001something foreign thank you foreign thank you foreign thank you foreign thank you foreign clearly this entire district has been crazy busy all summer I always think about I have a very good friend who's a teacher in another District he always asks me like if I'm enjoying being relaxed over summer and as I run around the district I don't see a lot of people being relaxed over summer they're just busily making the things happen that need to happen and so I want to give a shout out to our Child Nutrition and wellness team they started providing meals to children and students in our community starting right after the last day of school and didn't finish up until this past Friday and over that period of time they served 82 707 meals to our students and our
002community part of the reason this works and the reason we're able to share that many meals out with our students and Community is because they don't work in a silo they partner with the summer school team the maintenance team team and most importantly the transportation team who helps actually bring the meals out into the community in addition to making sure all that feeding happened they were able to send five of their School site managers for professional development at the school nutrition Association National Conference this summer which provided 18 hours of continuing ed so that'll I'm sure help drive more Innovation and support from that program and I'm also very proud to announce that Aaron Bronner our director who was already a member of the national school nutrition association's board of directors was nominated by her
003peers to sit on the executive committee of the school nutrition Association during the final year of her board term and the best part about that is it will give her opportunities to have conversations at the national level to support nutrition and meals for our students and because of her being in that role she was actually able to give me a heads up right before I had an opportunity to meet with one of our Congress people at an event that our board president connected me up with and so we were actually able to get a message of support from our school district for the needs of our students for what we would like to see as universal for emails for all students so I'm very proud and appreciative of that a new educator orientation our camp
004Creighton was actually last week and we had amazing participation the entire curriculum instruction team did a fantastic job we're also very appreciative of the Creighton Education Association for their support of one of the lunches and just being there for support in general our paraprofessional PD also happened tail end of last week and our assistant principals that team partnered with our child Justice Advocates to provide professional development for a fairly large group of our um our student support professionals throughout the district we also had a hundred students receive 450 in clothing and backpacks and school supplies through a back to school event sponsored by GCU and another 200 backpacks of school supplies via aztv stuff the bus and I know our Community Education Department and their director Yvonne Carvajal have quite a number of other donations
005coming in that will be distributed out to our families as school get started up here we have our teacher curriculum nights coming up and so we're going to go ahead and make sure we get that information out to the board here but I think the majority of them are coming up this Friday and our all teacher curriculum update meeting will also be this Thursday morning that will be an opportunity for our teachers to work with the new curriculum we had shared with the board a report that we had 24 teacher vacancies still to fill I think that was last week and our HR team and our school leadership have done an amazing job we're down to nine and a half teacher vacancies as of today it was actually 10 and a half this morning and
006we hired one during the course of the day and then the last thing I apologize for this being so long it's been a long hot summer but we have our welcome back rally tomorrow um and I wanted to give a shout out of thanks to the Creighton Education Foundation for supporting um some items for the event and the creative Community Foundation who is sponsoring our breakfast in the morning as well as our nutrition and that's all I have thank you so much matharis would you like to start us off with the board reports oh sure um so welcome back I know there's not a lot of people here tonight um but man you get tired like that first day you go back I've been back for two days and I'm like okay I need like
007an app um I went to the breakfast um when was that last week Wednesday yeah I know I can't even remember um Wednesday so I I stopped by but I had a leadership team meeting so um I had to run out but um it looked very productive and it looked like there was a lot of people there and it looks like they were excited too um I cannot make it to the rally um tomorrow because I have my own rally that I have to be at that's a bad thing about being an educator as well is that things kind of fall on the same time so I'm not able to go to some of these things but I'll be thinking about you guys I love going to the rallies I love my rallies because I
008I like to be bop around and go see people um but thank you have a good year um thank you for all your hard work during the summer I know a lot of people put a lot of work in during the summer so thank you thank you so much for that Miss McCaleb um yes welcome back I feel like I haven't been here in forever because I was at a conference during the last meeting we had um but I hope everyone had a wonderful summer I know um pretty much everybody here in the room right now worked all summer um and many more of you but I appreciate all the hard work that everyone did um to make sure kids were fed make sure teachers had materials and curriculum and scope and sequences and all
009that prepared administrators making sure everything's ready for the new school year I've been working all summer too so I know there's a lot to be done and I hope you guys all have an amazing new school year um I got to go to the cea luncheon last week I didn't get to go to the breakfast because we had our new teacher breakfast so ditto um being an educator in two districts that start and end on the same day and have the same exact calendar is challenging but um I did get to go to the cea luncheon it was phenomenal thank you cea for having me and um I cannot go to the rally tomorrow either because all of my teachers come back tomorrow morning so I have to be there for them but I wish
010everyone the best and I'm so excited for the new school year thank you so much Miss mcshefree yeah um welcome back to everyone I just wanted to do my board report on the naleo conference that we attended in New York um in uh July I guess it was um it was I I liked the conference better this time than the first time I went part of it was um our our legislators were there because they were on a little break so I got to meet a couple of new ones um so that was that's always nice here's it's not all school board members it's other elected officials and so not every um session is directed towards school board members so some of them I'm I go into kind of scratching my head going what's going
011to be my takeaway here but everyone I went to I had a really great takeaway I thought and I feel like the theme of a lot of the sessions where that mental health needs to be the higher priority for students than achievement like that's critical it's it's the same as food you know um they're not going to be able to learn if they are not um if we're not addressing their SEL needs um I had um there's a a thing the feds are doing called Justice 40. um I sent it to my fellow board members and Mr Mann it's um a lot of grants that the feds are um offering up and 40 of it needs to go to disenfranchised um uh communities and it's um connected to climate change um that I went to
012a climate change session again like how does that relate to us but um gosh a lot of it does um I'll give you one example that I really had no idea um places like Walmart are adding charging stations um now people who live in apartments or who rent cannot charge their electric vehicles at home so they have to go to Walmart or somewhere to pay for it and the problem is residents get a certain rate but places like Walmart is about 10 percent higher and they have to pass that cost on to their customers um I know the utilities are working on this once they become aware of it so it will change but if we want to see more um electric vehicles you know we have a lot of challenges I think in our
013neighborhood in order to do that there's not going to be enough space to have it if we really get to um have people start getting electric vehicles so anyways that was interesting and um a couple takeaways um Toyota has a nine million dollar Grant from a Mobility um the justice 40 like I said that's full of grants for that I think Creighton would really potentially qualify for and uh the National Science Foundation um our takeaway is broaden opportunities for stem careers because that is where um the climate um an electrification lives and you know I know we've we always say Mackin is a stem school you know I don't think it's it's stem enough from the feedback that I've gotten we we really we do not have we don't have the workforce in this country
014to attack these climate change um um issues that we really need to work on until we we up our stem in this country anyways I thought that was very interesting um and then Mr Mann and I went to um like a trauma-informed um a session that I thought was just great uh I feel like in the 45 minutes that we were in there it it really just kind of told the story of why being trauma informed is really the most important thing we need to help our new teachers especially understand and that is going to go hand in hand with our discipline policies as well um so I know Mr Mann uh took you you grabbed a card right and and um and you're working on things like that so um again he reinforced um
015trauma-informed SEL needs to be like one of the only initiatives in order for it to work in order to see a difference so again because this post covid you know we're still getting through this um and the trauma that our kids went through and still go through and went through before covid um I really think and I know we're focusing on it um but it really needs to be the number one thing I think that we're looking at so I think as a board when we go to our study session you know that's going to be something we can talk about focus focus focus you know and not have too many initiatives um oh and we also went to a budget one um I was very glad Mr Mann was there I wasn't I I
016was like this is not my the one I want to go to but I felt it was my duty too and it was really actually quite interesting um and I'm gonna have Hilda share with the other board members there's a virtual um session coming up that um these folks are going to put on as well um but I think I learned a lot and I thought they brought up some really good points and again I'm glad Mr Man was there for that as well so thank you I thought it was a good good conference this year thank you Miss MC Jeffrey Miss Gibson McLean hi everybody um I I feel like my brain is like moving slow right now I don't know if because I was like on a roll at work before I decided
017I had to get in the car and come here but um first of all just welcome back I wanted to congratulate Dr pombo and Dr Lauren um excited to have you all working with us in your new role and in general so thank you and welcome um also thank you to the facilities folks I know last week I know it's probably a lot to make sure everything's all still up and running even if people aren't necessarily totally gone out of the buildings the entire summer but I know there's been some AC issues and other things and it doesn't go unnoticed because we definitely couldn't be here without that especially with the weather that's been going on so we appreciate appreciate you I did not go to naleo but I'm excited to go to cube next
018month and I don't know that I I can't make it in the morning I have uh two sentencings that I have to get to um I would love to be there um if I didn't have a pesky job that got in the way I'm sure my clients will appreciate me being at work in the morning but I hope everyone has a good time it sounds like it's going to be fun I wish I was there and um I don't think I have anything else I feel like we were just here and it's also been a long time so I don't know here we are look at us thank you um I also went to the new educator orientation that was great and just to kind of touch about this common formed I think I'm here
019in the district we do a really good job I was able to go into one of the breakout sessions and just listen in um for the new teachers and I can't believe I can't remember who was giving it but they were talking about how SEL can be embedded in the curriculum and how it can be easy and it sounds scarier than what it is but it can actually be implemented very well um that's why I like going to naleo conferences too because AS school board members you would never think that you would be trying to make policy changes on you know this type of stuff of SEL or climate change climate change actually impacts low-income communities way more I mean when I joined that cohort of urban hit leadership when we were learning about all
020that just within our ZIP code our you know Arcadia area had better weather than our southern part whatever district and that was just because you know of the resources that are out there what they put out there trees all these different things so climate change does affect everything and this is why I love going to conferences like naleo because nalel stands for the National Association of appointed and elected Latino officials so when they bring in these type of breakout sessions they bring it in with another lens you know there's a whole different lens to it as because it's impacting you know Latino communities so I appreciate you bringing that forth and I also appreciate that our district is kind of riding in that wave already when I go to these conferences and I go to
021these breakout sessions it makes them feel really good that when I come back some of that stuff I'm hearing all that stuff already or it's already being implemented so that's great to see um I'll be there tomorrow morning only for a little bit because I also you know work in life um I'm really excited about this new role that I took up and I usually don't share much personal stuff but I am this time just because I feel like it's really gonna impact and be a value to the district I just got into fair housing I know that that's a big issue and accessibility to the houses and everything and we basically um help out communities who feel that they've been discriminated against renters specifically not homeowners and that's something that our community you know
022our the majority of our kids and parents live in rental homes and sometimes things get done to them when they don't know that it's actually a fair housing issue and they're being violated or they're being discriminated against so it's going to bring a lot of educational pieces to our families so they know what to say or what to do and like kind of like know your rights and get feel protected and having them self-advocate for themselves when they're dealing with these landlords or these renters so I'm really excited excited about that and seeing how we can bring it into the school district and actually help her community with that um stuff too and lastly I just want a big give a big congratulations to the new executive director of the Arizona School Board Association um
023out of all the school board associations in the nation there's only two executive directors that are people of color our new executive director is actually Devin Del Palacio he is a school board member in Tolleson unified and he's an afro-latino so that was amazing to see and also for the first time ever in the nation we have an actual School Board member or somebody who was a school board member to sit as an executive director of a School Board Association so nobody in the nation has ever had an executive director that's been in the role of school boards so it's just great and I feel like a fresh new air for us the school board members since that's where we get most of our policy service most of our professional development to actually have somebody
024up there leading the way that knows what it is to be a school board member and the issues and the things that we um face every day so it's very weird it is very weird and when I heard I was like what but you know it's it's very exciting for us here in Arizona we have an upper hand in all the other states so I'm really excited to see where this association takes us in the next few years under his leadership and that is my board report next um we go to I move the governing board approved consent agenda items a through I in accordance with policy bedb Dash e all those in favor all right and that brings us to 6A which is amended governing board asva policy advisories number 744 through 746 this
025is going to be our first reading and Madam president members of the board um this one's going to feel like deja vu all over again because this is actually a series of policies that we just adopted changes to back in June and what happened in the subsequent time period is that um one of the law firms found some legal errors that needed to be corrected and so asba has integrated those adjustments and then submitted those changes to school boards for ratification I don't really you know in looking through it our team doesn't feel like is there any significant fundamental changes they're ultimately to bring the policies into alignment with the state statutes that they were intended to be aligned with in the first place so Administration is recommending um you know that we move forward
026clearly this is just first reading and we're happy to answer any questions and get any clarifications between now and next meeting for a second reading is there any discussion and questions on the Amendments no just for transparency's sake though if nobody's looking at it basically the only big deal is that they remove the word board as they said it's too confusing there's still all these new open meeting law requirements that are in effect so that big part is not changing yeah parts we don't like about it yeah all right um I don't have any additional questions so we'll just move on to the next item which I am super excited about it is the approval of principal for Monte Vista School well and we have an irony I'm going to turn it over to our
027new executive director for human resources who actually has some background and experience with principaling Monte Vista school so that's kind of an exciting way to do this so I'll pass it over to Dr Laura thank you madam president members of the board so we conducted a comprehensive search for the principal at Monte Vista School the Department of Human Resources advertise that they can see on our system as well as through the Arizona Department of Education through Facebook uh aspa indeed there were eight viable candidates in the pool and the paper screening Rose five candidates to the top and after they were selected they were participating in in basket activities plus a panel interview which was a pretty large panel 15 participants the participants were made up of Administrators there were student representation there was a
028parent representation as well as classified and certified staff from Monte Vista um so through that process we recommended the top two candidates for the finalist interview uh the superintendent uh assistant superintendent of teaching and learning myself Mr carbajal also participated in the final interview and we are pleased to recommend Miss Adriana apadaka as the next principal for Monte Vista Miss Apodaca has served as assistant principal at Monta Vista and excellencia schools and before that she was an instructional coach and teacher her experience in the classroom and supporting teachers and campuses has earned herself a reputation of being a well-rounded leader Miss Apodaca has two bachelor's degrees two master's degrees in educated related fields from Arizona State University so I'm we're proud to put Miss apodacco forward yay um that's extensive education thank you for your
029commitment that's amazing and with that I move the governing board approve Miss Adriana Apodaca for the position of principal effective August 3rd 2023. second and all those in favor aye aye congratulations [Applause] ever yes please oh Lindsay yeah um yes thank you so much I just want to um show my gratitude for the opportunity to be able to like continue to work with the Blue Devils and our mission um and also I really want to thank our um the mentorship that I've had throughout the district and throughout these years coming from all sorts of areas um it's just been really helpful and so I'm just glad that I get to continue to have a role in it and I'm really excited to continue all the good things that our team has been doing so congratulations
030thank you so much yes congratulations thank you [Applause] okay I need a breather for this one um so we're gonna have discussion on policies jic j i c a r j i c f j i h j k j k d a and j k e um before I go into what we're going to be doing we do have a public comment for this so I'm gonna ask Miss Dorothy to come up the three good evening thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak on this agenda item I did get a chance to review um I don't remember all the letters but all of those policies I opened each one and went through it I couldn't quite tell for sure um you know I saw the strikethroughs and then the additions um
031I couldn't quite tell like was was that coming from you guys or was it coming from like Asda whatever those letters are that usually Drive our policy um but overall I really thought the changes made sense they were logical they kind of fit um what we're looking for in terms of the trauma-informed care more restorative practices looking at that proportionality issue when it comes to different subgroups of students and what their suspension or expulsion rates look like so overall I thought the changes made a lot of sense um there were um some areas that wow just really changed a lot in other areas that only changed a little bit I guess one of the things I wanted to talk a little bit about was all right we're in this tough place we need to find
032this way to get the balance between we have some students really struggling right even some adults but we have students really struggling and they can be very disruptive and they can assault other teacher teachers or other students and we need to deal with that and we need to continue to love them right because our our little box doesn't say we love each child who behaves great or does wonderful and never makes a mistake and never does anything wrong it says we love each child as our own and I know out of my six kids sometimes they did things that were wrong and that they needed to learn and grow from and there's different ways that we can help children learn to grow from the choices that they've made um so we got to find that
033balance we need to make sure that we are yes holding them accountable for the standards that we're setting yes helping them learn how to have different ways of responding when they're frustrated and upset but we also need to continue to treat them like human beings who also deserve our support and our help in my experience hurt people hurt people so we need to make sure that we're supporting 100 percent the the victims those that are bullied as well as supporting those that are doing the bullying because if we don't start setting some of that now when they're very young and as they're growing up then society as a whole suffers right when they get into high school when they get into college when they get into adult worlds if they haven't built some of those
034skills you know all of us are going to feel the impacts of that and it's going to be harder to make a difference for them so I support the work that we're doing and I just want us to keep moving forward there are several different organizations that I'm aware of that deal with things like the bullying and The Dating Violence Bloom 365 is a wonderful organization so I would encourage us to keep looking at those things thank you thank you so much Miss green and to answer your question and everybody else so basically what when was the last time we had a disciplined revision of policy do you know because these all have various States as when they were adopted so oh yeah I see it yeah so what I did is that I belonged
035to this cohort called School Board partners and I had talked about that and it's a basically a non-profit that does professional development for school board members but all their work is an anti-racist policy work um they have a lawyer and I sat down and it was very long meetings with this individual but basically I met with this person um I know that we have discipline committees I've heard I've gone to the schools and one of the things that I noticed as I was going to the schools and as a parent of two kids in two different schools started noticing that our discipline policies looked very different in every single school and to me that looks like an issue as me personally speaking not speaking for anybody else and this is why I decided to tackle
036this on I just thought it was it it's more hurtful for a child to be moved from one school to another school and then their whole discipline everything that they're doing is different that I don't believe that helps anybody and when we're adopting this policies it should be the norm across all the schools now I understand that every school has its own Community has its own way of doings like I know that we have in one school houses and we that's fine that that's a way of getting kids involved and what works for that Community right but when we're coming down to the nitty gritty of discipline what are we doing when it's the same repeated children I wanted to have this candid conversation with all my board members open it up to the public
037people are going to be watching this when you know later on they can go back and we're going to just have a discussion today and keep having a discussion next board meeting or the next board meeting if more input needs to put into this but I felt that we were at a time where these discipline policies were outdated they needed to match the work that we're doing and the only way that people can fall back on to make sure that what we are doing stays is that they go back and look at this and like okay this matches the policies that we have right now do not match the stuff that we're doing in the district and we're doing great things in the district it needs to be reflected in this so when us are
038gone when you guys that are doing the great work is gone the next school board members or the next superintendent will come back and say I have a clear vision of where this District stood not just you know talked and said they were doing all these other things so that's one of the reasons why I decided to bring this and and these edits come from school board partners and myself but that's why I opened it up we're going to have a discussion and if we have to have another discussion we will do that um as well but that's kind of like my train of thought where I went with this and why I think this is so imperative because at the end of the day like Amy reiterated earlier this is one of the most
039important things and this is what this is going to either make or break our kids in their educational experience I understand that they have to have grades they have to have all this but you can't sit here and tell me that if this doesn't get fixed first in children there's no way that they're going to give you that a or they're going to give you sitting down paying attention to the teacher like it just doesn't work that way so I really wanted what we're saying and what we're doing actually reflects the policy and it's not doing that right now so I just wanted them to to kind of imagine and you know it makes sense um so the way that I'm going to do this is that I'm going to go through the first sections
040what was taken out and then we can ask questions we'll have the discussion if you guys have questions that we need to take back to the attorney just make sure you let me know and then I'm going to be making notes and then the superintendent and I Mr Mann can work together to get that stuff turned over because even though that attorney looked at it that attorney is not from Arizona and I know that we are bound by a lot of different statues here so that's why we're going to have our attorney look it over to to make sure that we're in compliance did you have a any questions or discussion before I start I I guess I'll just add about school board Partners I've been through things um pre-covered um I think they're a
041great organization um so I think that's awesome that you've been working with them to bring this to us so thank you I'm sure it was has been a ton of work so yeah I have a lot of trust in them as an organization you know so um I guess I didn't I guess I wasn't ready to like I mean I am ready to go through this piece by piece but I guess I wasn't thinking that was what was actually going to happen so I guess my concern is this um one of the main things that I want to always do is have ever have things that are this serious and this comprehensive be as collaborative and bring as many people to the table as possible um in reading all of this it's very apparent to
042me that you know that which I already knew and in doing my job that there's you know there there's stuff that's just literally copied and pasted from the criminal code in here which just goes to show the prevalence of the school-to-prison pipeline and how we are um grooming our kids to be um uh to be in Conformity with the uh the expectations of the carceral state here in Arizona and so um I guess my my concern is that we get a bunch of suggestions tonight and present them to the attorney when we haven't even gotten input from Community or other folks at the table and so I don't I mean I would love to sit here and go through stuff I just don't know if that's gonna I don't know if it's the best use
043of our time in terms of if if as a board we think that this should and you know maybe I'm the only one that thinks this I was thinking there should be some sort of board advisory committee or something that takes this on over A month's long thing if I'm way off from where everybody else is I'll move on but I do think there should be some more collaborative work done on this um knowing that I'm like thank you