May 20, 2025, Board Study Session and Governing Board Meeting

001Um I believe it's our student government's work. No, I don't know if Hild ever told you that the proposal for cube was accepted. Well, thank you for All right. Good evening everyone. Thank you. Thank you for joining us tonight. and I appreciate um you all being out here. Um I'll just go ahead and call the study session to order. Myself, Miss Gibson Mlan, uh Miss Marquez, and Miss Ayes are present. Um and tonight's study session is a special one. Um essentially, it is a time for you all to hear a little bit about the basics of budgeting, but also to give your input on what our priorities should be moving forward. Um, we really appreciate you coming out here to be here early for this. It's not always the most exciting topic, although I think

002Vanessa does make it exciting. So, um, at least maybe maybe it's just the nerd in me. But we're appreciative that you're here and we're really hopeful and, um, eager to listen to your feedback and your suggestions or even your concerns with our budgeting priorities. So, um, Miss Shapiro is going to have a presentation for us. Um the board will be able to ask and answer questions and then um because it is a study session a little bit different than kind of how formal meetings run you and the audience will be able to ask questions talk about your priorities concerns etc. So we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you uh madame vice president board members superintendent man uh all everyone who uh joined us tonight to discuss budget. I will do my best. uh budgets

003are pretty dry uh especially in Arizona. Um but I'm excited to share the information and some data pieces on how budgets are built and how the school finance process looks. So some of the topics that we're going to be um doing an overview of tonight is a big question is where does where the dollars come from? How how do we collect dollars for the school district system? And then where does the money go? Uh we want to go ahead and um give some time to talk about our student outcome focused governance and how that has been affecting our budget over the last couple of years and uh share some statutory compliance. There's compliance throughout the presentation. Everything about budgets and how school districts spend money. Um this is taxpayer dollars and everything is very regulated.

004There are a lot of rules. uh there are a lot of um legal aspects to it and then um in efforts of transparency there's a lot of pieces that we put out publicly on our website. So, I just want to make you aware that the Kraton School District website does have all of the required budgetary information and our annual financial reports, which is where we are allocating the dollars and then where did the dollars get spent and that's always on our website. So, the purpose of a school district is to educate students. That's our only purpose. And that is what goes into the funding formula in Arizona. That funding formula comes from our student counts and that's called ADM. ADM is average daily membership. I kind of do this um explanation of it. So we

005are funded from students that attend for the first 100 days of school in the Arizona. Um if a student attends from day one to day 100, they get an average daily membership of one. If that student attends for 50 days of the first 100 days, we get an average daily membership of 0.5. Half of the one. So now we're at a half of a one. If we have a third student attend for 50 days, we now have two st students at 0.5. We now have two ADM, two average daily memberships. Those are the the amounts that get counted when we receive dollars. So, we now have three students that we're educating that we had a teacher for that we turned on the lights, desks, materials, supplies, but we only get money for two. So, that's

006one of the considerations when you're trying to manage budgets uh under this funding formula. Um, oh, let me go back there. I didn't click on it. So, this is a summary report. This is located on the Arizona Department of Education's website. These are also uh documents that are available to public when someone wants to see what the average daily membership is for various school districts in um our district. This is all fiscal year 2324 data. And the reason that I'm using that year is so we have a full year to look at over the presentation tonight. I wanted to show you the budget process from start to finish and then what the outcome was when we spent the dollars. This is very tiny. Make it bigger. Oops, not that big. So, you can see that

007it does track it by grade level. And then, um, at the end, this was the 40th day, we have two periods that we track our average daily membership, which is the first 40 days of school. And then on the 100th day, this is what the final funding formula um, meets us for. Throughout the process, we are on current year funding, meaning that for the entire year, we have the ability to make sure that our data is very clean, that every student goes up to um Arizona Department of Ed so that we get credit for every single penny. Uh it's really critical. Um the IT department does a fantastic job managing student data. What's interesting is that there are a lot of things that keep student data from going up. um there's a challenge there with

008uh interacting with the state student management system. And so there could be integrity errors, meaning that let's say uh student in kindergarten was enrolled in another district and when that person put that student data into AD, they um got their birth date wrong, transposed a number. Uh when they come to us, all of a sudden that student when we put their birth date in is the correct birth date from the birth certificate. when it goes up to the state, it will reject that student's data. So, we work really hard throughout the year to ensure that we get every single student counted. And in this year, we had uh 4,580 students and change. And that would have been our average ADM for that year. This is also where our sped data is located and accumulated for

009budget purposes. Um these are the different weighted categories for special education. And what that means is that if a student has a um identified disability on an IEP, we do report that to the state and the state does have additional dollars in their funding formula. These funding formulas were set in the 80s. Um a couple of these areas have been updated since then. The most recent was uh developmental delay, emotional disability, uh mild intellectual. This area, I don't know if you can see my mouse. I don't think you can. Um this funding of weight went from point it used to be 09, it is now. 29. So not a big increase, uh but an increase. Uh and again, these are most of these weights were set in the 80s and have not been updated since

010then. Um in addition on the same report you will also find our ELLL data for our ELELLL uh English language learner students and then our free and reduced which we do get a little tiny bit of funding for those students. Uh there's a challenge with this data um in that we have a community uh feeding program which means all students eat for free in Kraton. When that happens it starts to become a little more difficult to get parents to fill out the free and reduced application. Uh so uh it does affect our budget when we don't collect those from parents who would uh normally uh qualify. So it's really important for us to continue to collect the applications even when students are eating for free. Vanessa, sorry. I have a question. Sure. That's okay. Um,

011just going back a couple steps to when you said the weighted data for sped students, who updates that? Is that AD or is that legislators? Those are legislators and uh it is set in law. Okay. So, that's why it makes sense. It hasn't been updated since 80s. Yes. Okay. Um, and then in our funding formula, we also have um Oh, wait. That was it at the end. Free and reduce. Um all of these technical pieces end up being the part of the formula that creates the dollars. Um there's a couple of other areas that we get in the funding formula and I am going to go through the funding formula quickly. Um there's a big piece to uh it comes through through our staff data and our HR department works very hard to ensure that

012our staffing data is very accurate what we report to the state because that is a part of our funding formula. Um in the state of Arizona if you have teachers who have great years of experience and your average compared to the state it's it's a formula. Let me show you. Um this is another thing with Arizona budgets. There are some interesting formulas that go on um to serve whichever purpose they were trying to accomplish when it came into into the law. So this is uh Arizona revised statute 15941 talks about the teacher experience index and this is where the state tries to give you some additional dollars if your population is uh much higher experience than the rest of the state of Arizona. So they look at our calculation for our teachers, they compare it

013to the state, they do some math, and then it comes out with an average. The average if you have less is a 1.0 additional funding, which is nothing. I'll show it in the funding formula, but if you're able to get more than a one, uh, then you get some additional dollars. Um, I'm not aware. I've never been in a district that got more than a one. Uh, so I'm not sure if Mr. man has ever seen a more than a one. You have had some districts with higher experience index. Yeah. Um I'm trying um I'm trying to think back. It was not a district I've worked at, but it was a district that I did consulting with in the East Valley and they were like a 1.2 if I remember. Oh, fantastic. Um the challenge

014in Arizona is that we do have turnover and teaching um careers. Some teachers get in and just decide that's not for them. But we do have a high population of um newer staff when it comes to teaching positions. So we typically don't ever go over that 1.0. Uh but again, it's just a lot of data that has to be collected. It needs to be very accurate and then we report that data to the state. Then this is where the state does the fun stuff. Um, this part I feel is maybe a little more interesting. It's a five-page calculation that at the end of it, it tells you how many dollars are going to be allocated to this particular school district. If you remember, we had that uh 4,500 um student ADM. That's what goes into

015the calculation first. The state then has several areas that they adjust the formula for various reasons that are again set in law. Um all of this is set in Arizona revised statutes and how the calculation occurs. Um so for the preschool uh we do get funded for special ed preschool. We get some additional weighted funding which is a 1.45. for K8 students you get a 1.15 and we don't have any high school students so we don't get that in our funding formula. What that does is do a it creates the calculation that then at the end uh they multiply that toward by the original number and we end up with 5,312 is our weighted count. Again that doesn't equal students. It's an average of those students. So, we had three students create two ADM. So,

016it's not really comparable to enrollment, but it is kind of close. And we do track these numbers closely when we talk about declining enrollment. Uh if our numbers are going down, this average daily membership number will also decrease. Then they take the funding formula with those weighted special ed counts. Um and they take the number of students in those categories. They do some more math, create the weight, we get additional added on um membership numbers, student counts, and then they give us our base um support level, which in this case in in the fiscal year for 2023 24 was $31,687 or $839. You can see that teacher experience at 1.0 as I stated before. So if we had had a 1.1 or 1.2, that calculation would have been included. You can see it would have

017given us a little bit of additional dollars. It's not a big amount, but every penny counts. And we do go for pennies. Um we get an a couple of other adjustments that the state supports us on. Uh it it's about $31,000. Um that is for our audit. We are required to have an external auditor firm come in and audit our financials and our um internal controls annually. And so the state does offer some support for those services. We also get an additional less than $1,000 for our gifted students. Pennies Every penny counts in the funding formula. We also receive some additional dollars for transportation. Something interesting in Kraton is that um they will only fund us for student miles driven for students who live more than a mile outside of the school site. Um, but

018we tend to bus our students who do live within that uh mile because of some of the demographic of the highways um and the very very busy streets that we have. Uh, Kraton is committed to not having students cross those areas. Um, Mr. man has pointed out in some of um of the northern sections of the 51 there are uh bridges that go across but when you come further south uh for whatever reason um there are not bridges or tunnels I will I have personal opinions about why but I don't know uh so after they do those calculation with those approved miles which aren't all the miles that we drive we do get some uh additional dollars In this case, it was $1.2 million. So now our uh budget's sitting at 32 million. And they're

019saying that that's how much based on the funding formula that is equalized across the state of Arizona so that every student has the same funding formula. Um that way every student is getting the same dollars to be educated. And that happened in the 80s also that they changed the funding formula in order to equalize it across the state. Um, we also received some additional dollars for capital purposes. Uh, that is, I believe, $589 per student. When you look at the actual dollars, um, so they're saying that $589 per student should take care of our capital needs. Um, it cost about $32 million to build a school. So, $589 times 4,000 or 4,500 students. It'll take us a while to accumulate enough dollars to build a school if we were to just rely on the funding

020formula, which is why most districts rely on uh the graciousness of their communities to pass bonds and overrides. That's why they're so critical. Oh, and I'll just point out for um this year we received $2.6 million. Uh that's what that uh calculation um ended up. So $32 million,2 million, we'll get there in 15 yearsish if the cost of things don't go up. And if you don't have to dip into something and if we don't want to buy furniture or you know um instructional materials or textbooks, those are all what's called capital expenditures. I'll talk about those in just a little bit. But um so when all is said and done, uh they calculate how much they believe that our students need to be uh the dollars needed for education. Um, and then they apply that

021to our tax base. And that tax base is, uh, how much do our taxpayers pay to help fund the 32 million, I believe, is what it ended up at. Um, based on our tax base, the amount levied on the taxpayer is $9.3 million. So of the 32 million our taxpayers uh can pay 9.3 million. So the state pays the rest through equalization funding which means the t the state goes into the general tax collection bucket and says out of that general bucket uh 25 million needs to go to Kraton in order to get them to that funding level. And that's kind of how the funding works in Arizona. they have that equalized funding formula so that every district has the same piece of paper and it is calculated the same way. Uh but not every

022district has the same assessed property values. So high property values would mean less support from the state and that the taxpayers can handle more of the tax burden. And then low property values means that the state has to step in and offer equalization payments in order to bring you up to that $32 million level. In Kraton, um 27% comes from our taxpayer base and about 73% comes from equalization. When we were talking about that per pupil and how much it costs to educate a student, I'll let you know that Arizona is currently ranking at 47th and that's a step up. We're usually at 48 or 49. So, um, we are in the bottom of the ranks when it comes to per pupil spending in the United States. All of those formulas and those calculations then

023give us the amount of dollars that we have for our budget. And this is what the budget looks like. And if you've come to the board meetings when we have proposed, adopted, or revised the budget, this this uh these spreadsheets should look pretty familiar. These are the spreadsheets that we are required to use in order to report our budget to the state. Um there's a lot of good information on here. Most people like um page two or no page three. So sorry. Page three is maintenance and operation. Um let me go back to the presentation. Hang on one second. So when we talk about fund accounting, that's what the state of Arizona has. Um uh how do I get back to the budget? User error. Let me go back to here. Most of the conversations

024revolve around the maintenance and operation fund. That's the main operating bucket for the district. Um, Arizona has a fund accounting process, which means that every type of money comes in and it has its own rules and it has its own regulations. Uh, we manage I think right now less than a hundred funds. Uh but each one of those has again it has a a legal way of how it comes to you and how you can spend it. Um and we have to understand and be in compliance with with all of those rules for every single fund. The M fund is the largest fund. It's the one that um that $32 million funds the M fund and our district additional assistance. This is what pays for most of the operations of the district. About 83 to

02585% of this fund goes towards salaries and benefits. The the main product uh for educating students is staff. So that's how students um learn is through teachers and direct support, uh nurses, one-on-one aids, bus drivers. Uh, but we also have to support all of that staff with finance, the payroll staff, um, the food service workers and all of that, um, comes out of this maintenance and operations fund, plus consumables and supplies and purchase services. I told you it's dry stuff. I really have no idea how to make it more exciting, but I can tell you a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet make me very excited. Um, anyway, so this is these are the budget forms. We're actually going to be looking at this again in June. Um, in June is when we will start

026the process to propose and adopt our budget for next year. And it'll be these same budget forms just with some different numbers. Um, I think my favorite page of the budget that gives a little insight is um the summary page and that's this page here. So, this kind of breaks out where we're budgeting those dollars and you can see that most of it is going into instruction and that's direct in that's that first line everything highlighted. Oh, it's so tiny. There we go. This is one of my favorite areas in finance. Um, we have a uh accounting chart of accounts that is set in our uh uniform system of financial recordkeeping. These account codes are also set uh by the Arizona um auditor general's office. they are the same for all school districts. And what

027that means is that when we report out information, we're able to very quickly see where the dollars are going when we spend them. So when you see a 1,000 instruction, those are direct classroom dollars. We're putting the budget into the classroom. When you see the 2,000, those are support services. So these numbers really mean something. And they mean something from school district to school district. when you go and look at 10,000 in another school district and you want to compare, it is the same classroom dollars that you're looking at. So, the chart of accounts and account codes are what help to create the transparency in Arizona funding in how we budget and how we spend the dollars. Um 2100 is direct student support. These are some of my most important dollars. This is where we

028want most of our dollars to go. 2200 is instructional staff. So, that's supporting teachers and helping teachers to teach. uh the 2100 with the direct support to students, that's direct face-to-face student um nursing, speech services, uh OT, PT services, things like that. Um but 10,000 are the classroom. The rest of it is broken up into the operational areas of a district. So, you're going to see in there administration, you have school principles, you have the executive staff here. Um we also have non-instructional services uh like community ed and our family resource center. And then um maintenance of our buildings is also in here at 2600. And then just to point out regular education is up there as a 100 and specials uh special education is a 200. So that's the difference between the two areas

029that look very similar. the difference is one is regular education and one is special education and the dollars we put there you'll see there's a pupil transportation line those are the dollars we're spending on um bus drivers buses things like or the things that support buses uh repairs and maintenance we have some additional dollars So when we talked about those individual funds, I I tend to talk about the maintenance and operation because it is again a the bigger fund. It's where the funding formula comes from. Um but each individual fund as we talked about is set in the uniform system of financial recordkeeping. Again, it keeps us all on the same page. It keeps us transparent. When you look at the um letters for that, that's the USFR or in the finance world we call

030it you suffer. I got one joke in. Come on. It's um and and as and this uh uniform system of financial reporting, it again sets uh takes all of the various Arizona revised statutes uh for Arizona school districts. We all have to follow this process. This is what we get audited for. Um, this talks about everything that we do in a school district. Uh, from how we keep our accounts, how we manage cash, how we keep um track of all of our assets, all of the things that we own in a district, um, how we record when people travel, it's all in this uh, document. And so this is the main document that oversightes school finance. This is also available to the public at the auditor general's website under the uniform system of financial recordkeeping.

031Um I want to talk about those buckets just a little bit. How much time do I have? Okay, good. So when we were talking about the individual buckets and we talked about M. This is part of the report that goes at the end of the year into our annual financial report, which is where did we spend all those budgeted dollars. Um, and you can see everything that isn't zero all the way across are the different buckets of money that we receive in the district. Anything um from 100 to 499 in this fund number on the far left is a federal or state fund grant. Each one of those grants has its own rules and regulations. Um, and then we have additional dollars in uh tax credit, gifts and donations, student activities funds, monies raised by

032students for students. Um, so these are the various funds. Every single one of these that has activities again does not look like the one next to it. They all have requirements and we have to have experts on our finance staff and on our grant staff. Um we have a very strong effective schools department that keeps track of all of those grants to ensure that we stay in compliance. The interesting thing about federal grants apart from what's been going on uh in the current culture is that if you mess up with one grant, you then um risk losing all of your federal grants. So compliance in that area is very high and we have to be very careful to make sure that we are not only following all the rules but able to show that we're

033following the rules and being very transparent with that. So the main uh funds uh while we had I'm not sure how many we had on there. I think I ended up with 83 one year. Um emo that takes care of our salaries and benefits 83% of those. We also pay salaries and benefits out of those grant funds. Um that maintenance and operation fund pays for the supplies, consumables, purchase services, repairs, and maintenance. Our classroom site fund is an additional butt of money um for teacher pay. It's also regulated. It pays for the performance pay plan and u also a portion of teacher salaries only. We have unrestricted capital and district additional assistance. This is part of that funding formula that I showed you at the beginning. Um, and as we discussed, it is insufficient to

034build or maintain schools. Uh, the dollars that we get, I I don't know that that would even buy all of the desks and chairs that I would need for one school. our instructional improvement dollars. And I do have the statutory references in the slide presentation if you want to have some fun reading um downtime, maybe some summer reading. Uh Arizona Revised Statue is always a good time. Uh these are gambling dollars. Uh there was a a voter approved initiative uh with the gambling dollars and a portion of those um come to us. It's very restricted what we can spend that on. Um and it is subject to supplanting. Oh, there's a missing P. I'm gonna fix I'll fix it. Uh, supplanting is an interesting concept that um most grants are subject to supplanting. Um, and

035uh a lot of the different funding buckets are subjected to supplanting. What supplanting means is I'll give an example. So, let's say I have uh four nursing positions and I'm paying them out of that maintenance and operation bucket and then all of a sudden says, "Hey, we have this nursing grant uh for just paying for nurses." I cannot pay any one of those four nurses. I have to add and support. These these monies are used to support programs, not supplant. Supplant means I pay the one nurse with the grant. Can't do it. All I can do is add a fifth nursing position with those grant monies. So again, a lot of restrictions and we're like, "Oh, wow. We got a grant. We could save some money off these four and put those dollars somewhere else."

036They do not allow you to do that. That's considered supplanting. And speaking of grants, um these are some of the grants that we have here in the district. It's about $7.3 million. Uh it ranges from um title one dollars, which a lot of people have heard a lot about in the news lately, and our idea grant. Title one um is to help us underserved students um and ensure we can try to add additional dollars and um educate and bring resources to underserved students. Also, the idea grant is specifically for our special education program in supporting that. So, I wanted to kind of break out the cost of where those grant monies go to. Um, so you can see with the title one, it's salaries and benefits. The main portion of most of our dollars go

037to salaries and benefits in the budget of a school district because it's people that provide those services to students. um when budgets get cut and people say, "Well, just, you know, buy less paper, I could buy no paper for the next 10 years." It's really not going to make a big difference in uh a budget. So, you can see that when we talk about budgets and we talk about increasing or decreasing budgets, really the only places to make big effect is with salaries and benefits. That's why when our meet and confer process uh comes together and they come and bring that information to the board um that's why the topic is usually talking about salaries and benefits increases or sometimes even working conditions. I know that you have a lot on this presentation. I'm going

038to go faster. Okay. I was like I do want to leave some time for folks to ask questions. I'm going to finish in two minutes. Okay. No problem. It's all important. So, um, we did just discuss our voter approved, uh, bonds and overrides. Again, it's because we don't have those resources coming to us from the state. It's the way that we're able to build schools and support our communities and provide additional facilities and uh so that we can have nice buildings and safe spaces for our students. Um, our next election cycle is going to be in 2026. Uh both of our overrides will be coming up. So we'll be having some more conversations about that with our governing board in the uh upcoming months. We did just recently pass a bond. So we wouldn't be

039looking to do that again for the next 5 to eight years. Um we talked again, this is about funds and funding sources. Tax credit is a donation uh tax credit direct dollar fordoll uh in the state of Arizona. when you donate a tax credit, you get a a a tax rebate on your taxes. It's intended for those dollars to be spent within two years. Um, you shouldn't be collecting dollars there. Gifts and donations come about when someone wants to donate directly to the district and it's as indicated by the donor of what how we spend those dollars. And student activities are meant and intended to be um spent on the students that raise the dollars. So, we do pay attention to that. We have a monthly report that comes to the governing board. At the

040end of the day, it'll look exactly the same as that budget sheet, but the annual financial report again is located on our website. And this is what it looks like. It looks very similar to the budget sheets. There's that M. So you could see what we budgeted it to and then where did we actually spend the dollars and you can see that the majority of the dollars are spent in instruction um and support services. We have some of the um lowest administrative cost in our uh compared to our peer districts. we are below uh in admin costs across the board and also uh comparatively to the state. The fund balance reserve I'm not going to go into but this is a budget uh mechanism to ensure that we have a savings account so that we

041can take care of uh catastrophes when they happen. If they take away our federal funding we have the ability to maintain and uh not be in a catastrophic situation. That's what that fund balance reserve is for. We've done several meetings on that with the governing board. Um and uh we've we do an annual risk analysis with a committee to ensure that we are not saving too too much and not putting it in salaries and benefits, but we also need to make sure that we save enough. This is an auditor general spending analysis. This is very interesting when you compare the statewide results compared to Kraton. It is a a piraphph which means there's some rounding and some issues that do affect this. This is also public information on the auditor general website. So if you

042say district spending auditor general website, you can go compare all districts uh in the state. I do want to just really quickly talk about student outcomes focused governance. Two years ago we uh adopted this process. The budget went through uh an alignment with SOFG and what happens now in the budget if there are any new expenditure requests. It goes through an SOFG lens meaning that we have to talk about how is it going to affect student outcomes and how are we going to measure that it's going to affect student outcomes. who just don't take our word for it. We say we're going to watch this data and see does this get better when we spend the money in this area and if it isn't uh what's working, what's not working. So we stay very flexible

043under the student outcomes focused governance um umbrella. And then there again, as we talked about at the beginning, there are legal um submissions uh requirements for our budget. So we have to adopt it in June. um we have to revise it at certain points of the year and then there's a a legal dates of when we have to uh file our annual financial reports and then this is our budget calendar and this is what happens uh throughout the year in order to set a budget. This is when we talk to different groups and we bring information to our community. We talk to our governing board. We talk to our meet and confer. uh we talk to our teachers and we set budgets and this is the process and that is it. I got one joke

044in and a lot of numbers and datas. Uh this spreadsheet or this slide is available on the board docs. Please feel free to click those links and go searching in those areas. Um it's very interesting but also don't forget Kraton website does have financial information on it. Um thank you so much Miss Shapiro. Could we make sure that the um pre presentation you presented tonight is the one that's on board docs because it's a little bit different right now. There's two on there. There's Okay, I just went to the one that's on the featured side and it's different than the one that's there's two. There's the all English and then there's the one that's translated. Okay. I guess I just clicked on the one that's featured. So there that one's not bilingual. No, because when

045the featured one it has both of them in there. Um, sorry. When you go to documents on the side when you're on the featured page, it just shows one PowerPoint. Let me look just because it's We'll make sure. Okay. Or maybe then I click on Oh, I think they're both there. Sorry. Okay. I just wasn't sure. I didn't realize there were two. Okay. Um, Miss Marquez, do you have any questions? No. There's you guys have heard budget a lot. Um well, there's lots of folks in the audience tonight. Um some of you may have caught the tail end of Miss Shapiro's presentation. Um but for those of you who are joining us, um this is our time to have a discussion, a community discussion about the budget and our budget priorities. So this is your

046time if if anybody has any questions, concerns, priorities that they want to raise, please come up to the podium. I don't want to put you on the spot, but we want to be able to pick up what you're saying. So, if anyone has anything they want to share or ask questions about or talk about, please come on up. Um, and don't hurt yourselves trying to get up here instead over getting up here. It's easy. You can all take turns. It's fine. It's fine. And if you can state your name. Sure. Um, my name is Sarah Mackin. Um, so I have questions. I recently was doing some learning and discovery about the enrichment programs that we're able to offer at Builmore Prep after school for the students. And I was having a really great email exchange

047with Dominic um Ruth about the questions that I had. He was very very helpful for me to understand the policies. But I just have a big concern with how the policy for like essentially room rentals is for our afterchool enrichment programs. Um because first it's like a a two-hour minimum. So I have some comments I guess and questions. Um it's a two-hour minimum room rental and then there's um a $40 cleaning fee and there's three different tiers of who can like what people are charged. So what that looks like at our school is for a small business which we want to support in our community to come in and offer something to our students. It's around $110, maybe specifically $108 for one session, which they only ever use one hour. I've never seen an afterchool

048program go more than one hour after school's out um for every session that they offer. So that ends up getting like passed down to us parents to pay and it precludes a good deal of the population of our our school from participating in those programs. Um or at least I feel like it does. I guess I don't have data on that, but it seems like it does. Um so Dominic told me it goes to line code I don't know 515 for the civic center. So, I looked at that when it was up on the sc the screen and it it's it looks like we have like $440,000 $440,000 coming in on that line, but I'm wondering how much of that actually comes from like after school program enrichment like room rentals. I can get you

049the actual percentage, but it is very small, right? So, if it's really small, I know we count pennies, and I'm supportive of counting pennies, but like it feels like this is just a little out of balance with providing our students with those opportunities to do those other things that like are important as like a student experience. Um, and also to be able to support the small businesses and things like that. So, that's that's my one concern up here. Before you get to the next topic, what's the deal with the room policy history? I guess how did we get to land where we're at with that? I know years ago we tried to lower the bar of entry. Um, one of the things we tend to run into is a concept in state of Arizona law

050which is called gift of public funds. So, as a public entity, we there are certain things that we have to be certain to do to make sure that we're not providing a value to someone of less than the value of what we're providing. Probably there's probably a better way to express it than that. So, in other words, like let's say for us to heat and cool that room, keep the lights on, and clean it costs us, you know, $89. If we rent the room for $75, then we potentially would get in trouble um from the auditor general that Miss Shapiro referenced earlier because they would come back and say, "Well, you you basically gave away $14 of value taxpayer money to this private entity." So, um I don't like to editorialize from the deas. Um

051the legislature seems to be okay with one very large taxpayer money giveaway that I'm aware of. But um but public as public schools Yeah. but public schools um were held very tightly accountable to that. So but it is certainly something that we are about due to assess again. Um, one thing I heard, I don't mean to cut you off, was Dominic told you that, you know, within that policy, there seems to be some sort of scale depending on there are three classes. Is there you said we it's time to reassess it maybe in Oh, I'm getting a little bit of eyes from Vanessa because I think the fear is the last time we the last scale that we assessed was like our our long-term leasing rates and that put us in that our leasing rates

052are actually below where they need to be, right? based on a market evaluation that we had done uh by a company and um so we are resolving that with our lease agreements with our long-term facilities users. Uh we were going to be taking a look at our um rate. We try to keep it as low as possible um for those facilities users who are coming in as you said for enrichment. um it they get a discount uh when they come in if they're going to be serving our population of students uh on top of low rates for facilities use. If you go around and look at other facilities use that the rates are so much higher. Um so I mean we can absolutely take a look at that and if it if you feel like

053that's something that is creating a scenario where parents cannot participate, kids can't participate in enrichment programs, we we want to be aware of that and and do a little more deep dive. We have committees uh that take a look at those data sets and I know that that's something that maybe our fiscal stewardship committee um could put on our uh agenda this year and we're always looking for parent uh support in those committees. So I'm happy to if you want to come and serve. It's a fun committee. I have a committee member in the audience. I mean I'm open to considering that. I like I I talked to some other parents who bring the enrichment programs to other schools and other districts and they have like an hourly rate of like $8 an hour. Sure.

054So I don't know how we we have a similar rate if there's no fee is being charged. So So the the differential is typically if a fee is being charged. So when it's forprofit, but we have a similar I think it's I don't know the exact number, but it's around $8 if the program is being provided to our students at no cost. So that I think is one of the differentiators, but it is as Miss Shapiro said we are always more than happy to review and see if we can do better. Um the thing that the reason I got a little twitchy is the thing that always makes me nervous is typically when we go back and review what we discover is we're below market and then that creates you know issues where we have

055to make adjustments in the direction we don't want to move. Right. And like understanding what you're explaining is really helpful because like there's always a reason for something and we don't always know what that is. And I say we meaning me in this case. So it's really great to understand why that is. Um, and you know, I do hope that you can look at that just because it's and I get the legal piece of it. Um, yeah. And like is that why there's a cleaning fee for it also? Correct. because we because then you know typically we have to pay someone to to perform the cleaning service and so we we can't provide that free of charge to to the person who's using and that's something I would appreciate you looking at too cuz like

056I'm there where the program's happening and I'm not seeing that any additional messes are being left that would require well even the trash has to be taken out but also it has to be um someone has to come on site and lock the building and secure the building and that's right. And that's some of it and there was a whole separate part to that. So like this is just the the programs that take place from like 2:40 to they're all done by like 400 p.m. So there's not like I think that's the normal staffing hours of the school. I I would be interested in know did you let Dominic know which program you were talking about specific? I wasn't talking about a specific one. I just learned about it when we brought a new program

057to the school and it apparently applies to all of them which is why some of the pro the enrichment programs are like $400 for eight sessions and like parents can't well and it depends on the program. So um nonprofit has you know much less anyone who offers discounts to our students gets a discounted rate for facilities use. If they are forprofit, they do pay and then that's their uh that's them putting that back on to parents to make their profit. It really isn't necessarily the facilities use. It's 400 is a lot. So yeah, it's like the problem is is there are small businesses in our community that like if they have, you know, they have to have 10 students, they're paying a minimum of like $12 just to use the room and that's not really

058I don't know it. I just appreciate that you'll look at it. Yeah. And I have one more question. Um No, I'm cut off. Am I cut off? Oh, no. I mean, there's not a line line off the door behind you, so you're good. Um, so I don't know, and I haven't asked a lot of questions about this, so I'm just speaking from my experience recently, and I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, which could be a joke, Vanessa, because I want to talk about transportation, the buses. Um, so in my experience shop running field trips more recently, um, there have been like some communication issues with uh, transportation and like personally I went on a first grade field trip and the paperwork was submitted accurately and the wrong information was communicated to the

059bus driver. So that's how the bus driver was scheduled that we were stuck with the entire first grade class at the um at a theater in downtown Phoenix for like two hours after the performance. So we were trying to corral kids and we couldn't get it was really difficult to get the bus to come back and pick us up when we had scheduled instead of what was mistakenly communicated to the bus driver. So I I actually have and I'm happy you brought that one up. Um there were a couple of um incidences and uh we do a lot of field trips and so when those things happen they really stand out because it is outside the norm. Uh we have worked with our transportation director and our IT director and Dominic uh the director of

060finance to create a new process to book those buses in a more electronic and efficient way. So that um because there's two separate paperwork pieces and in that situation one was done correctly the other one was not and that created that miscommunication. Um, so we absolutely were aware of that and uh worked pretty quickly um to put in a new process for next year. I don't know who you're looking at, but I was very grateful for that. I'm so sorry this isn't a budget topic. I can't speak to this, but it's solved for next year. So budget. So like back spent money to solve it for spent money out of the budget. Okay, great. That happened. Great. Because that was a you know a question and a concern. So well thank you. Transportation I would

061love to You have any more budget questions? I'm absolutely happy to talk about budget. Thank you guys for all the work that you do. I appreciate it. Gale question. Welcome. Hi Gail Smith. Hi Gail. Go ahead. Um, I have a quick uh question about the gifted money that comes from the state and I was curious if that money is based on the number of gifted students that are enrolled in the district or does every school district get the same amount of money for their gifted program? And how are other districts able to do like a self-contained gifted program where we just have a once a week pull out and other gifted programs have a daily pull out for their children? So the dollars that I showed in the in the budget calculation that's about00 is

062that the same for every district? No, that's based on student count and but it's about 30 cents a kid. It's about Yeah, I'm maybe slightly, but it's ridiculous. So, what that means is that those districts who are doing a different program have either uh been able to u a procure a grant to help support that program or they're taking more of their regular ed dollars and pushing it into that area. So, it is just a a a decision made by that district to support that program in in a different fashion. I've been in other districts where um one of them I got a very large grant and I had more opportunities to do that. Um but in that district it was because I had such a large uh gifted program was why we were even

063able to accomplish that. So the budget um as it is does not support the gifted program. We have to take dollars and put them in that area. So for districts that do a daily pull out for those children, like I have a friend who's in another district, her son is pulled out every day for math and reading for their gifted program. Sure. And we're getting 20 minutes a week. Again, I would I would need to know like their funding. They could have that grant I was talking about. Um how do we get that grant? I doubt we could qualify for it. We only have nine schools. I had 50 schools in the one that I was able to qualify for. So, I I do think it's it's um you know, getting those additional we have

064some grant or dollars in a grant that we put towards some gifted cost, but again, it's it's not it's minimal. I think it pays for one of the teachers. Um I just I'm not sure how to fund it adequately to that level. Um, it just depends on the program and how we support the program in our district. I know that we have a gifted program and I give you every one of those that $1,000 goes towards it. Every penny of it, you know, and more and more. From what I understand, I thought I heard this and I can't pinpoint where, but we're the district is making more of an effort to identify our gifted students earlier, aren't they? Like cuz I think like we started testing all second graders. Oh, it's a free test. So,

065so that's a free test given by the state that they test all the second graders. We we actually do the testing but they provide the test to us. But okay, if we identify more, we'll get more but I mean it's only 30 cents a student and I may have exact it's actually more than 30 cents a student. It's like I don't know how many gifted students we have. something not in that. It's not in the room. I would have to look that number up, but our total My other question is I think that's overstating how much we get per student. Actually, not not joking. I think 30 cents is too much. Uh my other question is where does the funding come from for programs like Battle of the Books that was cancelled this year because

066I was told because of funding. I can speak to that. Miss Smith, good evening. Um, we had used uh several different buckets of money to pay for that in the past. Most recently, it was funded with our ESSER dollars, which were the pandemic relief grant funds that we had access to. So, the last three, four years of Battle of the Books, that's how how that was funded. Prior to that, it was a combination of student activities funds from around the district and a little bit of funds from the curriculum instruction and assessment department's um M discretionary budget. Does that fall into like enrichment programs like afterchool enrichment programs? That's how we categorized it at that time. Yes. And is there a possibility that the program like that will be brought back next year? As Jay

067likes to say, there's always a possibility. It would just be a question of what we would be willing to to to let go of in order to free up other dollars to pay for those costs. Okay. Yeah. Or or as was mentioned earlier, if we could find I mean, there are grants out there that will support things like that. So, one of the thing one of we've restructured our grants department, and one of the reasons we've done that is to be able to be more effective at going out for competitive grants. One of the reasons, as Miss Shapiro said, often very large districts tend to tap into those grants more is because when you're 50 or 100 schools, you have the budget capacity to have a team of a dozen people who that's what they

068do, right? But in a district of our size where we're only 4,500 kids, you know, our whole team consists of, you know, 2 point something people. So, uh, but we've been able to make some adjustments with that team to improve its capacity in the hopes of being able to chase more of those grants because we recognize what's been choking a lot of these programs out is they were funded by the federal dollars that keep dwindling. And given the current federal landscape, the concern is that that will continue to be a problem that will just get worse and worse. So, we need to find some other alternate funding sources to be able to support those programs that are desired within the district. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is your opportunity. Um if you

069have any questions or would like to raise anything, I'll come on up, please. Buenosardes. Good afternoon. Uh this year my goal was to get more involved in everything that is school related uh for the benefit of my grandchildren and if every time I have a question I ask Google. So here I am. Arizona. Thank you. So she asked Google, what's the salary of the average salary of a teacher in Arizona? This is what Google said. Uh teacher in Arizona as of May uh 8, 2025, the annual salary average is $43,416. And if you need a calculator uh to simple calculations, this equal to approximately $20.80 80 cents per hour and also $834 per week or 3,618 a month. Um, so as I learn more about the budget and how it works in Arizona. I want

070to make sure that we put our efforts and monies to support the salary of the teachers because as a parent when I have three to four kids, I'm really unhappy sometimes. And so as a teacher to have 20 to 30 students, I want to make sure that they're happy so they do their job correctly. Fore. Another budget priority that I would like to see is um efforts to support sports. Um recently I went at Excalencia and they had a game and the students have good uniforms but I would like to make sure that the uniforms were up to part. Also there was no shading and all of the students as they were waiting for the game they were look like little sardines in a can trying to be in the shade. So that will be

071another budget priority. Gracias. Thank you guys. Gracias. We do have a regular board meeting to follow this, but obviously these are important conversations. So if anyone feels moved to speak about a budget issue or priority, please this is your opportunity um before we close the study session and move into our regular board meeting and the study. And this is a good on this is if you've noticed it's a little different than our general board meetings at public comment. At general board meetings we cannot respond to you. This is a study session. So we're able to respond ask questions immediately start a conversation as opposed to our board meeting where if you make a public comment it's going to be some time before we get to where we're going with that. But it also does have

072to be about budget. Does have to be about budgets. You can't just come up here and talk about whatever you want. But just let us know. Yeah. Welcome. I wasn't planning to speak on this tonight. My name is Casey Aken and I'm a um math and science coach here in the district. Um I taught in the district for 10 years and then I went to Baltz for a couple years as a science coach, district coach there and then returned this year. Um, I just do want to express that like they are a similarly very small district, but I took about a 10 to 11,000 salary cut to return here. So, I just want to make like that clear that like salary is a consideration for people when they're looking for employment, right? Thank you. Thank

073you. Alrighty. It's going once, twice. Anybody? Okay. All right. Thank you guys. I really appreciate the input. Yeah. Thank you. Do I need a motion to close the study session? No, you just adjourn it. I'll just go ahead and adjourn the study session and we'll move right into our governing board meeting. I'll call the governing board meeting to order at 6:21 p.m. Again, me, Miss Gibson Mlan, Miss Marquez, Miss Ayes are Mr. Jones, and Miss Kodall are are not present. Um, and uh, Dr. Dubin, if you wouldn't mind leading us in the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance 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. I know. Oh, okay. The Kraton school district understands

074that our community of schools is located on the ancestral land of the Odum Jud and Akamal Odum Petul who descended from the Hokam and have inhabited these lands since time and memorial. The Aodum, whose names translate literally to people, are a vibrant culture and community spanning countless generations into the past, continuing to arrive into the present and carrying a powerful legacy for generations into the future. With this acknowledgement, the Kraton School District formally recognizes the traditional care and keeping of these lands by indigenous people is an aspirational model of community stewardship that we're committed to honor with practices, policy, and human relations. Just want to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting and remind the audience of the request to address board cards that must be completed and submitted to our board secretary, Miss Huades. If you

075wish to speak on an agenda item, you can find those cards right over there. Um there are two cards. Blue cards are kind of general. White cards are for a specific agenda item. Um and they those white cards, if you submit one, come up at the time of the agenda item and not during the regular call to the public. Um, and due to open meeting law, like I just kind of discussed in our study uh session, board members are not allowed to address items um that are not on the agenda. With that, I'll move on to 2A, approval of the agenda. I would like to make an amendment to the agenda. Go ahead. Um, I would like to move um number eight, which is um the approval of the director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

076Um, and put it right before student outcome focused governance. Oh, right before you mean right before, sorry, right after three. Right before four. All right. So, we have a motion for Miss Ays. I'll second that motion. All in favor of approving the agenda with moving 8A to right after 3B. I I I Okay, that passes. Moving on to governing board reports. I'll start with Miss Marquez. All right, almost done. Just a few more days of school here. Um, I'm excited for the eighth grade promotions coming up that I get to participate coming up soon. um was really exciting to go to the um awards ceremony for the district and being able to shake a lot of hands and just it was really I I hadn't ever been to one of those and so I've been

077to the volunteer lunchons but I'd never been to any of the staff events so that was awesome to be a part of. Um and interested well I'm glad that we did the budget 101. I'm excited to learn more about that cuz there's just realizing how little I knew about uh education budgets and funding. Um that's that's it. Oh, there's a summer school board conference coming up in June that I'll be attending and learning more about school finance and budgeting and um hopefully get some good tips and stuff to bring back to the district. That's it. I wish everybody a happy summer and hopefully it won't be too uh tumultuous. Miss, um good evening everyone. Um there is nothing like teacher tired at the end of the year. Literally like I feel like the the weekend

078after we stop I sleep like the whole weekend I'm just like out like a light. So, um, congratulations on making it a whole another year. Um, congrats to our students, um, especially the eighth graders that will be leaving us, um, to go on to high school next year. Uh, I hope everybody has a great summer and I hope that, um, our staff members get some rest during the during our break. Thank you, Miss. Um, first off, I hear her back there and I just want to say thank you to Miss Science Hernandez who's uh, interpreting for us this evening. She's also our educational support person of the year. She's amazing. Thank you. Uh wish everyone luck for uh the rest of the week. Um promotions are exciting. I'm going to go on vacation with my

079family. Uh because it's that time of year where if you still have little ones, sometimes you don't have child care for some days at a certain time of year. So, we got to find something to do. So, I wish I could go to promotions this year, but I'm not. I'll be at Legoland hopefully having the time of my life. Uh um so I I hope everyone has a great time at promotions. I hope people are able to take some time off in the summer and get some rest and relaxation in and take care of yourselves. Um and I wasn't at the last meeting, but I was pleased to hear, sorry, my brain's like also moving slowly. Um, I was pleased to hear that there was a great reception and presentation about um all the work

080we've done on the student conduct committee and an an encouragement and willingness and eagerness from the board or my fellow board members for us to continue that work not necessarily just with the student conduct but with the student bill of rights and also with uh staff conduct policies as well. So, I'm excited and I really mean that even though I don't always sound excited um to continue that work. I think it's meaningful and it's um makes me feel I mean obviously we're doing things here but it just feels like we're doing something on the side too which is good to get multiple things done at once. It's nice to have different pots cooking at the same time. So um just happy to continue that work and happy to get that done and I'll turn it

081over to Mr. Man. Well um I will just second the kudos to our amazing translator in the back of the room who is our um our um education support person of the year. We also have in the room our um administrator of the year, Dr. Lissa Bombbo, who will be our assistant superintendent for teaching and learning next year. So, I'll give her a round of applause. And she's not here. Maybe she's watching. and she sometimes watches. But our teacher of the year, Mercedes King, is um just also an amazing individual that I have really enjoyed getting to know over the years. Um similar to the story that Casey shared with us, she had left us um at one time to go work in another school district and then um I think I was one of

082the first people to find out she was coming back and was like over the moon that she came back to us. She's been with us a number of years and I was at an event um the one of the top people at um Teach for America is um leaving Teach for America to become one of the top people over at the Desert Botanical Garden. Steve Ericson who's been a great partner and to embarrass him was also a student of Dr. Laurens. Dr. Lauren was his theater teacher years ago and the connections just never end. Um, but in talking with him and Tony Best from Teach for America, I learned um how impressed they are with Kraton as a district because they feel like we do one of the best jobs of working with the teachers

083that they provide to us. And I learned that Mercedes was actually a core member teacher many years ago. And so, um, it's just very interesting all the interconnections. Um, but one of the things I was sharing with him is that one of the other amazing things about Mercedes is she works very hard with our students to help them make good choices about high school in preparation for thinking ahead to college. And I know there are a number of teachers who do that in our district. Um, she was one of the first ones that I saw do it with just amazing gusto and um, just so greatly appreciate about that about her. So, um, we are very fortunate to have a lot of amazing teachers in Kraton and, um, I just want to take, as we're

084coming to a close for the year, this moment to once again say thank you. Um, they work so hard. They're so amazing. And um I know being a teacher is like a roller coaster because it can be exhausting and it can be exciting and it can be terrifying at times, but when you get off at the end, um like like Miss Aris was saying, you kind of need to sleep for a weekend. Um at least that's how I feel when I get off a roller coaster. So um so thank you so much for hanging in there with us this year and all you all the amazing things you do for our students in this district. um it it really does make a difference and um and you really are valued and appreciated. Um and and

085beyond that um we're also very appreciative of those who are coming back in about 3 weeks to do summer design studio. Um and some of the effort that will be taking place there in alignment with our student outcomes focused governance work will be work related to the development of our common formative assessments to help um inform instruction um throughout the course of the school year and help us be better at looking at um our data through our data wise process to be more effective in making you know real time what I like to call game time um adjustments on the fly. So that way um we're able to be a little bit more agile as we make um improvements to get the outcomes that our students deserve, our community deserves, and that we really want

086to achieve. So thank you very much and sorry those are probably the longest comments I've made. And while I apologize for droning on today, I made up for the two board member comments that we didn't have. So you don't need to apologize in a minute or two. So, since we amended the agenda, we're going to be moving 8A um to now, which is the approval for director of curriculum and instruction and assessment. And I will um hand it over to Dr. Lauren to go over this. Um after we vote, we'll invite potentially someone to come up and talk and then uh we can take a quick break for some pictures. So, go ahead, Dr. Lauren. Thank you, Madam Vice President, members of the board. uh we worked to uh hire a have a good process

087to hire our director of curriculum instruction and assessment with the vacancy created by the um Dr. Pombo moving up to the assistant superintendent position. So we conducted a comprehensive search for this position. Um, we advertised our vacancy in our usual places. Arizona Department of Education, Indeed, Facebook, uh, Aspo, which is the Association of School Business Officials, ASPA, which is the Association of School Arizona School Personnel Association Administrators. This is like a test. It's a lot of A's. Yeah. Yeah. All the places. Uh, there were seven viable applicants in the pool for this position. The paper screening resulted in the top five candidates who were selected to participate in the inbasket activity and the interview process. An interview panel made up of administrators, teachers, curriculum team members, students, and parents recommended the top three candidates for

088a finalist interview. The superintendent, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, assistant superintendent of business development, executive director of human resources, and the executive director of communications and marketing. uh and the current director of curriculum instruction held the final interviews. The candidate being recommended is Dr. Kimberly Dods Karen. Dr. Dods Karen brings 28 years of experience in education, including leadership roles as director of teaching and learning at Scottsdale's Unified School District, coordinator of gifted and talented education at Higgley Unified School District, and director of director of gifted education, AVID service learning and alternative education at Scottsdale Unified School District. She is also an educational consultant with J Taylor Education. She is a pro practitioner of teacher education specializing in differentiated in curriculum and instruction in both the K12 and university levels serving as an adjunct assistant

089professor at the University of Southern California. Her educational background includes doctor of education from University of Southern California where she also earned a master of science in education and a bachelor of science. So we are pleased to recommend Dr. Dods Kieran. Thank you, Dr. Lauren. Um, so without further ado, I'll just move the governing board approve um, Kimberly M. Dod's Karen for the position of director of curriculum instruction and assessment effective July 1st, 2025. Second. All those in favor? I. Congratulations. And always, you don't have to say anything, but we'd love for you to come up and say a little something. And as she's coming up, if anyone caught a smirk when we were talking about looking at improving our good services earlier, you might have noticed some things in her biography as well. Yes,

090thank you. Um, good evening, Vice President Gibson Mlan, members of the board, um, Senate Man, everybody present. I'm honored for this opportunity. Um, it's been an exciting, uh, month, it feels like, um, to get to really know your school district. Uh I appreciate the um student outcome focused governance that you as a board are truly committed to and I look forward to getting to know the team. Um of course supporting Dr. Pombo. She's been really delightful to get to know in just these last um few weeks and of course with change there's always some trepidation but I have to say um the day that Dr. Pombo called me and there was like a speaker phone of we're all here. Um it felt really welcoming and I just really appreciated um how sincere everybody um has

091been. And my husband couldn't be here this evening and not a lot of people um know just yet about this but one of my um partners in crime, one of my coaches came tonight because she didn't want me to be alone. And so I want to thank um Johanna, one of our science coaches who's here and I think some of the other members of the team are uh in the cloud. uh creeping in, but um I want to acknowledge um their support for my transition. Well, thank you so much and welcome. We're excited to have you and and ready to get you to work. Okay. Thank you. So, take a quick five minute recess. sister. She told Go Okay, look at me. 6:42. I said five minutes at 6:37. Here we are. Okay, we're moving

092on to 4A, student outcomes, focused governance. And hopefully I'm doing Miss Cardio proud by reading all this information that we're going to go over when we um do our mindset a little bit before we get into this uh topic every uh board meeting. So if this is your first time, we welcome you and enjoying this part of our presentation before we get into the rest meeting. In the fall of 2023, the Kraton School District adopted student outcomes focused governance, the student outcomes focused governance framework to ensure a focus on improving student outcomes. This framework is grounded in six research informed competencies investigatoro ees. communication and collaboration collabor and continuous improvement evolstante. Guided by these six competencies, the board created a set of goals and guardrails and the goals reflect the community's vision for student success.

093The guard rails reflect the values and set boundaries for leadership. competences. Progress monitoring is what we're going to discuss next. And that's what we're doing tonight. We have some progress monitoring reports to go over within this framework. One of the most critical components is progress monitoring. between the board and superintendent where we ask the following. One, does student performance match our goals? Is there evidence of growth towards these goals? When done well, monitoring supports by the uh monitoring supports the district by the following. Modeling effective leadership [Music] clarifying strategies and next steps. Setting clear priorities across the system and providing continuous feedback for improvement retro. This is how we hold ourselves accountable to the outcomes our students deserve. This is how governance truly serves our community. And with that, I'll go ahead and turn it

094over to Dr. Dupin to get us started on our progress monitoring reports. Thank you, Vice President Gibson Mlan, members of the governing board, Superintendent Mound, uh members of executive team, and our community members who are with us tonight. As mentioned, the governing board has adopted four student outcomes focused goals. Tonight, the focus of our progress monitoring this report is goal one, which is about decreasing minimal proficiency in math for our eighth grade students. Goal one is that the percent of eighth grade students that score minimally proficient on doubleASSA math will decrease from 73% in August 2023 to 48% by August 2028. Our annual target for this year, which we are awaiting data on, is to decrease from 77% last August to 71% by August of 2025. Tonight, we'll be reporting on two uh measures. Our

095current measure 1.1, which utilizes our DNA math benchmarks, and interim measure 1.2, which also uses our DNA math benchmarks, but focuses on fifth grade learners. This table focuses on current measure 1.1. Highlighted for you are the percent of eighth grade students scoring minimally proficient in math. We have added to this uh per governing board member request detail about the number of students in each of the uh in the all student subgroup for each school so that you have a reference for the number of of students that are there. So in our analysis of our benchmark uh performance, the May 2025 rate of eighth grade students scoring minimally proficient was 80% on the post test and it is a little higher than in 2023 2024 but lower than 2022 2023. The rate of eighth grade students

096scoring minimally proficient decreased by 13% overall in 2223. 18% in 23-24 and 17% in 2024 2025 arriving this year at 80% on the post test. Our interim measure our current measure rather was to get to 77%. So we fell just short of this current measure. Therefore um although we are close we did not meet current measure 1.1. So, as I mentioned before, interim measure 1.2 focuses on our fifth grade learners and reducing minimal proficiency from 86% in May of 24 to 79% by May of 25. Once again, the numbers uh at each school of students in fifth grade, uh the numbers of students at each grade level in math, we're looking at 348 students overall. And here I'm pleased to announce that we actually did not only meet but exceed our um interim measure for

097this goal. So, um, just to cut right to the chase, it's it's nice to be able to see that number there. Um, in our analysis, we found that the May this this month's rate of fifth grade students scoring minimally proficient was, uh, 72%. It was a little bit higher than the prior year. Um the percent of fifth graders scoring minimally proficient decreased 32% between IBM2 and the post test during the 2223 school year, 26% in 2324 and 25% this year. So once again we did meet interim measure 1.2. So with more on the inputs that led to this work in math, I will turn it over to Dr. Pombo and Mrs. Twist. Um, we've talked about many of these inputs before. So, these are our review, but there are some new inputs that we did

098this quarter. And so, 85% of our teachers enrolled in math Kraton professional learning completed six hours of professional development and building conceptual understanding. And they also conducted a SWAT analysis of theraton's math instruction as of April 16, 2025. And what that is is if you look on the right hand side, there are sticky notes. And so we had all of our third through 8th grade math teachers in a training this past quarter and we had them work in different groups and identify strengths of our math program and math instruction weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And I have um our coordinator for math, Miss Twist, right here just to give a quick summary of those what our um third through 8th grade teachers um put on these charts. Thank you. Good evening. It was so exciting to

099get to spend a couple of hours with those teachers. Um, in April, we had them work in our elementary groups and then also middle school groups to first determine what their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats were and then they moved to the chart paper and were able to read everyone's and then it was their job to group them, to categorize them. And so they came up with things for strengths for example like coaches and teachers, professional development, curriculum materials, data and resources. Interestingly though, some of our weaknesses were also staff time and curriculum, um, learning gaps and mindset, which was surprising and noted as a weakness because it came up as a weakness from staff mindset being somewhat deficit focused sometimes to also student mindset. How do students feel about math and about themselves and

100their own math identities? Um, curriculum resources were seen as both a strength and also a weakness depending on who you asked. Um, coaches, teachers, professional development were big strengths all around. Staffing was definitely a threat that came up as something that could be getting in our way next year of meeting our goals as far as some turnover. It was noted by teachers about their colleagues absences and the number of times that they've had split lists or lack of substitute teachers and then also staff turnover from last year. Um I can say luckily also being the person who helps to run Kraton educator orientation that our staff turnover in the math department is looking better for next year. Um I do want to I want to add that this past quarter it was like it was

101third quarter and also fourth quarter um Miss Twist and I and the math coaches have been doing a lot of research to see what we can do with our inputs from this year and also to improve those for next year. So we're using this information with our math consultant to plan for next year. Um they als we also had 20 of our fifth and eighth grade math teachers receive content specific coaching from our math teaching and learning coach um coaches which are all of them are here today. So we'll we'll introduce them real quick at the in a little bit. Um we have five district leaders complete 25 hours of professional development in math pedigogy that promote student thinking as of April 2025. And they piloted these strategies in a fifth grade classroom. Um the

102district conducted 16 hours of classroom observations in 14 of the 25 fifth and eighth grade math classrooms to gather baseline data on instruction as of April 30th 2025. So these were separate um classroom observations in our data wise observations. Those we um go into all the different classrooms. These were specifically just to go look at our math classrooms. um and Miss Twist had conducted those observations to understand what's happening in our classroom so we can figure out how to support our math teachers for next year. If you remember last year we did the same thing with our SEI teachers. We went to all observations in their classrooms to figure out how we could support our SEI teachers this year with um training. Um, and then the last one is math. The math team analyzed the

103scope and sequence of math standards for 3 through 8th grade, cross reference them against the Arizona essential standards and the curriculum calendars will be rearranged in multiple grades to allow more time throughout the year to retach essential standards to mastery. So, we looked at that and I don't know if you want to explain that a little bit, but you spent some time um rearranging our standards. If you could um Miss Twist also explain especially for community members who may not be um as familiar with educational lingual what exactly scope and sequence is also. Absolutely. Thank you. So the scope and sequence is which standards are taught and when. So making sure that every student in the district is receiving those standards at the same time. that allows for making sure that there's continuity, that there's

104equity. If students move from one Kraton school to another, they're not going to get fractions twice and miss out on decimals. Um, and one of the things that we found that was very interesting, particularly in fifth grade, since that has been such a focus this year, is that a very large percentage, about twothirds of the essential fifth grade math standards are introduced in third quarter. twothirds. Which means that students while they are learning a lot of math standards in the first two quarters, they're not the building blocks of essential critical understanding that prepares them to be successful by the end of the year and moving into middle school math and into high school. So, one of the things that our team is going to do during our summer design studio work that's coming up in

105a couple of weeks is take a very critical eye to the calendar and which standards are being taught and making sure that some of our most important standards, more of our most important standards are being taught early enough in the year that we can teach them to mastery, assess them using those common formative assessments very regularly so that teachers have real-time information and can make adjustments because we know that February and March is too late. It is too late for those fifth graders. We need to know in October and November and December if they are still struggling with really important concepts. So that's exciting work. I have a question real quick on that page. That's all right. Um just real quick, which which school was it that you piloted the fifth grade classroom? Yeah, that

106was really exciting work this year. So, our math coaches did an entire year, they did a book study this year called Building Thinking Classrooms, which has been supported by the Arizona Department of Education. It's all about getting students thinking, like deep thinking, not rope memorization, like real true problem solving that also applies to their real life persevering. And as we were reading it as a team, we were like, "This is amazing." And also, this sounds really hard. we can't ask teachers to do this until we've tried it ourselves and all of us are out of the classroom at the moment. So they had a super brave amazing firstear Teach for America fifth grade teacher at um Iron Mountain Academy who had built such a great relationship with her coach Patty Lockwood over the year that

107she agreed to let the math team come in and teach eight building thinking classrooms lessons with her students. We were able and then we had our own professional learning community of the coaches would teach a lesson and then get back together and say okay let's look at the data from students and what was really hard and oh my gosh they did not talk to each other. How do we get them talking more? Um we look noticed really interesting things. We noticed that the girls were really quiet in that particular classroom. Um, we noticed that when we gave formative assessment at the very end of the lesson, students were given the choice between a mild, a medium, and a spicy task. And it was it 14 out of 23. I mean, it was more than half

108picked the spicy task. Like they our kids want the challenge. They want to be challenged. They want to think deeply and critically. Um, and it was really exciting work to do. And the team was really great to be adventurous this year and try it and get their hands dirty with kids. And they were a tough group. I mean, because they don't know us. You get four teachers that they barely see in there trying to get them to be uncomfortable. Did they give you all feedback other than the unsolicited feedback you probably got normally? Or they did. Every day at the end of the lesson, they did a reflection on both what was great and challenging as far as the collaboration with their group and also what was great and challenging about the math work. And

109so they had some really really interesting comments. I think when our coaches come up to share in a little bit about the work they've done with teachers, they could definitely give you more details. Thank you. Okay. So what is working? Um increase awareness of our SOFG goals. Uh 21 of our fifth and eighth grade math teachers are working with a math coach. Over 300 hours of direct planning and coaching support. We increased teacher capacity, data analysis, and use of resources. 38 3rd through 8th grade math teachers completed eight hours of focused professional development math instruction. And teachers have implemented action plans targeted math instruction utilizing the data wise process. Um, and then if you also look off to the right, you could see how many of our students grew, maintained, or um, lost ground on

110on the um, DNA assessment for both eth and fifth grade. What needs more attention? Increasing student engagement, opportunities for practice, and obviously opportunities for thinking and higher level um, higher level opportunities. Analyze analyzing the scope and sequence of math unit guides to ensure critical content is covered earlier in the year. We're working on that this summer. Observations indicated room for growth in the standards for mathematical practices and critical thinking and continued coaching and professional development. So that's what our really big focus next year is the um coaching and professional development for our teachers and that support in the classrooms. And then now Miss Twist is going to introduce our coaches. Um all all of them are here and they're going to share a little bit on our next slide. Great. If you want to come

111on up. So, because I knew that you had the opportunity to review our inputs and our 2526 inputs, which I'll share a little bit more detail about in a few minutes, um we thought that you might like to have a glimpse into the work the work of coaching and supporting teachers. So, our math coaches are here with us tonight. We have Casey Aken who works at Builtmore Prep and the Kraton Academy, Sarah Larkin who's at Monav Vista and Gateway, Maria Guyire who is supports Kennedy, LMA, Linda and Macken, and Patricia Lockwood who supports Iron Mountain Academy and Excellencia. Thank you for joining us tonight. They're going to give you a little little taste of the work that they've done this year with teachers and some of the successes. And they could also tell you about

112building thinking classrooms if you want. All right. So, um, our intent, I think we were just going to focus on kind of our work with one teacher to give you a picture of what that might look like because although we'd like to have like a one-sizefits-all solution for professional development, like that's not the case. So, um, the teacher I chose is a teacher who taught multi-age this year at the Kraton Academy in third and fourth grade. and um she has taught in Mexico, but she um is not certified here yet. She's an emergency s. Um when I begun my work with her, um we really were just you I because of my content knowledge in math, I've taught fourth through 9th grade mathematics for I think 12 years. Um we really were diving mostly into

113like strate different strategies for conceptual understanding of content um explicit instruction of vocabulary and because it's was in a dual language classroom that other layer of like getting students to produce the language. Um so that's where our work started and then it was pretty quick that I identified that like classroom management was a challenge for this person and they said that you know there which I've heard from many people who also have taught in other places that it is just a different experience as far as systems and the students mentalities and um so and and all the standards. Um, so I saw a need there and we really started working on behavior management at that point and um, I kind of created like a model for her that she could replicate. And so we started

114with a dismissal procedure. Again, this was very early in the year and um, it was like okay I went into the class and we talked about with the students this is what we expect from students. This is what the teacher will be doing at dismissal. this is our goal within two minutes all these things are accomplished and it was visible for them. We pra we we we tried it first time um and then we come back and have them reflect what you know worked and didn't work and um then just worked on refining the process right and then that teacher was able to take that model and use it with other procedures and expectations which then really changed the dynamic in her classroom and reduced some like somewhat disruptive behaviors. Um then after that I

115really like focused my work on like overt student engagement because there was some passive and disruptive things that had been prior I did some focus student focus groups I guess with some of her students. Um and we tried some like strategies around student support because we didn't have a student support coach at our school. Um and so we worked through that and then we were able to um move more into again that overengagement that I mentioned and that's when we really saw a lot of change there with students using whiteboards and formative assessment and a lot more dialogue and deep discussion. Um some of the data that um was a result of our work together and of her very very strong effort, right? like she was working hard the entire year and you know there

116were challenges but um in with her fast bridge which is like fluency in math um 35% of her students increased by one or more levels um and that ended with 42% of them having their fluency with their math um facts and then um so and then in on our from our benchmark pre-to post test. Um her growth was 17.8% um which was third in the district for third grade. Well, that's that's exciting to hear. My family's been a TCA for about five years and I know those third and fourth graders are no joke and like so you know my my son was in fourth grade last year and so everything that you just said about what you coached this teacher on and and the changes that were made I can like visualize that and like

117see that being such a a benefit. So hopefully that's something that you know can be shared and passed on to to to more of those teachers because it is you know behavior is always kind of an issue and it does affect their their learning. So thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Um so I wanted to talk about a team I worked with. Um at the beginning of the year their students scored 93% were minimally proficient but then by the post test they were down to 71% proficient and with half of those being either proficient I'm sorry I said that wrong 72% were minimally proficient and over half of them were of that 21 three were um proficient or highly proficient. And uh what I really enjoyed with working with the team is that I was able

118to meet with them all individually and they selected goals that they wanted to work on. So one of them was uh working with small group in um she wanted to why her students um she wanted to help her struggling students the ones that didn't quite get it after the first instruction. So we did some street level data. I conducted interviews and we talked to those students said like what what what is your struggle? What's going on? And so it was interesting to get their input. And from that um she decided to make some arrangements in her classroom. So she had them up closer to the front. She had them working with certain students that they worked well with. And then she also started pulling uh small group instruction. Another teacher in that grade level, they

119wanted to work on number sense fluency. So we talked about teaching strategies as opposed to like just like memorizing facts. So that way students would have um something to use. Like if they know that seven times four, right? they might not know their sevens, but if they have like fives and twos down, then they would be able to use that strategy for any uh problem. And then the third really wanted to focus on having more conversation in their classroom. And so we imple implemented math review and did a lot of partner talk. Um and then once we got that going, then we were able to support the schoolwide goal of um from their data wise action plan in quarter 2 of looking at data from tests and responding to it. So like gathering together as

120a team and um seeing where they scored well, what they need to do for retach, and just really having good conversations about good teaching practices. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. I think that's it. That's it. Yeah. Sorry. I was just expressing to Joel um a reflection of of gratitude for the coaches. uh you know as we reflect on all these inputs our coaches have been through a tremendous transformation this year. We've talked about it multiple times but to go through what they went through from um the first a year ago the the notice that we were going to restructure going through the process to apply again and be selected and that's a rigorous process and then to try to come up with a schedule build relationships across multiple campuses. That's all before

121you do anything with math content. And then so to get to the point where we are now having deep relationships with the content, deep relationships with the teachers across multiple campuses and all the way to creating great relationships with the kids so they can go in and try out the things that they're expecting, you know, that we expect all of our teachers to do is just a tremendous success. And so we commend the whole team uh for that work because it's it's it going to show it. Well, it it's showing up, but it's just it's it's so much untold story of the year, and it's important to acknowledge and celebrate that work and and the leadership that made it happen. Um, real quick, can you go back to page six? I'm not sure if I

122can't see the numbers, so just tell me. Um, inter measure 1.2% of fifth grade students scoring. The one with the table. The one with the table. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Okay, there we go. because the the one I've got here doesn't have the those numbers. Yes, we made that as an addition since we published to board docs just to make sure I can't sorry I'm uh being responsive to we can get that sent out okay to the board as well. We received the request yesterday so we were able to get it in for today but we weren't by the time it was done it was too late to change the posting because we were limited to 24 hours before the meeting. Okay. Yeah, because I was curious to see those numbers and my eyeballs can't see

123it from here. Um and then I one thing that caught my attention on uh current measure 1.1 um so that same table but for uh measure 1.1 it looks like Macken had um has got some pretty good good scores. I mean, if I'm looking at the Native American students and Hispanic, um, and you know, just overall, they've got a really great percentage there. Um, so I was just curious like I wonder what you know, is it one like super great teacher or just a really great great smart group of kids or I don't know or maybe they were the ones who got extra coaching. I don't know if that's been looked into yet. Well, the data is fresh. We haven't had it that long. But one thing I can tell you about Macken's math team

124is that they're consistent. They've had the same They've had this team of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade middle school math teachers for a couple years. I know they've had their seventh and eighth grade math teacher working together and they collaborate very well for multiple years. Um, and their sixth grade teacher, how long has do you remember how long's been there? um and their sixth grade teacher has been there for a bit also. And so the consistency, the collaboration, they are they're learners. They go the extra mile. And I think it really speaks to that loop that even though we're always talking about eighth grade, it's not just about the eighth grade teacher. When kids show up to 8th grade with great math experiences and believing in themselves and having some of that critical knowledge from

125sixth and seventh grade, the eighth grade math teacher can put the bow on it. Thank you. Oh, really? All right. Thank you so much for that. And we can um move on to goal two report four now, I think. or did we have anything else we were do you have to adopt this one before we move on or do them together? Um I don't we do them together. I think we've traditionally done them at the end of each one. So I mean I don't know that there's a rule one way or the other. Otherwise I would be glad to share them. Somebody doesn't want to approve one of them and the other. Yeah. All right. So, I'll move to accept uh sorry, go ahead and move to accept uh goal one uh progress monitoring report

1264. Second. All those in favor? I I All right. Moving on to uh goal two progress monitoring report 4. Thank you. Goal two also focuses on mathematics and the the intent is to increase proficiency in math for black eth grade students in particular. Our goal is that the percentage of eighth grade black students that score proficient on ASA math will increase from 0% in August of 23 to 28% by August of 2028. Again, we're still waiting for AASA data to come back so that we can report on our annual target, but we will discuss tonight two uh our current measure and our interim measure. The current measure focuses on this year's eighth grade black students and with a goal of um increasing proficiency from zero to 4% by year's end. Interim measure 2.2 focuses on

127our black students in fifth grade mathematics and calls on us to increase from 0 to 6% by May of 2025. So when we look at this table, I just want to point out that we have we've maintained the all student count because the numbers are so low at specific schools. As we've discussed, it's impossible to put a put the number beside these without potentially calling out um or giving the feeling of being called out specific individuals. So we try to avoid that. But we are able to see across some variation of the sites in um proficiency in math for these students. So in deep analysis of current measure 2.1 again looking at our change from the preassessment to the post assessment the May 2025 rate of eighth grade students scoring proficient was 4% on the

128post test and it is the same as in the prior year. The percent of eighth grade students scoring proficient increased 4% between IBM 2 and the post testing 2324 and 2425. So we did meet current measure 2.1 for eighth grade black students. For interim measure 2.2, we're looking at our fifth grade students. These are the students who will be the eighth graders in 2028. Um once again distributed across our all student group by school. You can see some of those changes and increases in proficiency. For interim measure 2.2 the May 2025 rate of fifth grade students scoring proficient on the post test is 9% higher than last year and 4% higher than 2223. The percent of fifth grade students scoring proficient increased 5% between the pre and the post test in 2223 and 9% in

1292024 2025. Therefore, we met not only met but but were able to exceed interim measure 2.2. I don't want to forget to say this, but I want to um thank Miss Twist for all of her work this year, like leading our math team and leading our math coaches. So, I just want to thank you with everyone. Yes. So much for all your hard work. Yeah, everything on this one is very similar to the last goal except for the first bullet which is determine five equity based mathematics teaching practices are mostly encompassed in the standards for the mathematical practice. Do you want to expand on that one? Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. So one of the things that we did this year as we have continued to say this has been a research year. It's been a

130lot of learning especially around this goal. It's been about learning what's happening in their classrooms, learning what it's what that experience is like for our black students, and learning what might we what might we do next? What might we do differently? Um, and so one of the things that we had brought forth that I know the board was excited about were the five equity- based mathematics teaching practices. Um upon working with a math consultant recently and entering into the procurement process with her, um one of the things that we determined was that the five equity-based math teaching practices are based on and very tightly aligned with the eight teaching practices, the mathematical teaching practices from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. And those are practices that are good for all students, not in a

131it's good for everyone sort of way, but like genuinely good for each student and encourage deep and rich thinking. And so we've decided to build our professional development next year around those eight practices as opposed to focusing specifically on the five equity based teaching practices. But I thought it was really important for you to know that we researched and we learned more and what we found is that they really are deeply embedded in the work. So you will still see the the fruits of that labor even though it's not going to have that particular label on it. That was part of our research this year. Then you want to talk about the this talk about the next one. Okay. So yeah, thank you. This one? Yeah, absolutely. Um Oh, yeah. We can talk about that

132one. Either one. Are we in order? This one comes before. We just talked about the five. Yes. And this one again, this really is the work that we've shared with you all year. One of the things that was an input that we struggled with to be transparent was utilizing Waggle. Waggle is a um adaptive math program. It's online. It's part of our adopted resources through HMH. And um of our eighth grade, one of our inputs was to have eighth graders use this more, especially in third and fourth quarter. And it was underutilized. Um Gateway, Lomolinda, Monav Vista, and the Kraton Academy leveraged this resource the most, but the average eighth grader completed about 18 assignments this year, which isn't really enough to say that that was effective targeted improvement for them. So that's something that

133we'll look into being able to communicate about from the very beginning next year. Um, also we've been collaborating with the technology department and across all the departments to figure out what's displacing this like we know students are using their iPads. We know that they're playing math games in some of the time. What programs are displacing use of our researchbased adopted resources? Okay. Yeah, I was going to ask what like what what might be that reasoning like are they not aware of it? Is it too complicated to log in? Um cuz I know in my experience, although I don't have an eighth grader, she's in second grade, like with the H.M.H. I found in the workbook that they sent home, it doesn't give you any instruction on how to get onto the online resource part of

134it because it's like for more practice or more blah blah blah, go on online and but nowhere in the book does it show you or tell you how to go online. And you know, when I reached out to the teacher, she didn't even know. So, I could see that being, you know, a barrier to to getting extra practice and helping your student learn more. So, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. That's great family feedback. Um, as far as making sure that not only are we teaching our teachers, but encouraging them to communicate and send home those really clear directions to families because Waggle is a great resource to be doing at home because it's adaptive. It has tutorials. It has games. I would rather kids be playing Waggle than doing a workbook page where maybe their family

135can help them, maybe they can't. Yeah. And I know as a as a parent, for me, you know, that would be a beautiful bribe to Oh, you want to play your video games? Get on Waggle for 20 minutes. Yes, I support that. Okay, Dr. Let me know when you're ready. I'm ready. Perfect. Um, I was just so excited to talk about this slide with you because after all the research, this is what we're doing next year. These are our upcoming inputs. Um, one of the things that we are most excited about is a targeted math professional development cohort. We have 10 teachers registered and one weight listed for our third through fifth grade next year. We have 10 teachers for our sixth through 8th grade next year. That is more than half of our middle

136school math teachers. That's awesome. Um, so during that time they're going to get monthly half-day learning sessions in classroom coaching cycles. It is mostly in during the school day. So it won't take them away from their work life balance. It will be an investment away from their students for half a day once a month. Um, we have we're in the procurement process with a consultant that we're very excited to work with that we'll be coming to share with you in the future. Um and then a couple of the other things are bringing in a student cadre. So we have a plan to start off a pilot with a small group of students and they're going to do a short course called how to do math, how to learn math and it's all about building their

137efficacy or like what does math really mean? What does it mean to be good at math? Um and then we'd also like to host a spring family math night. Um, we also through coaching and assessment, we've talked a little bit about formative assessments, rearranging the calendar. We are hiring an additional math coach for next year. So, we'll be going from four to five in our interview process. The candidates that were the strongest and move forward were all external. So, we didn't lose any teachers from our classrooms, which I know is always a concern when we expand our coaching staff. Um, coaches will continue to provide their PD throughout the year. And we also have district leaders. We have principles and assistant principles who will be embarking on the work with our consultant and learning more

138about math which will make them more effective leaders in leading the math in their classrooms and on their campuses. Of the Oops. Go ahead. Of the 20 teachers that signed up for the cohort, are each of the schools represented in that? We tried really hard. Um we tried really hard and most school I think every school is represented I know every school is represented between the two. So we may not have because there are 10 spots each. We may not have a teacher from every campus in middle school or from every campus in elementary but between the two we do have a teacher from every campus. And some of that was genuinely teacher capacity. We had teachers that said like this sounds great. I'd love to do it but I can't right now. or I'm

139really passionate about K3 literacy or about language development and I'm going to do that cohort instead. And I was going to say, I don't know if I've shared, but we have a cohort for literacy, one for language, and then one for math. And so, um, these are the teachers that put math as their first choice. They want to be in this cohort. And we're replicating what we did a lot with our language acquisition goal. Were you going to say that? It was the I was going to ask it as a question so you could say it, but I am thrilled to have you say it spontaneously as well. So, a lot of things that Miss Twist is sharing like the cohort, we had the language acquisition cohort um this year that so we're replicating things

140that were working and that we were seeing results in the classroom and seeing in our um also in our you know achievement and growth and so that was a cohort um also some of the other items that you added here already, right? I'm just trying to think. I think so. Yeah. So, everything here has been replicated. Do you want to add anything? I'm just going to say I appreciate the team for coming up with the you're you're so um I again there's a reason that Dr. Pombo was our administrator of the year. Um like she we talk a lot about leadership and she always gives me great new leadership books. So one of the books she had me read this year was switch and I've talked a little bit about it here and on the

141podcast. But um in that book one of the things they talk about is bright spots. So you can go out in the world and look at about what a bunch of other districts are doing and you can try and bring that back and replicate it, but sometimes those districts don't have your culture or they don't match you demographically and so those aren't always the best fit. And so the most functional changes that you can make come from the bright spots you find within your own organization. So as we've been trying things this year, you'll through these progress reports, you'll see where we've done exceptionally well, where we've done fairly well, and where we've struggled. And so what the team has been doing is assessing um those things we've done exceptionally well. How do we leverage

142those into the other areas where we've either just done well or have struggled? And so that's part of why you're seeing that practice replicated here. But one of the things I'm super proud of all of you for is that it's not just replicating what we did that was successful, it's also taking it and putting it on steroids because there's been this addition of these cadres in each of the areas that are coming together. And um many thanks to our principles, assistant principles and other district leaders who are joining those teams so that way that information isn't just embedded with their teachers, it's embedded with their leadership as well. So they're getting the type of support they need to be able to do the things they need to do. And if I misspoke on any of

143that, feel free to correct. That's perfect. What I was what I was going to add is that we're engaging like all stakeholders. So with the language, we had the family um night. So we're adding the family nights for um math. And then we also want to make sure we're always engaging our students. And so adding um the student what do we call it? Student cadre. Um and then we also have our leadership teams and then obviously our teachers and everyone involved. So just trying to make sure that we're reaching all of our stakeholders. I think that's everything, right? Oh, I know one more slide. I'm also going to commend our some of our math teachers. We have 20 teachers that are coming back from summer vacation two days early to attend fifth and sixth grade

144math training with the Department of Education. um and seven teachers who are going to invest an entire week of their summer in June to go down to Tucson and spend a whole week being immersed in excellent math teaching practices and then bring it back to their campuses next year. And I'll just add on this goal in particular because it focuses on our black students. One of the things out and about in the world, this is the goal I get asked about the most. Um, and I would say that we have learned so much about this group of students this year because of the goal. Um, specifically, we learned that many of them are immigrants. Many of them are second language learners. Their experience in this country is very different from the African-American experience in this

145country. So, what the team is continuing to do is they evaluate the inputs that are for all math learners. They are also being very conscious about the intersectionality of of race, language, and math development. And I really commend the team for for being very mindful as they build these structures and build these interactions that they are, you know, they are being really aware and really specific of what is unique about being a black student in the Kraton school district and learning math and then having to perform well on on standardized assessments for their future. So, it was a a courageous move to establish this goal and we've all been challenged by it. But the learning that has come out of it when I've shared it with folks outside of the district, we've gotten a I've

146it I've gotten a lot of like posit like there's a lot of positive feedback around what we've learned about our kids because we took a close look. So, we'll continue to do that and report on that for the future. Well, I I appreciate the commitment to the goal and I appreciate the numerous times that I've pushed back on things and folks are still willing to meet the the requests. So, I appreciate it and we're continuing to learn. We also have a book study that the coaches are doing and the cohort's doing about specifically how to um it's it's called like how to teach our black students, right? Teaching black students, the dream keepers. Yes. Um I saw that on the list. Yeah. And then this uh slide is is the same as before except for

147the the data is different. It has our um our black students their growth for um the numbers that showed growth that maintain and also that lost ground for both eth and fifth grade. And that con that's that's what we have for our our goal two. Any other questions? Sorry, one just popped into my head. So right here looking at the uh those that showed growth, maintained and lost ground. Is this based on these same students where they were last year or from the benchmark prior? These are this is actually pre-est to post- test data. So 20 81% of our eighth graders grew from the pre-EST to the post- test, which is really exciting because that's 25 students that grew. And when we presented the exact same data to you back in January, only 15 of

148them had grown. Um, and likewise with fifth grade. In January, only eight of them, eight of our students grew from August to December and now 23 of them. So, we're excited to see them really picking up speed. I think that segus into something, Dr. Deepen, if you don't mind going to the third slide one more time. Um, tell me when I get there. It's the one with the goals and the annual target and the current measures al together. That one. Um so I just want to kind of to reiterate both for this and the last one we looked at. Um these are progress monitoring reports where we're looking at those current measures. What we're looking forward to in August with our fingers crossed are the annual targets, right? And so we haven't gotten to those

149yet. And so I just want to make that clear for anyone watching or anyone in the room tonight that, you know, we've done our best with these current measures to pick assessments that we already use to try to see if those can be markers for us moving forward. And hopefully when we get our annual target, we'll know if these assessments that we use are good indicators of how students will do on the annual for the annual target. But we don't actually know quite quite all the way yet. And so we'll find out in August once we have been able to get all the um assessment data back for this school year. Yeah. And I um just wanted to point out too that um it's a combination of knowing how aligned the test data is to

150be correlated. But it's also there's a going to be a need for us to fine-tune based on what we learn because you know we did our best to try to figure out like well what would a result that would indicate the result we're seeking be but we're very early in in doing that right so and we really haven't done that um probably for I don't know I don't know if it was done at sometime maybe a dozen or more years ago but at least in the time I've been here. This is the first time we've been doing that. So, um, so we will get better at that over time, too. And so, there'll be sort of like a fine-tuning refinement of those numbers as well. And in some places, the team has already talked about

151changing out the tools that are used to measure because we may have access to some better tools for next year. And that's just a really long way to get to. Um, a bunch of us sat in a room last year and tried to figure this out, right? Um, and as people who've worked with me a long time know, I'm fond of saying that none of us is as smart as all of us. So, I always feel like the more people in the room, uh, the better the, you know, decision-m that we make and the ideas we come up with. So the first week of June this year, we will be engaging not only with our executive team, our principles and our assistant principles, but thank you to our coaches who are going to be joining

152us, our coordinators who are going to be joining us. So, we're going to put all the people who like are living this from day to day in the room and try to come up for ne with with recommendations uh for the board for an even stronger set of interim measures for next year. And you'll see some changes, you know, in some of these areas. Um, and you'll see us targeting some things that the board has brought up this year in the guard rails. Like one thing that comes to mind is the chronic absenteeism. You'll probably see some reflection of that. So, so um what we will be bringing back to the board will be the work of a much larger group all of whom have now been deeply engaged in this work. So, as we

153continue, I know I know um President Curio makes fun of me because I like to say the goal is to be vertically articulated from the board all the way to the students understanding what we're doing with student outcomes focused governance work. And it's kind of like a pyramid. As we as that articulation gets deeper, there's more people involved in it. And the more people that are involved in it, the broader our knowledge base and the better we can do bringing forward recommendations um as we intend to do this summer. Totally. Well, thank you all for all your hard work again. Um and I'll go ahead and move to approve uh progress monitoring to report for uh goal to report four. Second. All in favor? I. All right. Thank you so much. You um we'll go

154ahead and move on to public comments. Item 5A. I appreciate you um sitting through. We've decided to change our agenda so that we prioritize our student outcomes focused governance um and hopefully get folks who are coming to speak to at least hear about that before they get up here. So, I appreciate your patience. Um, what do we have the timer on, Hilda? Three minutes. Three minutes. You'll have three minutes to speak. And again, um, board members can't respond to things that are not on the agenda and we'll go from there. So, uh, I have Rebecca Jean, come on up. Hello, my name is Rebecca Jean. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here tonight in front of you. I want to start by saying I'm a teacher of 12 years and I love my profession.

155I'm here to briefly explain my recent experience in the Kraton district and close with one request from the school board. In January, I underwent an emergency appendecttomy. Soon after, I made the heartbreaking decision to resign from my third grade teaching position at Larry C. Kennedy Elementary. But I wasn't treated like someone who resigned due to my illness. Instead, I was treated like I had been fired by my principal, Miss Helena Lebron. Despite still being employed, my classroom keys in hand, my classroom was packed up without my consent or my knowledge. I had to involve HR to retrieve personal items that were wrongly claimed belonged to the school. It felt less like support and a very difficult and vulnerable time and more like punishment. As my kids walked away a final time, the principal told me

156with a grin on her face to quote, "Take your last looks." Sadly, this was part of a larger pattern. Throughout my time at LCK, I had I and many other staff members faced bullying and poor communication from admin. Despite all of this, one of the best parts of my year was founding the school's first cheer team. We raised over $400, primarily through cheer parent donations for bows and palms for the girls to have as keepsakes for their season. I later found out from a colleague that only the bows were given out to the girls. The principal decided to withhold the pom poms for possible future use. Those were not district- funded items. The palms came primarily from monetary donations made by cheer parents in the LCK community at large. The Cheer Girls deserve to have

157these special keepsakes as a way to remember their time and cheer and a token of all of their hard work. This was not a decision made by someone who values putting kids or their hard-earned accomplishments first. This was a selfish decision. There are still many LCK parents and cheerleaders upset with the decision as well. So, I respectfully request the following from the board. Before the school year is over, please consider returning these pom poms to the girls as a symbol of their hard work and their accomplishments. Thank you. Thank you so much for your comments. Thank you. Go ahead and move on to uh the approval of consent agenda. And um I'll move to approve items 6 A and B. I'm sorry. 6 A through C as well as E and F. Can I get

158a second? Second. All those in favor? I I I All right. Um that leaves us to 6D. Go ahead, Miss Marquez. Yeah, I had um some questions about this one. Sorry. Let me pull up that um purchase. So this is for the curb extension. What um extend package rooftop unit curbs. What what are those? You do a good job explaining, but I'm happy to defer to you. Google curves. Um, uh, extend package rooftop. Yeah, because I'm not sure. I'm like I guess I could give it. It's And I apologize. I have an email if it's something on the roof or like that catches the dripping. Gutters or something? No, it's it's Oh, it's it's a it's what the which the HVAC sits on it and it's um to help protect the roof and maintain the

159warranty of the roofing. I do think I put more detail in the board update update. I apologize. Let me go get that. Um, that was why because I wasn't sure and I was like, "Oh, I said it so well in that board update." Uh, let me go get that real quick. I just don't want to misspeak. Um, I did have to look it up. May 13th. Okay. Thank you so much. Um, there it is. Okay. I did. HVAC. Okay. Oh, I didn't give as much details as I thought. I apologize. Um, we got any H. Okay. But it is it's the it is it looks like a just looks like a little square that they sit inside in. HVAC curbs are raised metal frames and roofs to support and protect rooftop HVAC equipment. They provide

160a level platform for mounting units, preventing leaks and ensuring proper air flow. And they also isolate vibration and noise. Thank you. And what you need differs depending upon the makeup of your roof and the engineering of the HVAC units. And so in in this case, what they determined was that our the life cycle of our roof and the warranty would benefit from having the curb units in place. They don't necessarily always need the curb extenders, but because of so in big projects like this, we do have um an audit of the product project to ensure that we don't overlook something critical. Um because, you know, it's it's different entities going up on the roof uh planning out big projects. There's 85 uh units I believe. And so when we did that audit to ensure we

161just had covered all the bases to ensure we get all of the maximized uh tax credit rebates. Um we go back through the requirements of those rebates. And I do believe that some portion of this may have been a part of um being able to qualify for the tax rebate for these high efficiency units. Um but then I know that when we brought in the other uh it's like a third party that kind of overlooks those uh projects um and Varie the company that we work with brings that that they pay for that to come in and review the pro project. So what they determined was with the those specific roofs we do need the curbing and those had not been included in the first go round of the project. So that's why we went

162ahead and and brought them back. We had a discussion. We agreed we do want to maintain the integrity of the warranty of the roof. We don't want to do anything that would a uh I can't remember um Mr. Wells had let me know how old that roof was, but it is still under warranty. Yeah, I would say that obviously we replace the roofs every now and then, but if you also know the buildings themselves are fairly old there. So, so you want to do everything to maintain integrity. So, um Lolinda has not been remodeled, right? Okay. And yes, uh those units will be moved uh during any remodeling. Uh and we wouldn't sacrifice those units. We we made that plan knowing that remodels will occur. Uh but we wanted to take advantage of these uh

163tax rebates so that we could have those savings that then also get the higher grade HVAC units that will be more efficient. Okay. So, do we know do those those curb extens extenders do curb extensions do those like if when we do remodel and you said we'll be keeping those HVAC systems and the curbs. Yeah. And the curbs the whole unit the whole unit would would stay intact once they're in there. They're in there. Sure. If it's something like oh no when you rebuild you got to get new ones and I'm okay. No, I'm good. That's that's all. Thank you. Okay. For sure. Thank you for your patience. I'm sorry I'm having it uh I have to look this stuff up too on all these until I understand what stuff is but for sure. Thank

164you. All right, we'll go ahead and move to approve item 60. Approve purchase of rooftop unit curbs for Lomolinda HVAC project through one GPA contract. Can I get a second? Second. All those in favor? I I All right. Uh, moving on to future agenda items. Right now for June 3rd and 24th, we're looking at SOFG, proposed budget, superintendent eval, approval of salary schedules, budget hearing, and budget approval coming up. Um, anybody have anything they want to add or get a slip from Hilda forum? Um, I would like to make sure that LCK cheerleaders can get their pompoms. Okay. Well, yeah. So, in the future, we can't respond to things on that aren't on the agenda, but you can ask for followup after somebody does public comment. And so, we don't necessarily need to put it

165on the agenda, but we can make sure that that's something that gets followed up on for sure. Awesome. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else? All right. I'll motion to adjourn tonight's meeting. Second. All those in favor? I I I need to I don't know the first she's saying can we get them to what was done or the situation or the situation It's