001e e e started the cron School District understands that our community of schools is located on the ancestral land of the oam doid and aimo people who descended from the hokam and have inhabited these lands since the time of Memorial theam whose name translates literally to people are a vibrant of culture and Community founding CET of generations into the past continue to thrive in the present and carrying a powerful Legacy for Generations into the future with this acknowledgement the cran School District formerly recognizes that the traditional care in keeping of these lands by indigenous people is an aspirational model of community stewardship that we are committed to honor with practices policy and human relations that brings us to 1B and Dr dupin do you mind leading Us in the Pledge of Allegiance please I pledge
002allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic which it stands one nation God indivisible liy and justice for all thank you that brings us to 1C which is roll call it looks like all of us are here today Miss ER Miss Gibson McLean myself Mr Jones and Miss Marquez we want to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting and remind the audience of the requests to address board cards that must be that must be completed and submitted to the board secretary if they wish to speak to an agenda item they're on our left side by Mr Ivan carbajal hi Mr Ivan carbajal um if anybody wants to do an agenda item board policy provides for two cards White cards to be submitted in order to speak to an agenda item and
003blue cards to be submitted in order to speak during public comments due to the open meeting law we have board members are not allowed to address items that are not on the agenda and that's per our policy BH that brings us to 2A approval of agenda like to make a motion to move some items of course okay so I would like to amend that we U Move consent item 6h um to iMed follow U the board reports and superintendent report perfect second thank you I have a first and I have a second that item 6 h was it h yes be held right after 3B and before 4 a all those in favor um any nay I think they just want to be clear on what we're doing okay sorry so 6h is the approval
004of assistant superintendent of teaching learning so that would okay uh Mr Jones any questions no okay so all those in favor any nay hearing none motion passes thank you for that and that brings us through threea which is governing board reports and Miss sis I'll go ahead and get started with you hi good evening everyone um feels like forever since we got backround spring break even though it's only two weeks two weeks even and it's like Tuesday um one of my friends last week was so funny because she texted me and she was like hey Happy Spring and I was like yeah next week it'll be summer so here it is today summer um I just want to mention a couple um things that um I got to be a part of the U first
005one was the red event which um I'm sure Jay will share um and that was a lot of fun um and then uh Nicole invited me to um one of her Saturday what do you call it a dual language learning yeah dual language learning with community members um and we talked a little bit about the lgbtq plus um rights um policy that we're kind of starting to do um so we got a lot of input from that so um I really enjoyed that um I want to wish uh Fifth and eth grade teachers good luck on their AI are they taking it now yet yes this week starting I know we started this week and I got to Proctor today um so good luck on that and then um Good Luck on all the other
006testing thank you thank you so much Miss Gibson McLean um we're moving right along in terms of um the advisory committee we have three meetings left the 1 the 14th and the 28th um we will be prep I I say we they will be preparing I'll just be watching them prepare um for the Community Council on the 11 and then we'll take uh back the feedback from Community Council on the changes we've uh accomplished this year um talk about those at the meeting on the 14th and get finalized on the 28th for submission to the attorney so that then they can eventually be sent to the board um I do anticipate this committee needing to continue again just going to throw that out there as a possibility um because there's obviously the time is time
007is a thing that's elusive to us in this committee when it comes to getting into these conversations so um our last so the last meeting that we're having where we're actually going to be discussing any policy changes is going to be April 1 coming up quickly after that everything's going to be kind of prepping and finalizing everything to get submitted to the attorney and then to the board we did get through quite a few um policies this school year so I'm definitely happy with that as well um man yeah it's already I it's March you know when I moved out of Education I feel like it was all really easy to remember what time of year it was and now that I I mean it's been 10 years since I left education but I always
008forget what month it is or what day it is um and then I'm like oh yeah it's springtime I guess um but good luck to everybody done testing um and I'm just excited for um us to continue the work that we're doing and moving forward and we're going to have an even better school year next year I mean I just I feel like we have a lot of great momentum and I'm excited for what's coming up after our reports tonight as well so that's it thank you Miss Gibson McLean Mr Jones uh good evening everyone I have nothing to report this week thank you Miss Marquez hello everybody um like Heather said we had our dual language learning uh group Meetup so this is something that I've been leading for about a year ever since
009the first lawsuit came down on us from Tom Horn and myself and a couple other parents got really mad and we're like let's start meeting and it carried forward so um we've met we've had Educators researchers other school board members um elected officials parents uh all kinds of folks show up it's it seems like it's different every time but you know plenty of people in support of dual language learning um for Public public school students and keeping that in in the um Arizona public education system so that's been encouraging um we did at our last meeting discuss a little bit about an inclusionary policy that would you know be um for lgbtq students something and and and what that might look like and what that should include so that's that's exciting to see and something
010that that you know we'll be piecing together for our district um aside from that um I did get to have one-on-one meetings both with Dr pombo and with Miss Shapiro um to help myself just get a better understanding of of how our system works and it's just like mindblowing how much these women know and so you know I'm I'm so thrilled that they're in our district and that I get to work with them so and I'll be meeting with um Dr dupin in a few weeks and um you know hopefully get to meet some some more of the leadership here in the district so so I can you know understand what we're going through what everybody does and and to do my role serve in my capacity better um another thing coming up tomorrow there's
011going to be a round table of Schoolboard leaders and other folks in um in education whether you know from foundations and other organizations and we'll be discussing the impact of the dismantling of the Department of Education I'm excited to see what comes out of that who we'll get to meet and hopefully start co uh what is it like Coalition building with some other groups and you know because we we need to stand together to defend our our students and our schools and then the last thing is I've been invited to join the sav our schools Arizona Network Schoolboard Fellowship that'll be starting next month and again another um kind of opportunity for me to grow as a school board member and to like learn the ropes and you know see how we can defend public
012education here in Arizona so hopefully I'll have lots of good stuff to report back at some of our next meetings and that's it thank you thank you so much um I do have a couple of things um first of all happy women's um History Month I'm really excited for this month too especially given our one of our agenda items today on how we're increasing the women of color Force over here in kraton so I love that for us um I'm also really thankful for our partners with the soccer field that we did at Loma Linda that finally got built and that's a real true Testament to how we're going to hopefully start strategizing what Community Schools looks like because we do have Partnerships with the local Community Church that has so graciously offered their time
013and their volunteers to actually even have the field open sometimes after hours with the soccer program that they have so kids have a place safe place to be at it and that just melts my heart because that's what really it is is having all these organizations come together to make sure that our students and our kids in the community have a safe place to be at at all times so that's really awesome I know that the red events were mentioned um and I know Mr Man will talk a little bit more about that but big shout out to Larry C Kennedy and honestly that award was a project of the K through 12 every year I guess there's a big um Development Group that comes together together and they pick different projects to I mean
014we were up in one of the runners even with places like Mayo Mayo's getting rebuilt just some awesome construction um things that are going on around the valley and we were in the K through 12 sector and Larry C Kennedy got best project of the year for K through 12 and that really is a testament to our community members that approved our bond because without those Bond dollars that building would not have been able to be made and also the strenous vision of our students because I know that a lot of the stuff and incorporation of student voice was put in and reimagined thanks to having our contractors and having our Architects being open to having those conversations with our students so that award literally was to the community and to the students that make
015that happen so that was very awesome and just a quick legislative update um at the house there was HB 2213 which was a bill that would provide free um breakfast and lunch to individuals or families with low income and that did not make it out of house committee and as we're facing you know Federal fund cuts and all these different type of cuts it's very important that as budget season comes up that we really start thinking about where we can reimagine our dollars to make sure that they're invested back in our students as the attacks on public education continue as we start losing support from the federal government our own representatives are not willing to help us so really as public entities there's really not anybody that's going to come and save us we're going
016to have to really come to some hard decisions as a governing board together with Community input but at the end of the day what works best for our students there are some students and I say this all the time that will be okay and we'll manage to make it out of the system dep um regardless of what happens ferally state or locally and there are some students that are not they completely depend on the services that we give them as a public entity and it is our responsibility regardless of immigration status or what color they are or what they want to be called or how they want to be um identified as that we are giving all our resources to them so as these budget conversations come up and knowing that we do not have
017support from our legislators we do not have support from our federal government and we don't even have support from our local superintendence and education here in Arizona so these are real things that are happening and we're having these conversations I would hope that everybody keeps that in mind and that our ultimate goal at least for me myself is that our students are being looked at it and centered in all the decisions that we make with that I appreciate your guys's time and I'll turn it over to Mr Man thank you so much president kuo um I think I'm Gonna Change up the order in which I share things since we brought up the red Awards a few times so um I had the pleasure of having the stress of carrying a glass award to this
018meeting there was a couple of touch Ando moments it has made it here successfully um but as president kuo and and some of our other board members have mentioned um it's a it's a pretty big honor the the projects that were in the education um space for K12 education project of the Year this year were some pretty Heavy Hitters and um we were just blown away um to be selected but in talking with some of the other districts that were nominated one of the things I keep hearing from them is the more we learn about what your District did with Larry C Kennedy School the more we don't begrudge you having won this award so people are pretty Blown Away um and as president kuo mentioned it's our kraton kids Congress kids that really had
019a lot of input with the Architects and the construction firm um it's something that we do I think that's a best practice here in the kraton district uh Dr pombo talks about bright spots a lot it's one of our bright spots right um these these students have not only helped us create an award-winning school that has student input into it but they've also had impact on our U selections and recommendations to the governing board for curriculum they've been involved in you know a number of key processes we just had um a really cool piece of news come our way um as a lot of you know we're in the process of implementing the ruler method throughout our district to help students be able to identify their emotional state and help them develop better executive function
020skills um we went through an overview of the ruler method with those students at our last kids Congress and come to find out that at Gateway School we did not know that this was going to happen but the young ladies um that were representing Gateway School went back and did a PD for the teachers um based on what they learned during Kids Congress so we have some amazing Future Leaders in our district and so the work we do with student outcomes focused governance and all Focus that we put in on trying to raise student voice I think not only benefits our students and our community but ultimately um will benefit our whole society because we have the Futures leaders here Among Us and they are proving themselves um as we go I'd also like to
021give a shout out to um Chase Building team uh wed Gilmore Black Rock Studio Architects you know all the subcontractors the the the partners that worked on this we were told the project couldn't be built we can only build half a school with the budget we have um and uh Vanessa Shapiro our amazing CFO and in particular Mr Scott Wells our our brilliant uh facilities and transportation director found ways to braid together you know a number of Grants and Partnerships and and other types of opportunities in order to allow that school to be fully realized um even though at a slight delay some of the projects were were being built this year as the school was operating because they were dependent on some of those Grant funds coming through and we just barely beat the
022government to cutting off the tap to get that school built so um that's that's also kind of great too um in addition to being recognized for that um this week we received we did not know that we were in the running for this um but we received the 2025 edition of ranking Arizona um for those of you who watch the show regularly um you might remember last last year about this time we were surprised to discover that we were ranked number four amongst all elementary school districts in Arizona by ranking Arizona um we maintained our number four seed uh for this year which we did not know was gonna happen so I'm speaking as close to as as I can it keeps drifting away but thank you um so um we're in really good company
023with our neighbors at Osborne um Lichfield and Tempe Elementary School District um in the top four for the State of Arizona for elementary school District so and that's actually based on members of the public ranking US so that's not like we nominated ourselves for something or anything like so pretty pretty powerful honor and a pretty big surprise and then I see um for one of our future items uh Mr Isaiah Washington is here with us and I want to give him a big thank you he's our idak coordinator and was kind enough to share some news with us today um which was that from the tournament over the weekend for uh the IDC tournament um we had some amazing showings from a number of our schools but probably the biggest piece of news is that
024our district champions for girls basketball the builtmore Prep Academy um girls basketball team is now also the champion for the Phoenix City championship and so they actually and then I mean there's a mill like so many good things have been happening um but you know we have other things to do but I did also want to share that um Thursday we will be having um at the Craton Academy Gym um a career fair job fair um for the school district and so if you know anybody who wants to work in one of the top four districts in Arizona um go ahead and send them on down to the kraton Academy Gym on Thursday afternoon I think it starts at 3 o'clock Dr Lauren and um send them our way because we're always looking for the
025best talent it's how we get the best outcomes and I forgot to mention also the Family Resource Center is having a kindergarten um round up from 4 to six I believe that's awesome for our families too um and that's four to six tomorrow evening night I'm gonna be there with my kindergartener awesome um was that it Mr Man I I'm gonna stop there okay awesome thank you so much so now that brings us to what would be I guess 3C which was 6h and that is item approval of assistant superintendent of teaching and learning and Mr man I'll let you go ahead and take it off I appreciate that I'm super excited um for the recommendation that we're making and um prior to having the board vote on that recommendation I'd like to turn it
026over to Dr Lauren to share a little bit about um the process and the decision okay Madame President members of the board uh the kraton school district conducted an internal process to recruit and hire the ass assistant superintendent of teaching and learning the superintendent surveyed interest in screen candidates an interview was conducted by the superintendent the assistant superintendent of business and development uh and the Executive Director of Human Resources the candidate being Rec recommended this evening is Dr Lissa Pomo Dr Lissa Pomo is currently a m M of the cranon school district leadership team with 28 years of experience in education since July of 2023 she is served as the Director of curriculum instruction and assessment she has been instrumental in bringing the datawise process to our district has reorganized our coaching model oversaw the
027curriculum adoption process for Science and has been deeply involved in student outcome Focus governance work she has served as a director of Elementary initiatives for the Leona Group schools she holds a Bachelor of Arts masters of education and doctor of Education in educational leadership Innovation from Arizona State University she began her teaching career in 1997 as a fifth grade teacher at Peoria Unified School District where she was promoted to Improvement specialist assistant principal and then principal we are very proud to recommend Dr Lissa pombo as the assistant superintendent for teaching and learning [Music] yay I am super excited for this and I'm going to invite you over to the podium if you want to say a few words or if any of our board members want to say we might want to oh I I'm
028sorry you know being super you know I'm just so excited being superintendent you just get to be the killjoy all the time yes yeah I got to two kill Joys up here all right so I move the governing board approved cons agenda item H which is the approval of assistant superintendent of teaching and learning Dr Lissa pombo second all those in favor I I any nce hearing none motion passes while you're making your way up um if you want to go ahead and get started I'll give the floor to you and then we if any board members have anything awesome to say then they can well president Kio members of the board superintendent man the executive team and everybody here tonight I was thinking I didn't know if I'd have an opportunity to speak um
029and so I was thinking about what I wanted to say tonight and I'm just going to speak from my heart I very thankful for this opportunity um I feel very fortunate to be able to work for kraton and alongside everybody in this room everybody here is such a great team member and we all care about kids and I'm excited to continue the work with student outcome Focus governance that all of our students thrive in our classrooms have rigorous learning opportunities and they can do whatever they want when they graduate from kraton and compete with anybody anywhere anytime um and so I'm excited to continue this work I do want to introduce my family because I wouldn't be here without my family my friends and all the Educators in my life starting from Poria Leona Group
030and here in kraton but my um daughter here is Eva Luth pompo my niece uh Julieta Hernandez my husband Jose pombo my brother-in-law Isaac Hernandez my sister over there if you don't recognize she we we're um we have the same birthday but we're not twins um and then that's all my family but I do want to thank my team for being here and especially all the principes and coaches and assistant principles that I work with every day so thank you yay thank you board members Miss sis would you like to share anything yes I think it's a testament to how many people showed up tonight um from the schools and I was so thrilled um when I talked to Jay I was like we are hiring her right so I am so thrilled in the
031wake of losing um Eric I am so thrilled that you're joining um our team in this capacity um and I really appreciate you thank you thank you Miss Gibson um you're everybody's gonna make me cry um I you know um there's so many like in certain things right now and I think um like hearing you say that and then just how you show up and everything is so um it like instills a lot of confidence and um you make me feel confident about where we're going and safe and so thank you thank you beautiful Mr Jones uh I won't cry but I I just wanted to say like you know was a little downhearted when we heard about Dr tubin Moving on but excited for him as well but I just wanted to share uh
032when Mr Man Named the top candidate how relieved I was thank you congratulations yes just a little Misty eyed but no tears dropping yet but I am Echo whatever everybody said you I'm very very happy that that you're moving up in this capacity and and excited to see where you help lead us yeah thank you so much and I love that you're a Community member obviously that just shows how much you really do believe in cran believe in the community its students and its staff and I know these few last year working on S SOG and trying to be a little bit more student outcome Focus has been a struggle and it's amazing to be able to collaborate with direct administrators that are on the same path and vision to seeing what's possible for our
033students so I appreciate it I am an awe and I cannot wait to continue collaborating and working with you so thank you again and I'm so glad that you chose Kayon and for you to be here me too thank you so much flowers and then did you want to take any pictures or anything with your family or anything we can take like a small five minute recess and then we continue with the board meeting so you can get your time okay we'll go on like a five minute recess thank you e e e thank you hello all right everybody we could go ahead and take our seats we're going to go ahead and continue with the board meeting we are at item six which is approval of consent I move the governing board approv consent
034agenda items um Miss K we are actually on not focus we just moved sixh I'm so sorry I totally missed that thank you Miss htis I apologize that brings us to four a which is our student outcomes Focus governance update progress moning report three I mean report goal three we just want to remind everybody that in the fall of 2023 kraton School District adopted a student outcomes focused governance s SOG framework to ensure focusing on improving student outcomes a student outcomes focused governance framework is composed of six research and for competencies vision and goals monitoring and accountabil ility unity and Trust guard reals communication and collaboration and continuous Improvement and with that being said um we're going to go ahead and get started our progress REM report and also just for clarity what is our
035progress monitoring our progress monitoring is a conversation between the school board and superintendent that provides boards the opportunity to evaluate the alignment between the community's vision which is the goals toward the student outcomes and the school district's reality the current student performance or growth while student outcome goals and current student performance may not match perfectly it only becomes problematic when there is no evidence of student growth and progress and even if students aren't yet growing and making progress that's only catastrophic if the superintendent doesn't have sufficient aggressive Strate strategies in place for increasing growth and helping students make progress these are fun fundamental concerns of monitoring how is monitoring beneficial in addition to clarifying student and super internent performance monitoring when done well confers several other organizational benefits we lead by example what happens in
036the boardroom is more likely to be echoed in the classroom board Behavior sets the culture for an institution if board members want a culture where teachers are open and reflective in their craft they set the stage for that by demonstrating what it looks like for the board and superintendent to be open and reflective this is where aj cbl's words student outcomes don't change until adult Behavior change kind of leads the way and it's grounded in student outcomes data it clarifies strategies we communicate expectations and we do formative evaluation with all that we'll go ahead and get started with our progress Mar report and Dr dupin if you can go ahead and get us started thank you thank you president CIO governing board members uh fellow members of executive team and members of the Katon Community
037goal three is to increase increase English language proficiency for emerging multilingual Learners our goal is that the percent of emerging multilingual students that increase one or more levels on aella will increase from 25% in August of 2023 to 40% by August 2028 the annual Target for this year is that the percent of emerging multilingual students that increase one or more levels on the aella assessment will increase from 28% in August 2024 to 31% by August of 25 we were enthusiastic about this goal because we did perform well and met we seated our annual Target last year um and so as a result of that work and all the work that led up to that this goal and the development of inputs outputs and our monitoring of outcomes has really become a model for how we've
038been approaching the other goals and we'll talk about that more when we get deeper into the the inputs and the progress that we're seeing so we've learned a lot um as a result of focusing on on this group of students and particular and thinking about the assessments and the complexity of monitoring language development with tools that weren't necessarily built to do that uh at least initially so we have two current measure a current measure that we're focusing on for this year and that is that the percent of emerging multilingual students that increase one or more levels on the DNA English language arts Benchmark assessment will increase from 10% in May of 2024 to 20% by May of 2025 so using our existing for grades three through eight our existing U Benchmark assessment and in our
039measure 3.2 which looks at the percent of emerging multilingual students in grades 3 through five that increas in one or more levels on a Zella increasing from 33% in May of 2024 to 35% by May of 2025 the um this the these data we do anticipate sometime in May as we have completed our AEL testing for the year so far but we don't have new data to bring to bear tonight for interim measure 3.2 but we will go into depth on interim current measure 3.1 as always we welcome your questions dialogue throughout so please don't hesitate to jump in we also have the additional question and answer slides that are reflected in the presentation deck uh based on the feedback provided by governing board members and our conversations that have occurred since then um for
040current measure 3.1 as I stated we are looking at the DNA English language arts Benchmark assessment and an increase from 10 to 20% from last spring to this spring this is the breakdown if you follow the total column down on the far right or on your screen this is the percentage of students that have made that leveled growth on their DNA benchmark assessments by school and so when we look at this we are actually seeing some some bright spots that are starting to emerge uh at our schools of course we have different population sizes at each one of those campuses and so this time I'm going to invite the team to come forward and share a little bit more specificity um because it was wondered aloud Miss Marquez if I may one of the questions
041was how many kids what what how many kids are at each school who fit in the emerging multilingual category so Sarah Dr bombo I would like to introduce Sarah Beth George she's our coordinator for literacy and languages to talk about the numbers good evening Madam president superintendant man um governing board members thank you for this opportunity we did want to share the total number of multilingual Learners at each site um so that you can get an idea of how our multilingual Learners are represented across our district so specifically at bmore Preparatory Academy we have 52 multilingual Learners and so when you see that total of 18% that's 18% of the 52 students who grew one or more levels um at excellencia school we have 190 English Learners gateways 236 larcy Kennedy is 67 LMA Linda
042has 178 multilingual Learners Mont Vista is 247 Papago School has our largest number of multilingual Learners at 256 the kraton academy has 126 and Mack school has 239 and so and these numbers were actually taken uh this morning from our our ongoing active living document of our tracker for all of our multilingual Learners so that gives us a total of 1,591 as of today who are multilingual Learners in our school district and then for the remainder of this I would also like to introduce we have three of our four literacy and language instructional coaches or team teaching and learning coaches who have joined us tonight to help us in our presentation I'll introduce them each so Jessica soloro was unable to be here today but she um sends her her um Good Luck to all
043of us and she's very much involved in this as well so Clarissa Minon uh serves Larry C Kennedy lomma Linda and WT Mackin so she supports our English our targeted and integrated English language teachers of multilingual Learners and also our literacy teachers and then Amber Miss Amber mlan serves Pago and excellencia schools and um Mrs TAA Stanford serves Gateway and Mont Vista schools and then Jessica soloro serves the kraton academy and builtmore Preparatory Academy okay so the with current measure 3.1 again looking for that leveled growth this is the the percentage of students increasing performance or achievement one or more levels on The Benchmark assessment over the last three years so far so what we know at this point in time is that in the 2324 school year the percentage of students of emerging multilinguals
044who increased one or more proficiency levels from the preest to interim Benchmark two that's this one here increased by 3% from so from prto 1 PR 2 that was a 3% change in 2024 2025 the prto interim Benchmark one starting point was actually um 3% lower than the prior year so we had seven in 23 24 4% meaning this year we you know we raised appropriately we raised our um our current measure and the kids at the beginning started out from a little bit of a lower Place based on the prior three years so we know some things um likely affected that what we're encouraged by is the fact that the the gain of the 5% jump from pre ibm1 to pre ibm2 that 5% means although they came in at the at the lowest
045amount of kids growing that much in the beginning they actually grew faster than the cohorts of students in the prior two years so what that means is the jump from this column to this column is greater faster or as superintendent man pointed out the trajectory of increase is farther faster so that that does give us encouragement so we're we're we have c um because the current measure is quite high and does exceed where we were last year and there's 11% yet to go and as a reminder interim Benchmark 2 was taken in by the students in December so these data are you know now they've got a couple months on them a couple months of additional instruction have occurred that's still still a big jump and so to reach current measure 3.1 by may we
046need to see an 11% increase in the percentage of students uh growing one or more levels and so because we haven't had that that 11% jump in the past we are not able to say that we are on track at this time however we are encouraged by the by the rapid rate of growth that was shown between uh the beginning of the year and IBM too if I could share Dr dupin one of the conversations we've had was kind of triggered by some of the questions that the board provided and just us wrestling with this data is that there's there's different ways you can interpret this data set so you could look and you could see that over the course of the prior two years from pre ibm1 to the post we are our two
047levels of increase were 6% and 10% right so if if you assume that that's going to be the same maximum level of growth than our best case scenario is 19 which does quite get us to 20 but if you look at these as percentages what you'll see year-over-year is an improvement in percentage of growth so if you look at um if you look at the 2223 school year you see a 100% increase over that time period if you look at the 2324 school year um where our team and our teachers and our classrooms started implementing some of the strategies that we've really enhanced and um added on to for this school year you'll notice that that increase was more than a 100% increase because 100% increase would have taken us to 14 but we went
048all the way to 17 um and and likewise if you look at the 7 to 10% from beginning of the year um to pre ibm2 that's really a um you know 40 something % increase um and then the increase from the mid year to the end of the year is a 70% increase but when we look at this year we literally had 125% increase from pre-test one to pre-test two so I think that's why we're really kind of we don't want to rely on hope we're going to rely on hard work but we are hopeful because if we're a if if we're seeing that 125% increase because of some of the strategies that have been put in place there's no reason to believe that those strategies won't have had a greater impact throughout the course
049of the year as more PD takes place more coaching takes place and put us in a position to have a significantly higher increase from mid to post than we've had in Prior years just like we've had a significantly higher increase from P pre to Mid this year and if that were to Bear out then it is very possible that that we are very much on track to hit that that 20 so I'm not not trying to poly it make excuses any of that we're taking a very conservative realistic approach with showing us is not on track based on mathematical progression but if you look at the geometric progression um in these numbers then that may actually be telling us a different story and predicting a different outcome so again just real quickly in measure 3.2
050focuses on emerging multilingual Learners specifically those students in grades three through five so this is not new data this is where the students finished aella last year and the percentage of students in grades through through five who increased um by one or more Levels by school so again we see u a large range but many students um able to make that growth and this is where we're going to bring additional data once it's available in May and we probably will have to bring like a preliminary result in May once the data are fresh we anticipate the mid mid Monon uh but then all of the final goal and guard rail data is based on cleaned uh you know full Academic Year once we've gone through and really vetted out the data to ensure accuracy usually
051there's not a big change but then we'll do an update um once it's been fully uh verified so at this time we'll talk about the inputs and the progression that has been made okay so these are the same inputs that we reported on before just the progress where we are on these inputs so the professional learning we have 40 targeted um seci program teachers are completing a professional development so as of March three of the four sessions have been completed um and then the 10 seci targeted teachers the teachers that are receiving the training from our consultant um as of March 18th 11 teachers are included and all the training days have been completed um which we do have one day left with one-on-one coaching with our consultant and our consultant's going to guide us
052with our pacing guides and look at because currently our teachers um look at the the literacy units and then look at the FCI standards from there is that correct right we want to do it the other way where they look at the seci standards and what order for our teachers that are teaching um the targeted instruction so we're going to have our consultant help us with that in this spring um the instructional coaching all four language and literacy coaches have been um a part of that professional development and they've completed all of the training and they're going to be part of that one-on-one coaching with the consultant um and all four liter literacy coaches literacy and language coaches have completed four the five days through the Ariza Department of Education and our instructional materials uh
053we as of March we have eight teachers implementing language power and then our seci family nights um you could see that in quarter 1 we had 135 families quarter 2 189 and this last quarter students I'm sorry students oh students students yeah oh by students yes sorry um 99 and the 99 were uh obviously we disappointed by that number but it was during the time that the immigration um things came out and we did have lower attendance at other family events so we think we attributed to that but um we're continuing for quarter four to promote it for our families to come to our um seci nights and some teachers have some ideas of how to increase the intendance and as as just to help out with the acronym for those who aren't familiar SEI
054stands for Structured English emersion yes thank you um then we also decided to gra uh get some Street data and talk to the teachers and the students and our families so this first slide is where we talk to our teachers that are going through the explicit language instruction training with our consultant and you could see in the survey results um wait is it all our teachers or just the the ones participating in the four Wednesdays yeah okay the four Wednesdays um so a rating of five is strongly agree so you could see that most of them strongly agree that what I learned in today's session will positively impact student learning and then on the side I'll give you a second to read but there's quotes from the teachers after the training when I when I've
055sat in the trainings with um Heidi kosy I've talked to the teachers and they say things to me like this is a game changer I can't wait to try this in my classroom um they are confident in the strategies that they're learning and then they're also um the teachers that are in the cohort are getting that coaching in the classroom Miss George is going to talk about the feedback um from our students right okay yes okay so for this for this particular survey we collected responses from students in the middle of February and so 197 total students were surveyed and these students are in the classrooms of the teachers who are participating that cohort of 11 teachers with our consultant Mrs Heidi kosy and the the survey feedback that we just showed from the teachers
056is from the 40 teachers who are participating in those four days when we come back um and present our final progress monitoring report we'll have the teacher data from that group of 11 teachers in the cohort since we have one additional day we wanted to wait on providing you with that feedback but what we do have is what their students have said so so we asked several questions and we really wanted to highlight two of them so one is oh so we did also survey students from kindergarten through sixth grade as those are the grade levels that are represented in our cohort of teachers so we asked the students how often do you practice Reading Writing listening and speaking in English and so you can see that the vast majority of them said always they
057practice each of those things so you'll see the reading in purple writing in blue listening in pink and speaking in that teal color and very few said never a little bit more than never said I'm not sure um we did give the survey completely in English um and then we also were just interested in that street data of the students experiences so not only experiences in what they do how often but how they feel about it and so 73% indicated that they do enjoy their lessons about reading and writing in English 23% said kind of and we did have 3% share that they do not enjoy them I want to add to this slide so in previous presentations we talked about when we do learning walks we're looking in the classroom that the students are
058doing most of the Reading Writing listening and speaking and we share that uh typically we see mostly listening and we're trying to work towards more the students being more involved in the lessons and the students doing the work so we're finding that in our classrooms that the teachers have received this training that kids have more opportunities to read write and speak in those classrooms so um so we obviously want to replicate that in our other content areas in classrooms and this really while this is a smaller section of our students it really does show that they are listening and speaking consistently and I know that is something that we have really been working on for years in this district and so this was reassuring um and really positive to see so on the next slide
059these are just a few of the quotes that we pulled out from the survey so these were actually oral prompt questions where we had students record their voices to answer the questions so they did not write these they they spoke the answers and uh we scripted them and so I wanted to highlight the first grade student who said I love to write sentences about what I like and don't like really shows that relevancy really matters to kids we'll give you a second to read the additional responses that we've highlighted perfect I really like that we're having all this feedback on students because at the end of the day we need to get their perspective and seeing what they're hearing and what their I guess analysis is of what's being taught to them so I really
060appreciate that you guys take on the added on um task on on doing that also impressive from the sixth grader I'm just be real I got the high school from this district and I don't know that I could tell you anything about subject verb agreement and I'm not an English language learner so just an interesting thing to see there that's great reflecting on our progress with this work this year and superintendent man has has been really a leader in this we we've really recognize that the students perceptions about their learning and about their position as the center point for the learning is is really a GameChanger and it's 100% an output so if we can help ensure that the kids understand the purpose for the learning and are given regular opportunities to reflect in how
061that process is going them it puts them more in charge of the learning puts them more in the driver's seat and then that ultimately our expectation is that it really shows up in our outcomes at the end of the [Music] game and then in addition to asking them what they like we also wanted to hear about what they would like to see changed or different and so on this slide I would like to highlight the third grade student who would change learning to write more and read more which is a great problem to have right we can absolutely work with that so I'll give you a second to read the rest of the responses I like that student feedback of the sixth grader because I kind of go back to a previous meeting where we
062were saying that we started noticing that um there was a lot of teaching or talking to teach versus having this two-way conversation and vaguely based off of this one coat I would change the way they learn even though they didn't fully express it that's what I'm getting the hand of it right that the way that they're being taught right now is probably not as as effective as if it was more of a collaborative maybe I'm thinking based off of feedback that we've had on other board meetings I was interpreting it the same way absolutely this triangulates with I big piece of feedback that has come from our team of principles so is throughout the year one of the things we've been collaborating on is the need that the principles have really identified for more frequent
063opportunities for formative assessment but not just formative assessment that's you know casual for lack of a better term but consistent and systematic so one of the things that we'll will'll begin having more doing more work on and and we anticipate bringing you updates about is the development of our common fora assessments and the making that the priority for this Summer's curriculum design work uh because if we are using formative assessment effectively we shouldn't be in a position to give kids the same content over and over again or content that they feel is repetitive we also wanted to share feedback that we've received from our family nights so we've had three of our four we have another one coming up next month our final one and when we look at the feedback from all three nights
064so far at all nine campuses 98% of the participants indicated that they felt welcomed and encouraged and that they can use the ideas shared with them at home and I do want to provide a little anecdotal information where the 2% that did not indicate that had indicated strongly disagree however when you look at their narrative respon responses one of them said everything was perfect and another one is the one that we've highlighted here that said very good and productive talk and so when we look at that on our end we're thinking they just mixed up the order of the strongly agreed disagree we also though want to accurately represent the data that we collected which is that 98% indicated they've had positive experiences and learned things that they're going to be able to use at
065home and then uh we did so the response the survey is given in English and Spanish the responses are in Spanish so we gave you specifically what the family said and then the translation and I'll give you a second to read those okay so the next slide is what is working which we've talked about the language and literacy coaches becoming expert in explicit English language instruction and using their knowledge to co- plan lesson uh modeling coaching reflection activities with teachers strategies learned during the Intensive professional development sessions are being observed in classrooms and of the eight teachers who have been implementing our new language po storyour resources all have expressed positive feedback regarding the materials and student learning experience is um what needs more attention what we've been working on this quarter and um our
066assistant superintendent business and Development I've been working closely with um M Shapiro about funding for sofg goal and part of that is um to secure some funding for another cohort for next year so we have one cohort and then adding another cohort so we have more teachers that are getting this training and coaching um and then also explore options for increasing our coaching and coord capacity by um splitting the coaches from literacy and language um from literacy coaches to language coaches so they can concentrate on our K3 literacy and concentrate on on um language development so they're not focused on both um content areas um we're also exploring how to use the aella mimic in the fast Bridge screeners as a new interim measure for next year and um once a new interim measured is
067adopted it will be crucial to maintain a balanced assessment strategy like we don't want to do excessive testing of our students that are emerging multilinguals that's what we're looking at right now and if I could elaborate on the mimic for just a second so Renaissance would that be a formative assessment if you guys came into a mimic that's part of the conversation is how to fit where to fit it properly so that we're not over testing right because if we give our emerging multilinguals the regular Benchmark and a bunch of additional assessments that mimic Zella you know that's a that's a sign ific amount of it's too much right um just being honest that's too much and and at the same time we also don't want to deny the students the opportunity to show what
068they know on the content test of DNA so it's that's the the grappling that we're kind of dealing with and and the the people that make our benchmarks they you know they really hurt our feedback so they've been very urgent around creating these tools so that we have access to better land language assessments not content English language arts assessments so we're excited so puzzled by how best to to balance out the the different sources of assessment and I was just going to add that ironically while Dr dupin and I were looking at the progress monitoring um the representatives from Renaissance had come in because they were going to be working with Mr Tyson Meyers to get him up to speed on this mimic and so they shared with us you know that this is coming
069forward um and we I I can't blame Dr dup and at all it was probably largely me that kidnapped them but we pulled them into the room and showed them what we were doing with our student outcomes focused governance goals and what our progress monitoring reports looked like and and really tried to give them a sense of what we were trying to accomplish and they were very excited by that um one of our neighbor districts is actually looking at moving to this tool set as well and that neighbor district is one of our partners in sofg work so we had a really great conversation about how them as a partner and our districts that are kind of moving in this direction could work together to ensure that their tool sets are not only informing our
070instruction like we would like them to but they're they're also providing us with the things we need to really dig in deep and monitor um for our progress reporting you know accurately are we on track for our student outcomes focused governance goal so it was serendipitous but it was a really great conversation with them um the next the next slide is thank you for the questions in advance we are going to go over the the questions that we received um we have held many family events what steps can be can we take to clearly measure how these events help students become better at English um I do want to share that we have some ideas how to look at it but nothing is actually directly aligned because when we think of the kids improve on
071the AEL we don't know if it was the teaching if it was the family nights if it was all the different inputs that were doing and so this could be something that is one of our adult outcomes or adult behaviors that could be affecting it but we don't know for sure but these are some things we could do um when we look at the family nights and I do want to thank Mr Carvajal he's here he helps organize and plan these is he still here he just stepped out for one okay he knew you were gonna call him out yeah um so uh one idea is that identify the trends of the children of the participants um so look at the aella growth with the children that their parents came to the family nights uh
072we also which we just shared administer pre- and post surveys of the event to get the parents feedback and then another step we could take is do Focus interviews and talk to the parents about um the participating parents and understand their perceived impact um on the students improvement with English so those are some ideas that we could um explore to to see the impact of the lording kns but it might not directly measure how Improvement on aella um any other questions on that one I you saying that made me wonder um if there's any way to tie it to another and I was pulling up our main sheet to tie it to like a guard rail or something but I I don't know that's just where my brain was going and then also to maybe
073expand it Beyond just this like if we could tie that concept to a guard rail and expand it Beyond English language Learners we could still maybe accomplish something with it but I don't know that's just my brain's just moving I I I do think it ties to that one of the guardrails is that the superintendent will yeah you know conditions that are insufficient for students and so you know this is actually very tightly aligned to that um particularly if we expand it even Beyond this group but this is a good group to test with because this is a group that is highly affected by INE equitability of resources right and and given some of the things um you know that dealing with with you know what's happening with some of our funding sources that particularly
074support those inequities because if you keep in mind things like our federal dollars that we receive are mostly based around some of those inequitable starting points um and so the fact that we have a focus on this group of students I think is really important to the work that we're doing but in addition to that um I think we could we could if we find that this is helpful in being able to triangulate being being able to do a better job in supporting those students and those families we could then easily translate it to some of the other areas where we're working which I think um Dr pombo and her team are already like considering because one of the things you heard them say at the beginning of of this progress monitoring report is there
075are a lot of things that are happening that have led to projected success with this particular goal and um and then those act for us as sort of those bright spots we can Target in on and say well this this is effective for language development could it also be effective for mathematics development how do we translate from one place to the other that's imedi what I was thinking about parents being maybe insecure about their math skills feeling like they can't assist or same thing with I mean there's crossover obviously with the reading stuff too yeah in terms of like reading at home and just in terms of making this go across the goals essentially and it was a small sample group but I don't know if he's made it back in the room or not
076if not his years will burn but Mr Carvajal one of the things that um he worked with with his team to do last year and again it affected only a small sample size because it was our community council group you know which is typically about a hundred people that show up and not all of them are are parents but they brought some of those math games to play we got great feedback on that and you know the input he built that off of was can we please have something that will help families help their kids right and they came back with this this great set of activities to provide the families so we certainly have you know some component pieces that we could build off of in order to be able to replicate some of
077the things that we're doing around language development in some of the other subject areas and I think all of it again goes back to making sure that there aren't insufficient conditions because sometimes the insufficient conditions because we know that adult or that student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change we don't want to get into the position of saying well the kids aren't getting enough support at home but I think it's okay for us to say that we're not supporting the families enough to help them provide those supports at home and that's what you're seeing reflected um in some of this information and that can be extended to other areas of learning so I've droned on way too long and I stop same page like how we replicate this in other other areas right um
078I had a question in regards to the the family events that you've had have it been has it been mostly primarily like Spanish-speaking families that have shown up or have any of our other families that speak other languages besides Spanish shown up so specifically I don't know without looking at all of the names of the families what I can say is that the vast majority of our responses on the surveys are in Spanish there are some that are in English um we don't have any in other languages um one thing that I would like to share is I actually uh last week and this week trained our Ed secret our educational secretaries at each campus who support uh enrollment of students and today uh or yesterday I don't even know it was today today thank
079you um I did the same training with our office managers and that training was specifically on using the correspondence language in Synergy and so there's a field in Synergy which is our student um information system when we have families enroll there's an option to put what language they prefer written Communication in and we haven't been using that and so one of the things that we know um that we tried to remedy this year is that all the what we sent home is in English and Spanish any written communication or the majority of the written communication is in English and Spanish that goes home and we it was really it is very important that we provide written communication in the language that makes the most sense and is the most accessible to our families and so
080we did try to do that this year and what happened was the only data that I had in this that we had available was students home language and so when we pulled that we had 28 home languages and when we I went to translate all only not only the required forms for my two programs which are language and literacy there are four letters for literacy that are required by the state and one for our English language program so just those legislatively required um letters if we were to translate those in all 28 languages it would have cost us over $660,000 and we did not have enough money available in our line for translation and when I started to dig a little bit deeper we uncovered the reality that many of those home languages were not
081representative representative of the actual written language that families needed so for example we have um several with three three different Native American languages that were listed as a home language we know those families and they do read and write in English and so they can access the information in English which means that we don't need to that translation right and so I we were not willing to make that decision without communicating directly with the fames so the end of the story is very exciting our Ed secretaries are undertaking a massive project to contact all of our families who have a home language other than English in our information system and find out what respondence language they need so then they'll finish that by the end of June so this summer we will have an accurate
082number and an accurate list of languages so that we can strategize how to be financially responsible and meet those needs of our families so all of that to say is that we we very honestly have not reached out in written or oral language to our families that speak languages other than Spanish and English and we are actively working to change that for this coming year so I hope to be able to provide you next year with a more definitive answer that says yes we have more other languages thank you so much for that um do we know was there like a generally a third most like spoken language that was pretty obvious or off the top of my head I don't remember but we can I I have the image of all the languages and
083the numbers so I can provide that oh we got okay so the second question second question um our reports have mentioned limited resources for Teacher coaching what can we do differently to make sure teachers get the coaching and support they need to help students grow and I talked about this a little bit before um increasing our funding for sofg is increased content coaches so specific areas of expertise language acquisition coaches and literacy coaches four of each continue our work with the consultant and add another um cohort and more PD um develop content expertise and I already said this add another cohort and then the last bullet is align coaching case load prioritize the teachers at directly align with the goals for example literacy coaches work with K3 teachers language acquisition coaches primarily work with targeted
084teachers and solely incorporate integrated and language coaches support um SEI cohorts so those are some of ways to help with our resources and Dr pombo I'm just going to take a moment to add some stuff to this because I think it is is important that these questions are asked to see how we're going to give that ultimate support because we always hear that if the teachers don't have since they're they're the number one asset closest to our students if they don't have that support then really nothing gets done and as we're having budget talks and all these things I think it's important for us to realize um there's some reports out there there's done a whole bunch of research and they say that uccessful boards recognize the need to support High priorities even during times
085of fiscal uncertainty um to this end the successful board supported extensive professional development programs for administrators and teachers even during times of fiscal restraint so this report that was conducted in 1993 on the effect of a school boards they were looking at how school boards align their budgets to to goals right um another part of this research based um says that research-based professional development for staff is one of seven conditions for improvement typically evident in high achiev districts from the board's perspective members did not simply provide funding for such professional development but they could articulate specific examples and this is the board members of activities in their link to Improvement plans in high achieving districts board members described staff development activities in the district and could describe the link between those activities and the teacher
086training and board or the district goals for students um it shows that an analysis of high and low achieving districts in high achieving districts the board and superintendent support uniform professional development built on curriculum in lower achieving districts professional development may vary extensively from school to school one example is new teachers also is teachers received 18 hours of inservice training per year based on uniform curricula new teachers also received six full days of instructional training and teachers had common planning periods to encourage collaboration on lesson plans and strategies to address student needs um so basically this whole report on alignment basically talks about how important it is to have effective strategies by District on improving the curriculum that are directly support supports either the teachers or the instructional coaches so as we're having these conversations
087and I'm really thankful that we are looking at ways that to me personally on hearing and reading all these studies on effective districts it's really prioritized on what the teachers and the admins are professional development is getting in order to align with the student goals um so I I think it's really important that we're having this conversations and how we are Al Ling but we also have to understand that sometimes in order to continue this work other things are going to have to be left behind other things are going to have to be rearranged in order to start targeting what we really need to move the needle for students and if I could build on that Madame President one of the things I think what you're shared is perfectly aligned with what's being recommended but
088one of the other things that I think is a best practice is rather than doing a broad implementation of something and hoping it's effective what we've seen the team do is do a limited implementation um to determine the effectiveness and it really from what we've seen has had two effects one is we've been able to actually measure the effectiveness of the implementation we see that it is having an impact which is why the request to add additional staff and add additional coaching is is included here because we can tie that directly back but I think the other thing that's also very important that I have seen um in other work that I've done in K12 education is that very often if you try to force on the system a broad implementation of a program the
089system pushes back and when you do a small pilot program what ends up happening is you may have some initial resistance but as those individuals who are in the pilot program start to find success they become your Advocates from within your staff and teaching ranks and then once they're your Advocates that actually allows for stronger adoption because now you have people lining up and saying oh you're opening a second cohort I want to be part of that because I talked to my friend and they were in the they were in last year's cohort and I think you can probably speak more eloquently to it than I can but um from things I've heard from the team it sounds like that's part of what we're seeing is that there was initial resistance with that small group
090and now there is demand for additional opportunities they could speak directly to do you guys want to share anything you share your teach yeah come in um putting you on the spot yeah um hi hello so just um an example would be I guess teachers not originally understanding what the cohort had to offer and who the consultant was and their coaches being alongside them doing the learning and being available um to really model the lessons and being in their rooms and doing the observations um because um at one of my schools specifically papao um I have four teachers I've had my kindergarten teacher Miss Martinez you should go see her in action um that's a huge huge win like if these kindergarteners can do it I'm I'm all game um for anyone but a lot
091of the teachers papao have heard or have seen people go in to these teachers who have participated in the cohort and they're the targeted teachers as well and they're like I didn't know that that's what that was oh when when when syvia approached me I didn't know that's what she meant and Sylvia's like that's exactly what I said and I'm like I know that's what you said because I said it too and so a lot of them were like is there going to be another one and they want to second chance at it so it's um been very rewarding to see that and then also see the teachers that have been part of the cohort that have really embraced it and get their feedback that like I need to be part of you know this
092next year when we make it to cohort 2 I have to do that part I need to keep my learning going and inviting um teachers from across the district into their classrooms um Miss Martinez is a seconde teacher in kindergarten at papao and she's had several teachers from across the districts come in and watch her Kinders um talk about different parts of speech and build sentences and write sentences it's it's very impressive so super super proud of what the teachers have accomplished and I love that you said the continuance part because at the end of the day this would this whole framework is based off as a continuous Improvement to making sure that we're moving the needle for students so just like us as a governing board member we go to continuous you know conferences
093and keep going back and forth and it sounds like it's redundant but it's not because every single time it's just a continuous Improvement that we have to continuously do to make sure that our students have the tools that they need to continue succeeding so thank you for sharing that I appreciate it yes thank you they're all gonna show up tell them Amber sent you if you tell your that Amber sent you she' be like thank you for sharing that okay the last question um we noticed that our current Benchmark tests DNA may not accurately predict student growth on aella how can we improve or add other tests to track student progress better and help students succeed I know we talked about this a little bit earlier um and I don't remember if if we talked
094about this and I know um superintendent man shared this but basically the DNA assessment measures the grade level standards just I don't know if I'd share this with our new board members um I think it's been a while and the uh the aella measures their um language acquisition and so my example from before is imagine you're learning Japanese and you're taking a test and I'm a I'm a eighth grader and I'm taking eighth grade tests in Japanese I'm not going to show my language acquisition on that test but if I take a test about how I'm acquiring the Japanese language and it would show where I am on there then that would um accurately measure my language acquisition so when we are looking at the DNA assessment it's not really a really good predictor for
095us right now of how they're going to do on the aala and so um some ideas is that we're going to analyze the look at the correlation between the Benchmark scale scores in the aella growth so like depending on how they do on The Benchmark how does that what does that look like on the aella um consider using a scale growth model instead of only measuring movement between proficiency levels so on the DNA assessment it's really hard for a person that is uh learning a new language to move from one proficiency level to another so just seeing do they grow on the DNA assessment like they scored this on the first assessment let's just say 10 and now they scored 15 even though it takes 30 to get to the next proficiency level are they
096improving within that level um we also put um expand the scope into grades um K8 because right now we're just looking at 35 um explore DNA Aela mimic which is um the fastbridge one or do DNA has one too yes so DNA AEL mimic is what Mr Man and Dr Dubin were talking about for the Renaissance product oh yeah you're you're right um I'm looking at the next one prioritize improving our current Benchmark system before adding more tests so that's why we were saying we we're trying to figure out how not to have too much tests for our students um then we talked about also considering using fast bridge but understands limitations and use it to supplement not replace other data and and consider common assessments for the seci cohort so we were uh thinking
097like if we're we're redoing the um pacing guide like if we could just test on what on what the teachers taught each quarter like a pre and post just just look at that and because since what they taught to see if they're improving based on the lessons they're receiving so there are some ideas we have to look at um for next year when we're looking at comparing um how they're doing on the DNA and and Aela yeah and one Epiphany that I had on this especially where you said expand the scope to include Kates through k through eight that already tells me that additional dollars are going to have to be fed in from somewhere to be able to have that goal or that interim measure met right so as we're having these conversations board
098members and as they're being told us I think that's something that has to lay the back of her head too on how they're strategizing all these new things but there's going to have to be a give and take as well we can't be everything to everybody and do everything all at once so I think because of the historic data that we have it tells a story and the Tory the story hasn't been very centered on students and it hasn't been on you know having them be successful for the next grade level let alone high school so as we're getting this feedback I just just hope it doesn't live in a board member question and answer but as we're going through the budgetary um revisions and going through all these things that we're really looking at
099what they're telling us and how much more resources that's going to take from what did you say third to fifth grade we're only look at third through fifth right now yeah for this specific major which is one of our five district goals which to me would be a high priority to make sure that our budget aligns to that right because it is a district goal so just being cognizant of that being aware and I'll move on from that and a lot of these things that we're talking about for um our language Learners we're also looking at what we can replicate in for Math and for literacy um because it was working with that small cohort and adding cohorts to those um content areas as well awesome thank you um board members do you guys have
100any other questions or any other comments yes yes Miss Marcus go ahead so if we pop back to inputs I believe that's page eight and I want to thank Dr dupin and Mr Man yesterday we had a conversation I had questions about the SEI and they tried to explain to me targeted versus integrated instruction um so going back I see here we've got the um 40 targeted um SEI program teachers will complete so my question is how many targeted SEI program teachers do we have in the district District do we I can I thank you for that question I absolutely can get that information to you I don't have it memorized on the top of my head but um I will absolutely give that information Okay cool so let me um and then kind of
101a followup to that is whether or not do we plan to increase or decrease that in the next um next school year um and then kind of along that same vein um for integrated um seia teachers you know from what I understand that's you know essentially that could be you know basically their home room teacher or any teacher um what kind of um training or coaching do they receive or or do we intend to at some point expand additional training to them um you know if for for those who were for when they do that um so that was my question related to that and I'm happy to to wait on an answer for that well well yeah we probably have to well with the targeted one we have a certain amount of teachers per
102school just based on um budgeting but Sarah Beth last year and this year has also writing a grant to get more um teachers so we can do that um but we don't know until we when do we find out like June usually middle of July yeah oh July we can find that out so that does affect the schedule and about the professional development we haven't developed a plan um yet for all the integ all the teachers that teach integrated um SE okay or integrating yeah the standards can I build on what I what we discussed the other day we we talked a little bit about the importance of trying to figure out which models are more effective so is targeted have a greater impact does integrated have a greater impact and a lot of that
103you know how it's implemented the school comes down numbers how many kids how many teachers but we have beg having some conversations about that would you care to elaborate at all on what we're might be thinking for next year the consideration at this point but okay absolutely so first just to give some context around when we say targeted SE program teachers we're not saying that we are targeting teachers what we're saying is we're providing the professional learning to the teachers of targeted instruction and so in the world of Structured English immersion in Arizona there are four different models that we can use to teach Structured English immersion and we use three of those models in our district each model has components of targeted instruction and integrated instruction and so they also include so a label
104so the three models that we're using are the pullout model the 2hour model and the Dual language immersion model and each of those models prescribe a very specific number of minutes that multilingual Learners need to have in targeted instruction and also an integrated instruction and so the Dual language immersion models are used at our two dual language immersion schools the most common models that we use are the 2hour model and the pullout model so when specifically the two-hour model that means that our multilingual Learners are receiving two hours of targeted English instruction which means that they are only with multilingual Learners and they are getting instruction solely on the English language proficiency standards and one little Nuance when I say two hours I mean two hours for Kinder through fifth grade sixth through e8th grade
105is actually 50 minutes sorry per day so it's 100 so for the two-hour model it's either 120 Minutes for K5 or 100 minutes for 68 and those are that's per day and it can be counted per week so if you did a few minutes less one day than you would have to make up for that on another day and so that is with our 2hour model and then we also have we the pullout model and in the pullout model students are getting one hour of targeted English instruction with the English language proficiency standards and one hour of integrated instruction which is typically in that pullout model what that really looks like is that we have a 2hour English language arts block pretty standard there give or take a few minutes depending on the grade level
106there's let's if we look at a two hour English language arts block and I'm an I'm a multilingual learner who is in the pullout model that means that during the two hours of English language arts one of those hours I'm getting targeted instruction with all multilingual Learners on the English language proficiency standards in my other hour I'm with some multilingual Learners and some mainstream like English language proficient students or students who are native speakers of English and we're all getting the English language arts standards but there are scaffolds that my teacher needs to provide to me so that I can access that information now let's pretend that I am Al I'm still an English a multilingual learner but I am in the two-hour model what the difference there is that for my full English language
107arts two-hour block I am with all multilingual Learners and we're all learning the English language proficiency standards now per the model I still need integrated minutes which means I'm getting English instruction with native speakers of English and English proficient students but I'm getting that integrated instruction in another content area so if that happens to be in math then my math teacher is teaching me and my mainstream peers math but providing scaffolds in English using the English language proficiency standards which could mean like there's an English language proficiency standard about vocabulary for example so it could mean my math teacher is really focusing on specific like they we're learning fractions right you have a typical fraction lesson but as a multilingual learner my teacher is scaffolding for me specifically ensuring that we that I interact with
108the math content vocabulary so when we talk about what Dr dupin was referring to is something that Dr pumbo and I have talked about quite extensively is that a lot of anecdotal research and just student experiences and Street data really really points to the 2hour model being the most effective for a multilingual Learners because they're getting full concentrated two hours of English language arts instruction English language proficiency instruction they have the same group of students for that are all multilingual Learners learning that together for their full language arts block and that tends to have greater impact we still looking at specifically what that looks like in our school district and um I know that Mr Myers has already started pulling some preliminary data and we need to clean it up before we can really make
109that assertion that it works for our kids but we are looking at when we're creating our Master course schedules next year to the extent possible given Staffing student numbers and teacher numbers at each grade level that we are going to prioritize as much as possible using the two-hour model so there are the two hours of targeted instruction that multilingual Learners are receiving with that additional like math or science or history class that's integrated and that two-hour model is what's being implemented under our to dual language schools right no so that is it's a separate I mean it's the opposite well it's a third model which is the Dual language immersion model we'll bring a picture next time that helps illustrate this I'm I know it it gets very complicated to sort it all out um
110but I love this because it makes it makes me have a lot of wonderings but also it gives me the wondering of the tool dual language schools that we have tend to have the highest outcomes for the most part so W model is being used there and could it what is it is there some preclusion of it being modeled in other schools even though they're not dual language I don't know if that makes sense yes and so yes that is a question that we have as well and also looking at when we look at the total number of students in the Dual language immersion models it is a much much smaller number so that's something to consider uh the Dual language immersion model in is 30 minutes of that targeted instruction with only multilingual Learners
111and then the remainder of that English language arts block which would be your hour and a half got is integrated got it wow I love that thank you so much and it just reaffirms how knowledgeable you are too and how much of a great asset you are to our district too thank you for sharing all that and it completely made sense to me so I appreciate it and usually it takes a couple of times for me to be like what is she saying but you did it perfectly so I appreciate it I appreciate that and we will in our next um presentation make sure to bring that picture that really helps I have it in my mind when I'm explaining it thank you thank you for those questions Miss Marquez um do we have any
112other questions comments or wonderings will you bring um the class size for all those uh immersion different sorry the different methods dual language versus 2hour versus yes so the numbers of classes that we have or the numbers of students numbers of students in each one and and we can provide that in like the next board update if that's okay yeah that would be perfect yeah yes we will get all that information thank you so much for that thank you so much I appreciate your guys's time and all the back and forth it it goes thank you thank you at least it makes my job easier on how to make other decisions I appreciate it so now that we have heard our cron sofg goal 3 progress marting report three I am going to move the
113governing board approve cran s SOG goal 3 progress maror report three second all those in favor I I any nce hearing none motion passes thank you team for being here and being so prepared yes thank you for all that and the back and forth it's it's really appreciated you guys don't even know that moves us to our next item which is 5A public comments have weed any more Miss qutis okay perfect I would like to invite Miss green up to the podium good evening I'll try to keep this short um I appreciate the opportunity to um address you I attended the last um school board meeting I attend most of them as most of you probably know and there was um some conversation quite a bit from Miss Shapiro and some members of the board
114about the budget and where we stand in the budget and I'm like everyone probably in this room and I get very anxious and concerned about some of the things that I see in the news about both our federal situation as well as our state situation when it comes to funding for education and support for our students I'm a long-term um employee and a very dedicated and care a lot about our district and all of the students in the community I want us to I'm urging you guys to find the balance between um I guess reality and fear I believe that we need to live in the land of reality but not in the land of fear and I believe that we need to look at um how are we going to make sure that we
115have enough staff to implement some of the things that we've been talking about tonight that are very very important I agree with you professional development extremely important but we also have to have the staff to provide that professional development too and I think we need to look at our Sur surrounding um districts and what they are doing under these same conditions some of whom are also part of the sofg cohort and we're already hearing that um most of the districts are giving at least some staff raises and I understand that right there was the whole conversation about that that balance forward the carry carry forward balance and you know how much is enough and how much is not enough and I get that and and I know Miss Shapiro worked very hard the compression and
116compensation team has been working very closely with her the meet and confer team has been working very closely with her to make sure we're finding that balance between not you know succumbing to full fear but also being responsible and conservative and and where does that balance lie I'm really really worried about our ability to attract and retain staff and I just don't I don't just mean teachers I mean all staff because good instructions begins with staff the direct instructors as well as the people who support them and we have to be able to at least kind of be in the ballpark of some of the nearby districts or they are going to recruit away some of our best and brightest um staff members so I would urge the district to yes do a lot of
117hard work at the board I meant um do a lot of hard work in weighing and finding that balance but let's let live in that land of reality and not just the land of fear thank you thank you so much I appreciate it that brings us to our agenda item six which is approval of consent I move the governing board approve consent AG agenda items a through G in accordance with policy be dbe I have a second second all those in favor I I any nay hearing none motion passes that brings us to 8 which is the board Direction on meet and confer policies HB and HC Mr pero or Dr Lauren whoever I think I think it's just us okay our show um oh I have my paper I don't know what else I
118can say um I understand is that we need to look at all retaining and and everything um one of the things that I do want us to keep in mind is that I do believe that for the past at least five years that I've been on the board we have signif significantly you know um approved raises and and approved different things as we go into this sofg framework and really look at our data and what we have not been able to do and maximize the tool sets that our students have is something that's really going to be in the back of my mind and yes I do believe that we should not operate in fear um that's always I I feel like that's something that we kind of historically do is that we're very reactive
119versus being proactive and um at this time with all the uncertainties that we have especially like I said before in my board update that we do not have any support from our other elected officials so we're really left to fend for our own in the local governance that we have at its most local Authority at the end of the day we do have more than what $30 million budget and I do believe that we can also as we're imagining our goals and we're reimagining our what's possible for our students that our budget is going to have to be reimagined and in order for to get different outcomes we will have to do different things I know that some of these conversations um it's not taken liken to everybody and that's okay too two things can
120be true at once two things can coexist and at the time um it is my perspective that this is not a time especially with all the attacks and everything that we have going on is on keeping adults happy and doing the same thing without showing any progress in our students at the end of the day we want happy healthy and full individual students and the only way that we're going to be able to do is to start reimagining what our budget also looks like how are we actually getting the support to from previous you know board meetings that we've had and looking at our progress monitor reports there's been a lot of implementation gaps that teachers has just been thrown you know 20 different initiatives with no really carry out professional development no coaching and
121and to me that's something critical we should not be throwing all these different different initiatives and then we have no direction it's what cost us to get into this you know ongoing issue of not improving outcomes for students and I understand we're human beings and and we feel things but at the end of the day our data does not lie our data does not lie we have historically left certain groups that tend to be our most modalized groups as a community as a whole and we're not providing what they need so that's just some of the conversations that we've had and I at least personally am really set in and if I cannot see the correlation of how a me and confer recommendation might improve you know the actual professional development or the assistance in
122order to achieve our goals I'm going to have a hard time being on board and saying yes um I think we are going in a New Direction and a lot of our districts here in Phoenix are as well but it comes to that whole number one phrase of student outcome change do not do not change until adult behaviors change and that's going to be a mindset you know we have all the knowledge we have all the skills we've been working on off of Knowledge and Skills for all these years and yet we still have the data that we have something different has to change and to me it is that mindset portion that we really are going to have to change our mindset and make sure that everything that we're doing and we're allocating our
123funds is directly impacting our students in order to help them be successful in the next grade level so with that um I'll leave it up to my other board members and whoever wants to add comments or ask any questions this is the perfect opportunity to do so miss Gibson M I was just going to um uh I guess briefly in terms of like when we're I I I understand the need and the want when we're trying to figure out how to um come to the table with something new for um teachers or staff Andor staff um to obviously there's a necessity in some regards to get comparisons from other districts what I will assert and I think I've said this in many ways without explicitly saying it in the past is that I think our
124district is very unique in many ways one is there's not another District that's similar in size to ours like name I I would challenge anyone to find a district that has nine schools that has the same socioeconomic makeup based on the wildly different geographic area that we cover um and like has the same like Dynamics right so there are other districts nearby that are e either have adopted sofg but maybe are one and a half to two times larger than our district and are forced to to close schools because maybe they didn't have some of the management that was going on prior or they're nearby and they're widely different in in total socioeconomically and have the support have boosters have all this extra stuff going on I mean obviously we're right next door to Scottdale
125we're right next door to Madison so I think it's just really hard to to compare ourselves to any nearby districts we have two nearby districts that are smaller than us who aren't necessarily doing that great and so I'm just trying to like when you try to put it into perspective it's really hard to compare us to people nearby um and I say this because I know this I am from here I am from this neighborhood I went to school here and I know my parent my dad went to school in Rosevelt my mom went to school in Phoenix Elementary right um I know this city and so it's hard to say how all of these Dynamics are changing I know we're on our own I think that I don't know that we've necessarily been operating
126in fear or that we're going to I think that um um I think that we're just trying to be as smart as we can and I appreciate the reminder because I'm not one of those people who ever wants to operate in fear and I think our board has shown at least the three of us who've been on here for some time that we don't operate in fear we operate in what we believe to be something that we we believe is going to work and that we believe in and we're going to stand on that um and so I think that if we can continue to make sure that we are like staying laser focused and that has to be at all these different these different facets and levels of what we're doing and so I
127think the two takeaways here are that we need to be narrow when we come back from meet and confer with like what's presented to us needs to be kind of narrow all right I know we had a lot of recommendations last year and so I would hope that we get a shorter list this year that's been more that's more intentional or seems like it has more intentionality behind now I understand y'all have a very long process um but when I say more intentional I think it goes to my second point which is that we're hoping and I'm saying we but I'm hoping I think my FK my colleagues are hoping um that there's also some evidence with the recommendations to show like how this is all going to tie into all the other things that
128we're doing in terms of hey okay you're saying we need more professional development we need or we would need more bodies for that but we would rather have these raises I need to see something to show me that um that giving raises to teachers is going to be a better payoff for student outcomes than getting more bodies for coaches like I need some sort of something to give me that information um or how it's going to be tied to student outcomes because it's hard to um it's going to be hard to move forward I would hate to turn down recommendations that have gone through a long drawn out process simply because we're not meeting the mark or we're not making the connection that we need to make in order to have these things line up
129with how they're going to further the work that we keep getting presentations about um and so narrow recommendations closely tied to student outcomes that's all I'm hoping for and I'm hoping that you can trust us considering I I hope we've proven ourselves to be taking the time to study all of this to ask questions to read to do our homework you know we're not coming in here haphazardly just going with the flow and so we're hoping that what gets presented to us is going to back up everything that we've endeavored to continue on in this ship that we're kind of trying to guide and it's difficult and along the way there's going to be people that are upset um but again we're going to we're trying the best we can to get this in the
130One Direction and that is to get our kids where they need to be um because like I just said earlier in this present a like 25 years ago when I was about to start high school I didn't know what a subject verb agreement was okay that's still an issue here it shouldn't be that's absolutely effing ridiculous and it needs to be changed and it needs to be fixed and whatever has to be figured out to get that done is what's going to be got like got gotten done okay is what I'm trying to get at okay and so narrow recommendations tied to student outcomes is all I'm asking and I think that's the direction that I would point out here thank you Miss Gibson mle misss um so I think I have a little bit
131of a unique perspective here um so I am on our IBN team um but I also am working in a district that was taken over by a receiver and so I feel like we have to really be careful as a board because we are the ones making decisions and we should be the ones responsible for those decisions so um part of that is making sure that we ask the people um that do these jobs um like the CFO to make sure that we're in a place where we can function because I would hate to come back and tell our staff next year that we're going to take a pay cut like we're taking a payat next year in in um Isaac so um I I think part of it has to be with with like
132what um Katie said is that we have been educating ourselves and um I I think that something that has been missing from um certain boards is just the education and the simple belief um of believing the people um that work for the district not that I don't believe our people because I do I I do trust but we have to as a board question those people because that's our job because if we don't do that we're not representing our community um and I I promise you if we ever go into receivership and I'm on the board I I will completely tell you I will resign I've asked our board members to resign because I think they have done a disservice to our community and and who's paying the price it's our kids so our kids
133are paying the price our families are paying the price our staff is paying the price and the people that made those decisions are not paying that price um so I think that's part of the decision now saying that I also am an educator I've been in education for 24 years um is the talk of raises always on the table for IBN yes why because we know teachers don't get paid enough we know Educators don't get paid enough and that's something that we have to gravel for every single year um our state doesn't fund us properly so um they give maybe a 2% Which is less this year it's a 1.8 so um when you're looking at um an inflation rate of 7% and then you get 2% you're continually taking a pay cut and I'm
134not sure that people understand that in in the real world because I don't understand um what other job may take a step back every single year um and so we're always losing um so I do understand that as well and then I also agree with making sure because we are so invested in our student outcome focused governance um that we do need to like look at the things that are being brought to us and making sure that those do align with our goals because otherwise we would be kind of like ironic in saying hey we support um this though it doesn't support our goals and that's what we have been um working so hard on so um for me I'm in a unique place I can see a multitude of sides um I promise you
135I'm not operating out of fear but I am operating out of caution because I am stuck in the midst of a crapshoot show right now in our district and I never want to be there so um I'm just kind of in this triangle right now and um I love that I can see multiple sides so um when it comes to it I'll make the best decision that I think I can make um to make sure that we have teachers that um are qualified because God knows we don't have enough in this world um and I think that this district has a lot to offer um you guys get free insurance still I don't know who still does that I've had to pay for insurance multiple years so I'm losing even more money um every year
136and graveling for my little 2% every year but this year it's minus 5% so we've lost two two and a half years of moving forward so that's my two cents thank you Miss SS um Mr Jones do you have anything um I guess I would just say I'm a little worried if the public hears this and it's we're so tied to sofg and I think it's a good thing uh that positive student outcomes uh what's not to like but it could be perceived by the public as another method of cutting but um I don't think it has to be that way so uh I don't think it should be hard for me and confer to really find evidence that there is a correlation between teacher pay and student outcomes um that's all I have thank
137you Mr Jones Miss Marquez yeah um so obviously I'm new to the board new to the fairly new to the sofg work um and you know obvious like like Miss sis touched on you know it's my understanding are you know the benefits insurance is covered which is huge that's you know that's one thing that's kept me out of the workforce a long time is Insurance you know being able to hold on to the insurance I do have or lose it um and uh I kind of I wanted to take us back to something real quick so if we look at the governing board guard rails um where is it there we go number three board will not conduct its studies without including students families teachers staff community members in a manner that inspires broad Community
138ownership of board policy so I think one thing um as as a parent who's been in the district four years and I've built relationships with administrators with teachers with other families with staff one thing that I've come to to witness is the culture we have here in kraton and that is something that you know you're not going to find everywhere that's something that you know some teachers are like yeah I'm struggling financially but no I don't want to leave my school I love my principal I love my students I love my community um and that's not something that you know you can just money can make up for so so um tying it back to to that like I think what the work that we're doing right now with our policy the policy work you
139know that that kind of ties into that and it's it's helping to build upon that culture and um create something that's you know going to be inclusive and G to be um you know set set the tone not just for the students but also for for our staff and and for our families um and so I think when we're we're talking about like like the meet and the confer and like how are we keeping and retaining um teachers one thing that you know is really disheartening is when I talk to a teacher and I hear about a situation where they've perhaps been treated unfairly or poorly by by an Administration or you know situation happened where they weren't backed up or they you know were were swept aside um you know it hurts to hear
140that because if it's you know that's the kind of thing that that drives teachers away so I think one thing that we need to be aware of as leadership is like what culture are we creating and is that harming and driving teachers away or is that making them want to stay despite you know a m you know a small raise or or whatever so I think um you know un fortunately like like if if it were up to me like man everybody be getting a raise you know like I wish it's ridiculous that our state and our country fails at funding like our our most important natural resource which is our students our our children you know their minds so you know unfortunately we're we're very limited on that front but as far as setting
141the culture and how we allow our teachers and our staff to be treated by leadership that's something we can control so and that's also something like hey you know I I know that's something I'm looking out for and I hope that as well you know HR and our superintendent are mindful of that too is that when we're hearing that some teachers are being treated unjustly that that is not allowed to continue um because that's going to drive drive good people away and create you know a bad reputation for us but if people know like man I you know kraton they love their principles they love you know they have a good culture they're you know it's anyways that's going to draw people in that's all I gota say thank you so much Miss Marquez I'm
142just going to end with this um as governing board members and elected we have a responsibility to the community I always say that we might not be responsible for let's say of a fight breaks out in a classroom I'm not responsible for what happened in the classroom because I wasn't there it's usually the teacher or whoever was in that incident but I am accountable to what happens based off of that situation um so in addition to the school board meing to align school system resources with priorities necessary for improving student outcomes the school board has to be intentional about communicating the school system's results back to the community and I think this is a big piece that sometimes is being left out is that we're now being held responsible to go back to our parents
143and told them hey that child that you have that we said is an adventurous thinkle Cloud bir of learner and kindhearted leader I'm just letting you know that they're probably in the 177% of not passing or being proficient in third grade so we have a responsibility to come and tell our parents that as an institution we're basically failing their students right and the number one conversation that comes from her parents is guess what it's not necess necessarily where are the teachers getting paid enough it's like what are you guys doing to make sure that my student has the resources they need to make sure that they are moving the needle so I'm not saying that this is uh who do we love more or who's at best but when we are out in our community
144and speaking to them about the one job that they think that this institution is doing is to ensure that their kids are learning and being effective for the next grade the number one concern is that you guys are not doing that and you guys as my elected as the person who comes and knock on my door and tells me that you're going to love my child like your own child which I have my third grader sitting in the front row today um is the same kind of respect and the same kind of values and the same kind of energy that I need to give to all the 4600 students that we have in our institution as the one child that I have so I think that's also important for us as these conversations are happening
145that we have a DED responsibility to go out nobody else is going back to the community and letting them know what I'm doing as a governing board member or what adult changes I'm making in myself to improve the success of their students in this institution only us not even Jay is responsible for doing that he's not elected we are so I think that's a big piece and component that we also have to make sure that we're keeping in mind as these conversations are going is that at the end of the day we have to face the community and when there is Backlash or other things are occurring it's our email boxes and that are getting flooded because we're technically the owners of this District whoever sits on the board not the teachers not with all
146du respect not the superintendent not anybody else but technically the owners are us as the governing board- elected officials and our only one goal is what the education system was built and the number one fundamental thing that schools exist is to improve student outcomes that's the only reason yes everything else coexists that's why we have guard room and we prioritize social mental health and all the other things that are important to our community but we are the ones that are 150% accountable for that data nobody else it flips we're responsible for the data and then our superintendent is accountable this is an us job so as we go further and we talk just make sure that I think that's my ass us well is that as the representa of this community I'm the one that
147has to have those hard conversations with those parents and let them know like you you know if you're the child of a black student let me tell you that since 2015 0% of those eighth grade black students have gone on to high school knowing the fundamentals of math to succeed so those are all the hard conversations that each of us have to have in the schools in community and broader in business relationships as we try to figure out how we're going to get all this support because it's going to take all of us so I just wanted to end with that um and make sure that we all all at the end of the day are aligned and I want the best for everybody in this institution but we are guard railed us as as
148people who make these decisions on what we can we can't do and we have to be Innovative and in that Innovation if the student if that third grader or those students are not prioritized at least for me personally it's going to be a non-negotiable I don't know if um anybody else has anything else to say or add to it thank you all right so that kind of wraps up our conversation and obviously this is a continuous conversation I know that we have one more meeting confer and I'm you know excited to see what comes of that that brings us to our agenda item 10A which is the acceptance of financial audit reports for fiscal year 2023 24 and I what happened where we at 10 a oh sorry I was on the wrong I went
149back to look at when we did this before and I was on the it's okay I was like oh no did I mess up again um all right so Miss Shapiro I'll turn it over to you thank you madam pres president um governing board policy requires that a final reporting of our financials uh be presented to the governing board for examination we also are required to uh procure an external auditor to come in and do this work and additionally school district and governing board um shall publicly accept all Audits and compliance questionnaires by a roll call vote which is why this item is on here tonight I'm very excited to uh present a representative from The Firm of heinfeld meech and Company this is Mr Josh jumper he is a CPA and audit partner with
150heinfeld and meech and the lead on our um account account partnership uh audit audit welcome back jaky fingers don't do that all right thanks for sitting through everything it's been uh uh well good evening uh the the good news is you got to hear them talk about how responsible they are for the budget right like isn't that one of the questions you typically interview them to find out like are you paying attention so here evidence presented good evening man president board members superintendent man executive team uh my pleasure to be here this evening but just uh not related to the audit but just so impressed of all the discussion you're having and the care that you all have so but that's my personal opinion not my audit opinion I'll put my audit hat on uh
151but here to present the audit results uh for June 30th 2024 so we're always looking backwards for the audit so just keep that in mind uh we're looking back at the prior fiscal year so not the fiscal year you're in not the fiscal year you're looking towards but the One backwards uh so keep my comments very brief uh but if you have any questions need any clarifications or have comments please don't hesitate to ask so uh the annual audit uh is required by uh in AR uh and just want to go through what's can what's entails the audit so we use this term the audit what's included so there is a presentation but I don't need it yes it it's fine there's a it's very high level in just a few slides but I can
152go over it without it too the same it is the same yes and it has been posted with the um board agenda yes it has uh but just to entail uh so uh the audit timeline so the audit engagement letter is signed in the spring of 2024 signifies the start of the audit we do some preliminary procedures uh before the year ends we do some procedures uh the bulk of our procedures after the year ends after June 30th and especially after the the records have been closed and the AFR has been filed in the fall so that October time frame uh the audit reports were issued in February so just last month of J I'm just gonna jump in real quick because we do have two new board members and so AFR is our annual
153Financial reports so that's the the closing up shop of the school year it's all of the expenditures have been closed out and we file our annual financial report yes my apologies uh it's okay yes one of the many reports required to be filed uh but that includes financial information so once that that is filed the the records are closed out uh the audit procedures can be completed so what audit reports are issued uh for the audit so uh the the main one being the annual comprehensive financial report the acfr that includes the district's audited financial statements that is what uh our audit opinion is in and included in that report so I'm pleased to report tonight that the audit opinion was unmodified that's the technical audit audit accounting term uh the non-accounting lingo version of
154that is a clean audit opinion so uh free of material misstatement so that's pleased to report that uh that annual comprehensive Financial reports quite large includes different financial information uh not going to go into detail on it but uh includes the audited financial statements additionally uh one audit report that's issued is the single audit report and this one is required for all entities that receive over $750,000 of federal grants so cron exceeds that and it requires a single audit uh so included in that report are a few things the schedule of expenditure of federal a wward so reports all the federal dollars the district receives and spends for the year and list them out all by the various grants that the federal agency gives the name of the grants too uh in included in that
155uh we did notate a few items a few findings this year so we notated one over Capital assets and then one over accounting records and specifically over some cash reconciliation items and revenue posting items so uh those were included in there which I'll touch on in a second additionally uh the federal programs we uh did detailed testing on were the special education program and Esser uh please report no findings over those grants but uh those two findings I mentioned uh the district is required to include a corrective action plan included in the report it's included in there this uh report or the plan uh is unaudited so I'll let Miss Shapiro talk to it talk to that plan if she wishes but uh I've spoken with her over these findings uh what caused them uh
156but in my professional opinion she's taking them seriously and has put a plan in action to ensure they don't repeat in fact at this time uh both uh findings have already been corrected on our ins for uh next year's audit so we're excited to have those taken off uh during the next cycle have any of those findings caused any major changes or issues on any of the things that we have in systems in place or anything oh other than just correcting them and absolutely so a a big part portion of that is something that I think we've discussed a few times is that in smaller districts you tend to have people who wear multiple hats and there aren't a lot of resources to have backup procedures um so one person can be very pivotal in
157a system and if that person leaves the district or is not available um it can have a big impact on a system so uh with Dominic oh he's already left uh our brand long Mr Ruth our new I know I'm like he should be there I think he's online right now watching us probably going to text um we have uh strategically been uh re revamping those procedures to ensure that there is a backup in place so that all the knowledge doesn't sit at one chair and that's what we deem to be the the most um important piece as to why these audit findings did occur and as you know uh here in the pretty recent past we had significant turnover in critical positions namely our Director of Finance our procurement um our payroll so those
158were the three specific areas that uh having turnover in one year uh definitely had an effect and led to these findings so filling the positions but then also uh doing the work to make sure that those procedures are not sitting at one desk and that there is a backup piece in in place was the the the fix that we knew we needed to make immediately and we have uh put those pieces in place thank you I appreciate that yeah and I'll just add I mean during the last part of the stage of the audit those positions that Miss Shapiro mentioned were unfilled so it was you know an all hands on deck to try to get the audit process complete and Mr Ruth did come in at the end and did assist in the completion
159of the audit as well so uh yes I I'm in agreement with her uh assertions and uh I do think that the district is on the right trajectory ensuring these findings don't repeat themselves so uh additionally another report that's issued is the uh uniform system of financial records the usfr a compliance questionnaire so that questionnaire has to be filled out and completed and submitted to the auditor general for every school district in the state so this questionnaire is the same for every school district and we have to go through and say yes or no they're all yes or no questions black and white uh there are over 170 175 questions that as part of the audit we go in to test transactions to say yes or no and uh I did my count uh my
160my count that there was 12 NOS meaning 12 instances of non-compliance and so the areas that we look at are a wide variety of all the processes and areas in the business office over attendance uh property control uh budgeting uh just a vast variety of processes and procedures so there were 12 questions that were no but keep in mind there are over 175 questions in total and I would uh point out that each year those questions do change um slightly or sometimes dramatically and we never know uh what the list of questions are going to be until they roll that information out even the Auditors aren't sure um and uh in the past my rule of thumb has been that uh 10 and Below uh tends to be where I like to keep it because
161that means that we're doing a really good job with due diligence working with our Auditors these are human processes there are going to be errors if there were no errors I would probably say to the Auditors could we please test some more um because this is a while Auditors are independent we utilize our audit as a tool to help make make sure that we can identify any areas before it does become a concern so we want our processes to be tested we want to see if there's uh things that we've missed in there but you know when a auditor looks at uh 15 deposit packets and in one of those packets somebody didn't issue a receipt that just allows us to know we just got to constantly be uh bringing that message and that training
162back out to staff um those are very common for those things to happen and uh when you do that test work so again anywhere you know 10 to 15 I'm making squishy face uh somewhere around 10 uh and and below I feel like we're doing a very uh good job and I would say that I'm being a little harsh uh 12 is a very good outcome with that many questions with the situation that we're going through and that um uh completely reflects on just the hard work of the staff in all of those areas I mean that's the school sites taking attendance trying to check the kids in and out withdrawing uh enrolling these are just just a tons of processes not just the finance office or payroll uh we look at um just a
163multitude of area areas and those uh items are attached to this uh agenda so you can get the single audit um if you wanted to see those two findings in detail this is our the bigger document the AER the audited uh comprehensive statements and then those usfr questionnaire um responses are in there so you can see which ones that they said no to um and again those things are yes or no uh one time in uh in the past I had not here at kraton um a contract to a staff member was off by one penny and the question is did we pay according to the contract and because of some rounding fashion or whatever at the end of the day we didn't pay by one penny and it was a no so those ones
164are tough and I always bring that one up because that one sticks in your craw but the the question is yes or no and did we do it no we were one penny off so uh just to kind of show what types of questions are in that in that process does the Arizona auditor general determine all those questions do they get it from some national uh great question the Arizona auditor general decides what questions are in the questionnaire each year I can't and won't speak to how how they decide which ones to change add delete each year but I believe it's their own Department gotcha I would say we'll be seeing some interesting questions here in the in the future um with some of the situations going on in the financial World an example of
165this is at one point in the past maybe like 10 um 15 years ago we had some border districts who weren't doing a a super strong job in ensuring that the students that were attending their school uh came from from Arizona and so we had them coming in from some border states we now have a slew of uh questions in the questionnaire that um requires us to go pretty deep on providing proof of residence which goodness if you don't live in Arizona and you're coming to kraton good for you that's a pretty dedicated family um but those questions still exist it came from situational things I do know that questions get into their uh based on current events and you will start seeing things uh coming down the pipe later um so trying to address
166issues if I get to S they also get in there sometimes due to changes in the usfr and there have been years and I I got to give kudos to Mr jumper because he's helped us through these over the years but there have been years where we have been three quarters of the way through the year and not re there's been no clarity as to how we were supposed to implement the changes that are being tested by these questions and so um one of the things that um as an audit partner heinfeld and M meech is incredible at is the PD that they offer as well has really helped us get through some of those challenging situations too all right one more report to touch on uh and so not a report but it's the
167letter to governance so included in there is uh a letter addressed to the governing board so it's directly from us this is required communication for every audit we do we issue this for every audit we perform and it just highlights uh certain aspects and required things that we are required to communicate to you but just some highlights that I'll notate in this presentation so uh no uh there were no uncorrected misstatements for the financials so uh those findings we notated so the items we came across we brought them to Management's attention they made the corrections timely to ensure the financial statements were properly stated so there were no uncorrected misstatements additionally we had no disagreements with management uh and as well uh the engagement letter assigned at the beginning of the audit representation letter assigned
168by management at the end of the audit that gives us the approval to issue our audit opinion those are my prepared remarks tried to keep it as brief as I could but happy to answer any questions you might have board members do we have any questions or comments okay perfect I really appreciate you coming and explaining these things too and I also appreciate all the backend conversations that Miss chaparo has and at least in my personal experience she's always open to meeting with us oneon-one and going over these in-depth questions before they come to the board meeting so Justice a transparency it's not because it's late it's not because we don't want to ask questions we really are meeting one-on-one and making sure that all these whatever wonderings we have are being answered so thank
169you appreciate it thank you a motion oh yeah the roll call [Music] vote DED on it next year if we don't nope all right thank you I move the governing board accept the audit reports for fiscal year 2324 in compliance with ar ar1 15- 914 second all those in favor and I'm going to go ahead and take roll call vote Miss Heather SS hi Miss Katie Gibson mcleen hi myself I Mr Tristan Jones hi and Miss Nico Marquez hi having five eyes no nce motion passes thank you thank you that brings us to our next agenda item which is 11a the continued discussion and consideration of paple school name change and with that I would like to invite Miss Sylvia Earl and her team up to have this discussion thank you so much so excited
170to hear the updates thank you all for sitting yes I appreciate it get through here good evening Madam president members of the board executive team uh thank you for having us here tonight we are here because because we wanted like you said give you an update on the progress we've been making on the school name change and if you are new to the board and may not be as familiar where we are in the process we want to give you a little short update so I'm going to um start with um reviewing our agenda thanks so I want to introduce our team I'll be doing that shortly and then we'll be discussing the progress to date we started with an examination process and we went to a little more exploration and now we're in more
171of the advocacy role and just for context I believe this was introduced back in 2022 or that's part of your I apologize I'm just going to be quiet no you're that's all right thank you and these are the members of our Equity team and here tonight to present with me is Miss senat mauka and Mr Isaiah Washington and thanks to this whole team has done a great job not only in this work uh with the school name in particularly but throughout the year so this has been a really really crucial team on our campus so yes in 2021 22 that was the first year we just were asked the question and we had a late presentation at the end of that school year um that from at the governing board meeting where it was actually
172when we were still online if you remember um when we were asked to consider a different name and we were learning about the history and that kind of came forward and so we started with some staff um introducing it to the staff we I went to Native American Community uh the family nights uh we did a parent connection just to introduce it we started talking to our students and then the following year um we followed up with the certified staff and then we started integrating the equity team into this process and included more parents into just educating about the name and just checking in on how we feel about it what should we do about it kind of kind of low uh level on the just just understanding and like I said examination and then
173year three we also added in lower grade students so that they can start understanding what was going on and then in the exploration world where we were like doing a deeper dive really learning more about it that happened in the second year and third year of this process where we just kept adding additional perspectives we started a little shallow but we kept getting a little deeper and deeper and I would even include some of the work we're doing right now as part of exploration um as we're doing the name change we kept going back to and doing more Outreach and I feel like that was part of exploration and kind of toggling and advocacy so that's where we are right now um we've learned quite a about the name that where it comes from the
174town ofam people in that the where the where the reservation currently is but also their ancestral lands being all the way um just stretching and also that who lives in this community in this area and so we learned quite a bit about that and um have a few names to bring back to your attention right so here's Mr Washington hi hello again Madam president uh members of the governing board superintendent um so last year almost I think it was like literally like a day was this almost Yeah March 26 now March 25th um we we came to you um to you know go over some of the suggestions that we had looked at and a lot of the work that the equity team and I have did was looking at the criteria of that governing
175board policy FF with naming facility ities making sure that it's of a geographic location um and looking at or specific people that were of significance to our community um we also wanted to make sure that we were keeping in mind that Native American representation a lot of what we heard at those Native American Family nights is if we were going to make a change making sure that you know if we change making sure it's not forgotten making sure that we're still having it included and and since it is a part of our community um we also wanted to again making sure that it's part of that Community Connection making sure it's part of what we see what we hear what we feel in our community um so at that time we had brought to you
176three names of agave um which as you know that a plant that we have here it's at our desert Desert Botanical Garden we've seen it around uh also piesta which would be after piesta Peak which is the mountain peak that we see from our school campus as well as we found out it is the mountain peak that is in our logo um and we also looked at possibly desert because knowing the uh Papago Indian tribe was now from Puma which would be also with the tan Nation T Autumn desert people so wanting again having that connection to it um we really appreciated that the feedback and the considerations uh that were given at our last formal request for name change as well as the discussion that we had here with governing board members some of
177the things that came up was about being able to consider the Hopi tribe since piesta uh named after Lori piesta being part of the Hy tribe making sure that we were uh having their considerations since we were incorporating other uh local tribes we also uh during that time uh one of our members Miss Sarah Jones had us also consider speaking to our local members such as the Salt River Maricopa Pima Indian Community uh so we were actually able to myself Miss Jones and Mrs Earl we were able to meet virtually with lisis baragan who is the manager of the language Department of the srpmic um we've also had some of our Equity team members re try to reach out to the pesta family uh as well as trying to reach out to the Tana Autumn
178Nation um and I know I wanted to have Miss Earl speak to some of the connections that we've had with tation oh sure I mean this is going bring back s several years now but we have reached out in several capacities um we had the speaker who initiated this conversation and then we also followed up with some texts from the tanam the cultural center that was that's on the reservation they shared some resources with us and so we purchased some of the text and had conversations and so that's one way I even looked up the T Miss ton aam Nation on Instagram trying to trying to get her attention it didn't work but I tried to just find some other opport for some public figures to just be able to share a little bit about
179how this might affect them as well so that's where we some of the work that we did thank you um so with that being said a lot of the considerations that were brought to the table really guided a lot of the work that we've that we've done for this past year um and so what we bring to you today um is two of our current name suggestions that we have and I will have Miss tzuka share with us uh those two current name suggest sus and then give a little bit more context for our first suggestion he really wants to talk about the second one so a lot of work on it uh so the two that we have been examining at this point are agave and then Iron Mountain as an alternative to pesta
180a peak uh looking at Agave um this was one of the most popular names amongst like the community members that we have surveyed particularly the students I remember going through that Google sheet and it was just there constantly um and this is used for Centuries by the hokan people uh for many different purposes including food fiber and medicine so this plant is really integrated into this culture that we are wanting to honor with the name change uh additionally it has not only been used by that Community but also by the Latino Community which we see very prevalently at our school um it has been used to reduce clothing footwear building materials fires and papers um we've informed that this really can be a strong option because of its prevalence in a geographic area I mean
181if you've grown up in this area you see the plant everywhere or most likely have and it is honoring both the Native American communities that we want to honor with the name change but also the Latino community that we see so prevalently at our school your turn yes thank you um so uh also one of the top was for pesta or pesta Peak and I know it was very popular uh here in our governing board as well uh but and because it's the mountain peak we see from our school campus again it's part of the logo it's part it's part of our community um and so but a lot of those considerations of making sure that we were we we didn't really consider the bigger picture and getting more of those voices and looking at
182it a little bit deeper so that's where we took the steps of reaching out to the pesta family reaching out to the Hopi tribe uh the toam nation and other local Native American communities so after speaking with uh the Hy tribe uh which would be Elders or leaders of the Hy tribe uh the leaders from our srpmic as well as one of our Equity team members uh Mr Dexter nibit is part of the naav Navajo Nation uh we learned that it is taboo to name something after someone who has passed away um that after someone makes passage to the afterlife that they should be allowed to rest uh in peace and just let them go on um we we re we in addition to that um we also had found out that there had been
183some time where when the name of piesta whak had been brought up that there was a lot of contention and a lot of other groups had contested saying this is against our values we want to make sure that they lay at rest and so for it to still be to still be named was something that we're like oh okay that that was very interesting that that you know they was still push forward um so that it's Arizona true it's Arizona um and so and keeping in mind of the PSA family as as I stated uh some of our Equity team members have tried to reach out to the family but at this time we haven't haven't presently got a hold of them we hope to connect with them in the future but we haven't at
184this time um we also learned uh that the uh srpmic Community has been had been working for some time to rename the papao butes um so it's it's been some time where that that also just that name of the different areas in our city has been uh had some had some controversy and that they were really optimistic that this could help promote and maybe be spark of change for Phoenix and for the community so that was something that made us feel really empowered and inspired uh so that brought us to learning that the original name for pesta Peak uh and please perit me anyone who is listening who speaks the Autumn language I'm sorry if ruin this uh but vam dog uh and this name means Iron Mountain uh and so members of the srpmic
185also found as well as many others that we've kind of talked about this about Iron Mountain says that it could be a strong option to incorporate this significant geographic location while respecting the cultural values of our local Native American communities so with that information we really wanted to come back to you for um just to ask where what you think our next step sh should be we would like to propose that we go back because we haven't been able to share this new information with um we have shared it a little very briefly with our staff but want to share it with our families and our students and our communities we'd like the opportunity to kind of do another feeler but this time for a preference between these two if you don't mind and re-educate
186them about why we've made um this new suggestion and then come back to you hopefully by your next meeting if if we don't know about your timeline but we thought perhaps by the next U meeting so that we could move forward as um expeditiously as you see fit but we know that this has been a long journey and we are ready to you know put the name papao to sleep and move on to move on to exactly where we want to go you move forward you know in in in aligning our name with our vision and making sure that we are responding to the new information that we have so that is why came back to you to share that with you and ask for your guidance and suggestions and if I could add for
187the board members um some of you have were here for last year's presentation others may not have seen it but all of this and it was in the presentation is driven by governing board policy FF and so in there two important things to note is that the board will ask for a committee to be formed and many thanks to pepo's um Equity committee who served as that committee on the board's behalf but the other piece is that following pre presentations at no less than two board meetings the board can then take a vote so even though there's been a lot of historical work on this we we working with the team we felt like if we had them come back since had some changes in board membership update the history give us an update on
188their work over the last year we would consider this our our first of those two board meetings and then if we had a presentation um assuming we're not putting too much time pressure on the team to come back on our April board meeting we would have that second presentation and that would put the board in a position to be able to to vote to make a decision on the renaming um the other reason you know that I think we would like to try to do that on April 15th is to give ourselves enough time because it's still a pretty tight window when you think about things like changing out signage you know updating records at the state level you know all of the getting Googled the acques to a name change appears to be one
189of the harder things to do so um so our hope is that if we do that April 15th we'll have a lot of that work completed between April 15th and the start of next school year so you all feel like you have enough time to go back like is the next board meeting enough time for you to go back to your I think so we have a uh we have another family learning night happening this Thursday okay we think we can share that with parents at that time we have pretty good readership of our school newsletter so if we send it out there we think that will reach families um so we can send it to students at any time and then I'm in connection with the local neighborhood association so I can ask for
190some feedback from our neighborhood association as well so and and if you would check in with Miss wasik um I believe we we have a community newsletter yeah that's going out um sometime in the next week or so so that might be another way Thursday's your deadline for the newsletter well we have a Google form we're already ready to go so we'll just send her that link as soon as well I know um do I know um Jay was telling me in our one one about kind of all this research it was very enlightening and interesting and I really appreciate it and I made kind of a joke about well it would have been nice to know all this when we did the other name change maybe even though there was a lot of more
191demographics and other problems involved with that whole renaming even I laugh when I tell people where I went to middle school because it sounds like a misrepresentation of like I went to some Preparatory Academy but um that's neither here nor there I appreciate all of this research and I think it's fantastic and I appreciate all the work that you've done is very informative and I hope that there's some way when these changes occur whatever we do land on that there's a way to other than just what's in board docs like to commemorate the work that you all have done in terms of something at the school that kind of out like shows some display of the work that y'all have done in determining this name I don't know how that could be represented somehow but
192I'd hate to lose all of this and then like people on down the road like when we were like well who the heck is Larry Kennedy right um you know so like maybe there's some way to commemorate this or keep it there somehow yeah as we're you know one of the things is as we're changing out signage you know one of the things we could look at is potentially changing out some graphics in the front office for maybe a super graphic that tells part of the story or something why why is the school name this that type of thing so I think we have some different options and I know um that M Shapiro and our facilities team will work with the team at papao to to try to come up with some things that
193that might be able to sort of capture that so that way we don't play the mystery game um again of trying to find out why why why would we have named our school thises and just in case you're wondering I have a lot of people asking me about the school mascot if that will be changing so we were hoping to keep it Panthers we've changed all of our shirts to take off the name Papo over the last four years actually and they lot of them a lot of them just say panthers so that we could continue in our school uniforms and I mean a team sports uniforms have only save Panthers on them right now as well so we were hoping that we could keep that part of identity while making a name name change
194of the facility so that's something we're hoping long history of good athletes that's right I hate I hate to the fact but it's true and our students very vocal that they wanted the Panthers to not be changed it was all in the surveys Panthers Panthers Miss Marquez I remember a couple years ago gosh I think it's been a couple years um but attending a Native American family night here in the district and your group was there and you got feedback from from everybody that attended and I remember just like being really excited that that was happening and but you know here we are a couple years later so I want to thank you for like that's a long time to be working on this you know and so thank you for all the research and
195the work you've done and for going out and getting feedback from you know the community and you know the our native American families and everything so and I I love both those names so I'm going to have to think hard on which one I like best and yeah yeah speaking of mascots I went to mon Vista in the 90s and there was a little you know Duke was popular that was a little tff about whether it was appropriate to have that mask that has come up several times Mr Jones do you have anything to add no I was just going to say uh that the naming of the peak Lori P well you know the greater American culture is we want to honor our military service members especially those that have died in combat she
196was the first Native American woman to die in combat and unfortunately when you have the Native American uh you know rules of naming things or not naming things after that people coming into a clash of with this American uh military uh worship or um honoring but there's another example is Hayes a lot of people don't know Sierra australa is named the high point is named after Ira Hayes who had a very tragic post World War II uh life and uh he was one he's one of the Marines in the eima monument but it it just goes to show that we live in a state where we have the highest military service of Native Americans right because the nature of having so many tribes in our state uh my money's on Iron Mountain and yeah I
197will wait and see yeah thank you Mr Jones yeah I just appreciate all the work that's been done I I am appreciative of the intentionality and really getting to know if we're going to make the move of changing something on what it's going to mean and what is what are the unintended consequences like what happened over there witha I would hate in order for it would hate for us to move in a way where we're going against cultural beliefs like he said there's a certain way that certain of us perceive certain things but not at the stake of going against the same people from that culture or from those practices this just doesn't add up to me so I appreciate everything I also have my own bias of what I like but I'm not going
198to share that I'll wait until it goes out in the community I I already know what what I want um it's it's awesome I'm just excited and I think it also tells a story of how it everything that we transcend and everything we do is aligning we have a land acknowledgement for a reason and it's not just there for words but it's really to take heed to the policies and everything that we have going it back and always centering back to our indigenous people that were unfortunately displaced when this institution was created in the 18 late 1800s so there's a lot of history there and I appreciate everything you guys did and yes you I I believe that we're all ready as long as you guys are okay and it's in your time frame we're
199ready to hear whatever next steps are to renaming the school Miss SS did you want to add anything no just the same sentiment like I'm excited that um we're kind of getting to the conclusion of this as I'm sure a long journey um and uh I actually like I like both of them so I really I can't say which one I prefer to tell you the truth I think they're both ke so thank you yeah thank you for the extra work and the hard work and for staying late with us yes I appreciate you guys and thank you to the equity team for all their hard work because without them all of them everybody thank you thank you thank you so much all right that brings us to 12a which is future agenda items do
200we have any future agenda items the only future agenda item I will add is um us giving a little bit more context on the majority of where our operations budget goes into and what is in that operations like what are we doing to sustain that oper um that salary and the operations when it comes to the co the workers of the district is that enough Miss hes I'll send you yeah perfect I had the two yeah of course I we we G to read these that are already on here or we don't need to um no the ones that are there we usually don't those are just living documents that we' I mean future agenda items that eventually we'll put on the agenda but go ahead Mr Jones oh thank you I I've had these
201on my mind for uh probably a couple months now um uh the first one is uh taking a look at Chronic absente absenteeism and absenteeism in general in our district uh I think it has a direct effect on student outcomes if it the students are not in the classroom learning they're not going to show any positive uh you know outcome and my understanding uh from a conf what prompted this was when the nape report came out uh I can't remember now if it was in February or January I was able to watch a a the campaign for grade level reading hosted a webinar on uh the result kraton does not participate in in natee but it's the nation's report card so it's just a general sense of how school districts across the country are doing
202and um not well was the big takeaway from this and I think even though we're not participating I think we're seeing similar problems and uh when they hosted this webinar this was after it was released and what what could we find from all the data in nape and uh what was brought up over and over again was attendance uh post covid or post pandemic you know or post lockdown that this era after 2020 21 and uh I had a conversation with Mr Man briefly on one of our Monday phone call meetings and uh I think we were in agreement that it's something we could tie into student outcomes for sure and I don't think you know it won't cost any money at least at first but uh yeah I'd like to see uh attendant attendance
203reports by year over you know five years before 2020 and then you know going into now and looking at those numbers but and uh any data that you all might that this executive team might have on attendance impacts on testing in the district and my second uh future agenda item is uh our student phone policy and usage of electronic devices during the school day uh by students and so just to clarify that I'm sorry I need to interrupt um we don't have to read the student um cell phone usage because was already didn't have it but we can add another one specifically to the usage of technology in classroom instruction and yeah that was actually Nicole right put that one on there but you m mine I I guess I just wanted to put the
204policy down there so that we're all clear from the start but if there was any discussion in the future of this it was more uh I'll write read my rationale it might be worth considering if we're not seeing an improvement in reading and math testing that there might be detrimental effects from students being distracted by electronic devices uh and furthermore since the first superintendent guard rail States the superintendent will not neglect social emotional health wellness and development the board should have a discussion about how much time our students are spending in front of screens and if there is a feeling that this might be affecting the mental health of our students okay and then um any reports or data collected on student times spent on electric electronic devices during the El the school day and
205if we could have any of the district psychologists or social workers comment if they have a perception of this being a problem in our district uh this was prompted by my reading of the anxious generation which was a very popular book last year um my brother who's a pediatrician sent it to me because it has some very troubling figures uh from 2010 onwards especially within you know looking at teenagers mental health and anxiety and depression and uh uh in in different subgroups within children but uh I told him I you know I think this is something I should bring up if I'm going to be a school board member awesome thank you so much I appreciate that any other future agenda items all right hearing none we go to 13A which is a move the
206governing board adjourn second all those in favor I any nay hearing none motion passes mu as noes thank you to everybody have a great night