this won't work or that won't work and we understood some finances relative to prepping the property and that kind of thing we rolled some other dollars into there so what you have in front of you is and what's over there is what is designated so um anna didn't misspeak on purpose that was the original number so three million dollars is coming out of esters to fund the housing that you're going to build okay instead of 2.4 million which is a 25

080increase okay thanks okay and then i can answer about the thing the whole point is to have affordable housing so it would be like i don't want to speak in regards to that but i know i would push for a lot lower than 20 unless of course rent goes significantly down anyway which eventually hopefully the housing market will burst eventually um as it usually does but uh i would definitely want it to be to where they can in fact save and purchase a home eventually and i do think this is possible my husband is disabled he does not work he works at home or basically stays at home takes care of the home we live 100 percent on my teacher salary at mojave high school with a twelve hundred dollar rent all right we still

081have a car we still are able to buy groceries i can still get health care and all that jazz um i am still able to uh fund my addiction with yarn you know so so the this idea that that it is 100 not a livable wage i would say i mean i have a friend who's a nurse practitioner and his wife is a nurse and they're always broke so i guess the question is is what are you doing with your money maybe it's that 750 car payment you have so there's things that people really need to think about when it comes to whether or not this is affordable or sustainable are you smart with your money or do you have a 400 motorcycle and a 500 car and you have netflix hulu amazon and uh

082you know we can go on and on and on but as someone with a disabled husband who lives 100 percent a 1200 rent house pays my bills they do not cover my electricity they do not cover my gas uh i have netflix i have hulu and i have amazon prime and i pay 1200 a month in rent on my salary alone so if the rent is lower if the rent is lower and they actually the minimum i think that the teachers get paid here is pretty much what i get paid okay so they might make a little bit more they might make a little bit more or maybe the thing but my point being is if the rent is low enough it is 100 possible like anyone else out here who has probably purchased a

083home or has done things you have to make sacrifices you have to just make decisions in order to save up to make a down payment on a house but from my experience it is a possible and if we can get the rent as low as we can to where it is understandable it is something that we can use i mean heck if i had a 700 house payment right now that's 500 extra bucks a month that i could have to put for a down payment on a house but i don't because my rent isn't that so i the one thing i would say bill like that i would say to you is i do agree with you and the fact that if it sits empty it's a loss because to me that means we're not

084helping somebody that means that somehow we miss something and and i do feel that if it if it were to sit empty for some reason that it would be but i don't see that as a problem i i really feel with what we've gone through in in the high school district elementary district and all the districts around us of the teachers that have left due to not being able to find affordable housing we will have a wait list for those we will have a list of renters wanting in as quick as they can because they understand or new teachers coming to the district or or veteran teachers that like she had mentioned earlier there are teachers that have had people their landlords come to them and say by september 2023 we're selling your house sorry

085we're giving you a year heads up year and a half heads up because the market is just too good and we have to sell our accountant had recommended it and there's nothing you can do about that you just have to continue on so um i hope that we don't sit empty so we can help somebody because i would agree that if it did so empty it would be a loss it would it would feel like a loss at least to me any other questions sir excuse me i've called on him i'm sorry let's go guys my name is james and i am mr chairman members of the board stuart dr stewart and i had a conversation about this at one time when i saw her at an event and uh and i'm in support of

086it um i think it's it's a it's good that we're thinking of other options to for teacher shortages my question is that if the 2.4 million or now three wasn't used for this project what would it be used for would it be used for teachers salaries to give raises if so how much how long would that last right at some point like you said you've got to replace that here you have something that you don't have to replace that gives some teachers a continuing it's a continuing benefit for teachers maybe not all of them but those who need it um and then let's say you can fund how long if you gave raises let's say three percent raises to your teachers how long would that last for maybe 14 years not even you can't even

087use it yes so the issue is the money the money stops on september 30 of 2023 and then whatever's left rolls over for one more year but whatever is not spent on september 30th of 2024 is gone so with that with with these these are assets you're going to have these homes that 15 20 years down the road you know they're generally real estate here in bullhead i've been here three years and real estate in this area has gone up considerably during that time sometimes it goes down sometimes it goes up but you're going to have that asset at the end of 20 25 years 30 years that if you need to get rid of it and sell it you're still going to have that pot of money so i don't see a loss here

088um the other question that i have and i'll wait for the answer in your spreadsheet spreadsheet presentation you mentioned that the sr funds are soft money right so my question is we don't use soft money for salaries because then at the end of that we we have to replace it but it appears that that's what we did and i think that's a question that we need to talk about and that's a great it's a good question so sr2 and sr1 were both emergency funds and when schools were shut down one of the things that fortunately the folks who shut down schools said keep your people employed do what you need to do to keep them employed and so that's how we use those funds and because sr2 is also emergency funds our budgets i talked

089about the buckets and one thing i didn't emphasize i said it but i didn't emphasize it is that our budget for any given year is based on our student enrollment the prior year so during our enrollment dropped by 350 students so the budget that was originally arranged for this year was based on 300 fewer students than we'd had the year before now the good news is that we've gotten a number of those students back probably about 250 it might not be the same 250 students but we've gotten about 250 students back so our the budget for next year will look better because of that increase in enrollment but to keep our current students so we started this year with almost as many students as the year before last not last year and so we needed

090the teachers so we could justify saying we can pay for these teachers so we can serve our kids our budget was affected by kovid we can serve these kids keep our class sizes decent but we know that those positions will either need to roll back into our regular budget or or some positions will go away but the beauty of that money and keeping those positions is that we could keep our class sizes a lot smaller and this board agreed to capacity for our classes so that we really could give the best effort to helping our kids they didn't lose education but they did lose opportunities for some education during that 18 months and this lets us have lots more focus per student than we might have otherwise so in that case that it is short-term

091salaries it's 17 positions next year it will be 18 positions that are funded with this money but at the year after we either absorb those positions back into our regular budget or we figure out something else so and those folks are making the same salaries the rest of our teachers are making it's not like it's less money it's the same salaries no they were existing positions that we got to keep yeah that's an excellent question thank you for asking that those were existing positions so had we not had s or 2 for this year 17 of our current teachers who are working with our children would not be employed by this district classes would be class sizes would be bigger considerably bigger at all grade levels and some things and some things would not be

092so good in those classrooms so yeah they were existing positions and that was the intent of that money was to keep people employed i will say that sr1 which was a hair over a million dollars kept our bus drivers employed during those three months that we did not have kids in school because our budget got cut for that year the budget had been approved but it was cut so it kept our folks employed so kudos to any of our legislative people for saying this is a this is an ugly situation but let's do everything we can to keep current employees employed and we worked at that excellent question okay we have another zoom question i'm curious about the cost of developing the land is there any water electric sewer etc already set up also would

093this land project ever be able to be sold in the future jeff record corey yeah mr burgess infrastructure is currently not in place but we are working on that that is in our budget of our entire project as far as selling this in the future i will have to refer that to dr stewart i don't know how i don't know the answer to that i don't really know the answer to that either i suppose at some point if we felt that it was not you know if the board felt that it was not a viable project it could be sold the difficulty then is you've got a pot of money in a bucket that you can't touch can't use it for anything else as far as i know but we would have to look into

094what would happen if we sold come on up man okay did i understand you to say your name please penny davis did i understand you to say that utilities were included with the rent so that's one of the discussions that we are having is to include it all together so then it's one joint package for them i know that you'd mention mec wanted to reach out and partner and somebody else about possibly wi-fi and so it would be we would try to develop a package who in their right mind wouldn't crank up the air in the summertime well they crank up the heat how are you going to regulate that and take care of it because where i live we don't turn the heat on much i take showers without the heat on all winter

095because we pay our utilities and we don't use our air conditioning to the max until you know i mean we don't use it to the max so how are you going to do this with rent i mean why would you move out if you're if your utilities cost more than your rent hey who's paying it good question and and that's one thing that was in here it was a suggestion and one of the things we talked about was including it all together so i mean that would be something to look at if if say somebody liked it like an iceberg in their in their house you know how would you regulate it would there be an allotment if you went over 250 then would they pay you know so that's all things that to look

096at so that just posed more questions just asking that one so who would not turn crank it up or i'm just kidding i hear you i don't we don't turn our air on we leave the heat the doors open as much as we can yes i hear you hey questions sir that's a good question hi my name is carrie and i think this is a really bad idea because i own properties and there is a lot of maintenance and you have to budget for that and you have to have insurances and all that i think you guys are just way out of your realm with what you do um but uh carolyn you mentioned social emotional quickly quickly um can you explain that no i was not talking about curriculum i was talking about that

097we are we had to build in there think considerations and ways of helping our folks deal with the effects of the pandemic so we're talking about physical health we're talking about emotional health of our kids and so we have our counselors and we have those things so we wanted to make sure that they had the materials that they needed the counselors had the materials they needed we wanted to make sure that our health offices have what they need we want to make sure that our employees have what they need because this has in fact been traumatic for probably all of us i suspect everybody has has experienced some trauma relative to this we're not talking about curriculum and about teaching things here we're talking about providing health services for our students and our employees okay

098thank you thank you yes sir brian burgess bullet city you said they would not be paying property taxes is that correct it's school district property and school districts do not pay property this is a housing unit it's not a school it's still school but district property as it grows five units 10 units 20 uses like the coach said back there 300 units you're using the services you're using the police you're using the fire that puts that much pressure on all the rest of the homeowners in bullhead city so i think you could rethink that and have a property tax taken out of the rent so as you grow five units it's not going to make a big difference 100 units this will make a big difference for the fire and police and all the other

099services that your property taxes pay the tax the property taxes here are county taxes they're not city taxes there are no city taxes okay but still but yeah your point is well taken and it would need to be considered but school district property is not school district but it's not a school it's too good school district property but it's going to be housing like my house up in bulkhead and i pay taxes a lot of taxes for somebody not to pay that it could put more pressure on everybody else you might want to consider that that's a good question thank you anyone else yeah i think dr stewart also had some questions some follow up on some earlier things and then we'll get to second questions if people have second questions i think if we

100go too much further than second questions we might be here really really late so um and we'll try to write down your questions so if you go through a couple of questions really quick like we'll try to like write them down so you get them asked in your two minutes and then we'll take some time to answer if we can so if that helps um i wanted to come back to something miss gary should sent had called yesterday i think it was and had asked some questions i don't remember all of the items that you had miss garish but i know one of them had to do with who's the developer we don't have a developer yet so we have to follow procurement we will have to put those things out for you know requests

101for uh proposals or bids and that kind of thing and we'll follow all of the procurement so i wasn't trying to avoid your question it's just that we didn't we don't have a developer yet we don't have those folks what we have are those renderings okay they're not blueprints they're simply renderings but i will be happy to send you a small version of those i have those you're welcome to have them and i'm sorry i don't remember the other questions you asked yesterday but we didn't answer them because we don't have answers for them yet so it wasn't trying to avoid your questions it was just that we're not there yet okay so yeah and and when we put out the requests for bids it'll be to local you know local contractors local whatever because

102we can't we can't legally say we're going to select somebody local but as much as possible this board has said that when possible we want to keep these monies in this community we don't want the money to go to you know if we can avoid sometimes we can't because we're supposed to take the lowest bids and the lowest quotes and those things but we will do everything we can to keep this money circulating in the bullhead city and mohave county community as opposed to going to maricopa or someplace else yep do you want to you want to do your two yeah you do a second round of two minutes you're go go for it okay i have a question because you're um obviously um well i don't know if most of you know i'm on

103the high school board and um speaking of microphone please i can't hear you say absolutely this is ashley garage are you ready for me burgess um so uh as far as procurement goes we have to send out our um we have to have our three bids right correct and there's a lot of times that we don't get our three bids back we don't we have um several projects that are out months in advance right now because we cannot get even a no bid and that is the requirement your three bids and we're not even getting that right now so i don't know if you've reached out um at least to see if this is going to be a possibility to get your procurements back because at this point um like i said we're months out

104and i'm sure that you guys have the same problem and i'm sure that you've had the deal with the same things in the past with procurement so um what are you gonna do if you don't get uh any bids back we will be looking for bids i will say though that um the the community task thank you that's an excellent question the community task team that karen summit put together those folks have been involved in some of these meetings and there's every indication that we will not have problems getting uh getting quotes and not have problems getting local quotes so as for procurement like i know being in the high school district like i've had to sit through procurement training where it was multiple hours over multiple days with a uh he had a lot

105of munchisms his name was mr bunch he he was able to answer a lot of those procurement questions and and if i were to go and seek out information we'll say um three quotes ten thousand dollars for two different football jerseys for home and away because they really do cost that much i could actually call a company and if they don't give me a quote there's a no quote sheet so if they refuse to give me a quote then i can go ahead and write that up obviously when you're looking at giant projects you want some submitted quotes you want to be able to compare quotes and we will do everything we can to receive multiple quotes and as she said we definitely want to keep things here in the community but there are ways

106that we have to do those things so um i can't just we can't just sit up here and say oh we want to create a new job and give it to so and so like you have to post it you have to interview so the same thing with developers like we'd have to send it out there and we'd have to say hey who would like to bid who would like to be a developer we'd have to interview we'd have to do the things that we have to do to make sure that we follow those procurement rules so we don't get in trouble so those are very important sir give a fault john i'm just going to make a comment that when we started the comment was it's a done deal maybe it's not a done

107deal and i think we ought to keep an open mind i was in government for 32 years there's no such thing as a done deal and i think you guys know that right come on uh things check look what happened uh two years ago things changed man and all of a sudden here we are with their pants down you got employees you've got to fill four four million dollars if you don't get it again that's a lot of people to absorb in this budget correct so i'm i'm just saying please please keep an open mind because a lot of people brought up some pretty good ideas and uh if it was such a a great deal that you could never lose the real estate i would have bought a lot because you can't ignore me

108anymore i'm going to ignore you one more time because larry's got a question and he hasn't even been up there yet come on up blair that's all sorry he'll do i never lived that down larry uh larry morse with arq engineering uh been a resident area for 30 some plus years i want to commend you for taking steps to try to to do employee retention which is critical in our area it's very hard to find anybody that's qualified to do anything it's really bad as an employer i know that i had a couple questions one of them was on this is federal money coming in so all the federal procurement including prevailing wage applies for not only the district but the contractors that the district hires okay that's one thing the other thing is recently

109last two years we've seen materials cost triple they doubled last month not on top of the triple that was i mean we were used to pay 16 a foot for an eight inch sewer line we're now paying forty five dollars a foot material cost only um anything like that a a water valve an eight inch water valve used to cost us six hundred dollars now it's twenty six hundred dollars just for one not installed that's delivered to your site that's about it uh just food for thought thank you thank you i think that's where we we got our dreams crushed when you know the original you know grand scheme was 20 and now we're hoping to push 5-10 and and it's because of things like that it's unfortunate that that that we got hit with

110that time frame because that's a large increase hildy [Laughter] can you reach a microphone don't let him do so much okay so in the beginning ms stewart said that anyone can go it can be custodian it could be an administrator who makes the decision who picks the people who get it and what are the guidelines or their qualifications you're going to have people submit like their their histories i mean who gets it there actually would submit an application at this point we haven't come up with specific guidelines as far as who's going to be first and who's not in some of the other teachers here in arizona that i've looked at it was first come first serve some of it was a committee was put together and that committee determined who you know so not

111be the board it would be a committee it would be a committee or it couldn't be property manager so or management firm so it may be them we haven't really because you said also that you thought there'd be like a big waiting list but then again you said that people can stay as long as they want so i don't really see how that turned over as long as we want we just said it wasn't permanent it was temporary but we didn't know how long yet so we did said we did there will also there will be so you know the idea that they're going to save up enough money for down payment in a time frame that you're going to set is probably not real but the other thing i wanted to say was patrick

112beck's assertion that no taxpayer money i mean we heard very similar things about something called the field house and i believe last fiscal year the taxpayers the school district paid 160 thousand dollars out of their budget to make up for the losses of the field house so there's never anything definite you cannot say the taxpayers will not pay i'm not saying that should be your overrun decision but be careful because you cannot say that thanks all right so amanda i'll try to just give you the questions okay all right um so first things first has the board read the exit surveys of the employees who left last year i don't recall a discussion at any board meeting about you guys actually seeing the 40 plus staff members exit surveys and the reasons why they left

113and i know for a fact that there was a portion of them that were not due to housing so that's first i also want to ask about the 2500 incentive bonus again that is not given to every educator in the district that was for a certain amount of the teachers certain teachers i believe i don't know if administrators got that i don't know if additional paraprofessionals received a bonus so saying that that would be in place of a housing expense stipend that would also not there would be a discrepancy there there are sites you have six sites in this district and there are multiple problems at every single site and i've gathered a list of those problems because my whole thing as many of you know because of my educator club is to advocate for

114the educators in this area and they have a lot of burden on them right now and so i want to make sure yes and i'm not saying that this does not have its pros to it and i'm not saying not to help anybody that's not what i'm trying to put across but when you've got five units let's say they're the one bedroom units that's five people how many employees do you have in the elementary district that's a real crooked crooked seesaw there i think that you would be helping five out of 200 to 300 employees so i have to advocate again and i know you said money went to the sites this year but there's still teachers who don't have air conditioning and heat in their classrooms as of april 6. that's an issue thank

115you did someone want to answer those okay so first one board exit surveys if they're red 40 40 plus teachers that left were they sir so read sorry survey's read mr burgess are you on yes sorry i'm here okay did you read any exit surveys at the end of last year i personally would not be 40 exit surveys no okay and then i know and then i remember dr stewart talking about some of the things in the exit surveys before you've read exit surveys have you yeah but it's been a few months so okay but i think the point is the current board should probably look at those exit surveys and also the ones that come this year as well okay i did not read 40 plus exit surveys i did not get 40 of

116them no i didn't read that and they're brand new here they're brand new so so can we pull those 40 plus absolutely exit surveys so then the five of us can get some of that information of what they previously have so we can take a look at it absolutely okay uh 2500 incentive bonus not given to everyone so um in the talk craft for my wrong but support staff and transportation also received risk compensation and the risk compensation was for every employee and based on the recommendations of the superintendent's advisory committee and the administrative team every employee had the same amount which was two thousand dollars in risk compensation the only reason it would be less is if folks were here less than the full year in terms of the 2500 signing incentive for this

117year that was for teachers and as things happen in the year things that have been budgeted for for any of these grants sometimes we don't fill a position or sometimes things don't cost as much as we thought they would and mrs lott is always busy looking for ways to use those funds in a in a really positive way so the intent this year is there are funds for us even though there were not signing incentives for classified folks there will be some funds for that it won't be 2500 but it'll still be a significant amount so we want to look out for all of our employees when we can and to correct something that ava said the 2500 dollars is in this for this coming year as well so uh so it's another year of

118that excellent but only one more year yes because the money currently currently because that's where it's sustained is in the esser yes currently right that's why they are risk compensation and incentive signing bonuses and not salaries or is because they are not sustainable reason where you're saying no housing stipend for the other employees we yeah we definitely haven't used it as a reason for not a housing stipend we just said that that is a benefit we do offer currently those are things that we do do for our employees currently what are your other employees who are not gaining from the housing piece what are they getting she's saying she's basically saying that like what do the other employees who are not in the housing project what are they going to get as a benefit because

119the housing people are getting a benefit okay um i see what you're saying because you're wondering how are we giving these added benefits but they're paying rent just as they would pay rent somewhere else so we're giving them the opportunity um i understand that you know it's not 2500 or 28 roughly we'll just say using like the figures you used per year it's not hundred dollars that the five are going to receive because they happen to be in a teacher's housing that allows them so i i understand what you're saying um but um we do offer a lot of different things that that and you know i hate to say but we did just increase all of our coaches stipends our our instructional we have instructional coaches we have we have eight we didn't we

120i we went through and we increased all of our our club and organizations our coaches we did didn't we increase all of those because that was one of the big we did we did all across six sites we did every single leads we did everybody everything that has an extra stipend that you can work so moving on so six sites problems that each six sites right but she had some other questions so i wrote down all of them okay so we have a statement from zoom i'm still replying to her questions she has said six sites there's problems still at currently at six sites and then one of them specifically was there's no ac or heat as of april 6 still in at least one person's classroom replacing 60 to 70 hvac units is in

121the esser funding and two yes or three three okay and that was something that we've been working on for quite a while now so that is something that's working on however if you don't have ac in your classroom please speak with your building administrator is there an open classroom can we accommodate because it's a hundred degrees out and they should not you know absolutely and we are regularly filing uh requests with an sfp grants with the state facilities uh um oversight board um and in fact you know each week i'm signing at least two so we've got a good person who's handling that and making sure we're on top of it but we have we still have the 60 to 70 that are in the plan and those that whole project will be part of

122what the construction new construction manager will be taking on immediately mr tuneforce are we getting off topic a lot our comment from the web listening to all of the discussion i can't help to think this will drive a bigger wedge between community members and teachers as well as different teachers within the district any other questions from the audience sir and again my name is bill earnest and i work over at bullhead city middle if we were able to fund the 2500 signing bonus say in perpetuity 10 years with these new teachers that are getting that housing get that 2 500 signing bonus that's a good question then there would be an inequity there would be my question on that thank you i will say that a lot of the questions that you've asked tonight they've

123all been writing them down i see three of them writing right now so they don't have the answers for every single question but they are all questions that they also want the answers to is there anyone else sir my name is james and i've heard a lot of questions from some folks that you know that i know to be elected elected officials um in the area so my question for them if you have other school board members and county supervisors and candidates and things like that my question for them is what would you like them to do with this money i mean you see that they spent it you see how they've spent over 10 million dollars so my question is for two more million what would you like to see i saw a lot

124of i saw a lot of i don't like this idea but no i think it should be put towards this i think it would better serve the community of this it was just i don't like it and i appreciate your comments but our questions tonight are for this board not for the public thank you anyone else all right would the board like to make a final statement each person well i just say i really appreciate everyone that was here and still here um a lot of the things that we're looking for you guys brought up a lot of really good things that allows us the opportunity to go back and delve deeper i mean we do a lot of research each one of us up here has been on at least i can i can

125talk for well at least the four here i assume corey as well um looking into this trying to find out the information um especially you know we took our sections and we're delving into those we're trying to figure out what we can do to help make this work and make it a positive thing for our community and our teachers and retain those teachers and keep our teachers because our teachers that are here our teachers that are in our classroom they work hard and they should feel supported and that's what we're trying to do and we just are trying to find another way to support them and that's what we're trying to do with this so i appreciate you guys thank you for being here thank you for giving us your feedback um anybody else mr

126burgess do you have anything i think you said it no one else thank you and i did want to say one thing you're good go okay i just want to again thank you for those who did come and who did have questions and i do encourage if you have concerns and questions to bring them to the board when you have these concerns because a lot of times you sometimes i mean i'm new to the board but the even being new i've realized that sometimes people will hold these things in and hold these things in and then it's not until uh you know someone makes a hoopla about it on facebook that people find out about it or anything like that because there were so many people who thought that this was being hidden from the

127public even though it was talked about multiple times you know and and i do understand i knew so they had started this before i got here but i'll be honest i wasn't sure about this project at first until my rent started going up and they raised it uh three times before it got to where it was and i started doing more research into this project and i had actually bookmarked a few schools that have teachridge uh and each one of them had rent under seven hundred dollars um and it was something i legitimately considered even though leaving mojave high would be devastating to me because it's the high school that i went to i absolutely love it there um i am a highly qualified certified math teacher and i know that if i wanted to

128go somewhere i could and they were the sites i bookmarked they were the first schools that i thought that if my rent got to the point that i could not afford to live here anymore those are the schools that i would go to so the idea that this would not work or the teachers would not be interested i still have them bookmarked just in case uh i'm just pointing that out okay so i thank you though for people who did come with their concerns and didn't just decide to uh rant on social media and have absolutely no input or into this process thank you mr swabrowski i just want to thank everybody who joined us online or in the room i think that we learned a lot tonight we listened and i think what you

129have told us or asked us we'll co we'll go to our hearts and we'll get it done thank you so as we get opportunities and as we get in this process we'll be able to gather some more of this information and be able to get those answers um many of them are going to take a little bit of time for us to even get a chance to figure out because it might be later on in the process or or as we gather more information we will get it out i can i can foresee another forum another town hall come in at some point here to kind of discuss some things because this is probably the best information that we've received in in you know pretty much a positive way i mean even comments and questions

130they're positive they're helping us uh develop this and that's what we need dr stewart the last thing i would say is the invitation that you have from the board members to contact them if you do so via email please make sure if you are contacting all of them at the same time that you do it in the bcc part of the email not in the copies or not in the two because if you don't do it that way it puts them at risk relative to open meeting law so none of them could respond to you if you don't put it in the bcc so it's not that we don't want you to communicate with them but let's do it so that they don't run the risk of being in an open meeting violation and you

131can always send things to me and i will do things the best to get back to you and that's a great comment because that does happen sometimes and we promise you we're not ignoring you a lot of times we forward it to dr stewart to allow dr stewart to address it but if you send the email to dr stewart and bcc each board member we then can respond to you individually okay so that's for any topic it needs to go that way all right thank you thank you and i also thank everybody for being here thank you all for coming tonight you