December 13, 2022, Study Session & Governing Board Meeting

001Amy we're we're hoping to hear you can you hear us I can hear you now okay great all right thank you welcome and uh and then miss uh president Karel doll will start the meeting momentarily okay thank you all right [Music] um I call this special board meeting study session into order that's all right do I have to say who's here so present we have Miss mcsheffrina on the phone Miss Ayres and myself is running late so we'll take note when she joins us foreign yeah all right well good evening everyone this is a really important beginning of a conversation for the board to think about for the next 18 months or so and we just wanted to begin the dialogue and get it out in public the very thing we're watching seeing and wanting

002to make sure that we're all openly discussing as we think about right sizing our district as our enrollment shifts and as our facilities you know have needs um and as we repurpose our facilities for equal and Equitable access for all of our students and community I have some information from other districts as well that I just gathered yesterday in my uh Phoenix uh collaborative which was 14 districts that are talking all of whom are experiencing significant enrollment decline as families seem to be moving West our colleagues way out Wester didn't grow are growing so I'm going to turn this over to Mr J Mann and Mr Scott Wells and I'm going to let them introduce Shelly and Dorothy and they'll share with us a variety of data my hunch is I I'd go into a

003mode of let's look at the kind of the six major pillars for scaffolding to start and then we can drill in on your thoughts I would suspend judgment and opinion for now because I know I'm filled with opinion or I'm filled with judgment and I kind of want to solve a problem and I think at this stage it's important just to problem awareness and problem identity is really the the first stage and I let us Loom and linger there for a little while as as sophisticated problem solvers on behalf of the community Mr Man thank you Dr Lewis uh governing board members um Mr Wells and I have had the Good Fortune to work with a team of individuals it's the facilities access on repurposing task force that we're working with and we have two

004of our members with us tonight Dorothy Greene and Shelley Stevens who are kind enough to volunteer to to join us and kind of help us walk through some of the data sets that we've been looking at what we have is is fairly preliminary data so some of the things we'll talk about this evening is where there are problems with the data we have or where it's incomplete and things that are still in process but we're we're not at a decision Point yet and the team hasn't even moved towards looking at recommendations yet what we're really trying to do is get our hands around what data do we have and what what data is in process and what data do we not have that we need so what we're hoping for the governing board to help

005us with this evening is to help identify some areas where we may be may be missing some data sets we need some questions that may develop out of the conversation that you would like to see answered that will help inform and influence our work and then um any at the at the tail end any opportunities that are seen that are things that we should be investigating as we move forward with our inquiry and so with that I am going to turn it over to Dorothy to kind of introduce um where we've been starting here thank you Mr Anne Dr man sorry um so uh part of our work has been thinking about um what do we need to know and then what do we do with what we find out one of the things that

006we definitely have focused on is figuring out how to be efficient and effective in the use of our space and the use of our facilities with around the entire district and you'll notice on the on the first slide there that there's three main Foci and one is maximizing purpose which comes to that efficiency and Effectiveness so being able to have space that can be multi-purposed and I know that's been a big part of the work that the design team for the new building at Kennedy has talked about is how can we make sure this space can be utilized for multiple things as we make sure that we're being Dynamic about predicting different needs in the future changing priorities or needs that the community might have how can we ensure that we have that flexibility so

007that we can use the space as efficiently as possible obviously one of our main driving forces is reducing cost being very aware of the looming mno budget crisis that the district is in given the decreases in overall enrollment that obviously impacts budget so we definitely are aware that we need to be proactive and be thinking down the line so that we're not reactive but rather proactive in designing the next steps that we need to do as a district to be financially responsible and Savvy for our community and then um obviously with our overall goal of having Equity that's been a big driving priority for the district for the last couple of years and it will continue to be forever hopefully we want to make sure that we're having that be a part of the conversation

008are we making sure that regardless of where my zip code is in this District boundary or even outside of the boundary that I have Equitable access to different kinds of programs and different types of services and are we making sure that that is true for all members of our community so ensuring Equitable access is a third component of what we're looking at I have a quick question for the Equitable access that you were talking about the community do we have any data actually on on that um I don't really see anything broken down by Race by um I see some stuff by school but I don't see anything by how many kids we have in special ed how many kids is responding especially to the questions you asked you okay so so annually we produce

009what we call the 100th day report the stack in that packet that Dr Lewis referenced is from 2012 through 2022 we we don't have one for this year because we don't produce this report until the 100 exactly and so sometime in late January yeah and then you'll be able to see Trend data there um this the the types of data that are in that report are largely driven by statistical District needs so it wasn't crafted for a specific purpose but a lot of the data sets that have come up in conversation or question are represented in that report okay thank you we're going to be asking you for what are those things we will need in order to make a decision that's based on at least three times I think the other thing is Equitable

010access doesn't mean that everybody to access right so obviously we want to make sure that every student regard except everybody regardless of their economic status has access to whatever programs that we're offering in our community that doesn't mean we can force them to choose to take on that respect that choice right to make that choice so it's a fine line right because I mean making sure it's available and wondering right asking ourselves well why is only five percent of our African-American population choosing that versus saying oh no we need to make sure that we have a 17 African-American so 17 need to choose that one taking away their choice so we have to be careful about that as well yeah and it's also not about Choice all the time I know a lot of the

011times half upper Community doesn't even know the resources that we have so it's not a I would deflect from saying that they're choosing not to be part of because most of the time you can't choose to be a part of something that you don't know even is accessible so I think that's a great point I think how we communicate how we share out what the options are is absolutely critical oh one of the considerations and you can see on the next page that has the enrollment um beginning at from 1950 through 2015 is enrollment is follows a cycle well we had you know low enrollment in the 50s bumped up in the 60s back down kind of in the mid 80s quite a bit of and I jump in the 2000 to the 2005 and

012then we know that it's decreased from there but just that these Cycles come and go and if you kind of look at I live in the neighborhood as well and just kind of see what's going on in the neighborhood as far as you know rebuilds and adding apartments and you know changing things that those are just all considerations that come into play when we're looking at um options and what the best choices are we go to the next page which is our 100-day enrollment Trend we can see that that has steadily decreased um since 2012 where you had over 7 000 now we're a little above five thousand but as we just you know kind of look at what we have we don't want that to be the driving force we want to take in

013other considerations that you thought as well so this next slide that you're looking at our page that you're looking at has to do with um there's a lot of complex things going on here so at first glance it looks like okay it's saying how many students can our schools hold how many are there is that up or down and then what percentage of utilization that is one of the things to keep in ourselves there's several things to keep in mind one of the things to keep in mind is that ADM does not equal enrollment average daily membership has to do with a set of criteria that that Jay's gone over many times in the past in terms of the days that they're there and then how much percentage we get funded for based on the

014number of days that they're in attendance and the reason that we check enrollment at 10 days and you know 100 days and all of those different things factor in but when you look at you know I'll just give beltmore as an example 591 was not the number of students that attended that school that year that was just the average daily membership that we got funded for for that year so that capacity that utilization capacity is based on these numbers even though these numbers are not true numbers of students so exactly so we have to keep that in mind the other thing is and it's in parentheses there but we want to make sure that you notice it is that any leases or additional programs that are located that are not directly a part of our

015district but are held are located on that campus are not included so for example little big mines or Covenant or you know YMCA types of activity there's lots of different smaller things that we lease out our different parts of our campuses for those are not taken into consideration so obviously you would want to think about well those are income generators so do we really want to have a school be at full capacity and have to kick off an income generator whose seeing some space that sounds kind of counter-intuitive to what our goals are financially so and you will see that there's a little arrow there pointing to Creighton Academy at this time just comparing the ADM remember not actual student count but ADM from the over the last two years they are the only school

016that right now has shown an increase of enrollment one of the things that we were just talking about before this meeting that we need to collect some additional data on is kind of desegregating that and finding out are those students who are in our district boundaries and our choosing TCA are those students who are outside of our district boundaries and are choosing TCA are those students likely ones that would stay in our district here regardless of whether what programs were offered or are they students we would lose if we closed any particular programs so lots of things to think about in terms of those numbers would we be able to get the ADM data for like previous years yeah absolutely um the the date most of the data that we have in that additional pack

017is related to enrollment but we do have it by ADM as well um and so we absolutely can provide that one of the things I think we we really this data is getting refined this was actually generated for us by not related to the ADM average daily membership but there's an Architecture Firm called ADM group they are the folks that we retain to do some of the work for us in here so we have an independent third party that's evaluating things um they're not done with this yet some of those things Dorothy referenced are you know haven't been factored in yet because they're still in the process of doing their work but we just wanted to kind of bring forward what types of data sets we would have and where they're at at this point

018in time but they they will be getting us a more comprehensive report and you'll see them pop up again later in the data that we have because they're also doing our facility study for us as well and I would look at enrollment over ADM the facilities recession and I think that that is a bit of a you know pick up in this this we we have two different ways of counting and they're using a source from the Ade I would the uh the Arizona Department of Education I would say we should be focusing on enrollments and program information this does not include that just yet yeah I hate the phrase but you know we often talk about you know butts and seats when we talk about who we really have or whites of their eyes

019but the reason I started with butts and seats though is if you have more butts then you have seats you have a problem so um so if you if you were to provide a number of seats equal to the ADM you would have some kids who don't have seats because our enrollment typically the pattern I've noticed over the years as our enrollment exceeds our ADM by about 10 so I don't know if that's an intentional skim in the way the formula is built to skim ten percent of our budget away or if if that's just an accident of how the system's set up but regardless there seems to be that relationship if you were to look at the enrollment data we have versus this this average daily mail ship data it tends to be around

020a 10 percent differential so I think we're reviewing along the way along with the attendancy ADM is those attendance areas and how do those impact our attendance there is in the future and I know this is really hard to see I actually had them put them on foam board so if we can spin around if I need to bring one you miss Korea doll I can okay I can see both of them thank you yeah absolutely so they're backwards right now foreign School Syria and you can see even stretching down the older Maps or as we decided to look at that they're still in fear we just had to look at attendance area for families who chose not to go great with that and we want to give them multiple choices not just one so

021that group if you look at them here you now have a great academic Excellency and we presently actually do have a shovel children that still want to go to Walmart now one of the examples that we could go to in the future is it's just a possibilities if we were to enter excuse what carried away they're actually is if we made Biltmore School of Choice and the rebuild of the Kennedy campus how can we adjust the temperature without making interesting right we don't know what your kids will choose what we do know is by Loma Linda taking this it doesn't affect how much yeah stabilize the numbers based on both Children's Choice one Vista we pretty much already transform both of the media transported it's important so we don't anticipate a lot of change in

022this and again it's a giraffe once we start saying it's being a number you can change it one try to keep on balancing responsibility if I could point out two more kind of important can I just check Miss Mick Jeffrey can you hear okay you know I was just gonna say um I didn't hear I I don't know if you guys are walking away from the mics I can't hear you there are other people yeah they're up at a Podium we're gonna we're gonna fix that so what we're doing Ms mccheffrey is we're looking at the three attendance maps and they're going back and forth between them so you don't quite have the advantage of the looking to this one looking to that one so if you guys could identify looking at the third map

023looking at the first map as you speak that might help Miss Jeffrey thank you yeah so so right now as we look at the third map of what Mr Wells was pointing out is this is a speculatory map of a a what-if scenario um it's probably the maximum number of schools of choice which includes builtmore Preparatory Academy and the new Kennedy as well as the Creighton Academy as a School of Choice Mr Wells referenced the fact that even though right now Biltmore is not a school of choice programmatically it behaves that way because one of the challenges that we have is with the exception of seventh and 8th grade which are the last which are the grades where the old traditional program is phasing out grades kindergarten through six are dual language only so one

024of the challenges it's created and we've experienced this at the district office is we're in some ways we're doing a disservice to families from a customer service perspective because what happens is they show up at Biltmore and Biltmore explains to them hey what we have as a dual language program and the parent may say well we just move in the neighborhood my kids in fifth grade they've never had a day of Spanish in their life I'm not sure this is the right program for them so I mean we are very customer service focused so we move into solution problem solving mode but it is very confusing for families because we say well we've got this other school for you and they're like well we want to go to our school well your school only has

025this dual language option but we have this other wonderful school it's got a performing arts program you know the principles get along real well they're even sitting together in our audience here this evening so there's good communication and so we've been able to work through all of those things and as Mr Wells said find ways to get those families access to that school but it does it adds it adds a layer of barrier and I think that's the biggest concern in relation to that one of the things we've been trying to do for years and I know it's not perfect as we talked about earlier is tear down barriers we want the ultimate goal and what we've heard expressed by the board in the past is every child in this District should be able to

026choose any school and so at this point in time we actually have shuttles for Biltmore that allow families who are down in the Papago area some throughout this area here as well as providing extra access for our little big Minds families who sometimes have kids both that little big Minds preschool and at Biltmore that shuttle will pick up in both of those locations and the majority of the families traveling on that bus to Biltmore come from down in the southern region of the district and so that has provided additional access for those families to be able to make that choice if that's the school that they want for their family but as Mr well said earlier if they would like Kennedy at Loma Linda for their for their child they have that shuttle as well

027and so part of this is a thought exercise and a concept is what we've looked at is does this free up the ability with our limited Transportation capacity to have more of that type of shuttling activity and create more choice in our district and today's modeling and it's a model it does model that we should have four additional buses if drivers hold that we can use for shuttles and that would be based on where is a bulk of those kids and where do they want to go it might not be the best for the Kennedy rebuild but who knows maybe we need to get kids to Papago and Monte Vista so we would look at that and see where the needs would be it's really just you know again just early thought exercise not representing

028it as a solution to anything but as we're having our conversations in addition to everything else looking at attendance areas is one of the conversations that we're having for future Solutions thank you Ms McCaleb has joined the group on to utility costs as a factor one of the other things we we've actually been monitoring for almost three years now is our utilities and as we know utility costs it's a slippery slope and no matter what we do trying to get costs down it's almost impossible because SRP APS are raising their rates the best we can do is try to stay stable with our kilowatt hours and so we actually uh have fuse box we meet with monthly they take a look at our expenditures and they go back they always do three months worth of

029data even though it's monthly hey why was your utility so high this month Scott it was at this campus it was on the weekend well we may have had a program there that weekend or a lease so that's something we look at but as you can see from one of their cost models for fiscal year 22 we look at 22 versus 23 and 22 was our first year back 100 at the campuses it's been really difficult since 2019. hey Creighton you're saving all this money now wait a minute let's back up no you're not so it's been that constant conversation back and forth but if we look at the forecast for 23 three it's uh it's about a ten thousand dollar increase that means our kilowatt hours are staying pretty stable we're again fighting those

030costs going up um there's a projected for not for 24 and you notice there's a fairly sizable increase they're also expecting a fairly sizable increase to APS and SRP that year so by doing this this information goes to Mr Man Miss domilene so helps them budget easier for that 12 months out it's also something we're looking at really closely because as we talk about facilities access and repurposing are there Partners we bring to the table and one of the things we want to make certain that we're doing is we don't want to bring a partner to the table build a financial model around that partnership and then find out that they're providing some funds to the district and they're providing say twenty thousand dollars less a year than what it's costing us for utilities that

031doesn't serve the purpose that Dorothy laid out for the committee that that savings were kind of going the wrong direction with that so we really want to be very aware of all of the sort of not easy to see costs that are embedded in some of those things and make sure that as we work with our partners that they're covering their fair share of the cost so that way that's not creating an extra burden for the district because we want to preserve our maintenance and operations funds for our students and for our learning environment so um yeah um so I had a quick question just I know um obviously there's lots of variables involved in the different amounts for the different schools but is there a efficiency check in terms of okay at this school

032a square footage I don't know the lingo of utility costs is much lower versus at this school and that has to do with all kinds of how new the facility is how efficient the different things that you have that are working at that facility is that part of something that we can get information on as well it is and we do have some deeper information and they do a drill down into kilowatt hours we went with dollars for the purposes of this conversation because it's related to that efficiency but um you know it's very difficult as as Scott mentioned when you're comparing say APS to SRP the rates are very different the other thing is when you sometimes you'll see a big number and it's anomalous a lot of things have to do with square

033footage but squares footage isn't always necessarily related to the number of students or the number of classrooms you have in a space if you have a school that say has a large additional facility like a gymnasium and let's say that gymnasium gets a lot of evening and weekend rental use or School use for activities or district-wide use for sports programs that's going to make that site look anomalously more expensive and the more volume there is in that space clearly the more it costs to heat cool and light that space so so so we are getting deeper teardowns to look into what you were talking about in relation to by sort of a square footage and a use case scenario you know where do we see those efficiencies and get and really boil it down to

034you know what's what's an efficient space and what's not an example practically on this chart is from the excellencia solar costs yes that's a great no because at excellencia we have uh in the parking lot there are solar Shades those solar shades are owned by Elon Musk they're owned by Tesla now they used to be soldiers um sorry I couldn't help myself but chuckle about that so um so anyway um what what you see here there's not that much that's funny in facility stuff right but that's funny um what you see here for Excellency is what we pay to APS in addition to that we pay what used to be SolarCity is now Tesla for the solar generation on that site as well so that that excellencia cost looks anomalously low as clearly as Kennedy

035School because if you've driven past there in recent weeks there's not a lot of building to eat if we were using a ton of electricity there we were doing something really wrong so so yeah so we so we have a um two more pieces that are in process um and both of those are being handled for us by ADM group one is outsourced to a third part a third third party um ADM is working on a facility assessment you'll see some draft information in the supplemental packet that's there that's site by site you'll notice some of the sites don't have as much info as others they actually sent us a couple of Updates this morning that we weren't able to get integrated in time um but all of this is is going to be truly

036Revisited the methodology used for this facility assessment was entirely designed by ADM it really was not based on any input by the district and as Scott said the other day to me and it kind of cracked me up he goes we really didn't influence this at all because all I did was give them Keys and codes to buildings and had you send an email out to the principals that they'll become so they they've been going out to our sites looking at things and giving us feedback one of the downsides to that process and this was something we talked about in our team meeting earlier this week is there some Oddities in these reports because they sometimes refer to things that might need repair that were already in the process of repairing so there's some things

037in here Scott's already gotten school facilities board I think you'll see some on tonight's board consent agenda it's gotten school facilities board project funds to resolve and then there's some things where they'll refer to them as a structural issue but like as an example for Gateway and excellencia roofs it identifies structural issues well they're related to the roof and they're part of the re-roofing projects that we're doing right now so all of that still needs to get fine-tuned but this was just a way of showing kind of some of what they're delving into to make determinations about the state of our buildings a side bonus benefit of that in addition to our planning work is it will also give more ammunition to Mr Wells to continue to get those school facility board and it was

038occurring to me the age of the building even with the work that we might need to add correct yeah we definitely want to want to take a look at what those building ages are because one of the things that happens is adm's doing a great job on the assessment but there's always infrastructure that's difficult to assess and see and sometimes you know if you have a building that's you know 60 70 80 years old you know that you know it might not identify this but there could be Plumbing stuff that they can't really see because it's underground and it's really difficult for them to locate some of those things in addition to that ADM has helped us partner with Davis demographics we were hoping to have some early Davis demographic study data it's proving a

039little more challenging than we had originally anticipated for a variety of reasons including some illness challenges on our end in various areas and getting different data sets to them but beyond that coming out of the pandemic Gathering some of the data on like what's happening with construction in our community is a little bit harder than it used to be so that what they're developing for us is a 10-year comprehensive detailed student forecast by residency we've made them aware with the the issue that came up the other week from some community members who came and presented to it um some of our trailer courts in the area because that's not the kind of thing that typically will come up in a demographic study but it's something they definitely need to be aware of because it does

040have an impact yeah and that's one of the things that I feel like we leave out a lot is apartment complex mobile parks and those are really important to have in our studies because you know and we have a lot of mobile parks in our in our school district as it is absolutely yeah so I don't know that that information was as well represented I'm not saying it wasn't but I don't feel that I have confidence it was as well represented as it should have been in our prior to demographic studies so it's one of the reasons we've created some awareness and the timing of that you know kind of information and concern coming forward was actually really helpful because it was a reminder to us this is something we really need to be looking

041at um but there they are working on pulling all of that together and of course as we get early data we'll ask them to continue to refine that and and help us do that one of the things Dr Lewis and I were talking this morning about demographic studies and some of our prior experiences with them one of the things we've learned about demographic studies it's a 10-year comprehensive study but the reality is it's most accurate in years one two and three the more years you go out the less accurate it becomes because you have you know what they sometimes refer to as Black Swan events so like something like covid five years ago nobody predicted covet so but that had a significant impact on what was happening demographically within the modest right so you might

042build a model for gentrification that might be disrupted by something else so it's certainly something we'll want to continue to update but we hope to at least have what's current to date Mr Man I have a question about this um what is the cost of this demographic study you know Scott well it wasn't just the demographic study it was all inclusive with facilities demographics three sections and I don't remember off the top my head um I don't know off the top my head member mcsheffery but we can get that to you yes ma'am thank you and and we'll put it in the update but as Mr Wells was pointing out it was integrated with the facilities work it was with the Creighton Academy to look at possible Lessons Learned From the crazy Academy Bill okay

043um just because I remember I don't know if this is the same company we used before it doesn't ring a bell to me um but I didn't have a lot of confidence in in there study because they dismissed Charter Schools completely which you know are kids in our district do choose Charter Schools over us um so I just wonder really how accurate these demographic studies are especially like you said if you have an event like covid they can't predict that and this you know the gentrification the way it's going that's very very hard to predict how that's you know we see what's happening but um do they really know what's going to happen um you know with how our parents choose and there's so many other factors on why people choose where they want to

044go so I just I'm not sure if I have a lot of confidence in these demographic studies that I'm just concerned about how much we're spending on it thank you yeah you know and and good point about the concerns having been raised in the past about the the prior firm that we used and so when we were working with ADM one of the reasons we turned it over to them was we said look you work with a lot of these firms this is who we've worked with in the past we'd like to see a different firm to see if we can get a different take that maybe captures some of the things that have been missed in the past and so we relied on their expertise based on their experience working with a variety of

045these firms so as always mileage can vary but we're hoping by virtue of that that perhaps we'll have something that's a little more accurate and a little more resilient we're also hoping to include the age of the homeowner if you will even if it's not oh I have a kindergartner or I have a three-year-old it's sometimes the person who keeps their home you know through their uh older years what might be the predictability of the home being then sold to somebody with children so it's formulaically Crystal Ball but it's uh that's all it all it is using a different firm I think we just you know in your discussions with them being very cognizant about noting the mobile home parks the apartment complexes noting the charter schools you know we have an opportunity with a

046new firm to say here's what was missed last time and here's what we really and it's it's not going to be perfect and I think you said like it's most accurate for the next couple of years but it's better than no data at all um I have a question do we have any data on how many kids are in our district under open enrollment and what districts are coming from because I think getting data on who we have that's out of district and and who's using this would be um good information for us to see or know as well we we do have data on open enrollment that's definitely something that we can provide the peace that we don't have um and this has proven difficult over time and it's somewhat ironic given you know

047a constant call for transparency and yet this is not transparent is that the state system doesn't allow for us to identify easily what district they come from so we sometimes have anecdotal data based on self-report from the Open Enrollment forms if there's transfer information there's the possibility of doing some very labor-intensive like capture out of individual forms but what we should in my mind what we should be able to do is get a report from the state that indicates those things the other thing that it would be nice if it was more transparent would be a way for us to gather data related to if we have students that are that live in our district that aren't going to our schools I feel like we should be able to see which schools they go to

048we we partner very closely with the local parochial schools because we handle federal funds for them and and um our person who handles that for us Pam does a great job of partnering with them so they share data back and forth with us unfortunately the charter schools are a little more close-fisted about sharing that data back and forth with us which makes it challenging to drill in yeah and maybe um ADM has a different approach of collecting that data too because I think the last thing that we're always missing to do is going into the communities and actually just asking instead of um you know waiting around for them to disclose the information a lot of the times if you just ask simple questions people will give it to you um also with the capturing

049the data of an open enrollment can't we just check their address where their address is and just look at their District by the address they're registered under yeah actually um we do we and one of the things we'll be bringing forward in the future is we do build dot Maps so you can see where the kids are coming from and so we'll definitely have that information and we'll see if we can find some way to convert those dot Maps maybe there's is a way we can use that to capture yeah work with Russell to see if there's a way we can get that to then vet that out into which districts those dots sit in to determine which districts those families are coming like overlaying on the map not being software overlay the district Maps

050maybe I mean it's not going to be perfect it's very time intensive to sit and say we're going to go through Synergy for every kid but at least with what we have with the dot Maps if you didn't overlay the districts it would give us an idea yeah that's how we make our transportation decisions now it's just not spread beyond our district but I'm sure we can move it up yeah because I think and you're right I mean that's the we lose kid it's not just Creighton every District loses kids and we don't know where they go necessarily even though they are supposed to withdraw like I know in our district we're trying to capture that information so when parents want to withdraw we're asking where are you going but if they say Tucson West

051Side like they don't have to tell us and if we don't get a records request we don't know so we're trying to keep our own spreadsheets but like getting maybe 30 of like the concrete info that we need um and it's it's not telling us much mostly it's telling us we've had a lot of families move to Tucson so it's not even a what are we not doing the other districts around us are doing it's they're moving where it's cheaper exciting I would also add I know we've got some share with you that I I was talking with my colleagues in Phoenix footprint and you know Phoenix Union thousand kids almost each year they're smooth stated we were in the 140 200 kids per week Roosevelt's down 200 this year Osborne says about 120 down

052this year of Madison's down uh I say 500 kids they have two schools that have waiting lists and two schools that are low enrollment um uh Levine is has been our only growing District of the footprint uh and they're stable and they've stabilized and they predict their staffing needs for next year Alhambra with Grand Canyon University growing is the housing has changed significantly and it's growing district and it's now substantially lower cart rates down about a thousand kids it was at 14 800 the last year 13 800 this year ish uh Murphy very small District lost 50 so proportionately still a very substantial number I think one of the most interesting studies for is our neighbor Phoenix um Elementary School Victor who is at about 4 600 4 700 kids and has 14 school buildings

053so you know if we're at 5200 just counting ADM but let's go ahead and add some programs and use the number 6000 ish maybe 5 800 you know when we're looking at 14 buildings that's about an average of 340 kids a building and so you know I invite the conversation because when Tempe was going through this 20 22 25 years ago Tempe L said to itself we are a small neighborhood School District they did not want to close schools and they wanted to declare themselves as intimate and small and all their Welcome Matt said small neighborhood schools and they saw a benefit in the intimacy um but they also have deseg money and they also have the ability to do some Boutique programs I you know I say Loosely I can't show you the cost

054analysis but I I know that's MBL fbl yeah so they they've uh I don't know if that's still their motto but it was of 18 years ago so that's a that's a choice that we can consider as we we go through the next few rounds over the next few months is we want to declare ourselves a small and intimate and we like small and intimate I would say the cost Effectiveness will be a factor and uh you know I think we were playing around with relative to Arizona State dollars what's the premier school size relative to the cost per pupil we get and we're Loosely landing on about 700 kids a bill so you know that's that's just some industry standards to kind of put in your head about the range of things you want

055to consider uh as you serve your beautiful cave so I would just kind of like to hear yeah go ahead Amy there's one other thing we can and should start tracking if we're not doing this already but is Esa requests that we get from parents it's my understanding they have to go through their District in order to request an Esa voucher and that's a potential opportunity to at least ask them provide them a survey like it's you can't make them do that but um they might be very interested in Sharing why it is they're choosing to request an ESA yeah that's excellent great idea so you know as we kind of close with this opening conversation just with the data awareness uh beginning of philosophy considerations my first thought is what are some of the

056things you heard that stood out for you um and what are some of the things you want us to be thinking about as we prepare for our next conversation with you so Amy would you be comfortable starting sure I mean I think you know what you said about Tempe even though it sounds like it was quite a while ago you know our community right now is not banging down the door saying you guys need to sell a school you know um we know it's not a gigantic cost savings to sell a school um in the long run I think it's a value to our community to hang on to these and if we want to make them smaller more intimate or if we want to save it to make it a community school or a

057potential park for our district you know what I mean that that you know you can open and close the gates we we really are lacking Community spaces and I think our district will really benefit from that and I think our community would appreciate that rather than you know shuttering a school I I just think that's brilliant and as I think about Kennedy's rebuild and where the design team so far has been it's been very much on an open outdoor full-use facility uh and again you know with the current bid and the opportunity to to move on maximizing the bond dollar that would be something to think about just exactly as you said Nick shepherdy thank you just to build on that I think you know I agree I don't think there's value in ever closing

058or selling our property our buildings um but I think the need for Community spaces both free community spaces as well as there is potential for making additional money without renting to competition so that helps us know not to consider leasing to uh maybe uh schools outside of the district yeah and I mean there's a lot you can do like I know you know we run out our community center and it's used by non-profit organizations it's used for private events it's used for you know I mean just everything if you have a space like that and they're getting harder and harder to find add a decent cost too thank you Miss Ayers I mean I don't think I have much to add beyond what Amy and Lindsay said as well I I worry about losing one

059of our facilities just for the same reasons that have been mentioned um and I think we need to look at um different ways that we can utilize them if they are not going to be used for a school and I do appreciate all the information that was brought to us the one thing that stood out to me tonight and I don't know why I'm thinking so much about it is just how we're moving our students around like in our district like how you said you're shuttling is so I'm just wondering kind of I guess how that looks I mean you can explain it to me later or whatever but um I don't know why that's just stuck in my head to choosing a facility choosing a school yes like the whole thing like how it

060just all like kind of like works together because I'm not I'm not familiar with that because we don't do that in my district so I just I'm not saying it's good or bad it's just something that I kind of don't understand so I wouldn't expect accrediting Miss Jeffrey on a conversation she and I had do you remember Amy five plus years ago where we talked originally about how do we invite people who want a philosophy associated with the school to sign on for that school and it began us to toggle with the idea of the Creighton Academy being a non-attendance boundary school um and then and eventually the Dual language commitment at Biltmore and then as we engage in the possibilities Creighton excuse me Kennedy why those conversations were at least put into a sample

061for consideration while still having a more traditional conventional map of attendance boundary as kind of plan a but Plan B is true choice is North middle and South I don't know if you want to comment on that Amy Ms mcshaffrey did you hear me we might have oh shoot okay anyway I credit her with opening that entrepreneurial spirit and that that sense of okay let's give people the choices they may want and that's why we've been so Community centered in these discussions um I really like the ideas I'm not a believer of selling any of our properties I think the property that we have should stay with the district because with the legislator and all the different unknown things that could possibly happen to districts it's really important to hold on to the buildings that

062we have um I do like the Community Schools but I I think a good idea too to get a little bit more of a community feedback is if we can have like a when we have our next community council meeting and have kind of like a conversation about this like what would you guys like for your school to be um would you like smaller School communities if not if we closed the school what would you like the school to be or if we leased out of school who what would we like to see at least out you know those kind of questions and just get a I know that we have a committee going on but this could be an added on opportunity for conversation for for families since a lot of them do go

063to these Community Council meetings just to get a feel in that sense too thank you I think to like making sure the conversations open about like being creative so it could be there is one entire campus property that is turned into something else or it's if you go back to like smaller schools what would you like half of your school to be in that Community you know so if you had multiple schools that were gonna shrink down and be small neighborhood school but half of the campus is used for XYZ you know like there's a lot of room to be creative and I think you're right like let's get people are going to think about things that we are not so in the vein of that conversation there there are third party uh companies that

064will come in and do assessments for you about other uses for your school facilities and I guess the question I'd like to ask is you know is that a data point that we should go after because we we only know what we know and sometimes when you you know guess it costs some money sometimes when you go out and get someone who has expertise that's worked with a number of districts they may bring to us some opportunities that we're not aware of so to date we've stayed away from that because we've really been focused on some of these earlier data sets I'm just curious to get a sense from the board if that is something that's worth exploring because I I don't I don't know the exact cost of it but it's something that we

065could look into the cost of and see if that's another Avenue that we could bring data points back for both for the committee work and for the board okay thank you um I usually would advise against that but we are in the process of potentially losing seven million dollars by April so I think all the options that we can get at the moment may be a good I'm not saying let's go with the first person you have but I think that would be great Insight just because of the climate that we're in right now we don't know what's going to happen um you know I I don't know our our public education is very wary right now so I I think that would be a good idea just to maybe start looking to see what

066other options and then use Community Council like you know we sought this out these schools are doing this with their leases or they're doing this with the smaller Community Schools so yeah because that might make or break it so I'm also wondering if we can get tap into some of the resources that you have Dr Lewis in terms of your communication with those other districts besides the fact that they lost a thousand students and what are they doing about that so that we can start picking some brains out there and you know not necessarily recreating the wheel if some other districts have figured out a variety of solutions let's find out what they're doing and you know way right now weigh some of uh some of what they're doing yeah might be able to gather

067free information exactly at the point where we're like we don't need to pay but I think yeah just need to be be aggressive on the data collection and what and have things on the back burner of we might need another resource for additional and I absolutely appreciate your recommendation for going to community council it's one of the things that as our committee we've wrestled with it's how do we get more voices we recognize the incredible um opportunity I'm going to call it that this represents and wanting to make sure that we're getting lots of voices not just you know these eight people are making this big huge decision no no how can we get you know expertise from other committees from you know especially the Strategic plan from you guys from the community how do

068we tap in and make sure everybody feels like their voice and truly their voice is being recognized and heard from the ground level up so this is no surprise to anybody you know two years from now 18 months from now when we're saying here's the best option that we have and while I absolutely love and appreciate all the ideas about keeping schools open like that would be my amazing dream as well if we won the lottery as a district I still want us to remember there's a reality to the financial situation that we're in and so if not this then what also comes to mind so if you guys can also give us you know know ideas and directions to go because if we aren't saving money in this way we've got to figure out

069some other ways that we can make make the budget work yeah and I think the first step to that is actually getting the community involved um PTO is a great way of getting messages to parents too um they just blast stuff out and and they help a lot so even sharing those information with all the ptos in the districts and making sure that they're passing out information I know a lot of the school districts do a lot of good job in that stuff too but I think the sense is what the community would want and from their go to those and kind of let the community know that sounds great but the reality that we are is we're gonna maybe lose seven million a lot of people don't know that so the more that we

070educate our community back and forth it's a little bit more of a partnership and understanding back and forth I don't know what this would look like but maybe thinking about some kind of surveys and or brainstorming forums where staff members or students might be able to share some ideas like I said we can sit here and be like we think this half of the school should be an XYZ you know or the Dorothy green show says so maybe thinking about how can we like I think Community Council PTO but also like our staff and students might have ideas as well and that's something yeah and that's a like you're with them so how could we kind of formalize getting that input from them as well this has been outstanding for us thank you I hope

071you felt like it was a good first step for the you know public conversation to begin and we will bring something to community council and to student Congress and to staff and we'll formulate some questions to help you learn what the priorities are as creative combinations and no spelling of property it hurts yes thank you so I I adjourned this meeting so we can start our actual meeting thank you picture yes good job situated okay thank you pictures that'll help you yeah miss Emily Emily she's just I think I'll be prettier are you on I am on can you hear me yes we can wait for Ms Michaela to get back with us no that's correct State of Arizona Spirit you just want to have her repeat that yes just go do a sentence at

072a time okay see how fast she wants to go but I'd make it well okay got it and she can stand right here we can do it right here just stand up and then we'll all take pictures okay there's a lot of people in Vegas good all right at this time the governing board of current elementary school district number 14 shall hold a public budget hearing to present the revision number two of the 2022-23 maintenance and operations and District additional system budgets in alignment with ARs 15-905e a summary of the budget revision is available online and that link can be provided if anybody wants it and now I'm going to turn it over to you guys thank you madam president um members of the board Dr Lewis and executive team um ironically it would come

073out of our study session where we were talking about abilities in relation to budget challenges that we have our our very next item being this budget hearing is about uh the revision to our budget for this fiscal year this is our second revision because we did have a revision in September due to having temporary forms over much of the year and with that I am going to turn it over to mistina dumeline who is our Director of Finance to walk you through the rebias number two budget good evening Madam president members of the board Dr Lewis and exec this is revision number two it's a compliance issue for us this is a required revision to reduce our budget capacity and mno we have a couple of assumptions as we do anytime we put together a

074budget the numbers have been adjusted to the most current data we have which is about a month behind reporting wise and then we did get our budget 75 which is kind of the reconciliation of last year's budget and luckily we did pick up some budget capacity otherwise this budget cut would be significantly larger so that's all taken into account on this budget the next two slides are really just showing you the difference between budget the revised one versus revised two and the numbers you want to keep an eye on are the mno and there's a slide adjustment down for Capital but the big adjustment is in mno so if you go to the summary we have some details there um it shows you it's about a quarter of a million dollar cut to mno that's

075based on student numbers in the budget 75 adjustments there was a carry forward adjustment in the budget 75 so we picked up some budget capacity there the rest of these are pretty similar to what we presented in revised number one but it does include the pandemic relief funds it does reflect the actual base level of support but as noted here the it's an estimate for the free and reduced paid lunch weight numbers those are based on 2019 and we don't have it actual yet so that's the estimate left in this revision and then our final May revision will be required to come to you before May 15th but as we noted if the aggregate expenditure limit is not overridden or something to address that then we will be required to come back prior to April

0761st and that will be a significant crippling cut to mno if that's not addressed future challenges there's there's not much new here you've seen these in Prior presentations as always it's our ADM that is driving our budget so as numbers decrease so does your budget capacity we do have declining State revenues anytime you have tax cuts and less tax revenues come in schools get less the big one is that third bullet inflation funding for new funds for schools are capped at two percent and we all know that inflation is significantly higher than two percent especially in in the Phoenix area which is one of the highest we're already seeing this in some of our large departments such as PPS Transportation you're seeing the cost of goods significantly rise to a point where you know budgets

077are already almost out for the year and we're not even to December breaks so we have some things there and then the one-time nature we've talked about uh with the pandemic relief funds it's also one-time finding as far as our carry forward so we do have a healthy carry forward right now but those again are one-time funds um a lot of our uh carry forward is due to vacancy we are doing um I think better filling vacancies but we still have a lot of vacancies out there I mean we're hiring people and we're hiring people for different positions across the district but we're losing people as fast as we're gaining them so uh that's kind of where we're picking up some carry forward and then the big elephant in the room is that expenditure limit

078that we'll need to address if it does not get overturned um and just I'm going to interrupt you for a few minutes um because we do have a wide public right now aggregate expenditure limit I know that's a lot of jargon can you and a short summary kind of tell us what they gave us what has been approved and what they kept us at and why we're facing a seven million dollar budget cut what they gave us the 7.2 million cut is still what we would be looking at as a district so right but what they gave us so um this doomalean reference that typically what we get is two percent of the rate of inflation whichever is less this last year they gave us a much more significant amount of increase in the base

079level um and then there were some things that they kind of snuck out for public schools and in the aggregate it was somewhere in like the seven to eight percent range the problem is when you do that increase and you don't deal with the aggregate expenditure limit all of a sudden the total spend goes up so the amount of the cut becomes greater and we also have some other funding sources from prop one two three and and what used to be 301 so all of those things are now in this total the the Statewide aggregate cut is close to 18 percent so when you see a number like Miss doomlin shared like 7.2 million it's because when that Statewide cut is around 18 that means each District participates to the tune of 18 and that's

080roughly 18 percent of our budget can you explain the what a limit is what the short story of the limit the short story of the limit is that it is an artificial construct that was voted into the constitution in the 1980s and it was at a time period where people were seeking to put a cap on government spending and the way that it's calculated is it's based on the 1980 spending level in 1980s student levels carried forward over time based on things like inflation and students it's usually up to about two percent right so it is percent and now we're not allowed to spend it although it's been promised to us already cut out basically they're just capping us correct yeah and there's been other like if we think back to the red for Ed

081time period and the 20 by 20. the governor's um proposed 20 by 20 which then was put into our funding it well exceeded two percent per year but the formula for the aggregate expenditure limit still was capped at that increase level so that's why one of the many reasons we're exceeding it by so much so you know I don't know how many people are still driving their car from 1980 um you know maybe if it's a classic Mustang or something but um but you you typically wouldn't and yet the the state insists on maintaining a financial maximum for school districts so last year the state legislature had to have a two-thirds vote to allow us to spend above the two percent and we got the passage at the state level this year they have not

082made that vote so in March we could be set up for a big Cliff yeah the the legislature has to act prior to March 1st if they do not it is taken out of their hands as well and the and the um School finance department is required by Statute if that legislature hasn't acted by March 1st they have to notice By Us by March 5th of the Final Cut amount so that way the governing board can take action as Ms dumeline mentioned prior to April 1st to reduce our budget mid-year so this isn't a future budget cut this is something we've already allocated that's for funds we were already allocated by the legislature funds that have already been expended for three quarters of the Year by that point and now we have to take an

08318 budget cut with only about 22 to 25 percent of the school year remaining and and it's important to keep in mind that 80 to 85 percent of our budget is in our staff so when you have to take a budget cut that deep you know you always want to keep things away from staff it would be physically impossible to do so so Governor Ducey was asked to call a special legislature to uh lift the the cap and the aggregate expenditure limit he has said he would not uh although he's willing to trade off some things if he was to do it in the next what 11 12 days left in this in the in the what is 11th of December yes uh so you know we're we're thinking there will be a series of

084of efforts with Governor Hobbs uh once she comes on board so we'll see how that goes yeah sorry and thank you so much for the clarification and I since we do have a lot of people here I just wanted to for everybody to understand what the aggregate expenditure limit and basically that it's the state legislator that's tying your hands there's really nothing that we can do um and if they don't if we don't put pressure on them that's what's going to fall back on us on figuring out what we're going to have to do with seven million dollars gone so I just wanted everybody to be aware that that's the situation that not only this district is facing but every school district in Arizona is facing to like summarize in one sentence essentially we have

085the money and we won't be allowed to spend it that's the but thank you for the clarification because I think it's important and and my ask to to anyone here in the room and anyone watching is to share that information and help raise the awareness about why this is an issue not just for Creighton but for all of our Public Schools thank you I didn't mean to take you off I just wanted us to be as transparent as we could and I know I don't understand a lot of this language unless it's broken down to me so yeah thank you any other questions because we really are at the question stage here so that's it I don't have any questions I think we kind of discussed everything that what we're facing so thank you and

086we didn't have any public comments for anything okay all right so that ends the discussion and the hearings so we go back to our land acknowledgment crane school district understands that our community of schools is located on the ancestral land of the hodam Jude and accumul Odom people who descended from the hohokom and have inhabited these lands since the time immemorial the hodem who's in translates literally two people or vibrant culture and Community spanning countless Generations into the past continuing to thrive in the present and carrying a powerful Legacy of generations into the future with this acknowledgment the crane school district formally recognizes that the traditional care in keeping of these lands by indigenous people is an inspirational model of community stewardship that we are committed to honor with practices policy and human relations and

087Dr Lewis can you lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance thank you Miss Jeffrey are you still on the phone yes yes okay perfect so roll call Miss Mick Jeffrey Miss McCaleb myself and Miss Ayers foreign and we want to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting and remind the audience of the request to address board cards that must be completed and submitted to the board secretary if they wish to speak to an agenda item board policy provides two cards White cards to be submitted in order to speak to an agenda item and Bluetooth cards oops blue cards to be submitted in order to speak during public comments due to the open meeting law board members are not allowed to address the items that are not on the agenda and that's per reference policy bedh [Music] um

088and that brings us to my computer's Frozen I moved the governing board to approve the agenda as presented second all those in favor aye perfect um and that brings us to the adoption of the revised number two budget I move the governing board adopt the revised number two total aggregate School District budget per ARs 15-905 and specifically 15-905 E1 for fiscal year 22-23 all those in favor aye perfect and that brings us into the Sarah swearing end of new elected governing board members um so we have two newly invited board members who ran and received their signatures and without opponents both will be our newly elected board members in January we'll be swearing in Miss Korea doll today so she can begin the meeting in January as she then swears in our new uh Katie

089uh McLean to be our new uh board member joining the team in January so Heather Ayers will be as clerks doing the swearing-in so you guys can stand right up here next to roll your chair on over she has a hurt foot how you doing hi Sophia doll so almost where do Solomon swear but I will support the Constitution that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the constitution in love and the Constitution all enemies foreign and domestic foreign and domestic and that I will faithfully and impartially I will thankfully and impartially discharge the duties of discharge the duties of the office of Creighton School District governing board members of Creighton School District governing board members according to the best of my ability so help me God so help me God the

090cheerleader one laughs all right well we'll look forward to Katie being sworn in in January I know she wants her family here all right do we have any public comments okay that brings us to our superintendent report well good evening what a lovely turnout it is it's so great to see all of you here tonight thank you so much the first of many things I have to announce are several people we want to recognize and I'm going to ask uh Dr Susan Lugo to please come up here where the president and the clerk just were to receive a recognition this is her last governing board meeting after 24 years of service and we want to thank her in admiration of her devotion and commitment to all the staff students and families of the Creighton Community

091join me in congratulating her fish all right and uh there are many uh opportunities to celebrate with Dr Lugo in her own special way wink wink there's also another person I we you know uh Scott Wells who's been invaluable to this district and all the ways in which we've been able to improve and make marvelous changes to our facilities thank him so much in his absence of recent there was a person who stepped up and you wouldn't know a beat was missed and it was amazing I'd like to please have Aaron Wilkinson come up here and be recognized for holding down the fort and keeping us moving forward in an amazing trajectory your kindness and your hard work and your relationship with each of us at the buildings has been duly noted by everyone please

092join me in congratulating Eric two late night third and not by any means last uh Leticia Acevedo has been a stellar Transportation manager and done an amazing job in her relationship with our bus drivers in her ability to navigate when we have people out or when buses are not fully at capacity and if we need to adjust she can if she's the queen of adjustment and she does it through the love and sense of true family that she creates in her culture in the transportation department so much so that the Arizona Association of Pupil Transportation has recognized her as the transportation manager of the year for 2022. Leticia come on up I love this stuff thank you for showing up tonight um I just want to slip in a love and appreciation prayers and thoughts

093for our Hilda and the experience that you're having with your family so just know that we love you um asba conferences this week and Katie will be with us for the new board member training and I think there's about half of us attending this coming week right Sophia great okay so we'll look forward to that this week and we'll share out once we get back from it and uh then I also know we have our Dental visits are coming to all of our campuses I think we had one start on the 12th already with our partners with smile America so we're so grateful that all our children are having access to some dental care I appreciate everything that Ivan Carvajal and his team Leslie and the team got that going and um you're Rosie we

094also are appreciative of the gift cards to families that you were able to provide and we are up to a 500 gift cards through the American Rescue plan act to help people get food clothing baby food diapers so 500 gift cards did I get that number right I just think it's great congratulations on that we also had 36 people at our strategic planning meeting last night and we got tons of feedback and engagement and validation and some continued efforts to see what do we do to keep making sure safety is at the top of our list so that was really beautiful and then my final announcement for tonight is after 40 years of service these last eight years in Creighton have been some of the finest and most exciting development of co-constructivist transformation in education

095I've had the privilege of leading with that immense sense of service and stewardship tonight I am announcing my intention to retire at the end of the school year I want to thank the community for allowing me to serve this amazing group of hard-working and playful children you're going to hear from them tonight who still need time just to be kids this talented and creative staff who are willing to take risks and partner with children in their learning as they choose to learn with children this supportive neighborhood and Beyond of families who Advocate and alongside all of the things that we do together and our outstanding Community Partners who contribute in hundreds of ways to make us better as winter break comes upon us it will allow our community to begin thinking about the attributes experience

096skills and qualities it would like to see in its next superintendent this allows the governing board to begin its search process in a timely manner I know the input of all will be valued I am committed to active engagement in the continued focus on learning for all and the ongoing best business practices for this final semester in support of our anticipated transition I wish everyone a Happy Hanukkah blessed Kwanzaa and merry Christmas as well as a peaceful new year as we welcome 2023 with another adventurous collaborative and kind-hearted year thank you thank you so much Dr Lewis I appreciate it all the years of service that you did Dr Lulu I I know that being at a job for many years I can I don't even think I've held a job more than five years

097consecutively let alone plus 20 years so thank you so much for that thank you for stepping up when we needed it I really appreciate the staff and Dr Lewis thank you so much for all your years and Creighton you have really established a great vision for the district and where it wants to go so I appreciate the years that you put in um so now we move on to the board reports Ms mccheffrey would you like to start us since you're online um yes thank you um thank you Dr Lewis as well and Dr Lugo for your many many years of service um I will be very brief I was at the cube conference um and although I was very sad that no no one for Creighton was able to join me guess what you

098probably would have covered right now if you were there so that's a blessing in disguise um my state I went to a session that I really enjoyed called why Legacy instructional systems are bad for black and brown students it's also bad for kids of low FCS so it was I'm not going to try to explain what the presentation was but um the presenter will present to our district virtually for free so I would love to bring that to the district um in the near future so you all can experience the things that he said because I think it's a very different and unique perspective that has sounds like he has had a lot of success with so that is all thank you thank you Miss mcsheffrey Miss McCaleb um first of all Dr Lugo thank

099you again so much I remember sitting with you in 2014. when I finished my principal internship at Gateway um and I said I wanted to go back to the classroom and get more teaching experience and you looked at me like you just got your principal's license but um you found a place for me immediately I that same day went and interviewed at lck with Andy Gutierrez and the next day interviewed at Monte Vista and ended up teaching at lck so um thank you for for that memory and finding a place for me in Creighton when I decided that's where I wanted to be and I know that you've been here for all of the staff for so many years so I wish you the best in your next Endeavors and you will be missed um

100Dr Lewis um I got to see you come on as superintendent while I was here and um continue to grow in our professional relationship as I became a board member and um I think Miss Korea doll said it wonderfully that the vision that you've set and the groundwork that you've laid for our district um really transforming what education should look like and encouraging others to be creative and not stick with things just because it's the way we've always done them I've always really appreciated that about you so wishing you the best as well um and to all of our staff um one a week and a half you can make it um but I really hope everybody takes this winter break to reset and relax enjoy time with your families um try to say stay

101healthy I know everybody is getting sick out there so please take care of yourselves and come back rejuvenated for 2023. thank you Mrs thank you good evening um Dr Lugo I I dread the time that I have to leave my district as well and I've been working there for 22 years so I know it's a hard thing I know that wherever you go they're going to be really lucky and very happy I'm to have you so thank you for all the work you've done especially during coven such a hard time I don't know how HR made it through um at any schools during that time so thank you um Dr Lewis thank you for always being such um an educational leader and role model um people are lucky to have somebody that does that principal

102superintendent so thank you for your leadership um I feel very fortunate to work in this or to be in this District at work I'd love to work in this District but I can't sir I yes I love serving in this District I love seeing all the amazing things that are going on and all the people that come together and um work in its districts so thank you for all your hard work and I do hope that um you rest during this holiday season I am so out of here on the 20th so I'm looking forward to my break I've never really left my house without I have many animals and so I'm so looking forward to just being by myself um without animals I know that's weird to say but um I'm looking forward to

103my break it's been a hard first not having my wife this year so I'm looking forward to my break and I hope you are too have a good one thank you um I don't have much of a board update the only thing that I would like to say is that I'm really thankful that those families came and spoke at the last governing board meeting about the displacement I just want to say how grateful I am for the Family Resource Center I know our communication even the school Loma Linda where some of those children that are being directly impacted they've reached out and seeing how they can be a support system to that family so it's just really great to see not only crane Community but other non-profits and other community members really fighting for these

104families that are going to get displaced here in April we are going to be having a press conference in January so if anybody is wanting to go or speak or anything or just be there in solidarity with these families because it's not the only family that's being displaced GCU is doing the same thing up in the Avenues so if anybody wants information on that you guys can let me know and that's pretty much my update Now we move to I move the governing board approved consent agenda items a through H in accordance with policy bedb Dash e all those in favor Miss mcsheffrey aye aye and I and that brings us down to our Creighton Virtual Academy update thank you madam president good evening members of the board and executive team in 2021 we established

105the Creighton Virtual Academy in the time since then the team has worked tirelessly tirelessly to create relevant learning experiences that meet the needs of our children who for one reason or another prefer to learn in an online settings I'm happy to introduce Mr Guyer and the team from Creighton Virtual Academy Mr Guyer you before here I'm just going to take a second to get set up here what's this good evening Madam president members of the governing board an executive team and good evening members of our Creighton community my name is Jeff Guyer and this is my second year as principal of Creighton Virtual Academy we are proud this evening to showcase our students parents and staff and we're excited to share our highlights challenges adaptations and goals for the future most of CBA most of

106our students come from Creighton neighbor and neighborhood schools CVA currently serves 73 families with 108 K-8 students though we have enrolled more than 170 students so far this year CVA relies on six homeroom teachers one teacher coach a shared resource teacher our office manager and myself the Creighton Virtual Academy is a district-wide school and so we align ourselves with our district vision and goals you will see and hear about students teachers and parents having access to learning in multiple locations and modes while retaining anchors to our district goals we learn everywhere please welcome our teacher instructional coach Amber McLean evening my name is Amber McLean and this is my second year as the instructional coach slash teacher for Creighton Virtual Academy the goals that you see are our CVA goals because we align with our

1072022-23 district goals as well it is my pleasure tonight to introduce you to our students who will share some details about our goals and their personal Reflections about Creighton Virtual Academy I would like to welcome our first student our fifth grade student Cora Wasson Woodward good evening my name is Cora Watson Woodward and I'm a fifth grader at CVA and I was also there last year I have made the choice for CVA because of the worldwide pandemic that's been going on for two years now the CVA students recently took us survey about our experience at CVA the goals we have why we chose CVA and our goals for the future many of my peers chose CVA including me due to health concerns and or feel they learn better in an online environment as a student

108I feel really good and connected to the CVA I really like being a part of this school and I've become pretty used to an online format I'm satisfied with all the progress I've been able to do in the last two years at CVA my main goals are to keep up to date on my time tracker attendance and to improve my scores on my math tests my future plans are to stay and finish strong as a fifth grader then possibly transfer to in-person school for sixth grade here at CVA specials looks a little different each day we are given the opportunity to explore any of the specials areas offline or complete activities from our specials webpage online even though I'm not able to get to the web page every single day I'm already doing so many

109of the specials activities and I don't even know it outside of school sometimes I find the flexibility and choice helpful because I'm able to develop my skills in art music health and PE even technology my family can also support my learning by taking field trips together to places like the MIM or the Phoenix Symphony another thing I enjoy at CVA is our weekly SEL lessons and Community circles each Friday as a class we explore a social emotional learning activity and we have a safe place to share miss Monica Wu also comes into our classroom and teaches us more about our tone of voice and how we work well with others and how this can be seen emotionally by our peers especially since we are online now I'd like to introduce you to Layla and layout

110playlist online also good evening hi good evening okay let me just get back my name is Layla Barrios and I chose CBA because it was a school that was offering online classes I am in fifth grade with Mrs Higgins and I was also here last year and fourth I love it here at this school because it's so fun I feel happy here the the teachers and Mr guy and Miss McLean actually try to help me learn I don't like starting classes so early but I have to get up my goal this year is to improve in math with when I started last year my mom and I picked up all the supplies that are given to him person kids and I feel like I have the same supplies to learn as the in-person kids now

111lie out hello my name is Lyell Lopez Rodriguez and I'm an 8th grader at CVA and I was here last year I chose CVA because online school helps me focus and understand the subjects better than in-person school I am learning regular and also Advanced lessons in all my subjects the teachers gave me a little push to learn more a goal I have for myself is to turn assignments in on time it is a top priority for me my goal is to be successful at CBA and go to high school CBA will team up with the Creighton Academy next week for the Youth Equity Summit and that should be fun we also have two students on the crane Congress so our voices really heard and now please welcome Chanel is that youth um Congress or equity

112in person oh okay cool hi my name is Janelle Ines Navarro and I am a fourth grader at Creighton Virtual Academy and I was also here last year in third grade in my fourth grade classroom my teacher meso Tello helped me with my goals together we looked at my scores from my first exact path Diagnostics and after I took the second Diagnostics last week we looked at my new scores I was able to see my growth and talk with Miss Othello about what I can do to keep improving I was really proud of myself because I showed growth in all areas I'm going to focus on math to move my score to the next level here is my teacher Miss otello good evening everybody my name is Maria Sotelo I am proud to be teaching

113fourth grade for the second year at CBA this is a year uh this year as a staff we are targeting data to support planning after our benchmarks and Diagnostics tests we use our professional development time to dig into data and track our students growth using a school-wide tracking template this is extremely helpful when I am planning lessons for my students it helps me group students and also guides discussion discussions with my students about their goals uh thank you so much and here's Mr Ibarra Mr ribara is online with us Mr Ibarra is our sixth seventh and eighth grade math and science teacher here in California hi good evening my name is Lucy Vara and I'm in my second year teaching sixth seventh and eighth grade math and science at TVA my decision to work at

114CVA is based on gaining the experience of working in a U.S School while applying the Knowledge and Skills acquiring in Mexico working with middle schoolers has opened my eyes to appreciate all the possibilities that I have in order to help these kids learn and to become a better teacher day by day as an educator I intend to learn and use all these strategies and tools that CVA gives me to improve my work I was not mistaken in choosing TVA as my second home ultimately my family influenced my decision a lot since they are the most important thing in the world the flexibility offered by working on from different points such as Starbucks cafe or my mother's house has allowed me to spend quality time with them just a week of Thanksgiving I thought my classes

115from a cabin in Sinaloa Forest it's a 17 hours drive from Baja California I know it I know it sounds like I'm moving around but I promise most of the my kitchen time is at home I think quality time with my family being able to pick up my son from school every day and being able to return on time to continue teaching is a benefit that not every job offers the training and constant support that Jeff and Amber provide is a success that I must recognize since it is something that I had not experienced before in Mexico participation gratitude and achievement of goals from my students the satisfaction of being able to see the growth they have they had have from August to May I would like to be remembered the best masked teacher challenge

116to mention is the willingness of students to work online asking students to put down distractions such as video games and cell phones to turn their cameras on so they can be able to actively participate is a constant challenge parents participation can be challenging too since not all of them give a timely follow-up to their children's schoolwork it is necessary to be in constant communication through different ways even when we do not have always the favorable response thank you for the opportunity to share with you here is Bartolo my name is Bartolo quesada I'm in eighth grade and this is my second year at CBA I chose CBA because I personally feel that I learned better doing online classes and because CVS a flexible schedule and flexible learning space where it gives me time to get

117away from the screen and gives me enough time for myself I feel great being a cea student because I have teachers that love us to ask questions about the subject that we are learning and if we do not understand the teacher and Mrs McLean take time to help the students that need help and improve their grades a big challenge was getting used to the schedule and what time I had to log in for each class but I'm used to it now and it's working good for me my goal is to promote from eighth grade and with flawless great and get into a good high school with an excellent learning environment CVA selects dates throughout the year when we we get to come in person and learn I was super excited when I got to meet

118my teacher for the first time in October CV I also invited their students and families to the Fall Festival at the festival our teachers had a football throw booth and a lot of Booth I look forward to more person to more in-person days field trips and upcoming Child's Play show I enjoy being given the opportunity to join clubs like Battle of the books and Junior Ambassador creating artwork to display here tonight in the boardroom and also also join from Sports and in-person sites and now to tell you about their experiences as CBA parents please welcome Mr Navarro Estrada and Mrs Woodward Boston I just want to say how impressed I am with all the children so thank you to the parents for bringing your kids and giving this Insight it's it's awesome thank you guys

119my name is mucho [Music] that's yes good evening I am Veronica Hernandez and I am the office manager for CBA and I will be translating Miss Nevada's statement she says hello and good evening my name is Jessica Navarro and I have two children studying at CBA Chanel and Alexander in fourth and fifth grade I would like to tell you the reason why I chose this tool the first reason was due to the pandemic we were all very scared and for our family it was the best option for my children to study online during the year I noticed that my children learned more the teachers were always very attentive and especially and especially help my children to meet their goals I was pleasantly surprised by all the technology apps to which the teachers reinforce reinforce their

120learning also for me as a mother it is very important to know everything about my children the teachers and the principal have always been in communication with me which I am very grateful for my children have been been accurate in Virtual Academy for two years and the well-being of my children is very important to me and because of this my children will continue studying at CBA I wanted to keep going that was our presentation I really appreciate the chance to come and share with you oh my good course mom yeah of course Mom and Dad I'm sorry they're online I forgot about them and I but here they are they're amazing and this is Cora's mom and dad hi we could just say ditto um thank you so much for having us and for providing

121this space for our students um we are Cora's parents and um the things that I wrote down for this evening are that Creighton Virtual Academy gives us flexibility and allows us to support the decisions that our student would like to make about her own education and that having access to online education has empowered her to make those decisions I feel like she really sees that she gets to choose where she wants to be and how she wants to learn um we have a lot of gratitude for the community for the district for all of the teachers and everybody who's been involved with this because allowing this Virtual Academy to exists means that we get to have access to public school education in the comfort of our own home which is huge especially because we are

122also caretakers and need that kind of flexibility in our schedule to make sure that everybody's taken care of so thank you thank you thank you um I agree with with all of that we also would like to say that we would like to encourage the school to have an option for the kids to be able to meet maybe once a quarter in person I I know that uh core is always very excited when there's an in-person testing day and perhaps uh there could be that sort of excitement without a test being involved um you know so we we very much support that idea and field trips and anything that's um would create an opportunity for the students to spend time together because we can see that there are these blossoming friendships that happen through a

123virtual uh interface and I think whenever they get to meet in person is very special and I am extremely grateful to all of you thank you yeah thank you no um just a comment that I have I think it's very beautiful thank you for sharing all this information for us muchas Graces so I appreciate all that the only question that I have is more on the you know governing board side is how many of your teachers that you have staffed are actual double dipping and work like how many full-time how many teachers do you have at TCA and then they're also I mean at the Online Academy and they're also fulfilling roles at other schools we share a psychologist share a speech pathologist and we share a cross-cat resource teacher who is mostly assigned to

124students at CVA but also sees three students at TCA okay besides that there are no other for the most part it's just online teachers are online teachers and right okay thank you I don't know if anybody else has any questions or comments Ms Jeffrey since you're online do you have any questions or comments okay I do yes first of all thank you to all the presenters especially the students you all did an excellent job so um Mr Guyer what is the enrollment at CBA right now 107 students okay and I think this is a question for Mr Mann but whoever can answer this what is a sustainability of this school with that kind of enrollment that's a great question I'm going to go ahead and address it I'm in dialogue with the um Phoenix collaborative

125team and we one of our top subjects and topics every time we meet is what can we do to possibly come up with an IGA or a memorandum of understanding from possibly sharing um the even smaller numbers at their the few neighboring schools that have decided to keep it and they are actually looking to Jeff Geyer because he has just leapfrogged over almost everyone in terms of his expertise and his leadership so the Phoenix collaborative is looking at sustainability of this option and figuring out how to share funds in ADM and Staffing um you know that that would not be a Turf issue but we could still offer this service for all 14 of our districts together somehow so we're in beginning conversations about this but we don't have a magic number it is significantly

126cheaper than anything relative to a full office staff or anything that require players utilities or facilities per se so we have another year with the Esser funds to continue to explore it's cost you know it's it's return on investment so to speak and I think that'll give the Phoenix collaborative Network a chance to really grow something um by this summer I'm hoping thank you okay love um yeah I mean just I'm in the thick of that um but um thank you for your leadership in this I've called on you as I am running an online Academy as well um and it's I think you know what's not talked about often is that going into opening an aoi and Arizona online school is out after the pandemic is really helping families understand and students understand that

127this is not emergency remote learning you're not driving by while we Chuck a device through your car window you know this is a commitment and I think it takes very strong leadership strong staff and of course amazing families and students who have said this is the right fit for me so I just want to extend you know a huge gratitude I know the work that goes into it and sometimes it feels like you're flying the plane while you're still building it and it requires a lot of flexibility as you figure out what works and doesn't work and have to Pivot so um just I'm really impressed and Amazed by the community you all have built which is harder to do online so I really loved hearing again from the students and the parents it's just

128very heartwarming because we do want to recognize that this is a need and a Better Learning opportunity for some of our kids so we want to make sure that we can figure out how that's sustainable and how we can make sure that we have that option thank you Mrs just the same thing thank you for the unique presentation um it really gave us a great view into online it's a little bit different than what we were kind of thrust into as regular Educators so it's nice that you found people that love um doing that job and families that love what you do and the students are thriving so thank you for the presentation and also that we have teachers from Mexico that's amazing um that's that's great and I know the school system is very

129different so they have a lot of different Insight that we can use as a benefit for us I I'm a product of half of my public education in Baja California so um I know how the kind of school system is over there so that's even amazing too so thank you for everything that you guys are doing we've actually traveled I've traveled down there twice to bring supplies and to meet with the teacher and the teachers down there and Luis came up here for the in-person testing day as Corinne described but uh so we've we've been doing a good job of you know staying connected that way awesome thank you thank you all right and that brings us over to that brings us over to excellencia school update thank you again Madam president members of the

130board excellencia is a school that Prides itself on its core values and going to come forward tonight and share how they're bringing those core values to life every day with intentionality welcome Miss Fisher and the excellencia team their shirts X cares thank you guys for coming good evening Madam president governing board members executive committee we are very excited to come and share with you tonight um as Excellency has put some things together it might be a little different this evening good evening everyone my name is Andrea zayas and I am the effective schools coach at excellencia it is my pleasure to introduce you to tonight's intentions for our learning intention we have that we are learning about excellencia's initiatives growth and progress toward goals we have three success criteria tonight the first one being as

131the board we can identify and explain excellencia's initiatives the second one we can analyze excellencia's growth and finally we can summarize excelencia's overview of goals we did at this point on purpose because we wanted to introduce some things that you'll kind of catch the connection in a little bit as we look at all the things that connect to excellencies four main goals this year there are so many things to highlight and celebrate we read it through read through and we have limited them to these six and before you you see a choice board this is used in a lot of classrooms as an opportunity to increase student engagement as well as to differentiate so tonight we're inviting you to be active participants we have in our cups everyone from the governing board and since there

132are four of you and there are six choices we have asked Dr dupin and Dr Lewis to play along tonight as well we have two of our ex-ambassadors student students who represent in multiple ways we'll hear a little bit more about them this evening too and we have Serenity yurias and almost uh no Corona Carmona there we go all right ladies Dr dupin what which choice would you like to have um culture culture [Laughter] oh okay I'm ready I like it good evening you have any more members my name is am I going to have to answer questions about this yes take notes please my name is Lisa Lee's here at excellence our excellencia ambassadors continue to demonstrate leadership on our campus they are the first friends that new students make as they give campus

133tours and explain our school-wide expectations they also welcome families for our evening events such as our curriculum night and our upcoming Winterfest recently they supported the youth Equity stewardship event helping to guide and establish the framework for open conversation around diversity equity and inclusion this event was collaborate better police event we've got to work together they learned more about individuals culture and background foreign discussions and more communication activities so Excellency of school continues to create a culture of open communication and restorative practices our students recognize the value and have taken the initiative to identify needs to hold conversations on their own here to speak more of that are Serenity and subject they restored conversation is showing everyone what is right to us it is important because we get to show we get to teach youngers

134how to control their actions and emotions we use restorative conversations by asking them questions and what causes that situation an important thing students should should remember from our restorative conversation is to be to be to be respectful to others and show respect to one another and treat people how they want to be treated our experience with restorative conversations is we made 40 decisions in the beginning of the year and we decided to change our actions and put ourselves in younger shoes and make a change and help them change for their own good because they are young still and we helped we helped youngers make better decisions and we took time to ourselves to realize we need to become better people and we noticed how we acted towards each other and we came to an agreement

135we needed to change because we didn't like the way neither of us would act with one another we've seen fifth graders in the need of our help support because we know what it's like being in their shoes we didn't like seeing the actions they were making and disagreed with their actions we as X Ambassadors we decided to stick up with the youngers and leave them in the right direction as we grew we matured and encountered others feelings because we want excellencia to be a better place we've been chosen to be Excellency about ambassadors to make a change and show what's right at all times president kariola uh oh perfect uh Gardens able to finish our Gardens our first Garden we have Korean we have two more to go but our first Garden has to added

136some winter plantings everything from brassicas to Chile Gardens and salsa getting ready to come off but we've also added companion planting and so when you're sitting and working with kids and they don't see why a tomato and a marigold should go in the same container it's really fun to watch oh that can happen I first came to acts um six years ago or so Brewer and I hooked up and got the garden beds going again and did a lot of revamping and put a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears into it and so it during covet and everything everything kind of fell off but it's been so great to be able to like repurpose the space again back the garden um it's a personal passion of mine to get my hands in the dirt and

137it's just such a great joy to see the kids being involved in it too and learning about the entire process from seed to harvest and then production and just watching them light up and find a new new passion for something that they've never been exposed to before my favorite question of the day when we put the Garden in this year was a middle schooler looked at me and he said wait we just planted food so to give the students a connection to that and the natural world just getting their hands dirty was quite a experience for some of the students who don't spend a lot of time outside the connection to where their food comes from and that they can actually create the lifestyle that they would like to lead in the future is eye-opening

138and a wonderful experience it's really fun out here because I will never ever had anybody to help me and when I was a little kid we had to do it by ourselves and yes the owl is real we went out on a planning morning and we had put bells in the tree and we were talking about oh I really like the bells and we turned them like I went wait a minute who put the owl up there oh it's probably just one of those you know get rid of the pigeons I said no no I put the bells up I didn't put the owl up and all of a sudden you can move and it was just such a wonderful thing that early in the morning and he just sat and we had this very

139quiet moment it's very unusual to find a great Hornell during the daytime like that so it was um really special all right ladies who's next um Miss Ayers go with the growth and David that's a good choice I feel like I'm Family Feud great joke great answer great sir good answer [Music] um we had Excellency we are so excited for the growth and you've seen this Gruff before as we've talked about Diana since the very beginning of the year but for us to have to be a b school it was a first time in our existence and so there's a lot of celebration in that we live breathe every part of our being is about the idea of Ubuntu I am because we are and because we are I am this was not accomplished in

140a single grade level it was not accomplished by a single person or a single team it is really the heart of who we are and it took the effort of every team member support staff to be and to do what we were able to accomplish last year so in order to look at this just a little bit differently it was important to us not to look at just what happened in third grade one year and third grade the next year because you're not really testing the same students so we wanted to look at what that went over time with the cohort so if you notice the little colored bands the third grade goes to the fourth grade and the next one so that was a 14 growth in a single year that was huge when

141you consider that last year we had revolving cohorts that were having to be quarantined teachers who were being quarantined and I went on and on it's a little bit easier to see it when it's side by side in the graph note that third grade didn't grow from the previous year to this year there was no test in third grade the previous because there are third graders it's their first year they get tested but it gave you a kind of a baseline of where they had been here's math same scenario same cohort comparisons but if you'll note in every grade level there was growth for our letter grade we are the only School in the district to have received all 50 of our growth points and we are one of two schools that was in The

142Double dividges with proficiency we're very clear that we have a long way to go but gone did that feel really good we know that there are challenges and things that we are constantly considering this year is still hard we don't have a true normal that we think of normal yet it's just hard social emotional needs are running High we have referred more students to crisis this year than we have in the 10 years I've been in the district we have Staffing challenges constantly we have construction disruptions not so constantly anymore which is awesome our Benchmark data shows lots of really good growth but we're also very clear where we have to go back and and really Shore up some things our littlest Eagles probably took one of the biggest hits because our Kinders as they've

143come in if you keep in mind that for two and a half years they have not been able to resurvey Services of any kind so they didn't get DDS or DDD support they didn't get screenings if they found a child who was born with perhaps a hearing deficit they might have gotten the first six months worth of follow-up visits and testing but then because everything closed down there was no follow-through with that so we've had several hinders who've not been identified and not been able to provide supports before this year and we know that we're going to see that for a little while longer but it really was Vivid this year in comparison when our Kinders came in and then of course our constant commitment is not a K3 literacy Focus we're a K-8 literacy

144focus and we're finding ways to support our students who really struggle with reading regardless of what grade they're in all right ladies we're ready to move what's the next one Dr Lewis thinking maps okay we've got a good option foreign good evening my name is Taya Stanford I'm one of the instructional coaches here at excellencia and one of our initiatives this year has been the rollout and implementation of thinking maps which have been an incredibly useful tool for students to organize their thinking it's not just a graphic organizer it's a way to organize their thinking um and it throughout content areas classrooms and grade levels we've been fortunate enough to have three teacher leaders help us implement this on our site Addie Welsh Jacob Anala and Tiffany corneli and they've been foundational in supporting their

145teachers with implementation but also it has helped grow their capacity and their efficacy as teachers and leaders on our campus and in our district um we are excited about the continued development of thinking maps in our school let's hear from Addie Jacob and didn't foreign needs whatever subject you're working on whatever um concept you're diving into there's always a different way for those thinking maps to be tailored to that experience I use a curriculum map that recorder to it's kind of like a bubble map where students see the connections between our readings and then our essential question for the order we did a story on character setting in events so we need a bubble map to explain to describe who the character was and then we'll check information from that map um to write a

146sentence so our character's name was Lucas and then we made an arrow to draw how to form a sentence so using one of the describing words these students were only asked to write one sentence in the community but they were actually taking it upon themselves to write a sentence using every single bubble so it was really cool to see them understanding the use of the map and um categorizing that information to make it a bit simpler I also use thinking maps for our extended writing projects for their planning um for example this border they use tree maps to organize information on a character and then use a flea map so a combination of a flow map and a tree map to actually plan out their each paragraph of their essay so that they can then

147transmitted to the right track the whole is that once the kids get to each individual higher grade they'll already have a concrete understanding of each other thinking abouts and knowing the different ways and the different techniques to work with any of that so now I think in general the thinking maps rolling out to all the teachers is beneficial because when everyone's on the same page the students can succeed can we have another contested please miss mix Jeffrey hi oh no I'm just following Along on board docs um so I got a little loss at the beginning I'm not sure what we have left is it Clarity okay discipline and Clarity would be the last two okay I choose disappointment good evening my name is Lauren Arrowwood I'm the assistant principal at excellencia school so I'm

148going to give you an update on both discipline and attendance so this year we've had a lot of success with the significant increase in student attendance this year so last year our chronic absenteeism was 21.38 and this year for 2023 it's 13 so we've had a lot of time space and energy this year to really intervene with the kids that were missing a lot of school and put interventions in place with students and families to really get them to school every day in terms of discipline so these are our office referral comparisons so for 20 21 22 these are our referrals for both teacher and office managed behaviors so you can see in quarter one of last year we had just under 100 and then in quarter one for this year we have just a

149little over 50 office referrals and this is a compare comparison with the discipline referrals that required office support So this year for quarter one we were a little over I'm sorry last year for quarter one we were a little over 75 and this year we were a little under 25. so you might wonder why the big jump so we have a lot of celebrations in terms of discipline we used our Panorama survey from last year and we realized that there was a big need for clarity in our school-wide expectations so we had um four teachers from all different grade level bands work over the summer we worked every Friday in June and we put together clear expectations for the teachers for all of the different locations in the school and in addition like Ms considine

150mentioned for our culture we are really working on the restorative piece so really changing the mindset of teachers and our staff and our discipline team to get away from the traditional which is more punitive and then go towards that restorative piece which we call ex-cares at our school and that's just really focusing on people and relationships plus the accountability piece for when harm is done in the community so so with discipline we have three different pieces an instructional piece where we're teaching Behavior as a change agent the reflective piece where students are really reflecting on the behavior and how it's violated different relationships and the community and the last piece is the restore restoration piece so how can we restore the relationships that were harmed and and fix the Damage Done in the community thank

151you Miss Michaela for picking clarity I lost my choice quite clear on that so my name is Kyle hammerquist I'm one of the instructional coaches at excelencia and I hope I can make it clear what we mean by clarity as well as what our goals are hopefully you've seen through the presentations that a big emphasis at Excellency is on social emotional needs and students taking ownership of their learning and the environment and culture and that's what's helped us as coaches to push academics forward so for my session uh section I want to take you on a little journey as to where we came from with this idea of clarity and a couple years ago when uh move it hit you guys all know um it kind of disrupted the learning environment as we know it

152and the educational landscape changed we just yes just a little bit we just got this witness a fantastic uh presentation of some of what came out of that but what it forced us to do at our site here I am coaching and everything's online and I was like I've never taught online so let's dive in together what that could look like so you'll see what we started with was the distance learning Playbook we studied that because we're like give us whatever we can to try to learn how to do this to the best of our abilities and what we found was good teaching practices kind of transcend online in person anywhere else and so it kind of forced us and you'll see over the next couple years to do an introspective and peel back everything

153else and what is it that we can focus on so that we can have clarity as teachers and ultimately the teacher Clarity piece and you'll see up here as well we as a leadership team did a book study on the PLC plus that we've been starting to adopt a little bit in our plc's as well to go a little deeper uh that's in our plc's is where we look at the standards we look at our curriculum and we get clarity as professionals on what we want to teach our students so that our students have Clarity and what they need to learn and then we dive into the success criteria of how do I know that I've learned it and that's for the students as well as the teachers so we've been really trying to to

154hone in on what are the main pieces and a lot of that comes from John Hattie's work if you're unfamiliar with it I'd be happy to talk any other time I know we're running short on time but suffice it to say that at a 0.4 or higher our effects that anything he studied a lot of effects on student learning and things in that blue category are said to have in research push students a little bit farther than a Year's worth of growth so the point four being that average site and so some things that we focused on as a school classroom discussion and a lot of these things you'll see in the classroom but the stuff that we wanted to focus on classroom discussions has been a big goal of our district for many years

155and we wanted to continue pushing that forward not only does it deepen understanding with our students but it also gives our El population a chance to speak and learn feedback is another piece that that came out of our IAP process so all of these we didn't just take them from this we saw a cool chart but it was paired with Danielson that we have in our our district as well as our IAP findings and these are the three that we wanted to focus on the feedback and data and assessment and part of what that looks like this year we've got back to and our plc's really looking at data we have a data wall we move the kids around so we can really see and and look at how they're doing and how they're growing

156and then teacher Clarity that's been a big focus and if you look remember back to that timeline right after and online we actually started with this is really trying to have in every classroom learning intentions and success criteria and so when we go in it's part of our look fors and what we just started is trying to kind of have some data around that as well so when we go into the classrooms we like to ask students before we leave what are you learning and we're hoping that they can answer what they're learning and not just what they're doing and so we have a little kind of a little spreadsheet that we keep track just numbers of how many kids in our school of the ones that we asked could answer that question of what

157they were learning it started with a baseline a couple weeks ago like I said we're still in this process moving forward but at about 66 percent last week we were closer to about 75 percent of our kids that could answer that but our hope and our goal is that 100 of our kids in every classroom could answer that question and to give you a little brief I know our time but brief uh understanding of what we're looking for and what that looks like in the classroom you'll see a little bit of kind of some teachers leading that discussion at the beginning and some students answering that question started learning to classify new absolution we are learning about order of operations and that's criterate into the way and according to get what do you need to

158do to be vegetables identify an action verb in a sentence so we'll know that we do that when we can identify what an active verb is and explain how that that's it you get learning today today we will learn about classify new Solutions what are you learning today the last time foreign [Music] thank you thank you for participating with us tonight thank you for sharing and celebrating with us and we would love to answer any questions that we have I don't have any questions right now I just really want to reiterate how important that piece um the last piece that you were talking about the clarity and the going back and forth with the students um I didn't have that growing up so I think a lot of miscommunication and a lot of stuff can

159be caught if those conversations are being held in the classroom with the kids so I'm just thankful that you guys give the students an opportunity to have that dialogue back and forth instead of looking like an authoritative classroom you know where it's like no this is what you're going to learn and figure it out so that's that's awesome that you guys are doing that thank you I don't have any questions um just I appreciated the different format um and really the between this and the school visit I was able to do releasing how you 've been very intentional about that shift in the you know discipline in the relationships all those pieces and then Mr hamquist kind of brought up my favorite point is that best practices transcend they are the same online as they

160are in person and um really helping I think the last few years our teachers have been through a lot and in a variety of ways but to the level of you know and as I worked with teachers as a coach at the time starting to doubt themselves and starting to second-guess themselves um and and their craft and their art and what they know how to do and so I think it's just very clear that your staff and your team are I've worked very hard to make sure that teachers know you know you know this you are doing the right thing so I appreciate that intentionality Miss mcsheffrey did you have anything to add yeah I have a couple questions um first um do you do you have a practice of um calling parents to pick

161up kids for behavioral problems and and come and take them home and if so do you keep track of that data um yes we track all data that has to do with any student who is being seen in the office for a referral which would include if they were um you removing from the school is not a typical solution we prefer to relocate them on campus so that they are allowed and still participating in learning okay um and then I'm assuming that the biggest challenges you face um are Staffing and some of the challenging life circumstances that our kids face um if I'm wrong on that assumption please tell me and and if not what would you say your third biggest challenge is wow because those are two really big ones um I know I

162know for our neighborhood right now there's such a transient nature with the both gentrification as well as families that have been displaced um we have a much higher number of students who are shared homes or several who are living in cars that we are trying to help support so just um basic Living essential needs is a really big one for our families but the social emotional then goes with that one young lady a teacher was really concerned that she was wasting time in his class drawing and doodling and he was getting frustrated because he took it personally and so he went to one of the teachers that he shares her with and she said well let me see if I can find out a little bit more she said so when you find yourself doodling

163what's happening she goes I'm just sad I'm sad and I'm worried and she started to open up about some things that had been happening that personally at home it had nothing to do with school she loves being at school but she finds when her mind goes that direction doodling helps her come back to present place and so it's those kinds of things that we find out of the ordinary and we it's just being able to piece together some things and do the investigative work instead of just assuming a malintent we assume a positive intent and for most of our kids those are survival skills thank you absolutely any more questions Ms McCaffrey no okay just wanted to make sure thank you for the explanation I just I had a talk with someone the other day

164that you have to find out where our kids are coming from our kids are experiencing an immense amount of trauma and normally they do not have ill intentions um in doing things and it's fantastic that that person that student Knows A coping skill right um so thank you for the presentation I was a little worried at first because you had popsicle sticks and oh my gosh like I do this to my kids all the time um but that was very unique and thank you for sharing and congratulations on your scores again it was really amazing um how well you guys improved last year especially during a very hard time when kids were a little bit more wild and crazy and they kind of seemed to start to settle down a little bit more so hopefully

165you guys will keep your roommate and so thank you thank you very much thank you and Madam president just to highlight very quickly the student artwork on display this evening comes from both excellencia and Creighton Virtual Academy oh awesome and teachers and students are so proud for the opportunity to share their artwork with you in the space so thank you for creating that thank you I'll go look at it right now well if I can move but thank you all right that brings us to Future agenda items I do have a question um I know that we have a executive session on January 10th with the superintendent mid-year evaluation um is that still occurring okay I don't have any future agenda items I have a question and I have a future agenda item um question

166about the curriculum management audit RFP is that will that RFP states that this audit will be um presented directly to the board um like the findings will come to the board not um superintendent's office member Jeffrey this is Dr dupin um when we put out the RFP we'll specify how the report will be shared the typical practice is for that information to come to both superintendent and to be shared with the governing board but the the raw findings will be presented to the board okay so so I know that's the typical way I I want this to be an internal audit which is Again by an external company that's presented directly to the board so that um you'll get it you'll get it directly and an internal audit has a different connotation to so instead

167of Eric running his own internal audit which he does regularly the external audit will be presented to the board directly right so an internal audit is is when a organization is large enough to have their own internal audit division which we do not and the internal audit division reports directly to the board not to the organizational staff leadership so I don't want um there's no point in doing it if if it's not done that way so I guess I I think you understand what I'm I'm asking for because that's specifically what I asked for when I put this on future gender items like close to two years ago now um so I I wanna I I will not be interested in in seeing it if it's something that gets to go back to superintendo's office

168and then gets the be tweet and um it will be presented as the raw findings okay and then um I did send an email today what I actually think is extremely high priority is um an audit or investigation of our special education practices because I am concerned that our current practices have morphed into something that is not the most beneficial for our students and I'm also concerned that we may not be following state and federal law so I feel like there is a matter of urgency for that and I feel like jet also needs to be um and independent um investigation that reports again directly to the board yeah what I'm thinking there and I've been talking to Dr Dubin about it for a little while is let's begin with the last audit in mind

169then pick up where things went with the state monitoring and then what took the district through and out of corrective action and then begin with what I think will be the next appropriate move to move to a special ed audit again eight years later so it's a good cycle to study and I think you know we've heard certainly through some of the comments made during the study session earlier today that there are certainly concerns relative to Staffing and continuity so I appreciate and agree with with the Readiness that we have Okay and like I said it's a matter of urgency for for me um so if the curriculum audit needs to be bumped a little bit lower um I would like to see that happen sooner than later thank you let's take a look at

170where we are with staff thank you and Miss Jeffrey I saw your email too so I'm aware of the situation and we'll we'll follow up thank you you're welcome uh Miss Ayers do you have any future agenda items all right um You said you didn't read oh you did you I'm sorry go ahead scenario I might have to come here for January 10th okay so mindful of the order okay awesome all right or clone myself and with that being said I moved the governing board adjourned thank you everybody have a great night second oh I'm kidding second all those in favor hi hi thank you