001okay it's streaming okay in case you're wondering that clock is not correct around this [Music] welcome everyone you please uh join us thank you very much hopefully mrs allen here mrs christ here mister here mr ellery mr mcgivin president thank you you have an agenda mr president or so i have a broader discussion of some issues underlying that rather than the voucher itself 11 f is that correct so that's agenda item eight approval modification about this correct f is that yes okay [Music] yes motion passes as amended thank you call to the public okay is there anyone on the phone online thank you we have one called the public uh roger truman if you would please um please state your name and address upon them you have about two ministers i'll take them out of
00230. thank you hi i'm roger schuman i'm a bus driver for the district my first year here i spent 10 years driving first really before that i drove in oklahoma city before that all that was basically worked around my real career which is started out as an accountant that i would include for the air force and then i taught college in high school bcc i'm here tonight to brag at my boss trying to get a pay raise and i put down some reasons why i think he deserves and i've also got a recruiting plan to help us be more staff with drivers for next year let you know what i'm going to do to help the district out there's only one copy of the of this for everybody to read and then there should be
003enough of these or at least seven out of eight that's it thank you any further good evening and welcome to our board meeting it's nice to see so many people usually we're sitting here with ourselves and our staff so um thank you for being here um first of all i wanted to acknowledge the volunteer little gift bags that board members received are from our volunteer committee and we normally have a big volunteer breakfast at the end of the year where we recognize all of our volunteers and being that as you know it's an odd year we weren't able to have our potluck this year but our committee did put together some goodie bags for our board members and all the additional volunteers who helped us out behind the scenes in the school year so i
004just want to make sure that you know that the bags came from our volunteer committee here at school secondly happy mother's day to all the mothers i hope that everybody had a great weekend and a nice sunday we are sailing towards safe harbor so we have eight official days left in this 2020-2021 school year last week we celebrated teacher appreciation week and i can't say enough how so very proud i am of our teachers and staff strong teachers don't teach content google has content strong teaching connects learning in ways that inspire kids to learn to learn more and strive for greatness greatness an extra special shout out to our ptc for the amazing treats they provided for our teachers and staff all week our adna team provided lunch on friday for our staff and we
005will be celebrating our classified staff on wednesday and as you see there's our little canoe there getting to safe harbor so we've had we've been in uncharted waters this year so we're proud to be colts we had our virtual career day last week last wednesday it was our first annual virtual career date we had you can see our zoom screen there it was very successful our career day committee worked very hard to make sure that our presenters had things that they were able to log in and meet so our occupations included ranchers attorneys an author musician u.s border patrol d.a technology specialist homemaker so again a great big shout out and thank you to our career day committee our eighth grade trip um started out with the day at the state capitol the day was
006very informative and everyone was very excited to see the students you know they hadn't seen a lot of movement around the capitol especially with students during this pandemic so it was the first time in a long time thank you mrs kaise for your help in making this possible and you can see some pictures there that we took um with uh president karen fenn senator david gowan gail griffin and representative becky nunn so it was a good day and the eighth graders will be um the students will be putting together a presentation and highlighting their the entire trip this was day one so they have a lot more to share with the board and so they will be here for um hopefully our june board meeting uh navi also had a virtual conference which was the
007national association of bilingual education so we had three staff members mrs cuevas and i um attend the sessions what's nice about the virtual sessions as they're recorded so we can go back and share them with staff members as well who didn't get to attend we are working on reinstating and refining our dual language enrichment strand this year we kind of had to mix the kids into different classrooms at cohorts due to the number of students who remain virtual and the teachers that we have still here on campus our students have tested in spanish for preliminary data with our nwa map our new assessment also provides a spanish assessment and we are working on developing a bi-literacy skill for elementary and middle school to prep students for high school and entering college so we want to
008develop some rubrics and benchmarks so that kids can receive a bi-literacy still to continue into middle school and then that we can present to them at eighth grade promotion to prepare for high school earth day planting thank you to our buy there the rotary for our 500 grand so we were able to buy flowers and if you look around our campus they we have about 12 different planners that are potted finally we had our parent volunteers who helped us out who were amazing and our staff of course that we honored our kids who had perfect attendance were the ones that we chose to come out of class and help us with the plan team student health update so our number of students with pink dye and flu overall have definitely improved from last year so
009we know that students are being seen by nds at urgent care centers more quickly and are being treated and not coming to school when they're sick our mitigation plan has restricted students from coming to school sick which has been helpful and communication has been a key factor as well so that's great news to share a great teamwork by all because it really is working with our families and communicating and with our teachers in order to ensure that everybody everybody stays healthy student attendance and health update friday we did have 50 students absent 16 on warranty and one ice quarantine and one isolation monday today we had 57 absent with the same 16 on quarantine and one isolation we currently have our dual language enrichment preschool under quarantine the students will test on tuesday and may
010return on friday with a negative result otherwise the students will return on may 20th and we did move the preschool dual language class promotion to thursday since the students will all be able to be back on that day student grade update this is not so not such great news as we review the dnf reports for students and which is our eligibility report our 8th graders we have 20 students who have ds and f's eight of the students are virtual students 12 are in person 7th grade we have 21 students with ds and s 7 are virtual and 14 are in person in 6th grade we have 26 students 6 virtual and 20 person so teachers and administrators have been meeting our students and calling parents students will lose end of the year privileges which is
011promotion for 8th graders splash day etc we're also analyzing the nwa map assessment data because they just took a benchmark assessment we really want to see if the grades correlate with the achievement level of where the students are performing again looking at attendance and the frequency of parent communication because these students are students whose teachers have reached out phone calls emails throughout the year so we know it's been a difficult year for students but we're still trying to get to the root cause of and i explained to the students what i meant with them that it's very hard to get an a but it's very easy to get an f because to me that's demonstrating that they're doing absolutely nothing or very minimal and have zeros so we're having serious conversations and all these students
012will be spoken to at least the sixth and seventh graders about attending summer school and we're also speaking to the kids about next year our mandatory after school tutorial and possible saturday school annual dance residency thank you to our continental foundation our third and fourth graders have participated in this program for 15 plus years we did have to do virtual dance residency last year and um today they came in so we'll be able to actually do in-person assembly so we're excited about that student advisory meetings we worked on reflecting on student advisory this year what they liked and what we can improve on or do differently for next year we've discussed our be kind efforts and every student advisory meeting the kids write on little post-it notes on who they think deserves our ben's spell
013for the month and this we recognize mr curtis today this afternoon he's definitely our rock star so they presented him with their best bell today we also reviewed our school integrated action plan and spoke about the goals that we have for next year and that helped us foster the conversation about saturday school and retention and bridge and our daily math skills that were implemented we will present two more men's bells at our awards assembly on friday registration update for next school year we are projecting 593 students next year k-8 that's 20 students less than our current enrollment right now of 6 13. our registrations are coming in slowly but surely we currently have 303 officially registered students and we're waiting for some of our kids who are here on open enrollment haven't submitted their requests
014yet and obviously we have new families moving into the new homes in nevada high dens which we feel will balance out and will be at the same enrollment next year work in progress for next school year so our staff has worked on our school integrated action plan and administration completed the lie act which is the district integrated action plan and you have copies there provided for our board members committee also worked on our two-year strategic plan adding specific measurable goals and now we're doing the alignment between the saya and the strategic plan to ensure action steps that they may be needed to be added let me see what else i shared the draft with student advisory like i mentioned so the draft will be ready in june and ready for rollout in august 2021 teachers
015are also working this week on developing the theme which is teacher the teacher highly effective needs guide so teachers on this week we have subs covering for teachers to work with mrs cuevas and mr nathan on developing our highly effective needs guide summer conferences and professional development just wanted to list a few of the trainings we'll be attending june 10th and 11th is the aziala's conference that mrs cuevas mr magayanes and i will be attending june 11th is asba virtual summer leadership institute so please make sure you let mrs monica know if you'd like to attend so she can get our board members registered also july 7th through 9th we will be attending the avid digital xp with eight teachers with mrs cuevas myself and mr magnanis and july 21st through 24th is the asbo
016summer conference at mr marianas will be attending and presenting this year so he's going to be putting some good pr out there for continental so thank you humber transportation administrators are also going to be attending a conference in flagstaff june 21st through the 24th and you see some of the topics that they'll be covering there so again thank you and we will keep calm and carry on and get through the rest of the school year thank you very much [Music] thank you all for being here my name is deanna cuevas i'm the principal here at continental i see many new faces and i want to thank you for your time that you've come out tonight to be a part of our photography so i just want to start with testing updates we have finished our
017state testing for azm2 which is our state test for third through eighth graders azalea testing has been completed that is a test that is given for our english language learner students science state testing has also been completed our fifth and eighth graders take that test that test was a field test this school year for them to gather data for the state together data so that they can decide how they're going to formulate the test for next spoiler map growth testing is our benchmark test that we used here at our district so we just finished fourth quarter testing multi-state alternate assessments those are to be completed by this friday may 14th and we are just about finished those assessments are done for students who have been identified via their individualized education plans through special education our
018summer enrichment program will be taking place june 8th through june 30th from 8 to 11 30 monday through fridays kinder jumpstart will be first through the going to have kindred gem start plus first through yes first week but what kinder jumpstart is is it's a way for us to be able to prepare our kindred gardeners our incoming kindergartners with the structure and procedures of what it'll be like when they enter kindergarten for the summer enrichment program from our teachers we ask for referrals so far they've turned in 110 referrals we've had 50 confirmed that they will be attending 12 parents who have responded for various reasons they are not able to have their children attend due to being out of town or some people that are moving 48 follow-up calls to parents are being completed
019and they will if they do not attend summer enrichment they will be slated to intend after school tutorials that will be taking place and there's no reason as to why they should not be attending after school tutorials since we do provide transportation for their for our students um this superintendent rico mentioned earth day this was a big a big thing for us to do here at continental because we were awarded the 500 grand through the bio birthday rotary we're very thankful for that our students beautified our campus and we're really excited because we have had those planters here for quite some time without any flowers in them so it was a really good thing for us to do and walk around campus and see teacher appreciation we did wrap up last week but we always
020appreciate our teachers and all of our staff here this week we have our classified staff appreciation week and we'll also be appreciating our nurse orange sports and trooper for all of her hard work through all the school closure and covet 19 mitigation plans that we've been working through many of you i saw picked up our structured immigration action plan which we call the saya our teachers have been working very hard on this these are pictures of the fishbones that we call in regards to coming up with concerns areas of need for our for our side for our school site and through all of that work you end up getting the school integrated action plan so it took takes a lot of time and it's with the work of all a lot of our teachers and
021our staff some of the primary needs are our teachers need to maintain high academic behavioral and social emotional learning expectations for all students the desired outcomes we will be working towards our teachers will maintain high expectations for all students by utilizing common planning time and professional development time to analyze data to drive and differentiate instruction another is our teachers need to use all available student data to intentionally plan an instruction that supports every student primarily special needs in meeting rigorous learning goals by differentiating the instruction and implementing design for learning that's called udl what that is is a learning template and that's something that we'll be rolling out more and talking about more next school year with our teachers these are outcomes our teachers and leadership will identify and implement curriculum for special needs students
022and intentionally plan instruction that supports every student our leadership needs to commit to sustaining a culture of high expectation for academic learning and social emotional growth of all students focusing on the most balanced and respectful professional learning community for all staff desired outcomes is leadership will increase teacher effectiveness by setting clear expectations and developing school-wide instructional and operational non-negotiables which we'll be talking about that's something that many of us have had as leadership myself and mr latham who's the director of student services is we need to be very clear which is superintendent people mentioned the high instructional needs guide which we're calling the theme it's a guide that's going to pretty much map out what our game plan is to be successful this coming school year we've been working hard on that we've started today
023with meeting with our teachers getting feedback and we'll before we break for summer we'll have gone through all of our departments in our school so we can create this guide that will be available uploaded on our school website for our teachers and it will be a clear plan for our parents and students to also be able to see what kind of curriculum we have here on campus what we're utilizing what our curriculum about this and what is the plan because it's important everybody knows so we can work together and be successful together as a community parents need to be aware of school improvement goals and learn how to better assist their students in meeting academic and social emotional standards desired outcomes a yearly calendar will be developed for parents in order for them to plan
024their involvement understanding curriculum and standards being taught to their children that's key parents do need to know the curriculum that's happening here that we're rolling out they need to also provide us with feedback so we keep the most successful right now we have a new math curriculum that we're going to be rolling out next year and we will also be doing requests for requests for proposals next school year for a possible new reading curriculum having parent feedback and community feedback is highly important so i encourage you to please keep attending our government because you can be part of that are there any questions again i want to thank you all for being here please never hesitate to come and speak to myself or mr lathan we're always here to listen and to learn from each
025other so thank you thank you recognition of some amazing people [Music] williams um so we would like to present staff recognition to miss dina friedman and schoolias as they retire from the continental elementary school district ms dina friedman has served as an educator for 30 years and has been an employee of continental for 23 of those years [Applause] mr williams has served as an educator for over 30 years serving as our physical education teacher the past three years at continental and we're just so very happy that you decided to ride out into the sunset here with your last three years of pre-retirement it does it is the right choice yes we agree we hate to lose you and um but we know where you live and we know where you'll be here and so we
026do have a sunshine community here at school that gives gifts to our staff members who are either retiring or moving on to other endeavors but you'll get that gift in front of the whole staff because they didn't want us to give it to you today and i understand but we do have a card for you that's signed by all of us and our board members to just let you know how much we appreciate you okay so thank you thank you [Applause] and miss freedom so it is tradition that as you retire and if you've worked at continental for more than 30 years that you receive a painted pony so this reading here is your official painted pony that i hope you cherish because it's beautiful and we cherish you we wish you so much luck
027and we're definitely board well i know members son jackson really loved her classes and i'm disappointed um i think uh these two folks are about what makes continental amazing they're amazing individuals and they will be missing but uh but i'll tell you anybody that divorced 30 years or 23 years of their life to educate has got my eternal admiration and i thank you both for your contributions on our kids and their teachers and best of wishes on whatever is next uh both of these amazing teachers not only rocket and foster but both of them coached for me um in their time career coach who has come in and helped with the cross-country and the track program um when i went into administration i was allowed to coach and she took over that and just made
028a good program even better and so we really appreciate her and her contribution in the classroom but also outside the extracurricular activities with our students which is why she gets some of the loudest cheers from our students at our assemblies because you know there's just a lot of coach this is freeway i'm going to try to get through this um i've been here 14 years and this australian has been here and i would call her if i had a mentor teacher being the only teacher of the district when i came in who worked with kindergarten's great great i heard of her when she turned to me and she really put her arm around me and my family where i came from northern meadow that's where my family was at and she really became the mother
029to me in the workplace and meant for me that i would not be where i'm at today if it wasn't for her and her love and her support and her kindness towards children which i've tried to mimic every day and the care of her passion i've had the fortune to be on sunday on one of her dc trips where she met her beyond now i got four of those trips under my belt and i went to arizona which is the first time but the passion for the kids and the outside the classroom i inherited that from her you know she's just how many years volleyball coach for this room about 18 years and i will tell you she creates a huge problem because of the fact that she has almost 65 girls out of middle
030school where there's not a lot of kids and she has such a huge team that is so competitive and it makes it turns the pressure on me to give them competition time against other schools that don't have that strong program and it's because of this lady right here and a lot of the compassion she has but also the care she has for the kids and so she's taught many of us that skill and we hope to carry that on but she'll be great forever in my heart so thank you for the influence passion drive dedication and love is what the both of you are and being the new kid in town last school year for me coach and you have so many ideas and you're such a leader and i don't know how many times
031i've walked through the hallway and this is feeling from diana and he has given me [Music] they're amazing beautiful when i think about continental i think about the two of you the love the passion and how much because of everything [Music] is okay thank you very much and congratulations okay we have a director of transportation okay um mr lane is not here so i'm gonna just cover this for him tonight okay and mr nathan you might want to help me out if you have more information okay so as we're looking forward to 2021 22 school year we definitely need drivers so um thank you roger for letting us you know what you're gonna help us we will be short three to five drivers to start our school year and we're also looking to create a
032preschool bus service because right now we had our this year we had our preschool kids riding with our regular elementary school kids and it's very difficult there's just a lot of students so we're trying to get preschool to have their own bus needing to add additional bus routes into modera heightens to meet the demands of the growth and specifically the north end two buses currently with an average of 57 to 65 kids daily we've made some changes and we did we had an informal agreement with sawanita director in how to help both districts be a little bit more efficient so we've come up with the plan to stop transportation in the elephant head area for the upcoming school year we our current service area affected is on hawkway at purple finch to the east currently
033an average of four students have been utilizing transportation to and from continental in that area and currently one student is utilizing the bus to walden grove high school a letter was sent home to parents april 1st this year and if service was to continue the students on the bus would need to be get picked up at 6 15 in the morning and be on the bus for one and a half hours before getting to school that's with us having to change the routes to meet the needs of the growth in madara highlands it's not a safe place to turn buses around in that area and um damage to buses over the years have entailed mirrors tires suspension systems cost savings to the district will save 18 900 miles a year on the two buses serving
034the area that's the cost of two prevented maintenance two pms preventative maintenance at eight hundred dollars each and it will save us over eight thousand dollars of fuel cost so we just wanted to state the state and federal laws to cover transportation so it's there for everyone to see okay so that's the reason for our plan so we just wanted to make sure that our board was aware and like i said we've worked in conjunction with and so there's an internal agreement that we will be taking the montana vista students because that's right on the border and we do have a bus that goes to montana vista picks up more students than what sabarita has so they have a bus that they pick up more students that go to saudi that go to slow free
035so that was the reason why we made that change so we will continue to accept elephant head kids here under open enrollment but we will not be able to provide transportation okay so that concludes mr lane's presentation so do you have enough besides lack of drivers enough buses to expand into their homes so currently we have two extra buses on any given day as many of you know some of our buses are older we have a plan that we're working on getting at least one bus every two years at a minimum which is what we're working on using capital funds for and we're talking about that plan and developing that just so we can continue to increase on buses the biggest issue right now does remain drivers it's not just our district it's all the
036all districts in arizona are struggling with this um it's a challenge we've got some amazing bus drivers most of them are semi-retired and like to golf um and so the challenge is is that they're great drivers and they absolutely love working for the district but at some point you want to go into full retirement and so that's we're looking at losing three to four next year who have expressed that that's their desire um and also with the challenges of covid it's been challenging as a lot of our drivers are uncomfortable with working in those types of conditions so that's been another challenge that we face especially in trying to recruit well one of the good things is this year the board approved for us to hire a trainer and so the district is in a
037good place where somebody does have the time we're able to to train a driver from scratch so you can put the word out there for anybody that is interested we have a lot of community members here today that's really a big need that we need and we are with that driver able in about a month month and a half to train up a driver where they get paid during that time but then they could drive as soon as they have completed their certification i got two cents to add to that if you love me once you have three roger three okay uh the plan i passed down to the board was i i think for older guys like me we have a hard time recruiting them to come in every morning and every afternoon five
038days a week that i think our recruiting could really work if we recruit teams two people on a route and they can work it between them any way they want 70 30 50 50. monday wednesday friday and tuesday thursday one week and then the other ones for next week i think you can sell that and get guys to come on board and stick with us for years doing that that's that's my recruitment plan makes sense just want to remind if we are going to speak we need to come to the podium so you can hear it on the live stream okay thank you great thank you very much okay we'll move on to our consent agenda okay mrs great i'm getting there so at the last board manual it was asked that we get an
039update on what we can do as far as refinancing our outstanding bonds i sent the letter i received from stipel to the board members as well so what it is is we have three bonds that are outstanding um the way it would work is if we were to refinance only one of them right now is eligible to refinance if we were to to refinance that bond it would save our taxpayers 550 000 if we were to wait a year and refinance two of the three we can save the taxpayers up to 1.2 million dollars if the interest rates were to increase by 1.2 percent financing of the refinancing of both those bonds would still result in 550 000 savings to our taxpayers we also talked about waiting an additional year on top of that to
040refinance all three at the same time and right now their suggestion is to wait see what happens and we can re-discuss it again 6 to 18 months down the road depending on where we're at the reason why we can't only refund that we can only refinance it the one time is as a tax-exempt entity after we refinance the bonds one time we lose our tax exempt status and start have to pay taxes on anything that we refinance after that okay and when you're talking you know between the two bonds a little over 11 million dollars that's that's quite a bit that we would have to pay on taxes on those if we refinance them separately so that's why we're in a holding pattern currently as far as the refinancing of the bonds go with that
041i will open it up to the board if they have any other questions if i didn't answer everything that they were looking for uh i met with mr schubert last monday for a few minutes on this issue and i'm basically fully supportive of waiting until next april there's some risk involved if there's a huge increase in interest rates and we wouldn't realize the benefit to our taxpayers in the district than by doing it now but i think based on the advice uh from steeple and in your analysis about this uh craig that it makes sense to to defer this until april i think you mentioned and refinance those bonds uh and we can publicize this greatly to our taxpayers in the district that we've taken action to save quite a bit of money for them
042on the secondary tax rate so thank you you're welcome sir how much time is left on those ones so the first set of bonds are not even callable yet we haven't started paying anything back on them those are don't call until 2028 if i the second set of bonds we started we start paying back on next year i believe so that's just going to be a death yes bond payback is over a long period of time don't quote me but i want to say our total payback is 20 years old one other comment and the reason why i think that this is so critical is if you look at the auditor general report on because every school district in this in the state um continental sits kind of as a sore thumb uh obvious as
043far as what we spend in interest per student than a pure school or on a statewide average we're anywhere from like five to six times what we spend for students on interest costs uh uh than than the state average and peer schools that were prepared against so by refinancing these bonds uh next year that significant gap will be reduced thank you sir and you're still uh electric revision number two so before you tonight we're asking for your approvals on our second budget revision this is the final budget provision that is required by abd every year to give you an update um we did have to take out 48 000 from our budget just to deal with the uh those students that were listed as distance learners um our distance learners are only funded at 95
044so our budget was reduced by 48 000 and also within the budget you will see where money has been reallocated in other areas um which is common you know we put contingency in our budgets every year and just taking that contingency out and moving it to another place that's needed currently and i know we haven't got to the district finance report yet but currently within the district even after our our budget reduction we are still sitting at just over two hundred thousand dollars in unencumbered funds uncovered meaning that right now i don't have a spot to put them um i don't have a i don't have a bill attached to it so we're still setting it to about two hundred thousand dollars on a covered cash so so a few years ago the state limit
045was four percent of your budget you could carry over into the upcoming school year they re they removed that requirement you can carry over as much as possible or as little as possible i i think the 200 000 mark is a good area for us to be in it because what it does for next year is it will help reduce the tax rate because we're carrying over the funds so you know the higher we can the more money that we carry over is the the less money that we have as a tax burden on our constituents but then again it's also money that we need to be spending on you know you know on things like classroom supplies or library books or you name it yeah and also remember you know even though we still
046have this 200 000 you know next year it will be less because we are adding the positions of the special ed director and the math code which will take up a good shot of that 200 000 for the upcoming year so it's a matter of looking at other areas to carry over the upcoming school year thank you you're welcome i'll entertain the motion please to approve this we have a um in a second with any further discussion or questions okay this is christ mr austin yeah we have our adoption of our masculine feelings starting 21-22 okay well we are very excited we've gone through the process of our committee and we have our new math coach with elizabeth here and miss wendy fanning who has been a math teacher here at school for many many
047years who are also part of the process so we are asking for the approval of reveal map k-8 for mathematics instruction and continental school year next school year and the books are there in the back if anybody would like to see them we were very happy that we had one member of the public come to preview our curriculum which i stated in the 30 years that i've been doing curriculum adoptions i think i had one other person committed to review a language arts book so again our committee did a great job they are here um to answer any questions that you may have of the process but we are looking forward to the approval and getting our professional development plan so we can move forward try to pass fourth grade now or is it fit
048i reviewed the curriculum a little bit actually um in for a few minutes in the third grade math class a couple weeks ago got introduced to fractions which i didn't get until fourth grade when i was going to school but but i think based on what i've looked at and some outside review of people that i think have a pretty good background in math it looks like a good curriculum and a rigorous curriculum for our students so as someone who spends every day in math i am really encouraged that our students are going to learn what's going to be necessary for us to work in the real world i run into people every day making really big mistakes and it costing federal agencies millions of dollars to correct uh just little mistakes and we see
049it in all our organizations so while i'm excited about the adoption of new curriculum and while i'm i'm you know a fan of mcgraw-hill i think what we really need to keep focused on is getting our students to competency and making sure that they are ready to compete when they go to high school and even more important than that when they compete when they go into the real world so as i i also sit on the jtag the vocational education advisory board and this is one of the things that we talk about we need to get the two big areas are reading math and communication and so good luck i'm glad to see us do this but it's really about getting kids that can perform and so anything that i can ever do to help
050i certainly will but i in our industry today this is a really huge issue that is affecting us and i have to throw out i just had a meeting the other day and truck drivers are now making 120 000 a year in arizona because they can't actually get truck drivers who can pass drug tests but that's another situation but all of this goes to getting jobs and it starts right here continental so good luck okay yes mrs yes mr mcgivern yes thank you that we approve the superintendent's intention motion in a second discussion mrs allen yes mrs price yeah okay preschool and after care tuition proposal that we approve the tuition entries okay a second motion in a second any discussion i just think it should be more that's the budget thank you okay we
051have the authorization of uh board and admin team for registration overnight travel reimbursement for 2122. this is something we approve in the that everything was virtual like we weren't traveling and conferences were not happening for outside travel but now that conferences are opening up everyone have this yeah okay we we have to submit a form by the 21st of may with our our priorities as a board so our first uh is the nominated delegate and then we have to submit our ideas to i guess you're we have gonna come up with our top five prior to the 21st correct and it can be submitted online by the delegate or you can actually download it and scan it into them so we communicate with our delegate now um i must decline the nomination okay sorry their
052first meeting is uh september 11th and that just doesn't seem like an appropriate day to me on the 20th anniversary of 9 11. that's actually the date of the assembly the first meeting is going to be held on june 4th it says allegedly committing meets on june 4th but the actual assembly that you would attend is september 11. why are we supposed to put together our top five priorities well i think we might have to have them put that together uh i personally would prefer a meeting because i haven't even reviewed some of these things in detail at this point to give this subject the justice that it deserves okay so we have um let's look at our calendars while we're on this subject sometime next week tuesday and wednesday monday and thursday next week
053we're pretty busy correct correct tuesday is kinder and wednesday is eighth grade promotion this thursday monday the 17th mid morning or early morning or late afternoon four o'clock so we're going to go ahead and continue this item to a special meeting of may 17th at 4 pm is that correct that's great okay so thank you okay e governor's order 2021-06 our compromise and our evening school discussion so we wanted to have a discussion in terms of the governor's orders and our task force is meeting on wednesday to go through our mitigation plan and go through our checklist in terms of our readiness to operate with without math or to transition to the plan of not learning math at school so what we wanted to do is just ask for some discussion and information from our
054board members so that mr mr nathan and i can take that to the task force on wednesday um i had suggested doing like a tiered mitigation plan level one two three whatever so we could easily adjust it as as we need to i think it would be easier for the task force easier for the staff and the parents to keep track of um that way if things get worse we can just seamlessly move without any interruption to the kids and things get better same same thing if i made miss rico you weren't talking about when we first started we actually already have faces integrated into it the meeting that we're having on wednesday is to determine which phase we're currently on um and there are different steps in that and we've been functioning basically most
055of the year at the highest level we feel that the numbers from the county green valley not to mention the numbers of our schools specifically our community are very good at this point we're ready to make a change to one of those other levels um we may with the since we wrote the what 74-page document that's led us this year um we may make some updates based off the things that we now know that we did not know back then about code as far as the spread originally remember when we wrote it if you touch something you get it that science is greatly changing they're finding out more things so as always we continue to use the medical and scientific information to make those decisions make some modifications to that plan um which we then
056present to mrs rico and she shares that with the board when we do those types of changes and kind of determine at this point where we will be at on the report phases that we have in that mitigation plan that's currently available on our website but as i mentioned there will be we anticipate some changes because of what we know and what we've learned about moving forward well i'd just like to say that on april 21st april 27th and may 5th i requested a meeting to talk about masks and i think this is a pretty big issue actually in green valley in this area we are one of the highest vaccinated areas in the united states and so we really have mitigated much of the risk of spread with we should have been talking about
057this great secret what happened people that want masks and so again here at our school board we should have been meeting about this because 303 kids right now and i don't want to let them down we're here for the kids and we need to open these schools and we need to take the masks off the kids so whatever we need to do we need to meet just a point of information that our current policy if i may just read this really quickly um effective april 28th students will be allowed to remove their masks while at the desk if students are going to work in pairs or groups their basketball to be worn students who will be allowed to remove their masks while running out in the playground so outside they don't need their mask we
058will continue to encourage social distancing on the playground as much as possible and if they choose to wear masks that's their prerogative and teachers will plan for frequent mass breaks during transitions from class or content subjects and there's a copy of this i think it's on the back table or something if you like just a little bit of information any further yes i would say when the governor looked at his order on the schools we had less than a month ago this would have been in and the vaccinations and the data would have been different in december it's a different conversation right now we've got eight days left i don't think it's a big issue um we've had the only school that's been in full operation to the best of our abilities all year kudos
059to everybody so i'm very proud of what we've done i can't see dropping mass for eight days would not be in our best interest also um yes the eight five six two nine or eight five six one four eight five six two two the green valley zip codes do have a high level of vaccines in that however a good majority of our kids are from two nine midair islands which is in the much lower and if i remember right in the 30 percentile so that is not as high and so that population is needs to be factored into effect like due respect and i think it's great that green valley residents have stepped up um that's the right word for it to to meet this thing head on um you know we've got eight days
060and we can see what you know next year is going to bring we've gotten feedback from teachers that and other staff that you know our colds our flu our strep our pink eye is down i know it is in my house um you know maybe the extra cleanliness isn't a bad thing coke or no coat not that i'm trying to suggest we wear a mask all day long next year but it's just something to be known so talk about my vote question answer any further i um that the governor's executive order came out of only about 20 days left in the school but he issued the executive order eliminating the mass mandate so obviously he thought it was a big issue and he also knew that we're only 20 days left in the school year
061my concern on this is that this is not going to go away this is not going to go away over three months of the summer and we could be arguing masked or no masks all the way until school starts in office unless we as a board decide what we're going to do what happens over the next eight days i'll be honest with you is not a big deal to me right now because we've already sent the letter to the parents saying that masks are optional about the kids are sitting at their desk but what are we going to do in august i think we're going to no mask an instruction beginning on day 212 summer school starts in about two weeks so we do because we are face-to-face in about two weeks so if i
062may we had discussed that once we meet with our task force committee and come back with the recommendation to the governing board we realized that we do want to have that discussion in that meeting prior to summer school so we had set a tentative date of the may 17th correct all right but if we're going to meet on the 17th oh the 21st so we can talk about me i'm trying to meet the week of on may 21st because that is record state we don't have students on campus and it would allow us to have that discussion with the recommendation from the top four task force to the government board and um again i just wanted to reiterate that as the superintendent after the governor's order came out we had no questions asked whatsoever pro
063or con in terms of parents coming or calling me to say mrs rico the mass mandate is eliminated we don't want our kids to wear masks anymore or otherwise parrots saying to keep their mouths on i believe we had three parents who requested to not have mass students wear masks contacted teachers teachers had conversations with those parents we came up with our compromise and so which led us after the compromise i heard from three parents who were upset that we made a compromise and one parent thanked me for the compromise so i heard from four parents out of the 500 families that we serve in the 600 so we keep talking about how continental is unique and special and different and this is one circumstance where we are uniquely different in the sense that our
064parents had buy-in and helped us we had parents on our task force who helped us develop our mitigation plan teachers on this staff and i reiterated to the board as well that even the best late plan if we hadn't had 80 of our teachers trust administration and the procedures that we had in place for the mitigation plan we wouldn't have been able to come back to school because if 80 of our teachers would have said no we don't feel safe coming back we wouldn't have had teachers to teach our students but because we're different and we're unique and we were able to communicate effectively with our staff we had the reverse 80 percent of our teachers wanted to come back which isn't the case into usd or even in our neighboring district of sao anita
065so we will continue to do what needs to be done as we listen to our stakeholders and as we keep our parents and our um teachers at the forefront because we do i don't think any of us want us to have to continue with our mass game longer than we have to so we'll plan to come back um on may 21st if you could check your calendars to see so that we can hear from the task force and the staff and our parents who are on the task force as well yeah can we combine it on may 17th is that instead of having a meeting on monday and friday just have a meeting on monday why don't we do that check those things in the times that we've done the checklist before it takes about
066an hour with that team okay and so it's very doable for us and then mr ferguson and i will go back to the drawing board take the information recommendations from them update the coupe the continuity of operations plan that would be presented to you on that day so both of those meetings will be considered study sessions and public meetings so everybody's welcome to come participate so that's the 17-4 right yes okay okay great any further discussions [Music] um this particular expense voucher caught my eye again because of the same issues that i brought up at the last board meeting with regard to the purchase of several books for the use of our school council they also appeared on on this expense voucher and and these books were to be in the office only of our
067of our counselor and i couldn't understand why we were purchasing multiple copies so one of the questions that i have i reviewed both vouchers again uh greg and and i noticed in 803.4 all those books are listed again but there's zero dollars and i just don't understand why they're listed again with zero dollars when they were listed on the 803.3 expense voucher last month that had dollar purchase amounts for these books you know if we ordered 10 books we only received three the first time and the the second last seven had come in on this other voucher okay well i i i had a very informative conversation with uh chris after our counselor chris are you here chris first of all thank you very very much for our phone conversation this afternoon it was very
068beneficial to me and if there's anything i say here that in any way mischaracterizes what you think our conversation was please correct me i had a concern deeply about the introduction of some of these books with regard to gender identity and sexual orientation i believe that these are very very controversial issues especially at the elementary school and middle school level even though there are definitely those who disagree with me and i accept that um the conversation that i had with chris this afternoon is i was interested very much at how are we using the material in these books which deal with a lot of lgbt issues transgender identity social justice issues and she confirmed to me that that her primary role is to be a listener and to listen to kids that come in and
069maybe have issues in these areas and want to discuss it with with somebody that they trust and and are willing to open up with and and her responsibilities are to listen and to use some of the material in these books to assist in that discussion with with the student uh she confirmed that she's not a therapist and i think that while i feel more comfortable with how this material may be used i think it also begs a larger question on exactly what our school's role is in our policy in dealing with gender identity and sexual orientation issues of our students when they when they come up i can understand that they may wish to discuss these things with a school counselor and chris mentioned to me her ethics on confidentiality every student wishes to speak
070with her on a confidential basis because they feel uncomfortable talking with their parents about that and i understand and respect that confidentiality but my question then becomes what comes next after those discussions if they if those issues continue what is the school's role in that whole process and when at any time are also parental rights come into the picture when a parent has the right to know what their kids are not only learning in school but maybe discussing the school staff i don't know what our policy is on that and i would very much like to have that discussion whether that be in a study session roxanna or as an agenda item at a further board meeting to establish better uh what our school's role in what i consider to be some very very controversial
071issues and deemed to be by a lot of parents and community members in the district and really across the country i would think most those are already in place for me they talk about divorce people dying in the same what becomes controversial i mean divorce was controversial desegregating schools used to be controversial i mean kids are actually dealing with this she bought those books because she had kids that had those problems and were experiencing that and i don't think these are real events happening in their lives and we say oh no no just go to go talk to your mom about it and a lot of kids don't have resources at home that's why we feed them that's why we fed them over the summer they don't have food at home they may not have
072parents they can talk to and whether or not an issue grows to where you need to bring the parents in um i think maybe that should be established um but just we can't turn our backs on kids who have real problems suicide among high schoolers middle schoolers elementary school kids is a huge number it really is and suicide among transgender kids and gay and lesbian kids are so much higher um i'm 34 i grew up in a tiny town in the deep south with about 5 000 people and i mean two transgender kids in elementary school i got asked out by a girl named amanda who called herself spike boy closed and had her hair chopped off and that way in the counselor's office actually that people are really exposed to these problems and i'm
073not going to let us turn our backs to these kids well i appreciate all of our concerns and i certainly uh and as a former school teacher and coach i am empathetic to children's however children however the arizona revised statutes pretty clearly direct parental rights 1-602-a item number four parents have the right to direct the moral or religious training of the minor child and so we then get into the discussion of what is moral and what is you know i agree back in probably the 50s i would guess that divorce was probably a big deal i don't think i knew any kids whose parents were divorced my parents weren't divorced but again in the arizona revised statutes we have outlined that a parent has the right to direct the moral and religious education of their
074child and so we're walking a pretty fine line and i think what mr ellery says at what point do we say this is no longer an issue for the school but it's now an issue for the family and it's not if the kid is being bullied because he has two dads the bullets need to be brought in and the goalies need to understand that these are people with intrinsic human rights just like you you have now if we go around and start teaching kids hey you know androgen blockers can put off puberty and voice you know then maybe maybe that's not where we want to go we're not teaching them how to be transgender we're not teaching them how to be gay we're teaching them how to deal with these issues as they experience them
075and that's not religious it's moral it's it's not treating other human beings like human beings is definitely moral it is treating human beings like human beings is very important okay further okay especially our parents and i think that is very important that when these issues do arise parents are involved so moving forward and i know that chris gothard does call and speak to the parents because families need to know what is going on in their homes if they if i'm a parent myself my children come here if they were to go to scotland's office and speak to her i would want to know what is going on and what my children are divulging so that we can take care of that new home i know there's a point where there's confidentiality but like you also
076said mrs kais it's important that parents are communicating with as well so moving forward i think we really do need to this is wonderful conversations taking place and we really do need to come together with a plan moving forward because these are real issues and these are things that we do have to take care of but like you also said this is case by case and it's not something that we are teaching in classrooms if we did have you know issues and concerns that come up we do have to address them we have to address them with their parent and either you know to support but the parents do need to be involved and that's one thing that i know that we will work on and we'll make sure that that is happening and i
077want to thank you all for bringing all of these things forward and everything that you've also said mrs allen as well it's these are real topics these are real situations but i do want to reassure you that i know mr eller you had brought up last time the concern if this was stuff that was being educated is not intertwined within our curriculum and our classrooms this is not something that we are teaching in our curriculum but if these issues and concerns do come up we do have to deal with them with our students just to make sure that everything's taken care of and make sure that their parents are aware as well so that they can you know take the lead and how they're going to move forward with their students with their children and
078with what's going on in their personal lives but i do want to really really stressed that making sure our parents know what their children are divulging to us is extremely important and which i know all of us agree mr conversations more so than not it's the parents who come to us or come to ms godfrey to say this is what we're dealing with can you help us so it is more often the parent coming to us to say this is what we've noticed this is what we're dealing with how can you help us what do you know because a lot of times the parents are caught off guard and not sure either so just like with instruction in academics when the kids are not doing well they come to us and they they expect us
079to know the answers and they expect us to be able to help so that situation occurs more so than i would say a student coming where we don't you know we aren't sharing with the parent because we do thank you well as you see we have a lot of exciting end of the year activities taking place so again board members we invite you to attend our preschool promotions we're having an awards assembly on friday we are super excited because we have not been able to have parents on campus and so we're going to be honoring honor roll pioneer rule our cult of the year and our pulse of the month with your being time saved and responsible our ixl users as well so we're looking forward to great assembly that will also be live streamed
080if any of you want to just chime in and see um our boards that we live streamed and just the rest of the promotions please you're welcome to attend thank you thank you governing board information discussion well i just want to give a special shout out to president uh senator karen fan for coming and greeting our colts in phoenix i think it was really exciting it may seem a little bit strange that senator down and representative griffin and representative nutt were the ones that showed our cults around the capitol that day but actually our school district resides in two different legislative districts legislative district 14 and legislative district 2. so and a special shout out i'm sure all of you know that president fan is quite busy right now and uh so for her to
081take time with our colts i'm i'm really appreciative of that and i can't wait to hear how the trip went i hope you guys had a great great fun time thank you for your effort well i did have the joy of uh sitting in on some class activities over the past couple of weeks um i sat in on dina friedland's eighth grade social studies class and uh you know and she is retiring um and i just so you won't have a chance to sit in on one of her classes uh next year but anybody who sits in on one of her classes better be prepared because she asks you questions as much as she asks uh the students she was teaching something on the cold war and just whipped around and asked me a question
082and you know i tried to be quick on my feet rather than going like this but i thoroughly enjoyed her class the math class and i sat in on julie oberson's kindergarten class too i i encourage anybody the staff here is wonderful they invite anybody from the community parents to sit in on classes and see what their kids are going through and i thoroughly enjoyed it and i also thank you all for being here tonight it's great to see a room filled with community members that are interested in what's happening here at continental mr older i just have to say that your student escort said that you were very shy and asked a lot of questions and she said she was having to feed you information but he was very shy and he didn't ask
083questions well i didn't want to be i didn't want to be embarrassed i did have an absolutely wonderful 8th grade escort i mean ceruli escorted me around all these classes she kept me on schedule and just did a wonderful job you know my son was on that trip and he really enjoyed the senate and i said you know it was super interesting and you know he said left over ninth grader got to come back to you on that trip but um i'll be quick i just want to take a quick second and say thank you i think it's needed about a year ago we were in a situation where we were fairly certain that we'd have to stare at a computer screen all of our students would have to for the entire 2021 school year
084and now a year later we're uh we're sitting here celebrating the fact that the vast majority of our students are not only in in the classroom but they're healthy and they've had a pretty darn good year and considering how things have gone over the last year that's a success story as far as i'm concerned i thought it's very appropriate to say thank you where thank you is due and if you think about all of the efforts that go that people put into the daily events on this campus from the janitors that keep things clean to the bus drivers that have to they're exposed to every child that gets on that bus yeah i mean there's got to be some fear in the back of their minds every morning am i going to be exposed to
085something what was it 60 some kids on some of these buses to the to the lunchroom we had we had everybody from the sheriff's department to contractors to anybody filling in wherever was needed in the lunchroom to make sure the kids had food when people got sick all the way up to teachers and assistants and administrators i don't want to i don't want to leave anybody out because it took a tremendous effort and i think that is something we can be very very proud of certainly it wasn't perfect everybody's mad about something you know they're mad about you have to wear the mask too long you're mad about temperature checks outside but you know what i i sat out here yesterday morning bringing my kids and i saw a very dedicated group of folks come
086out and they've done this every morning doing temperature checks do you think they really want to do that i don't think that's the last thing they want to do but you know what that's what it took to get these kids back in the classroom and i think that's a success story and i just want to say thank you and i i hope more than anybody that we don't have to deal with this nonsense next semester i really do but the good news is that heaven forbid we have to in any capacity we've got a heck of a team to figure it out so again thank you i think we will we have quite a few documents to sign so we will reset them