Board Meeting

001[Music] good evening everyone i'd like to call this meeting to order for our september board meeting welcome everyone if you would let's stand and have a pledge i pledge please to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all the clock was right yes i actually wasn't paid like once a year it cycles it's almost all right um at this time i'd like to entertain a motion to adopt tonight's agenda i will make a motion to adopt tonight's agenda second any anyone need to take anything out or questions on anything before we move on all right the second on the floor all in favor thank you call to the public i did not have any forms flynn

002good all right thank you item six information and discussion items student council reports so wesley was supposed to be here and i'm not sure if he's just coming in yes he's perfect timing thank you um hello i am the student council vice president unfortunately our president leslie couldn't be here today so i'm here to sub in um what's your name wesley wesley i'm gonna pull up here i have a list of things all right so we all good am i ready to start right now okay so student council is getting busy with events and we're excited to be planning these events considering that we did not last year our events our next events will be homecoming spirit week the chairperson is our senior class president sabrina lopez and she was the one that planned prom

003which was very good and so we're excited to see homecoming this year the theme for our homecoming is lights camera poco it's like a red carpet kind of hollywood kind of theme to it and our spirit base so starting monday is um let's see here monday the 27th is know your role seniors are the list stars they will wear yellow juniors are supporting actors they will wear green sophomores are the understudies they will wear red and freshmen are the extras they will wear pink and then that money that monday the 27th we have a 30 minute assembly to kick off the week seniors will have the senior parade at 7 40 am they will meet at del rio drive drive to heritage and cross the highway towards territorial and back to the school trafford will

004be controlled seniors will be given their class t-shirts and will take the 22 picture outside which is where they line up on the field they form a big 22 their graduating year and then nominations for our homecoming royalty will occur next week during english classes and will be announced at the homecoming football game tuesday the 28th will be fan or fame that is our theme for the day people can dress as a tourist or as their favorite celebrities we will have a powerpuff game that night same tuesday the 28th which will run from 6 to 8 p.m students are three dollars and adults are five dollars and bonfire will follow right after with free admissions wednesday the 29th will be the homecoming dance which is lights camera hoco from 6 30 to 10 pm we

005will have our own dj because we have the equipment to do so and the uh playlist will consist of all the family friendlies thursday the 30th we will have another 30-minute assembly to promote the homecoming football game and then friday the first will be the homecoming game and the theme for the student section will be neon colors so all the students in the student section will be wearing their neon shirts and stuff and then royalty will be announced at halftime and admission is up to how much football the football team has decided to charge and then for our student council budget as of right now we have about thirty two thousand dollars which we will use for dances decor djs venues class t-shirts senior gifts studco state and senior field day next year we want

006to buy all the student class students class colors class colored t-shirts that correspond to their skittles day color so like how for the new coming freshmen we have the orange shirts we usually get them we want to do that forever all the classes so we're thinking about doing that next year and then um paying for only sophomores and seniors as oh yeah okay so for the shirts we'll be paying for only sophomores juniors and seniors because the just uh the office bodies did for the freshmen and um one last note for students that cannot afford certain things miss deangelo and the class have budgeted money for the kids that can't afford stuff so if nobody can afford something they can come to us and hold on one more thing oh yes for the senior trip

007um we voted to have it but we are currently counting the votes for the destination and we have four places um knottsbury farm disneyland adventure park or six flights so those are our current um choices we're trying to choose from right now but we are gonna have a that is secret fantastic does anyone have questions for wesley great beginning of the you wesley year you thank you item 6p superintendents reports all right we have a few items on here first of all we're going to start with enrollment thank you and the district continues to be up um 150 atm over last year and which is that and literally within one adm of our pre-pandemic um 100th day adm so um it's 22 60 i think no 22 15 is where we're at right now that's

008identical to where we were two years ago on the birthday now this year is going to change just because of um we tend to lose high school kids gain nka kids so that number is going to change as we get closer to the 100th day which is end of february beginning of march but uh off to a really really good start there continues to be a significant increase in kindergarten enrollment we were at 208 we are now at um it's 208 right now it's playing with two 11 but i don't have those hard copies yet in my hands okay so that is the largest cohort we've had in a decade at least um and um great over last year which was 135 kids so fantastic numbers and because of that we're gonna we're coming to

009the board to request another teacher later in the meeting we'll talk a little bit about that but we're suit it's a fantastic problem to have so we're super excited that parents are trusting their kiddos with us and with territorial early childhood center we also have a significant increase at that at the high school um peter and i last week attended the aspa law conference and i'm actually going to give some time to peter to kind of share his uh impressions of the law conference yep right now you people should know me better than this um i have enjoyed not enjoyed the asba long conference is the best learning experience i ever attend while serving on this board they bring in technical experts to not only go over current legal issues but incredible background on specific

010topics for two straight days so if you can bear with me i literally take right up my notes some people not surprised okay um cindy thomas who's the executive director uh kicked it off chris thomas okay i'm structured yeah okay trust me guys um he updated with you're all familiar with the lawsuits that are going on the one about proposition 2828 which was the tax increase a lot of the issue rested on the term these are grants not an income to the state now the reason for that is very simple there's a state constitutional limit as a percentage of the state budget that can be built if devoted to schools and with that income it would have exceeded that 49 percent so some of us who heard about this said well that was that was

011a mistake why would they have done they should have known better than that well as chris explained and i'm not going to delve into it because i only understood a portion of it there's some legal basis for terming these as grants that they think can stand up in court to keep it outside of the state budget limit and it will be going to they hope to get the stakes at free court within the month to test that term if that term holds then that tax increase will will stand uh if it does not hold then then it dies there's a second suit on the state budget bill which had things like the mass prohibition and things things like that there's a couple of suits dealing with that one of them and this has been forever

012in arizona state constitution says you can only have one topic in a piece of legislation well when they had these bundled legislative finance failed they threw the kitchen stink all the bills that could could not get through committee were thrown in just to get the bill passed so there is a lawsuit saying challenging this year's uh comprehensive budget bill saying that it's illegal because you can't put non-budget items in to a bill which is labeled budget um the title and there's another there's another word in the kind of phrase the constitution says the title must describe all elements of the bill and this did not it just simply says saving my hands whatever um now the masked bill ducey's anti-mass bill there's another court case dealing with that and that is under the equal protection

013clause and there's been a lawsuit filed saying you cannot treat public versus private schools differently and it does it's only addressing public schools so the private schools the approaching schools and so forth are not affected by it and there's a lawsuit challenging that so as you can see there's a lot of things going on in court right now to try to upend some of the stuff that the legislature did now on some of the of the next one is the our keynote the keynote speaker was john ratzenberger name means nothing to me but i can't remember cindy's man john rantenberger was the loudmouth expert on cheers i took his word for it but he was he was talking about cet and the desire and necessity for cpt throughout our system that's about as good as

014it got because he just spent an hour giving anecdotes about his life and why it was good for him to have done manual labor and why you need to know how to wire a circuit board or a house and so forth so it was i mean he spoke very well but he could have sent his message in five minutes and done jokes the rest of the time and he would just go off sorry but john uh okay uh now on some individual sessions there's three that i i wanted to highlight um one was the school's authority on stating regulations on our campuses particularly dealing with thc vapes and all the marijuana stuff has now come so close to us because of legalization marijuana and basically the bottom line is we have absolute authority we can

015prohibit of course it's illegal for kids under 21 to possess it but we could prohibit which i think we do already vapes on all of our campuses uh but we could you know do anything that we need to whether it's sporting events school activities off campus anything involving our district we have the right to regulate those sorts of things which is to me was very very good good news another session which was interesting uh somewhat disappointed but very interesting was the whole issue of affordable housing for staff people remember we've been talking for a long time now about the problems of getting housing john for staff moving here uh just because there's not much available in chino valley or or paulden and prices are high so there are two or three examples from around the

016state of what districts did to provide for staff all but one was very simple they owned land and they actually built housing specifically for staff unfortunately most of them required passive bond issue to be able to forward build the housing which of course we have difficulty doing which sort of eliminated that excitement for me but it was possible legally to give extra signing bonuses for housing for new staff so that was legal so if we have somebody who could not find havoc housing it's like a legally like a signing bonus but it is for us the system of entertaining housing if somebody's coming here from from out of town the last one i want to report on was titled avoiding litigation this one i was passed out when i saw it because they started out

017with katie stuck out with hazel i didn't realize that hazing is still a problem but he showed physical photos and graphic descriptions about how hazy was still endemic throughout this country and that hazing primarily affects boys primarily affects sports but he says there's one thing that you've got to be very careful about that all of your sports affiliated staff our coaches and and staff are well familiar with the signs because he said basically nobody has been who has been hazed ever reports it the reporting comes from other people who are aware of it or seen it zero times that the person has been hazed and as part of the culture apparently of sports that you don't show your weakness by admitting that you been hate and he was very graphic in some of the exact

018examples of that he gave other examples of physical problems like he gave one where there was a school staircase and unfortunately the school had a slight incline leading to the staircase and some poor person in a handicapped chair lost control of the wheels rolled down to the start of the stairs and fell all the way down and they had a graphic picture of what her head looked like after it's been split open at the bottom of the stairs so again careful looking for the physical things that could be leading to danger to kids which they could lead to lawsuits to the district uh so he said final grandpa you need to have supervision in all activities locker rooms sports activities and bus stops trips in particular be sure you have eyes on those events and

019uh again superb superb session and i'm so happy i was able to appreciate that i'm glad you're able to attend for all of us also any questions [Music] thank you for your report moving on um in the packet there's um two forums um mr total was talking about how he and his wife looked at all the numbers i do every day also um the first one is basically on the the young by county community health services website daily they have the county numbers this is just a summary and then the next page is the yapi county revised benchmarks that are on the arizona department of health services uh one thing to notice is uh there's two real two real benchmarks there's cases per hundred thousand uh this is from the department health services and percent

020positivity the percent positivity has been hovering kind of up and down a little bit in a relatively small range between 13 and 15 but the cases for 100 000 um was going up since july and we are hoping peaked august 22nd because it um at 308 cases per hundred thousand and um last week it was 252. so we're hoping that it continues we find out on thursday mornings is when the results are posted and i'm hopeful that we can continue that downward trend and things will be okay john if i remember last year we were down at the rough five percent range testing positive at some point we were correct so it just shows you how much that has increased last year and i think we were between 10 and 50 for the cases per

021hundred thousand at one point um but uh these numbers are nowhere near what we were in in january um when we hit the really bad peak but still still significant we still need to be careful and but it's a positive trend um that hopefully will continue the community health services department released an updated letter for parents basically describing how the school district is required it's not optional we're required to contact trace and to quarantine and isolate those students off of campus we can't control what happens at home for those that either are positive or close contact that's something we do not have options about we have to do it and so um i know it's tough on parents and um it's tough on our nurses to tell the parents but um we appreciate those families

022that are um keeping their kids home when they're sick and helping everyone else out in the process um i uh there was a on friday there was an announcement about the possibility of requiring vaccinations for employees of businesses over 100 employees we have 280 employees it's still unclear what those regulations if they apply to schools unfortunately arizona is one of the number of states that follows the federal osha regulations and this is going to be mandated through federal osha it's just uncertain if it's just private companies or also uh government entities and so those regulations are being developed as we speak and we should know within a week or two how um if at all we're going to have to address that so i have a question what is the percentage of our employees that

023have been taxed um and um people don't have to tell us so we don't necessarily have a firm number my guess would be probably about half yeah now it doesn't mean that you have to get backstage because the option is that we that you get tested weekly and that's something it's either be vaccinated or be tested weekly and we have access to the tests so it's something that we if we have to do it we can hopefully do in-house um so that that would be the option that people have if they choose not to get next to so if they do sign a positive sign i'm testing then we can quarantine them correct we'll actually isolate right now yeah exactly right so we are protected either correct but again don't know if that's gonna that

024it is um in con it conflicts with state let's anticipate the state law to start on the 29th um and uh federal law typically trump's state law but i guarantee there's going to be court challenges and so this could be tied up for a while who knows what's going to happen i would not get any money on either side so anyway uh really good news um we have a certificate of achievement for excellence in financial planning um i would pat john on the back but this is not his year that this applies to next um this is something that actually talked to john before we learned about this that we we want to continue and it's something that i started with this business manager basically a third party looking at the audit and uh to

025make sure that we are doing what we need to do as a government entity and reporting um in a way that is how it's supposed to be reported so um there is going to be another one i think from asbo international is that the other one that comes out that we're anticipating but this is basically a sign that our finances are the way we report them is accurate and um transparent so that this is a it's something that we we strive to do to kind of a stamp of approval on our um books so we're excited about that uh the denise pearson scholarship i wanted to talk spend a minute or two about that um and also i wanted most of you know pastor wayne ballard he's in the back here he's here because he

026is the chair of the board president of the board for the chino valley education foundation so um i'm going to read a little story to you this is um what i read at graduate or at the that's on the back page this is what i read during awards night about the denise pearson scholarship so in the early 1990s a former superintendent dr rob minnick was called by an attorney asking if a scholarship fund could be set up for students at china valley high school after his client's death dr minnick spoke with the attorney a few times to develop some language for the client that dr mick was never told the name of the client at the time fast forward several years dr minute received a call from another attorney letting him know that ms denise

027pearson had passed away on december 13 1999 and left a significant amount of money to the school district to set up a scholarship fund for graduating seniors at chino valley high school miss pierce has also left money for her two horses to be taken care of until their death of dr never met ms pearson and no one else in the district seemed to know her we don't know what connection ms pearson had with the district but we are grateful for her contribution to the students of tino valley high school so i karen and i got an email a couple months ago saying okay the denise pearson scholarship trust which is the trust was run by wells fargo bank um is some saying it was a 20-year trust and the trust is going away so here's

028the money that you're going to get and you take care of it for the scholarship fund so we talked to our attorneys uh consulted john and talked to cindy and we said we don't want it and the reason we don't want it is we can't do anything with it so if we take this money and the amount of money is 430 000 just so you're aware it's a good sizeable amount of money and all of the scholarships are having um paid for using the proceeds from that 430 thousand dollars last year we gave 17 000 away on scholarships which was the earnings off that money but we said we don't want it because if we take it we cannot invest it against the law for us to invest that money and though any scholarships we

029would have to give we'd make what half a percent if that and it would likely be just going into the principle into the purpose of the amount so we i contacted cindy and that's where uh where wayne comes in where we are partnering with the education foundation and um with the help of our attorneys convinced the wells fargo bank to write the check to the education foundation and i'm going to let you take over what you what your plans are with the um uh denise pearson scholarship after that well great hello esteemed board and thank you for giving me a moment of your time tonight the education foundation just uh so you know is a 501c3 organization we're actually a qualified charitable organization according to arizona statutes and so there's a lot that we do

030with hungry kids project homeless project and a variety of things part of our vision over the last couple years was to develop scholarship funds and and to provide that for the students of china valley unified school district as we were working and building and trying to establish that we found out about the denise pearson and and wells fargo wanted to wash their hands of it the great news is this is such a time that we're prepared for um we are in the process right now of uh getting all of the legal counsel all of our bylaws set up we would like to continue the denise pearson scholarship as is where we have financial planners we have a fiduciary already lined up who will help us with investment advice and all of those kinds of things

031we're in the process of getting legal counsel to make sure that everything that we're doing is completely above board and with that we want to continue this in as long as we're around and and the great thing about it is is my children have been recipients of it and so i know how significant this scholarship is for our students here in china valley and the greatest part about it is it's for our kids none of the money goes to prescott it's for kids here in chino to assist them in going to college so we're very excited about the possibility and we're very excited about being the conduit for for this at this time so you'll be able to use just the interest correct for the scholarships and you won't have to touch the principle correct

032in fact uh my understanding is that is how it's even been working in previous years and uh one of the things that's happened we've had several years where only a few students have applied and so they've gotten large gifts from the scholarship but again because it's all based off of the interest of it the principal will remain and what we can generate now this year because we're receiving it halfway through the year and because of some of the things we we will be working with our board to probably use some of the principal in this first year looking at the scholarships and needs but our goal and intention is to generate the interest and off of that interest to provide scholarships for our students so the so the foundation would set the criteria then correct

033for eligibility and then review the and a lot of that would be worked off of the uh previous uh policies and so on that we will receive from wells fargo as well as from the cougar center that counselors and so on who work with them now so we'll be developing all of that we know that in in january uh that will all have to be completed in place so that we'll open up the scholarship and then in february we'll receive all of the applications and hopefully by the first of ours we'll be prepared for the end of the school year in in the past it's been based on gpa ct or sat score and economic need and uh it didn't go just to those that it well there was what he said we had three

034students that shared seventeen thousand dollars last year and we only had three applicants and that's i think in many years or most years that i've been involved every kid that applied got a good amount of money so last year we had two good seven thousand dollar scholarships and one with a three thousand dollar scholarship so it's definitely um for those out there that are here listening to this i i was with student council the day said apply apply apply um you know to the denise pearson scholarship fund absolutely is the criteria weighted then i'm just curious it so wells fargo had a weighted um system i think this is going to be up to the education foundation to determine their criteria how they want to do it thank any other you thank you thank you

035for coming thank you thank you for your time two more things um we continue to experience a driver shortage um those that have kids got a nice nine o'clock call for me last night i apologize for that that was um inadvertent but um anyway we had to cancel the prescott valley route indefinitely um we wanted to focus on those chino and paulden routes to make sure that the in-district routes were secure and that we could service those then our next focus is going to be on field trips which is our athletic teams um we you know i my understanding is it might have worked out with some buses and everything but we got quotes was going to cost us ten thousand dollars this week to transport kids for events uh because of um we didn't

036have drivers we were gonna have to charge some buses so um we can't afford that long term so we want to make sure that our that our field trips are taken care of and then our intent is to bring back our prescott valley route in hopefully the near future so we'll be coming up with some ideas that we may have to throw some money at that we want to bring back to you in the future one thing that's that is happening um now or shortly is that chris walton our transportation director has gotten permission from the trust to offer like a school bus rodeo say where people that have no cdl or school bus experience can come and drive a bus over at the transportation department just to kind of see what it's like if

037you if you're afraid of driving a bus come and try it out it may work may be a good fit for you we train people to get their cdls you train you get your bus certs um you get paid while you're doing that training and so um it's a it's only a part-time job ultimately but you get full-time benefits you can actually get health insurance at 20 hours a week so it can be for the right people a parent a mom a dad that wants on safe schedules for kids that kind of thing it can really work out so the last thing is just a reminder make sure it's on your calendars that we have the october 6th meeting is the first wednesday of the month so it's not a it's not a monday october

0386th is a wednesday and i believe it's after national night out is that correct so national excel is on the fifth this is on the sixth five o'clock at the paulden community center so it's not karen's gonna send this email you're gonna send an email out there so paulden community center five o'clock on october 6th um we're excited this is kind of our first field trip as a as a board and reaching out to those you know half of half the current board lives in poland so it'll be a home game for you guys and um so that will be good that's my reporting questions when you're coming up 89 turning on the big chino is a big building on your right hand side kind of right across from ace hardware yeah national natives is

039the fourth on the fourth on monday it is monday on monday gotcha yeah okay sorry so the night out on monday the fourth our morning is on wednesday the 6th and there's a big sign there it's hard to miss it's an old fire station oh i know exactly oh we're getting it for the cell phone tower yeah where's the big something okay anything else mr schultz that's my report any questions any comments moving on to items six so with the month of august month in we've got three or four numbers i'd just like to report and then if you have any questions that's great we ended the month of august from last year the 2021 year with a grand total of 2.8 million in all the accounts in the 2021 year we spent 2.1 million

040in colder related grants we had four of those grants two of them will be closed as of last year uh ed stabilization and cobit one we just got our buses today so we can pay for that this year because we have that grant once more here so basically those two are closed after two and three go forward into this year and into next year so we're grateful for those but 2.1 million was spent last year covered related funds and this year i have incomplete reports because most of the cash in all these reports is stuck in last year so when we approved the activity annual financial report october 6 all that cash and those fund balances eight hundred and three thousand all right we'll all roll into the 21 22 year and then we'll be

041working from that real cash so you've got reports from last year and i won't give you one for the month of september uh from last year but you need one month why so it shows those ending fund balances and the activity the last check we wrote out of the 2021 year was august 25th we had some late utility charges and things so now we'll be after the october 6 meeting in october activity reports september's activity reports you'll see just the 21-22 going forward and i appreciate you approving the fundraisers and talking to elizabeth lexmark my office so there's going to be several more fundraisers this year than we had last year so you will get notice of those and we do have a consent item here our auditors want the board to be informed of

042all our auctions so that's on the consent as well that's the ussr change they want you to know when we're going to auction strip this material basically we try to recycle it two or three or four times and then finally it's it's worn out not used useful at all we dispose of it and we do have in our student activity report 112 000 and things are picking up quite a bit more than they were last year so i can just mention that those monies are present accounted for and used correctly in this new internal control activity that's fraudulent and we have excellent advisors that watch those funds fantastic well you covered everything thank you any questions comments here no not yet oh he's got another one covered he actually did all three of them once

043correct well i gave you a little tip there on seeds just that it's complete and it's accurate so if there's anything else you'd like to discuss looks like there's gonna be here john it's just a real quick question i was surprised to see the encumbrances that high this this early in the fiscal year it almost looks like you rolled over the ones from last year into this year i'm just going by memory it seemed to me earlier this year in the fiscal year our conferences were not right up to your budget line well i'd like to say that the difference and i'll get back to you with an email and i'll show you last august or i guess last september meeting and how many encumbrances we had i would just like to say that maybe

044our payroll communication is a little better and maybe we've got all the payroll encumbered okay that's all i'm going to project that that might be the difference i personally rolled about 85 purchase orders over from last year to this year what we call annual ones utilities and uh the one for the ag center over here the 59 000 we paid the city from the water at the farm uh so there's a few things i'll i'll put in a detailed report and so i appreciate it yeah because we don't have a lot of flex right now you know our customers deserve within two percent of our uh income yeah so i wasn't playing right for you i was just busy today didn't get a chance to call you so i apologize for it and there is

045with that there is some really good news that we know we're going to be sharing and it probably will be the december meeting it might even be back to the november meeting we know that we've got more students on site than we budgeted for right so with that we know that our budget is going to creep up and then that will increase hopefully that uncovered amount as well so rather than going down which inverses uh student count is up compared to what we budgeted 2150 adm and we're standing right at about 20 22 15. so we've got about 65 in the bank so to speak uh and last year we had 2057 so we're up about 165 to 370 students i will send you i'll send the board my answer on them consent agenda [Music]

046um all right should i entertain a motion then to approve tonight's consent agenda all in favor aye aye aye all right we are going to hear from mrs cox item 8a edition of one paraprofessional position at tarrant department so i'm coming tonight with a couple of different things originally we asked for one paraprofessional which is ahead of the other one the paraprofessional we are still over our staffing model even when we get to the next one to meet the needs of these kindergarteners that are keep coming in as i walked out today we are enrolling another one so i don't know where the floodgates are gonna stop but um so we're asking for one pair an addition a kindergarten paraprofessional to help with the surplus of kiddos just to help the teachers with all of

047their prepping and working with the students mainly giving us more individualized attention what is your uh right now what is the highest student per classroom that you have in kindergarten right now i have 29 in one class okay i mean that's a lot 30. that's a lot for one teacher to have i mean it is a lot it's a lot of classroom manager our staffing model is 225 any other questions nope i'll make the motion to approve of the addition of the peer professional and territorial channel second only paper thank you next the next one is an additional paraprofessional for preschool and this is one typically it's for a special needs child but our child find is doing a great job there as well the kids are coming in and a lot of them are

048requiring more support and this one's more for safety this little guy or this little one that's coming in but we did receive a grant that we can cover with a grant to cover this one so um thank you moving right along to item 8c and now we're going to ask for an additional kindergarten teacher so that we can get closer to our staffing model and pull a couple of kids up while three to four kids out of a class will still be sitting over the staffing model slightly but that pair will help out and do you already have somebody in mind for this um well we have a student teacher right now who is in kindergarten giving a certification that we could put who has also worked for us previously um so i know our

049classroom management style i know all of that and she's if i went off my last applications nobody fell other than the one that didn't truly fall out of the sky so i would probably lean towards moving this student teacher into the position i heard an emergency start until she gets finished now will the paraprofessional be in addition to this or all right i'll make a motion to approve the addition of one kindergarten teacher at territory thank you thank you item 8d personnel report i have one correction so there is a supplement so make sure you get yourself as well uh on the initial personnel report number four if you look all the way over to the right we have a an effective date of five i can't read the 24 excitement it should be 5

05024 22 the end of this school year okay that was going to be my quarter right so that is the end of this school year that as a correction needs to be made this yes um i am after reading over this i'm not okay with the way that this is coming and here's why is i see a letter visitation and then i see it come back uh-huh and i feel like we i've been on this board for six years and i've seen lots of letters of resignation that hasn't given other people the opportunity to state what they have an issue with so i'm just asking why why this one because there were in the letter of resignation there was what i thought was a personal attack and so i i gave the person that was

051the subject of that personal attack the opportunity to respond because i i do feel like we've had personal attacks on other employees before yeah i don't think to the same extent though and you know i i think you're right but i don't think nearly to the same extent i just like things to be done fairly and i just i would hope that everybody that had a chance to defend themselves gets a chance to defend themselves so you don't necessarily have an issue with that the response being included you saw other people haven't seen myself i don't have a problem with the fact that somebody is able to respond right but i think that everybody should have the chance and that's fair to me that's fair because there's been certain situations that have brought been brought

052in front of us that we don't know the second side and so i think what i'm just asking for is that one person is allowed to state that that everyone should be allowed to update their sites yeah and john just for clarification that if we approve his personnel report tonight his resignation will have been effective as of independent this year no next year is next year he his his letter well that's where i read his letter as that's that's why i was i was confused by it also but his letter is effective the end of this current school year uh okay that's that's my concern so this is my question and i don't know if we should discuss this now or an executive session uh we can't do it in the executive session because it's

053not noticed i can answer it later okay yeah yeah uh so even though he has all this communication he still wants to teach this coming year correct and we're working through it i met with him today and we're we're coming to some agreement that that will allow him to finish the year our goal is to afford to finish the year um strong and doing what he's doing in a in a way that works for the district and for him okay i i again i was going to ask for an executive session i can't now so i can't talk about him yeah uh so basically i'll say is that you and cindy feel comfortable us approving this report as it stands well he's resigned so yeah you know there's not just phobia on the staff well

054but we can't terminate them so yeah that's the only option that really didn't know we're just gonna make sure we all understand he will be on staff this year yeah okay and you you and cindy feel comfortable dealing with it during this year well we yeah i believe so right to me that's the most important thing uh i think all of us read very carefully uh both his letter and cindy's response cindy which was excellent uh i can't believe what you've done over this last year to try to resolve this but uh no i just want to feel comfortable that you all feel comfortable letting this person continue on uh understand i believe so we had a good meeting today so that was so just as a summary one new classified 40 classified subs eight

055resignations one certified change four classified changes 14 extra duties and 135 timesheets [Laughter] a lot of those were friday school which we had we started last week which was um those are those not those were on the supplement correct but there was other timesheets so yeah so all right so i'd entertain a motion to for the personality report but please picture that says with correction update yes i will make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented with the correction on number four um the year corrected to 2022. second thank you moving on to item 9a our targeted student achievement goals okay so i did start and i wanted to talk about a few things just so we understand because arizona's state assessment system over the last couple years has had quite a few

056changes and it's a little bit confusing how it's all sort of evolved over time part of that was because of cobit and not having students in the building during fourth quarter of 2020 and then having some of those students take state testing in the fall last year but not all of the students do that and then doing state testing this year but with most of the grades not a test that we're going to do in the future so like trying to come up with longitudinal data that's helpful trying to understand where's this train headed you know all those kinds of things so i wanted to just remind everybody that the test that we took we had rolled to arizona merit and then a few years ago we rolled to what was called azm2 but testing

057was suspended and in high school we had opted about three or four years ago to do the alternate state assessment which was act and you guys approved our like opportunity to do that we did that at the time believing that the state would eventually choose act as the 11th grade high school assessment and it turns out they did so that's great so for us we're very unique compared to other districts in the state going into next year and this year when it's official we already have a couple years worth of data to help us plan so that was really great foresight on the part of this governing board to do something that allowed the high school to be able to start preparing for what we assumed was coming so that was pretty cool so and

058i want to talk a little bit about the fact that territorial does not receive a school letter grade because they granny's so excited because they don't have any tested grade levels testing starts it used to start in first grade many years ago when i started my career state testing started first grade poor ms bryce was teaching and all those and miss reader all those poor little first graders trying to have to learn how to bubble test and not lose the line and all the things yes yeah it was so hard yeah and the first year that like it counted was that you know those those uh california achievement test a million years ago so at brandy school they use assessments they use some local assessments from our textbooks they use dibbles which is assesses how

059a child is progressing with their language acquisition skills reading skills and they use an assessment called esgi in kindergarten they also use some star math assessments and things like that so they do a lot of monitoring using very sound assessments at third level they just don't participate in state testing students in grades three through five we locally we are using um english language arts assessments that were developed at territory excuse me at del rio and we use assessments from our wonders curriculum and we use mcgraw-hill math assessments and star math to monitor progress monitor kids throughout the school year in heritage we have quarterly benchmark assessments from star math and star reading and we have textbook based local assessments and one thing i want to share with you we have been able to roll to

060stronger textbook-based benchmarking because you guys bought new books and those new books came with a fabulous set of assessments that go with them that that help us get a whole different kind of data set than we ever had in the past and so that was something that was super exciting is that now we have some tools and it was really cool because carolyn was really digging in and brandi's really been digging in and like they keep calling me oh my gosh we found all this amazing stuff so i think it's really cool because last year was our first year with the books for english language arts but it was such a crazy year that this year we trained everybody all over again and sort of did a reboot and started fresh with it high school

061students take a ct practice assessments some locally designed text-based assessments and the pre-act john and i have the opportunity to go around and visit with each administrator on their campus and talk about some assessments and to really talk about it and we ask them there are some questions you'll see them answer in their presentation there were questions that we asked them but one of the most basic question that we asked was is learning loss real because we hear lots of stuff about that and the answer we found was different on every campus that learning loss looks different at each school because for example and you'll see some amazing things in our spring test results you'll see some things that really prove to us that learning loss is real so for example heidi and i have

062talked even quite a bit more since the three of us met about the fact that in high school we have some introduced material you know like in higher level math classes or higher level science classes but in high school we're using all the skills we learned at other levels to learn new things we're not necessarily learning you know long division for the first time or how to write in cursive or things like that we're applying all that core learning that we did so we can learn individually and take in new content not necessarily new skills the exception of course is things like trigonometry and calculus where those bar new skills but one thing that we learned was and it was pretty interesting miss bryce shared with us and she'll talk a little bit more in

063her presentation that they saw learning loss profoundly in sixth graders and part of the reason was that they miss a lot of that crucial instruction at the end of fifth grade that fourth quarter when everybody went home and then their sixth grade year because we had so many learning modalities was patchy you know some kids stayed at home all year some kids you know came when we had hybrid some kids you know so it was and we did some online instruction and because of that there are certain grade levels where we feel most that learning loss most acutely and miss cox is going to tell you that we really saw it or miss reader will also tell you that we saw it where kids were needing to learn really important cornerstone skills so for example

064if they didn't we did if they didn't have fourth quarter of kindergarten two years ago and then went into maybe a first grade where their family opted to have them be an at-home learner all year that the students came to second grade i saw mr schultz today i just reviewed mrs cox's first round of dibbles test our second graders almost 59 are well below grade level starting second grade in their language acquisition skills and their reading skills and so they're places where in certain grade levels it's the most glaring because the stuff that came before that was so crucial and so they're going to tell you more about that and what they're doing to address it i want to talk to you a little bit about the state test results are in your packet on

065the sideways pages like that and i wanted to you know i would love to say oh my gosh it was fantastic but it wasn't fantastic and one thing um i wouldn't do differently and i've thought about it since then and we talked about all this i've talked about it kind of individually and collectively last spring we told our teachers don't worry about state testing you guys have had a horrible year the students have had a horrible year don't when we all were finally back in session and we knew we weren't going to be hybridine or distancing or all the things it was almost fourth quarter and so it was one of those situations where don't feel like now that you have everybody back in the building you have to just go berserk for like the

066next six weeks to try to pack everything in because the kids weren't ready to learn some of the kids hadn't been in the building we have kids even this fall who haven't been in an actual classroom for like 18 months so you forget even like how to be a student like a good citizen in your classroom you know to use like that elementary language that we use like you forget how to like share your stuff keep your hands to yourself you know that mom isn't the one answering your questions and you have to raise your hand and so they spent a lot of time just rebooting some of that like the citizenship-ness of coming back to school and because of that we do see it reflected in our test scores and i wouldn't tell you

067that our teachers just kicked back or anything like that at the you know at the end of third quarter into fourth quarter they just didn't try to close a whole year's worth of learning gap in a few weeks and so that shows too i wouldn't regret i don't regret saying don't make testing the most important thing just get back to the business of doing school i don't think i would give different advice even in light of our test scores but i do want to tell you we had some amazing bright spots and i would tell you that our most amazing bright spot was the fourth grade i can see that and when you look and see and we have some of our most experienced teachers in fourth grade and that really really shows our fourth

068grade scored 11 higher than the state average in english language arts and they scored 14 percent higher in math i mean there we and i would tell you even this we were down a teacher in fourth grade we had an unexpected resignation about a month into the school year and the rest of fourth grade said you know what don't hire anybody we'll all take extra kids and they all took extra kids so even with extra kids it was like the most amazing thing and you know i guess i would tell you the sad part is some of them are like really teetering on the brink of retirement you know they're there um but to me they've been in our district for years that stability shows their experience shows and they they just knocked it out

069of the car and we had some areas when you kind of glance around at the ela scores for the most part except for at the high school level we we were within you know swinging distance of the rest of the state um high school 10th grade yep not so much but when you think about it some of those kids had very little direct instructions starting with fourth quarter of their ninth grade year and then we're kind of hit and missed when we look down at the math scores mrs reeder's gonna she'll tell you a little bit about that that third grade math deficit and i would tell you if we all think back if they're great for you know it's a bit of a stretch i'll be honest i remember my teacher's name mrs ferguson

070but the um what do you learn think about what you learn in third grade multiplication and division and at the end of second grade they learn a lot of the cornerstone skills that enable students to perform successfully you know whether it's um you know when you think in terms of am i doing single digit digit addition subtraction now i'm doing multi-digit where i'm having to carry and borrow and things like that that really showed and so but you know what i would tell you last year's third grade it was rough but i know that they have headed into the grade level with the strongest teachers in our district so i have a ton of faith that even though they left third grade behind we've got the team to help help turn that around at the

071fourth grade level and you'll see that fourth grade did an amazing job and then as you glance through we talked a little bit about what ms bryce has said regarding some of that sixth grade issue and then one of the things i would like to help us remember is that the state test in math [Music] for high school has items in it that our students haven't taken yet it contains algebra 2 and a lot of our 10th grade students are only as far as geometry so when we look at that score it's a bit deceptive because we know that not like our honors kids or some of our kids that are more advanced in math i've had that algebra too but a lot of our um gen ed students have not and so that creates

072a deficit as well so it still requires graduation it is still required for graduation for all students except our center students so and then if we turn the page we have the aim science i put it on here just because i didn't want you to think that we didn't do it it was a field test so they don't give you a score we don't even know how we did they don't send us a score but just so you know we did do it we didn't test in 2020 and then 2021 was a field test so we don't know how we did and then you can see the atc um the act results um i would tell you that we are when you kind of look through and see where are we composite score wise in

073english we actually improved from 2019 to 2021 our math composite is virtually unchanged our reading composite went down a little bit miss wolf's going to talk to you about some things they're doing in that regard our science composite went up and our overall composite was within kind of a statistically insignificant range of change and so even though we're still behind the national average this was actually two cohorts of students so juniors from last spring were in this score mix and seniors took it in the fall they should have taken its spring of their junior year and it was the one group the state decided well you didn't get to take it but we want you to do it in fall of your senior year and the craziest thing happened and we all were like what

074the heck the kids we weren't in session when the kids had to take it they were like at home learning and so miss deangelo they all created a day they sent the word out to all the seniors hey we need you guys to come in take act and we thought yeah like nobody's gonna show up right like nobody cares they're not we actually had a really good turnout and the kids blew it out of the water and we were like they didn't even go to school fourth quarter last year you know we were at home learning and here they and they came in to take the test we weren't even fully in person and they did really really well so they kind of helped carry the day and so our 11th grade was a little

075bit lower but that group of seniors really helped carry the day so i wasn't um i wasn't disappointed with how our students performed on act i think it overall you would expect that we would have you know done that and we did not see it so that's a testament to me that a couple things happen students did take advantage of um whether it was learning lab or online tutoring from our teachers we also offered the high school offered before school and after school tutoring last year and we had quite a few students take advantage of that miss wolfe was a coordinator for it and i think that because students are feel that impending graduation cliff that i think some of them were more diligent about taking advantage of some of those opportunities and academically came

076out okay not great so that's the summation of what the test scores look like i can talk to you about um what it's going to look like this spring we have a new test that's called a a s a something like that it's a really bad acronym that only makes a word that sounds naughty when you try to make it to a word and that's this will be a field test year so we probably won't have scores from this coming spring but we will have act scores and aim science scores this this coming spring still do the act yes yep and the whole rest of state's doing it now too thank you so you're welcome i it's a lot to take in and i've had a lot of time to kind of ruminate on it

077um i wish it was better than it was but i'm confident that we have a plan and i think heidi's up first yep and we're using the thing today we're in the process of changing up our boardroom presentation systems and cameras it'll probably be about five months we'll have moving cameras better mics better springs for you guys but for now we're all going that way all right so learning loss i like um cindy talking about the train so for for me and for my other principles i think about we need to mine the gap there is there is a gap um if you've been to england they always tell you when you're on the train to mine the gap so this is what i'm thinking about for my students lining the gap so as far

078as learning loss um as we talked about or cindy talked about we have test scores that we wish were higher um and we know that the loss of instructional time and especially at the high school level that guided practice time where the teachers there and practice the skills that the students need were especially in our cte programs and some of our science labs and those kind of things where you actually need that guy to practice and the teacher wasn't able we weren't able to accomplish and then there was a technology barrier and the decrease in daily academic schedules at the high school a lot of my students were sharing computers with their siblings or um or having to go ahead and blend our two computers with four or five kids um combined family so that

079um played into it um also in inconsistency with the school schedule just going from hybrid to in-person to whatever distance learning and it's not um it's just the reality of what we faced last year and then um students missing school due to once we were back in the quarantine time and then some of our students um did not take advantage of the student support lab that we had available every day um one of the things that our the transition from eighth grade to ninth grade the kids really didn't get that that normal transition and learning how to be a high school student and i see some of that even right now with some of their habits they got out of practice of being at school and then also that social interactions that's really important to

080them um with the staff and with their fellow students um emotionally um there was a lot of anxiety um the biggest one that i heard about was am i on track to graduate they were very concerned about because of the age of my kids they have a lot of not that the other students don't but there's home stressors that happen financial stressors where some of my students had to work to help their families out during that time and then some of my students had jobs and they really had a hard time coming back to in-person learning they stayed online so those are just some of the things that played into the last 18 minutes excuse me some of the concerns that you've been talking about obviously you would expect those last sprint are you still

081hearing those same things as falls of school started yeah i think that the the seniors have that anxiety about being on track to graduate and i'll talk about what we're doing about that and then also some of my students are really relied upon to be part of the income of their family still and um i know i lost a few kids even though we gained kids overall um to going on completely online somewhere else and working with social behaviors yeah all righty so um sorry so what we're doing um as our focus so we went with all of our departments and looked at the the standards and you have their goals and your path yep and we identified um them and developed by each department um and then we know that we're going to do

082benchmark testing and we're going to use pearson math and biology assessments um sciences heart is difficult the high school because usually it's one teacher that teaches one thing like i have one earth science teacher i have one chemistry teacher i want physics biology is the only one where i have three teachers teaching that and then algebra one in geometry and other science classes may use the pearson assessments that go with it that came with the textbook and then um teacher created assessments um we'll be using our english nine decided to use grammar as their um benchmark testing they designed a test to get to all english ninth graders and all of our benchmarks will be done every quarter once a quarter so we felt that the grammar would help the kids with both their reading

083and their writing skills and then um if the teachers were teaching the same course then they use the same benchmark test because we want to see how one teacher compares to another so they can say your kids did really great on that question my kids didn't what did you how did you teach that so they can kind of work together on improving with their teaching and then of course we have the act practice test and we decided that english 10 would take the practice test they don't take it till 11th grade the act test because one of the input i got from this lawyer who's one of my english teachers is when she was a proctor she saw that the kids were freaking out with the time constraint with act so she felt it would

084be good if we started practicing that the year before so the kids would get used to that being timed um because you only get like i think it's like 45 minutes for the english um reading portion it's very limited so we want to make sure our kids are used to that time constraint and then of course english 11 algebra 2 and some of the science will use the ac practice test up to the level and so we're um how will we know our students of learn will utilize our assessments from curriculum pertaining to those essential standards we'll use summative assessments conducted quarterly again pearson teacher created assessments and a ct practice test and of course we'll have our state assessment the act in the spring to see how we do any questions so far i'm

085going to i am going to let them know too because i think i left this out that ninth grade takes a test called act aspire as their state assessment we pay and give the pre-act to all 10th graders even though that's not required we do it so we have good data and then the 11th grade takes the act so three years in a row will practice practice practice so moving forward so where um database decision making we're going to use our data collected from benchmark testing any local school created test textbook test practice act and we're having monthly data meetings to go through um what how the students are doing on those um you know like chapter tests and the teacher created tests um instruction includes kegen act um active engagement strategies we're focusing on

086that now that we're back in person school might focus on integrating reading writing and mathematics across the curriculum before and after school tutoring counseling we have a social emotional support from our certified counselor for those kids that are stressing out about stuff and we do our annual credit checks with all of our kids so we want to make sure and we always do our seniors first so this is dia angelo has met with just about every senior to make sure they're on track and if they're not on track we make sure that they're in the right classes if we need to give them an online class through our cvi program we do that to make sure that they can graduate with their cohort and we've sent a few students that are very far back from

087their credits that aren't on track the two aspire currently we have about 20 students there so so hopefully they get caught up and they come back to us either in january or in may to graduate with their with their class and we've already had workshops with our math and ela teachers at the lead we devel develop smart goals for all other subjects so they came up with goals that teachers could help math and english because those seem to be the areas because a lot of the science act is about reading comprehension it's really not about science standards it's more about if you can read this read the chart gather information from it so we went ahead and all of our teachers who are not math or english have made smart goals where they're going to

088go ahead and work on things that will help all of our students achieve on the act or just in general just to improve achievement and our instructional code meets regular with our students and all teachers are being taken trained and we have uh sei refresh um videos for our teachers if they're struggling with students that are learning english and finally we for our parent outreach we have parent-teacher conferences we are having our first one this thursday night and we also have ones that we go ahead and set up between administrators and counselors to meet with students who are struggling our spanish speaking family night is planned for the 23rd and we have that in all in spanish so that we can go ahead explain graduation requirements attendance everything so we'll have rosa maria and anger

089johnson come in and yvette translate for us and then we i've already started our dnf list on our first progress and we will be calling parents and letting them know about our tutoring so that is our plan to mine the gap as i called it heidi has about 17 students this year who have no english skills speak no english this is our highest number in quite a while are these people who've moved into the district recently i presume that and we have about 30 percent of our student population at each campus comes from spanish-speaking households except at heritage where 34 does i don't know i have no explanation all righty any questions for anyone i'll send it over to julie i would i would surmise that other districts are having the same kinds of issues

090yes yeah i mean i have friends that teach in california colorado arizona michigan and everybody's kind of in the same boat you know and they're having success with the same kinds of remedies that you've described yes they expect to have yeah i talk with them about what they're doing give me some ideas they talk to me about what i might be doing here um well and i'm going to brag on heidi she is um high school is undergoing accreditation this year and so not only is she dealing with making sure that all our paperwork is in line for that because of that she has an opportunity to be on teams that are monitoring accreditation for other schools around the state so she is getting the insider's view on what other schools are doing yes i'm

091going to be doing that the last week of september virtually though they are not doing it in person this year yeah miss julie that's pretty cool thanks sarah good evening well um so is learning loss real so cindy covered a lot of this um and i met we met with peter as well and i mentioned this in our meeting so um we do have load test scores um that's right in front of you you see it but i want to bring some things to your attention of our school days last year were distance learning were hybrid so they were coming every other day 45 percent we were all in person and i think that's really important that we realized that so is learning loss real sure it is but i've also done some research um

092to see what the experts are saying about learning loss and if it's real due to the pandemic and one study here i have is that it says that the learning loss for reading isn't going to be minimal which our test scores show that and the reason for that is because a lot of the learning was done at home and that parents are better equipped to support reading in their homes then they are math which makes sense i wouldn't be able to help my students with their math so that makes sense why could first grade so um so but the math um they say to expect math achievement to decrease by five to ten percentile points low or lower also in the study it talks about um that we're also going to see low scores scores

093due to unequal opportunities for learning depending on whether students had access to technology and parental support during school closures which i think we saw that and heard about all that in your meetings throughout last year also um it says do we even really know what the learning loss is just by comparing tests um assessments for the last couple of years and it says the long-term ramifications we haven't even seen though yet and so those are yet to come for all of us but i asked my colleagues my staff um if they thought learning loss was real and i'd like to read what some of them said um i would then this is um came from my ela team i would say it depends on how you look at it i do believe students will often

094forget what they learned especially in the area of math although some students do forget the foundations they have learned are not lost um i see they're able to pick things up again once they're reminded of how to do something or given the opportunity to practice the material again here's one that my title one teacher nancy morgan wrote and i thought this analogy was very good so i'd like to share it with you she does not believe that learning loss is real learning is continuous our path to learning can vary the pandemic for example our students were forced to adapt to a learning path that required much more independent accountability and the ability to grasp a completely new concept and routine virtual classrooms i had the quote unquote i would venture to say that students have

095learned a great deal in the past couple of years due to this pandemic if i found myself stranded on an island for a year without any reading materials i would not lose my ability to read once i was rescued i would be able to pick up something and read it i'm not going to she wasn't going to lose that in fact i would have learned much more about myself how to find other modes of communication how to adjust my role in my current situation and how to complete new tasks so new learning simply ignites prior knowledge learning is not lost it does not need to be brought back up i it does excuse me it does need to be brought back up to the surface once in a while but it's not lost you know

096nancy is one of my teachers that has a strong relationship with every one of her students she could sit and talk to you about every one of them and feel very comfortable with that she is one of my teachers that does believe in the growth mindset and if you walked into her classroom you would see that every day and everything she teaches and um her approach is that in life we approach many different obstacles and that's how we um we have many obstacles in our life it is how we approach them that will determine the outcome and as we know that is true so is learning loss real it's a matter of opinion um by some as we're seeing so one thing i want to talk about and cindy brought it up is the social

097skills if i was working on my doctorate i would want to study the class of 2027. they are the class that did not get to finish the last nine weeks of fifth grade and they did not get to come to middle school the first nine weeks of sixth grade they did not have their middle school orientation the parents did not receive a middle school orientation so it was all new to them they had no idea what they were coming to or what to expect that very first day on our campus and i think it'd be really interesting to watch them throughout the years and see how they do not only in school but as adults i would be interested in seeing how they function as adults in our society because what they suffered is um

098severe social deprivation and i think the social emotional well-being of these children were um they were attacked it but they did not have what they needed to socially um improve and grow as a middle school student and so to me that's what i'm concerned about more than their academics because they can google what they need to know about science and social studies but can they google how to act out in society how to interact with other people that's the skill they need and so that's my my um concern for them how so and then the emotional part of it you know um we were told not to worry about the tests and we were told to just get them through it do you know we had over 400 makeups for our test due to the

099pandemic and we had kids who were afraid they were going to fail the grade they were in if they did not pass that test i had parents calling me concerned that their child was going to be retained i mean these fears are real and that's what these students dealt with um you know how can i catch up my student how you know am i behind what what's going to happen to me i just think there's so many moving parts out there that we need to look at besides the academics um so let's how do i do this to the right so um how are we going to know what are we how are we going to know that we're going to focus my my teachers took um the azm2 and they're comparing it to the

100assessments that we're using this year so all my students took pre-tests the first two weeks of school i'm in math they took the mcgraw-hill reading we did the star reading my ela teachers made a teacher made assessment based on their essential skills standards that they have to have for that grade level and my science also have a pre in a post that they'll take so then all my students took those tests within the first two weeks and then my teachers took those results and compared them to my azm2 results and that's how they came up with their goals that you have in front of you how are we going to know they learned it well we give formative assessments weekly in our classes and that drives our cat our cougar academic time that we use

101for response to intervention and so they will do formatives on a weekly basis and then we will do a summative assessment three times a year to get those benchmarks our last benchmark is right before our state testing so our teachers can see exactly what we need to focus on right before the testing but they're watching that weekly daily our students are also responsible for tracking their own growth in being responsible our goal is for them to take responsibility for their own learning and so they will do that as well next how are we going to achieve our goal this year um black we've been doing the 30 minutes a day for our intervention time per math in ela we turned gavin gave it a term this year um we call it cougar academic time it's

102the last 35 minutes of the day at heritage middle school and so they are every monday they are given a class where if they need reteach they'll be told to either go to their ela teacher or their math teacher if they don't need reteach then we my other teachers are teaching enrichment classes so they get to do enrichment one thing that we're doing different this year instead of pulling out a child four weeks a month because they're constantly behind we want to give them a break and give them a chance to be with the students that are in enrichment so um we made it where students will only be allowed to be pulled out twice a month for interventions to give them time to be with their peers and have that enrichment as well because

103that is important as well um we are progress monitoring and we're using our essential standards and the target skills so my teachers have broken down the standards to essential standards and then they've broken it down further to their target what is it they have to know to move on to the next class next on grade level what is it they need to know um to be successful for the next unit so they're they're focusing more on targets and that's what they're assessing them we have um you're probably asking well julie thinking well what are you going to do about that social emotional i want to show you um hand out to you what my counselor i have a new counselor miss nolly and she guys want you to take one and pass it she is

104going to start this next week going in with sixth graders once a week and start working under social emotional health and she'll meet with sixth graders um you're gonna see the letter that was sent home with families and once she's done with sixth grade she'll do it with seventh grade and she'll do it with eighth grade our goal is to catch our students up with their social emotional health and we believe that once we can fulfill what they're missing um emotionally that we will they will be prepared to come and walk onto our campus and be ready to learn any questions julia i just want to thank you we didn't have a chance to talk about the unique situation middle school has with the gap that the kids had during that incredibly important part of

105their life and i've got to congratulate i i'm sitting here i'm all struck on the efforts that she's going through now to overcome that you know very sensitive time period in the kids lives and thank you for the presentation you're welcome i i i'm to be honest with you like i'm not surprised at seeing some of these results i i'm a mom and this last year a single mom who was working i i don't know how he made it through you know and so i can't imagine how everybody else feels i know that um every time i drove by the liquor barn the blind was like considered in all seriousness i mean even having a care partner you know there's stuff for me when you said you know you could do first grade math i

106was like well you're so sure about that it's a lot things are loud but i mean i know i feel that i do want to tell you that i try to find the good out of this and i guess speaking from my own family is something that is that my kids learned skills that probably my older boys didn't learn like there was laundry to be done that my older boys never did because they were always in school in sports so there is like some good you know that i try to find out of it but um i definitely think these scores like i know i couldn't help jordan a lot of times with her stuff that she needed so we appreciate you thank you any other questions thank you all right thank you thank you

107so del rio loss is real i think our scores indicate that um it's also the lack of instruction and julie was just saying how much time we've spent online and hybrid but the lack of face time lack of time the connection that teachers have with their students whenever they taught students whether it was online or hybrid i mean it was limited as to their time because they grouped kids also we also had a lack of support with the time constraints our special ed and title supports um they filled their day but it was more limited than what they have when they're on campus and then of course the students accountability was a piece that was a strong piece we weren't sure if the students were going to attend that day or if they were going

108to do their work or not so students accountability was part of the whole learning loss but we're going to say what's next what's the steps and set our students up for success we have structured our day with more efficiency and effectiveness we've increased the instructional time for reading and math something that we weren't able to do last year was to do walk to read and walk to math the walk to read is third through fifth grade where we group students according to their ability based on a test assessment that they take and then we work with them at their level to push them and to help them to make the gains and we weren't able to do that last year in reading or in math we've also looked at our curriculum guys uh we were

109um cindy was telling me that last year was the first year for our wonders and our wonder works and so um we dug a little bit deeper this year into that and we've done a pacing guide so that we can make sure if we have all of the days of instruction where we're going to be by the end of the year um the collaboration amongst teachers has been tremendous this year which we didn't have last year um and then we've also got an additional pera that is also helping and supporting that we didn't have last year we're also going to be doing progress monitoring our benchmarks it's going to be just like the all the other schools um our benchmarks is going to be quarterly as well as bi-weekly and then we've also got after-school

110tutoring and variety school that we're going to be doing to help our students meet those games something that we've done this year was the collaboration with the teachers and the in-service and all of our wonders wonder works and top score writing which this is um we've got some new teachers as well as some older teachers that have done it for a couple of years now but like i said wonders and wonder works is new last year um fourth grade anomaly was they are seasoned teachers and they also tutored after school when they were allowed to do that so they put a lot of face time as much as they could into their kids as well questions i always look at you for a second so back to what we've talked about the learning laws yes

111it's real but like julie said it's different it's not necessarily the same thing they lost that face-to-face time with with the teachers learning those specific skills that we're looking for um but a lot of them they gave a lot of stuff just like danny was saying earlier some of the skills they have are like wait where did that come from that's not something we've taught them but so they have family skills with them however the biggest impact we're seeing is the social emotional what do they learn in kindergarten is to share everything and what do we told them now don't share anything don't share your prayers don't share your pencils don't share your anything so we've kind of gone backwards i mean before we're always writing goals for special ed to learn to share things

112and now it's not to share we're not interacting and so it's hard those are the skills that we've lost so it's really um the school structures the lack of the school structures where they have to get up in the morning brush their teeth get breakfast and get out to school instead of on their own time frame so that's been hard and just following consistent routines at home it's a little bit you can do a little bit more slow paced at mom speed is because you're not trying to hurry everybody out the door so that's been some of the routines that they have lost um and the interaction with friends they don't know how to be a friend how do i make friends um so that's those are the bigger impacts we're seeing kindergarten our kindergartners

113are right where they're pretty much where they're supposed to be that's exactly where they're supposed to be first grade we already talked about a little bit um those who are now second graders they lost that critical time in kindergarten carried over through their first grade and i'm sorry in first grade it's carried over and so we're seeing the impact on our second graders but but they have other things that they in place so we're gonna do okay um what are we doing with this we have our grade level goals that are targeted based off of what they're needing we have our benchmark assessments the esgi assessments all of our esgi assessments are one-on-one assessments that we do with our kindergartners we do accelerated reading progress monitoring this year something we're doing just to get on

114top of that is to do monthly progress uh i'm sorry monthly data meetings where um mrs meyer and myself meet with all grade levels we look at the data and we look at everybody if what teacher is doing if her date is going up then let's let's talk about what is she doing different that we can all implement so to really jump on board with that and then we have quarterly assessments just to make sure we're on track to meet those goals by the end lots of professional development um emily our instructional coach meets with the teachers regularly she meets with all teachers but any new teachers she meets with them daily some are already we have our wonders and our wonders works reading that we did the training with all teachers are taken trained

115and we have sci rosaboria has shared lots of great videos for our teachers to really jump on board with our kids um kagan all of our teachers are using and we're doing monthly weekly walkthroughs to check on that kagan and we have some incentive stuff going on um and we also have our curriculum pacing guide with related that we're using to keep us all on track and the wonders works or the wonders in the wonders works has really changed it for us so thank you for buying that curriculum because it's amazing um we also have school-wide interventions we have our transitional first grade which is new this year with a paraprofessional and we're already seeing some gains in that classroom those are the kids that just needed a little bit extra they we just needed

116a little extra stuff um we have our dick our daily we have title one push-in services where we send staff into classrooms to support reading and then we also pull out kids that need a little bit extra and have a face-to-face interaction with our title one staff we have ell services provided by our paraprofessional that you guys approved with our esther's money and so she's meeting with kids every day working with them um cup time intervention is where we do almost exactly like what julie was talking about at heritage this is where we can pull kids and do intervention or enrichment activities with them um we also have for that social emotional we have a certified education um a certified school counselor that's what's sitting right there that i have for karen um she is

117working with all the kids it's we treat it like a special classroom every class goes through her class during the week to work on social skills just how to be a friend how to how to let things roll off your back if kids say they don't like what you're wearing because that's those are the big things or i'm not your friend today but tomorrow i'm your best friend so she's working on that with the kids how to handle that but it's not everything is not bullying you're not being bullied because that's that's a buzzword and we also do a monthly positive action um we have a monthly positive action focus then we also do assemblies for bring the parents in and the kids get recognized for that um we do our friday school and we

118have after school tutoring that we have started last week we started friday school and that the kids were excited they wanted to know why more kids didn't get to come um and then we have parent engagement activities which we have scheduled this year just to help parents know that not everything has to be paper pencil that it can be fun activities so we do abc bonanza and we also do games galore where we make games and we teach them how to write spaghetti noodles and shaving cream and just make it fun instead of paper pencil did you say shaving cream i did shaving cream is the best we write a lot in shaving cream with their fingers um so there's lots of different things because so we get stuck in that paper pencil paper pencil

119kill and drill and there's so many other ways to work with especially with our little ones so we bring our parents in for that and have fun activity any questions i made a stupid statement you're fine no parents ask us all the time no i'm trying to envision it right on the table smear it out with your magic head and then write with your finger well and they're young enough they're probably not going to have shaving cream fights yet we have rules we do have rules and it only takes one that they have to wash their hand in the shape which is put away if julie did that that would not be something you'd want her age kids no they would have too much fun i'm sorry i would tell you i think if you

120didn't know it before that you know it now that you have the right people in place these are fantastic building administrators with lots of experience who are super in tune to the needs of their kids and know their kids by name and know things about them and are working with those kids and families and if nothing else what i wanted you to hear tonight because we all know they're doing great things we don't always get to hear about all those great things but i wanted you to know we've got the right people well and i was going to hit on that also i just i i think i can speak for all of us up here that none of us are questioning the ability of our teachers none of us are questioning these scores none

121of this is a surprise we have good people so thank you good question for cindy by me yes please yeah um are you seeing them when when kiddos are graduating from high school are the colleges actually lessening or lowering their requirements for admission well you see that happening it's been interesting because i actually dug that's a really cool question because i actually dug into some of that this year to see where enrollments were you know like we're universities where they're incoming classes as large individual and things like that and across the board um it i would tell you some huge universities aren't seeing the number of on-campus students they're seeing kids who are choosing to stay at home and continue to learn online because they've become comfortable with the format and they save 30 or

122more of the cost because their kids aren't living in a dorm and so in some ways they're they've been trained and prepared to be successful in a way that we wouldn't have envisioned just 20 months ago that kids would be ready to make that kind of transition but they are and we also have seen um like yeah college's enrollment is very robust and kids everybody got a free class this year everybody in the whole community could have a free class at yavapai if you wanted to go take tennis you could and no matter who you are and so there are lots of things that we're seeing and i would say this i think one of the most interesting things is that colleges have had to forego some of the standardized testing like the act and

123sat starting in the spring of 20 all the testing centers were closed so kids couldn't take tests anywhere and so i think that's something that may turn in higher ed is requiring certain scores on those kind of tests for admission because they have two years worth almost three years worth of students coming to them who never could take it so it's going to be really interesting to see what happens in higher ed but one thing that was really surprising to me was the number of people who like their students are opting to be at home learners wow good question yeah that was a great question because it's changing higherhead thank you then let's move on to item 10a it's the first reading of policy jica and regulation j-i-c-a-r student dress so this came up um

124you know we are in a community where people hunt people shoot people fish people use their bows and arrows and um there was some inconsistency about um the message that um a weapon may have and so um the dress code um regarding wearing clothing with environment order images in the high school and heritage handbooks it does not align with the policy um jica or the regulation jxcf-r so in order to provide clarity for the schools and students we're recommending that um the proposed revisions to policy jc and jsc r which is just adding the word violence so it's looking for violent images um that um that's what's already i think in the ended the high school handbook um but it's going to be in they're going to make a change in the middle school handbook

125and so this came up we had a student wearing an nra shirt that had a weapon on it it wasn't necessarily meant to be violent um and and uh there's some discussion with the parent and we think we worked it out but that kind of led to us having meeting in vlt and coming up with a kind of a common purpo what's the purpose of this and really it's to prevent you know violent images and so that's why the change in the policy and literally i think in the policy it's one word and in the regulation it's the word violent and or so there's not a huge change and i think it's been more in line with the community and what the intent of the dress code is so in your example then the nra

126with the gun would be unacceptable under under the new policy under this it would be yes because it's not meant to be a violent image it's just you know meant to support the the ability to you know have arms which is purely legal so any other questions this is just a discussion item it's a first reading so no action will be taken on it item b is a second reading that is the action item of all of the policy updates from aspa again an action item any questions and they need second reading promotion i am ready but i will move to adopt the policy service advisories as published in our agenda and as shown second second all in favor have a wonderful thank you thank you now the big question is how many of us

127read every one i just want to build changes