Dysart Governing Board Meeting - February 23, 2022

001good evening at this time i'd like to call this regular meeting of the dysart unified school district governing board to order let the record reflect that all board members are present please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all before we get started tonight i just wanted to ask everyone to give me a thumbs up or give me some sort of signal in working at hospital i found i was exposed a couple days ago and just out of an abundance of caution from my fellow board members and i can't social distance i'm wearing a mask and i know it's hard to hear me sometimes so please

002just feel free to give me a thumbs up if you can't hear me with that move to recognitions and celebrations with b1 dance performance dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr pulling will introduce this item madam president members of the board cabinet and audience it's my pleasure to introduce west point elementary dance they will perform led by miss hannah bradio i've always been the one to say the first goodbye had to laugh and lose a hundred million times had to get it wrong to know just what i like now i'm falling you say my name like i have never heard before i'm indecisive but this time i know for sure i hope i'm not the only one that feels [Music] whenever you want it baby [Music] i

003knew that was the end of it all i [Music] should know [Music] am i falling in love [Music] every time everyone [Music] whenever you want it baby [Music] oh [Music] what a beautiful job y'all did i see some uh future dance company and palmies over there you guys are definitely on your way doing a great job what grade levels are represented my goodness excellent job thank you for coming yeah with this a different group or the same group oh perfect perfect i keep fighting voices in my mind that say i'm not enough every single light that tells me i will never measure up remind me once again [Music] [Applause] when [Applause] and i believe [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the only thing that matters now is everything you think of me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

004[Music] it at your feet you'll have every failure god you'll have it that was a stunning performance for sure beautiful thank you for coming um madam president that was absolutely beautiful and young lady you have a gift that was wonderful [Applause] next we move to b2 city of el mirage and surprise essay winners dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr pulling will introduce these students and would like to invite the board to come down to welcome them and congratulate them thank you madam president members of the board dr kels cadman audience so dysart partnered with the cities of el mirage and city surprise to host a my el mirage and my surprise essay contest for dysart students students submitted an essay that were evaluated on understanding of

005city services and amenities creativity clarity sincerity of thought and proper grammar each winner will be recognized or has been recognized by the respective cities so i'm going to call all four students if you are here if you would please come up and get a picture with the board so for the city of el mirage first place claire ibere el mirage school third grade city is yep [Applause] city of surprise grade winners for third and fourth grades caleb levitt freedom traditional academy for 5th through 8th grades casey dunn canyon ridge school [Applause] and for 9th through 12th grades valerie ortega at valley vista high school congratulations [Applause] thank you very much and congratulations again [Applause] all right next we move to audience uh with let's see seat one audience with individuals uh we have none next

006uh superintendent governing board updates do you won student update dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet we have jocelyn poundstone here from the dysart student leadership council to provide an update good evening madam president members of the board dr kellis cabinet and community my name is dawson poundstone and i'm a member of the dysart student leadership council at our most recent meeting we continue to work on an upcoming event for all the councils to get together and learn from each other we also attended the aasc state convention at north high school this weekend where we went to different leadership activities we did workshops and we listened to keynote speakers and we collaborated with a ton of other councils from all across arizona valley vista shatterage and daisar were

007all awarded with the title of outstanding council of distinction we're excited to be planning a spirit conference for all of the student councils in the upcoming may and it's going to be held at the westmech northwest conference we look forward to sharing more information and accomplishments with you all thank you next we have superintendent update dr kalas thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet um just want to acknowledge that we had a tremendous showing of athletes at state playoffs we enjoyed wrestlers and basketball players and soccer players and we are still keeping an eye on the valley vista girls basketball team and we will be recognizing these athletes in a near future board meeting so congratulations to all them also like to put a plug in for volunteers we have

008some pretty significant events coming up with the dysart festival of the arts and the vista center for the arts and also we are still open our classrooms are open our schools are open and we're ready to welcome volunteers back into our schools then i would like to just excuse dr dean who's in here this evening he's not having very much fun on a very large boat so and he's not watching online either i hope not next we move to governing board update anyone have any updates um i do have a couple of them um had the opportunity to attend the concert that was at valley vista uh featuring the shadow ridge wind ensemble led by mr forrest and also part of that concert was with the glendale community college community band and that was under

009the direction of bill humbert who is the director of the concert bands at gcc and bill and i go way back we were in marching band together honor band and orchestra and so it was great to see him and not only listen to a lot of great music that was put on not only by shadow ridge but then also gcc uh also attended and it was just on the spur of the moment visited cimarron springs with dr kellis to hand out a couple of extraordinary pins and thank you miss richards and also an impromptu band number by the band and they were good so thank you mr may for that uh also attended yesterday i went to rancho gabriela to see their win innervate intervention time and win means what i need and that is

010about 30 minutes of the students all of them do it and it's about 30 minutes of getting that targeted instruction for what the students actually need it's every morning it's for all grades each all the special classes and everybody meets incorporating the writing standards in english into the specials and such as art pe music so thank you uh mr kerr i think he's over there yes and also went to uh countryside for their tutu and tiara taco tuesday with tie-dye shirts it was a lot but it was okay and yes i did actually put on a tiara and a tutu and i looked great i think but it was awesome we had tacos and quite honestly that was the quietest cafeteria i had ever been in and i the once miss hessler and miss hill

011explained to me is that um each of the classes are getting points and so um they have a point point system that by the end of the year if they've followed all the rules and regs and are respectful in the cafeteria they get points and so um there were a lot of points for each of the grades so that was awesome to see so thank this thank you miss hessler and miss hill and also i received an email um from scott thomas who was our former architecture teacher at with the program over at shadow ridge and he shared that we had two shadow ridge students juniors emma davis and sebastian st germain that won the nahb national championship so this is the fourth unprecedented national championship that the student chapter at shadow ridge has has

012won and so it actually stands for national association of builders so quite honestly i needed to to say that because this month is still for the next couple of days we're still celebrating cte month so um congratulations to these two students i had to say that that's it anyone else okay next we'll move to item e motion to approve consent agenda items i'll entertain a motion i move that we approve consent agenda items with the exception of items f3 and f4 they be moved to action discussion motion made by crystal chapman seconded by tracy sorry sinkville yep yes please motion carries next we move to information discussion items g1 information on district insurance policies and coverage dr kellers thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet at the request of the

013board we have invited representatives from the arizona risk retention trust otherwise known as the trust to present to the board information about coverage and liability coverage for the district and with that i'll let mr hicks introduce our guests thank you very much dr kellis madam president members of the board it's my pleasure to introduce mr chris welker um acting attorney or lead attorney for the arizona risk retention trust thanks mr hicks and madam president members of the governing board dr kellis my name is chris welker and i am here as counsel for the arizona school risk retention trust i'm grateful for the invitation to be here this evening i'm here just to provide a very brief overview of the trust and certainly to answer any questions or engage in any other discussion that the board

014would like to to ask or engage in the trust is the insurer for the district provides various forms of insurance coverage for the district its board members its employees and agents primarily the the main coverages provided include liability coverage and that applies when a claim is asserted against the school district or its employees or administrators board members the trust provides liability coverage provides defense and indemnity for those types of claims provided that their coverage by covered by the trust coverage agreement with the district there are various other coverages property coverages there is administrative practices liability coverage that is of particular interest to administrators and and board members that type of coverage is provided for actions that are brought by the department of education or other governmental entities that can be brought against the district or

015its agents board members employees the trust always interprets its coverage agreements as broadly as reasonably possible to provide coverage uh as often and as broadly as it can now the coverage agreements that the trust provides the district do contain exclusions for various activities various acts various omissions that would prevent coverage so if an exclusion applies then the coverage provided by the trust does not apply and those things are determined on a case by case claim-by-click claim cause of action by cause of action basis whether something is covered or not cannot be determined until the trust knows exactly what is asserted and what is claimed but for purposes of covering the school district its employees and its board members the trust is the entity that provides that coverage if something is not provided by the trust

016or if it's excluded by the trust coverage agreements then there is no coverage available for the employees board members agents etc again the trust always interprets its coverage agreements as broadly as reasonably possible to provide coverage wherever it can and has had a long relationship with the district so that's a general overview in summary of who the trust is and what it does and what it provides happy to entertain any questions or discussion anyone may have but i don't have anything else prepared in advance but just wanted to provide that overview in summary and let you know who the trust is and what it does thank you for that information um do any board members have any questions i do go ahead down you can go first you mentioned um the exclusions is it possible

017for us to get a listing of those exclusions i know that they're you you can't guarantee coverage until you're presented with the situation but are there guidelines that we could be provided with absolutely in fact the district should have a copy of the coverage agreements that it has with the trust those coverage agreements uh outlined in various sections of the exclusions for instance the main section of the coverage agreement with the trust is appendix a1 that is the largest section regarding liability coverage and then section two of appendix a1 contains all of the exclusions to the liability coverage there are 35 specifically identified exclusions in appendix a1 the administrative practices liability coverage is endorsement 6a to appendix a1 and that has its own set of exclusions those are contained in section of endorsement 6a to

018appendix a1 again these are all agreements that the district should have in its possession if not i am more than happy to provide them thank you and do we know where we can find those like are they posted for us somewhere um madam president members of the board we have a risk manager she has our policy yes we'll get him emailed out to the board i'm emailing her right now thank you so if something is not specific to that exclusion um and there is some sort of lawsuit um if we create a policy and somebody doesn't like that policy and then they decide to sue us you wouldn't be able to tell if it's excluded until you actually know what it is correct coverage can only be determined based on the actual claim asserted and

019so until it's known what is being alleged or asserted it's impossible to make a coverage determination it has to be done on a claim-by-claim or or action-by-action basis in general terms the the coverage agreements will define what is covered in the ensuring language it will specify what typically is covered what types of activities and acts for instance in order for an employee or a board member or any other another agent of the district to be covered they must be acting within their authority granted they must be acting in their official capacity so someone outside acting outside for instance of the course and scope of their employment when something happens wouldn't be covered by the coverage agreements because they're not acting on behalf of the district at that time so generally speaking you first consider the

020insuring language to make sure that a claim that is asserted falls within the insuring language if it does then you look to the exclusions to ensure that that the acts alleged don't fall within one of the exclusions to coverage and again until those claims are asserted it's impossible to know whether the insuring language applies whether certain exclusions may apply okay and then another question as far as a mandate versus a law if congress has not made a law and this is a federal mandate then are we still within our i guess are we still able to create our policy if it is a if it's not written into law so if there's a federal mandate and then we create a policy it's not a law congress makes the law so i how would that work

021in a mandate versus a law again it would depend on the specifics it would it would depend on the facts alleged and the nature of the claim asserted before coverage can be determined but i'll i can quote you some relevant language for for instance from the administrative practices coverage there's an exclusion that may be relevant to to the hypothetical you're posing there's an exclusion for any uh acts allegedly or actually arising out of or contributed to by any acts or or or omissions where the results of the axor missions were intended or should have been expected by the covered party covered party meaning either the district its employees its board members under either an objective or subjective standard so again this mean this exclusion means these acts or missions are excluded if they were intended

022or should have been expected to be any dishonest or unlawful act or omission so the term used is if it's an unlawful act or omission that term unlawful is not defined but it doesn't just mean violation of a statute a federal statute it goes on to say that the exclusion applies to any knowing or informed violation of arizona or federal statutory requirements so it includes violation of statutes laws made by congress at the federal level or the arizona legislature but it's broader than that so it the exclusion applies to any acts that should have been known or expected to be unlawful that is broader than a violation of a federal or state statute violation of a federal or state statute is included in the in the exclusion but it's not limited to violation of federal

023or state statute so again without knowing the specifics of a claim or an action it's impossible to make a specific coverage determination but that gives you a general idea of how the exclusion reads it it excludes coverage for anything that was known or expected to be unlawful and the term unlawful you just said isn't really definable at this it's not defined in the coverage agreement we know because it includes violations of stat federal or state statutes that it's broader than simply a violation or federal or state statute so that's state statute and just to clarify for myself does that include any federal mandates again it depends on the mandate it depends on who's issued the mandate does it have the force of law so that violating it would be unlawful those are all the types

024of specifics that would have to be analyzed so what if a case were to go before supreme the supreme court and the supreme court upheld a particular lawsuit even though there's no law would something similar be considered a violation of a law even though it's not typically a law again it's difficult to prejudge without knowing the specifics of a claim or a lawsuit that's brought but courts can create law court decisions can have the force of law so following that conversation when we're talking about these exclusions and i'm sorry i wish we could have had that in really plain language back there but um a court case would be considered unlawful if we tried to go against a court case again without knowing the specifics it's impossible to render a determination without knowing the specifics

025of a claim asserted or or an action brought either by an individual or a government body it's impossible to make a coverage determination without knowing the specifics of a claim asserted but with that generally speaking courts can create law okay that that can have the force of law court decisions can have the force of loss or something certainly can be unlawful if it violates in the right circumstances a decision by a court with jurisdiction you know there's another exclusion to the general liability it's a little speed it's perhaps doesn't contain so much legalese the the liability coverage afforded by the trust is meant to cover fortuitous acts or omissions meaning not intentional generally liability coverage does not apply to intentional acts they're in what i mean by intentional acts knowing violations of law typically are

026not covered by insurance coverage or policies and the coverage agreement provided by the trust is no different it contains a very common exclusion that is often used in insurance policy insurance policies for any alleged or actual liability caused intentionally by or at the direction of the covered party so typically liability coverage is not afforded for intentional or knowing acts that are in violation of law it's typically provided for fortuities accidents things that are not intentionally done or knowing violations of law so if we were to you know hypothetically have an executive session and invite you back then we could get a little bit more specific with our questions hypothetically i would have to consult with that i would have to consult with the boards council to determine the extent and scope of the executive session

027and whether the law would allow such an executive session hypothetically if there was a policy being discussed and there was a lot of questions about the policy and the language of the policy whether or not it's lawful legal or not legal or not would the trust look at that policy ahead of time to say that that would not be a wise path to take or you can still go down it and not knowing what's going to happen but can they do it ahead of time the district is always hypothetically the district's always welcome to submit questions to the trust at any time the trust is there to answer questions but the difficulty is there can be no final coverage determination ever issued without knowing what a claim or cause of action is a coverage determination

028cannot be made in a vacuum on based on hypotheticals it can only be based on an actual claim asserted or an action brought either by an individual or a governmental entity the trust can provide as i am the language in the general exclusions that apply to its coverage but unless and until a claim is actually asserted it's impossible to make a coverage determination but keeping in mind the general principles are liability coverages are afforded for unknowing or accidental acts or omissions typically and again there are exceptions to every rule but typically liability coverage is not there to provide coverage for intentional or knowing acts or known violations of law and again that whole unlawful unlawful word is very subjective unless you know the specific situation correct without knowing the specifics it's it would be impossible

029to make a determination whether it's an act or omission was unlawful without knowing a claim asserted or a cause of action filed it would be impossible to know whether the cause of action is alleging an unlawful act but the and that is not a defined term so it will be given its ordinary meaning but the exclusion does apply to exclude coverage for acts that were either known or expected to be unlawful so if i just kind of give you an outline you can kind of give me uh maybe maybe not if i give you something more specific with more specifics we can provide probably more language from the coverage agreements that may or may not apply there still cannot be a specific determination on coverage unless and until there's actually a claim or an action

030asserted or filed well i have a question just in general um it was my understanding that as long as you're working within your scope as a board member then as far as any liability as well um you're not going to be personally held responsible as long as you aren't going outside of your scope of a board member then you're covered so is there something that you if that's not always the case are you able to provide some information on when that might not apply sure so as i mentioned earlier there is there are two primary components to determining coverage for any particular claim or cause of action first you have to determine whether the potential claim may fall within the ensuring language or the cover covering language and that includes whether the person against whom

031the claim is asserted was acting within their official capacity course and scope of their employment if so then they're a covered party so that's kind of the first hurdle to get over is the person against whom the claim is asserted a covered party were they acting within their official capacity that has to be met for their for the coverage to apply any time someone is acting within the course and scope of their employment within their official capacity they meet the definition of a covered party so that the insuring language could apply but then the second determination is are there any exclusions to that apply to the coverage so even though a person an employee a board member may be a covered party because they were acting in their official capacity or in the course and

032scope of their employment they could still be subject to exclusions to coverage which is the second analysis they may be covered as a covered party but then does the claim or the lawsuit or the action brought assert acts or omissions that would give rise to an exclusion for coverage and the the hypotheticals or general issues we've been discussing touch on some of these exclusions where there are exclusions for intentional or known acts or omissions that are unlawful or that violate there's another exclusion i can give you this language too there's an exclusion for known for any alleged violation of statutes regulations penal quotes or ordinances committed with the knowledge of the covered party and knowledge is defined to include whether the covered party actually knows or reasonably should know that the acts or omissions may

033violate the statute regulation penal codes or ordinances at issue again the general idea being though a covered party may be covered by the insuring language because they're acting in their official capacity or within the course and scope of employment the exclusions may then take away the coverage to the extent the acts oral missions fall within one of the exclusions and for our purposes if we've been as we've been discussing those could include intentional or knowing acts okay so let me give you a hypothetical but make sure i understand this so let's say for example speaking to that exclusion about should have known i don't know if that's exactly what you said not is that should have known or had reason to have known actually knows or reasonably should know that the acts okay or emissions

034will violate a statute or ordinance or penal code so maybe how this could fit is are you saying like for an example the board writes a policy that they want to paint every every building in the district pink and in in writing that policy the attorney says i really wouldn't do that and we say well we're we think we're within the law we're going to write this policy and then someone sues us personally is the attorney that said i wouldn't do that kind of us reasonably should have known does that fall into that exclusion i don't know of any law outlaw outlawing painting buildings no no no that was a total hypothetical yeah no i i'm in other words if whatever the whatever the ish the policy is if in the midst of drafting it

035the attorney says ex uh expresses concerns or advises against and the board does it in a way where they they feel is within the law or tries to be very careful about it whatever and and and it passes and it's a and it's a policy and then someone brings a lawsuit forward and um not just sues the district but also individual board members as their own person that exclusion that speaks to should have reasonably known is that position going to hold up simply because you should have reasonably known because your attorney told you you shouldn't move forward do you see what i mean i do i understand the question so again with without seeing the specific claims or the specific lawsuits it's impossible to make a coverage determination but in general terms or discussing general

036principles if an employee or board member or anyone is sued individually and accused of knowingly violating the law and it it is shown that it was a violation of law there is a risk that that exclusion would apply and and so that there would be no grant of coverage to the individual accused of knowingly violating the law well no that's assuming they i don't think and i would hope nobody would openly try to violate the law and write a policy that was definitely unlawful i'm saying things are up to interpretation and if someone out there says i i think that's wrong and i'm going to sue you for it that's what i'm talking about and and so to your hypothetical if if an individual had been advised that their acts were unlawful and then someone

037another individual ultimately sues the employee or agent of the district saying in fact the the la the acts were unlawful yes the the the information that the employee or representative of the district had received would be relevant to determine whether they had should have reasonably known that their acts were unlawful so any and all information would be relevant to that analysis including advice given by other board members by council by administration all of that would be relevant to determining whether an individual reasonably shouldn't have known they were acting in an unlawful manner thank you so what happens if there is an exclusion what happens if we create a policy and then somebody decides to sue us and the upcourt the court upholds the lawsuit what are what are the ramifications of that even if there

038isn't if there is an exclusion and then if there isn't well if if the lawsuit filed is against an individual who is acting in their course and scope of employment or within their official capacity so that they're a covered party and the lawsuit is the type that is covered by the coverage agreement and no exclusion applies then the trust provides a defense and ultimately potentially indemnity for that individual if an exclusion applies and again that only can be determined once the claim and or lawsuit is filed to determine whether the exclusion actually applies if individuals are sued personally and individually and an exclusion applies so that it is not a covered claim then the trust would not step in to defend or indemnify if the exclusion does apply to remove coverage okay so let me

039just make sure i understand if there is no exclusion and if something happens somebody decides to sue the district there's no exclusion um worst case scenario we end up having to pay out the money are there consequences from that are we going to lose insurance or anything like that that gets into um the district's loss history the district pays contributions into the trust and those are based in part on the district's loss history so it could affect the amount of the contributions for the insurance but if they're if a claim is clearly covered and the party against two bits asserted is clearly covered and no exclusion applies again then the trust will defend and pay for any covered claim down the road it could factor into the to the district's ultimate contribution for the insurance

040going forward that would be the case of everything's covered and no exclusion applies again on the flip side if an exclusion applies or the claim asserted does not fall within the insuring language it's not covered then the trust again would not provide the defense and would not pay the claim thank you so to that point um if there's an determined that there's an exclusion and board members are not covered then each board member would be responsible for their own legal service is that correct correct if the trust does not the trust is the insurer for the district and its board members and its employees so if the trust does not provide the coverage then the employees board members would be on their own to provide their own defense to look to whatever other sources of

041insurance they have okay thank you so it all depends on that one definition unlawful i don't want to i don't want to put it that simply because the coverage agreement is hundreds of pages and there are 35 exclusions just in appendix a1 and there are multiple endorsements and other appendices and so again it's it's not as simple as it's just this one exclusion that was one relevant exclusion for the hypotheticals posed um but there could be numerous provisions relevant to any analysis of coverage for a given claim thank you any other questions um yeah so i i know that there are statutes at the federal and state levels and laws and case law that that you have to consider and this board considers those as well um but i am wondering hypothetically if you're presented

042with a situation and you analyze that situation yet you have two separate case laws that contradict each other or two statutes you know a federal versus state how do you determine whether that's the intent to go against one of those laws or statute that's all part of the analysis that's why it's so dependent on what the specific allegations are made against the district or an individual the coverage determination cannot be made without analyzing the specific allegations of a claim that's asserted against the district or one of its agents or representatives the specifics of the claim is obviously vital to the to any analysis of the coverage just one more example because i mentioned that there are numerous exclusions and numerous provisions there's an exclusion to coverage for any alleged or actual liability which is caused

043by or done at the direct direction of a covered party with the covered party's knowledge that the occurrence or offense or wrongful act would violate the rights of or injure another person and again this is it says in this exclusion for purposes of the exclusion knowledge shall conclusively be deemed to exist when the covered part party actually knows or reasonably should know that the acts may violate the rights or injure another person so that's just one more example there are numerous but that's one more exclusion that could be relevant to any coverage analysis for a claim asserting someone's rights are violated a knowing act an act that knowingly violates the rights of another is part of this exclusion thank you thank you very much for all your information appreciate thank you again for the invitation

044it's a pleasure to be with you all right next we move to g2 update on restroom use dr kalis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet at the request of the governing board administration is set to provide some information regarding the use of restrooms within the district we have several pieces of information that several of us will be presenting so first of all i'd like to just talk about why we're talking about this and this is obviously to protect the privacy of students when they're in the restrooms one of the things that we have been looking at as ways to look at the physical facilities that we currently have and how they might be retrofitted to provide more privacy for students and then we also have an estimate on what

045the cost estimate would be to provide additional human resources to monitor student safety or privacy in hallways or traffic to and from restrooms and we have also developed and communicated procedures regarding the use of restrooms that the board has had access to not the restrooms the procedures and then just as a note that these procedures have been communicated to administrators through professional development training and then the board had asked for information about the types of accommodations that students receive whether it's medical safety or other for the use of restrooms so to start off with the first would first couple of items the estimate for retrofitting bathroom facilities to ensure greater privacy mr ken hicks will provide this information thank you very much madam president members of the board and just looking at our restrooms we

046have over 1600 restrooms or fixtures within our district but just looking at groups at the school level we have about 161 groupings of restaurant restrooms that have multiple fixtures in all of the locations and so looking at if we were able to reconfigure and look at it the option two that was put before the governing board to reduce out and take out all of the fixtures the urinal fixtures and then extend the the doorways which would require some metal doors and frames to extend to increase privacy within those would be about sixty thousand dollars is the estimate we have to do that if we did that now there's a caveat we have not researched the ada requirements and other health code requirements of the number of fixtures on every facility there are health code requirements

047of number of fixtures you have based on your occupancy and anticipated occupancy and such and so our facilities director has started looking into that and has not got a response back on that so that is why um if i looked and said could we take one of those groupings and do this modification so it would be only one at every heist at every elementary and then one per building at the high school so that would create approximately only 43 instead of 161 groupings to kind of whittle it down that would be around 2.5 million dollars to make that modification and then the other cost requested for me to look at was to if we had a restroom monitor um if we paid that person on a 190 say 97 day calendar at the minimum wage

048knowing that minimum wage is going to go up in january since that is the one thing that's tied to inflation will guarantee to always go up and so um just estimating um what that would be the second half of the year um the total cost is around with benefits for a fully um fully benefited person full fte there's about 30 a little over 32 000 a year for that position total cost of the district that's not that's salaries the arizona state retirement and also the fica as well as the medical benefits also following that same lineage of one um one per k-8 um and then at the high school putting one at every one of the one building per building would be 43 of those which would cost about 1.3 million if you only did

049one per site it's about eight hundred thousand so eight hundred thousand one percent one point three million if we did added a little bit more for each of the buildings at the high school level and that was just my own editorial cost of adding the high school and there was no reasoning behind that except for just wanted to provide one thank you mr hicks the and we can come back and take questions the next one was procedures for students who request to who request assistance with bathroom use and when we talk about requesting assistance there as i mentioned are multiple categories there's could be for medical reasons it could be for feelings of feeling safe as they need to use the restrooms it could include being allowed to leave class a couple minutes early there

050could be some some emotional issues with using the bathrooms in public where they're allowed to have an accommodation to leave early or be late or whatnot and then any mixed gender type accommodations and so those those procedures have been provided by the board i think they're in the word packet but basically to start off with if a parent or guardian or a student presents to administration a request for assistance the administration will meet with the student and the parent to make sure that both are part of this plan they will develop a personalized plan including available options to use other restrooms such as the health office it could be a private single use restroom the communication with staff to make sure that there's an awareness that if a student is out of class early for

051whatever reason that they know that they have permission to do so so communication and then obviously the monitoring of the plan and then these plans would be reviewed regularly to make sure that they're working or that they need to be revised it's important to know that every employee currently is responsible for student safety at a school and that includes monitoring restrooms and locker rooms employees and students must report any misuse abuse or misbehavior in and around restrooms or locker rooms and then if if that's the case then those reports would be investigated just like any other report of misconduct and then regarding the meeting with administrators last week there was a full all administrator meeting and these procedures were shared with the administrators and then the question was about the accommodations the number of accommodations

052that are being provided four restrooms and we have collected that data and dr pauline will share that information thank you madam president members of the board dr kelson cabinet um dr dean and i did reach out to our principals who you know you supervise different principles and to get an estimated number of of how many students are on you know a commission plan and um for the medical category probably about 27 students across the district k-12 for safety plan about eight about eight students across the district and for gender identity about seven across the district k-12 those are the ones that have approached and made a plan so with that information we're open to any questions from the board i'm sorry could you repeat those numbers again yes the first number is 27 the second

053number was eight second number her third number was seven what were the the 27 was uh for medical like an iep or or uh health and safety or health plan second category was for uh safety that was eight and the third was for gender identity and that was seven okay thank you you're welcome dr kellis when you were going over the the safety plan you you quoted it i think correctly however in print for the step two um the school administration will meet with the student or parent or guardian but you stated and uh ms desmore thank you for that clarification it is the intent that whenever this plan is developed is done with both students and their parents or guardians right but in print it's ore we will correct that thank you okay so

054do we currently do we currently have students using restrooms based on their chosen identity not their biological identity madame president miss jaffen yes so if i don't want to use the restroom with a biological male i have to get my parents to sit down and meet with an administrator to come up with a plan madam president miss chaffin if you and your parents would like to meet with administration to discuss the uh challenge that you have or the the concern or complaint then yes that would be done with the administration and then so what if we have i don't know ninety of of our pers ninety percent of our students asking for individual bathroom plans and we've got forty five percent of those who are you know being released from class early third period and

055then 45 percent of those who are late to fourth period we've got a ton of students wandering around the halls how how do we anticipate to monitor that madam president miss chaffin right now with our current numbers we are not seeing that volume and right now the plans that are being developed are definitely manageable so as far as the what ifs if we had that many then we would have to regroup but we're not seeing that happening right now so what would you say what would you say to those parents who bring up the loudoun county virginia incident where there was a boy who identified as a girl on two separate occasions in two separate instances and sexually assaulted a young female in the restroom at one high school and then identified as a girl

056went into the women's restroom and continued to sexually assault another girl um what would you say to those concerns madame president chaffin the details of that incident there's many details i think you gave a brief summary there were other details of that case that are specific to that case as we have included in the plan that we do not tolerate the misuse of restrooms and what happened in lounge county could happen in any restroom across the america america schools airports movie theaters anywhere where there is ill intent and misbehavior so as it says on the plan that any misuse or abuse or misbehavior would be should be reported we still have boys restrooms and girls restrooms and if students are inappropriately using or accessing the restroom then there are consequences to that so we we

057really can't do anything until something has already happened and what about locker rooms what if i am in a pe class and i do not feel comfortable what if females or males don't feel comfortable undressing in front of someone of the who is of a different biological sex madam president miss chaffin um just to clarify your first statement that we can't do anything until something happens is incorrect we do have as i stated in the plan that every employee is responsible for monitoring the safety of students on campus including restrooms and so that is preventative as far as students in locker rooms this these procedures also apply to locker rooms and individual plans can be made i have a question so um so we have seven seven students right now with plans and that's the

058circumstance of a potentially a biologically male student using a female bathroom and a biologically female student using a male bathroom right madame president that is correct okay so um and it looks like just based on this plan here you're saying that um you know the step one would be the parent or guardian um needs to be involved and requesting a conference to have that happen i'm assuming so not everyone is just randomly using whatever bathroom i'm correct madam president that is correct okay so what if and again honoring the rights of of everyone and looking out for the safety and discomfort of everyone what if you have a student who say feels uncomfortable going into a bathroom where they know a student of a different biological sex is going into that same bathroom and they

059feel uncomfortable with it but they they don't necessarily have the opportunity to tell their parent hey because this is happening at my school can i have a plan to go to the nurse's office if i want to or you know what i'm saying to where i don't know that we should require and i don't know because i again i it's new area as far as the legalities and everything of it but i feel like we need to make sure all of our students are comfortable and if there is a student who maybe witnesses another student that's not that identifies with a different gender than their the bathroom and they don't want to go in there they shouldn't feel forced to or feel like that's their only option because they haven't had a conference i feel

060like we should be able to just in general allow if a student doesn't feel comfortable going in there then if they want to use the nurse's bathroom then that should be like no questions asked they should be able to do that so they're comfortable because they're not going to be able to in the moment say oh i i got to talk to my parents about having a conference madam president i would agree with you 100 percent that no student will be will be denied access to a restroom where they feel private fill the need for privacy and i would confidently say that anytime a student goes to the nurse and asks the nurse to use the restroom that they would not be turned away from using a restroom in the nurse's office if this becomes

061a norm i mean they're they're if the student's in a little bit of a crisis right there and needs to use it right away then we're not going to ask to have a conference with a parent but if this is something that the student feels like there's a need for ongoing and continuous then it would be required that there's a meeting with the parents to work out this plan so an ongoing issue could just mean they know that there's maybe a student on their campus who's transgender and uses their same bathroom they would have to have their parents come in and have a meeting to get them excused from using their right their their bathroom that they had been using so they could go to a nurse's office to use the bathroom madam president with

062such any time a plan is developed it would be developed with both the student and the parent i i don't know i i think we might want to consider changing that step one only because um i mean i underst i don't know i'm torn on it because there could be several students who maybe you guys are going to have meetings all the time then you know if there's students that say i just don't i i want to have privacy or i don't feel comfortable being a a girl in a bathroom where there could be a boy or being a boy in the bathroom where there could be a girl coming in and that maybe is that's unfamiliar to them and their family or uncomfortable um that they should without causing a big thing of maybe

063parents taking off work or having a huge meeting to say hey can i just if you know they're not telling people they can't go in the bathroom they're just saying i want to go into a bathroom where you know the door goes all the way down or i can shut it or whatever whether it be a staff restroom or a nurse's bathroom that that should be allowed and then in regard to um on this valley vista plan as far as delete the urinals patch walls i don't i think that's a lot of wasted money to spend when you can i don't know why you have we would have to rip the urinals out i think that again looking at the comfort level of all students because you know we all have different opinions and different

064lifestyles and i don't think one lifestyle should trump another and there's the truth of the matter is there's going to be kids that are uncomfortable and that's that's okay for them and i don't want anybody to feel um at a disadvantage if they say they don't feel comfortable so as far as again using those two other options for bathrooms if we were to retrofit um you know adding the the doors that go all the way down in the stalls as an option i think would provide some privacy for students that feel they need it but then as far as the monitors 32 000 per position that's an awful lot of money um when we have students or the earth teachers the expectation it'd be in between like passing periods and things they're supposed to be

065in the halls kind of monitoring student behavior so if i'm outside my classroom and and that's the bathroom then i just watch it you know i and it's it's it's not like a because you were saying as far as to miss schaffen's point of you know doing something when it's too late and you had mentioned well everyone's responsible kind of for watching we can say all of our staff are responsible for student behavior but we know we have student behavior problems so i think i don't think we can we can be as hands off with it and just assume that if something happens we'll report it i feel like because of you know times are changing and and now we know we have um transgender students that are using bathrooms that they identify with which

066could cause some discomfort for some students that we need to be more deliberate maybe in our planning of not necessarily hiring people at 32 000 but just again if i'm that's the bathroom and this is my classroom i'm just watching the bathroom so and then to that point so during passing periods students can feel like okay if i go in this bathroom especially before we get the retrofit done if that's what we do um i know that if i'm if i'm uncomfortable if another student comes in who's not who identifies differently with a bathroom then um there's a staff person there like maybe that will give them a feeling of security or safety and i don't want to speak to it too long because everyone's different and to one to some people they could say

067that's ridiculous why are people upset well that's some kid's realities just like i mean it goes both ways so again honoring the position of all students i feel like um we have to be mindful of that and so that in between passing periods someone's watching but if someone has to go the bathroom in the middle of class then i think because of i think we need to be flexible in there's a student knowing okay no one's watching that bathroom my teacher's not watching like they normally do i'm going up to the nurse's office we can't have nursing staff turning students away or saying no you have to go to the other bathroom we have to make sure the message is clear that it's allowed madam president yes um so lots of comments to respond to

068as far as ripping out all the urinals um one proposal could be that there's one modified restroom at a in a building or where students know that okay if i really want that privacy this bathroom has the the all the way to the floor and almost the ceiling doors um in both the boys and the girls bathrooms um the urinals could be taken on just the one bathroom because they secret to all who don't use the boys restroom there are no partitions um on the urinals but you could just choose not to use them if you were uncomfortable that's correct and so those could be those could stay there as far as the cost for the the doors and the the partitions um the sixty thousand dollars could be reduced by uh minimizing the scope

069of the of the retrofit as far as teacher monitoring of hallways yes that is an ongoing expectation for all of our schools is that during passing periods referring to middle schools and high schools who have passing periods um that yes that there are teachers in the hallways that they're monitoring to guarantee that every teacher is going to be stepping outside their door there might be a student who's asking the teacher some questions after class they will try very diligently to assist the student and know that they need to be out monitoring as far as a restroom monitor the the position that mr hicks mentioned that was a suggestion certainly not something that would make or break the plan because as you mentioned all employees are responsible for student safety everywhere on campus there are opportunities

070to monitor students not just in the bathrooms but in the cafeterias the playgrounds the hallways everywhere and we take that that responsibility seriously um so yes as far as monitoring the restrooms as part of the responsibility of the staff and it's not just a teacher's responsibility for the students the safety of students it's everybody's responsibility um that would definitely as it mentions in the procedures is part of the plan so these procedures basically speak to to students um who are not transgender um we couldn't create procedures for students who choose the transgender lifestyle president miss jeffen just for clarification these procedures are not for any particular group of students any demographic of students this would be for any student for whatever reason is requesting an accommodation it's just cut sorry go ahead you go ahead

071okay i was just going to say it kind of reads like cisgender students have to go out of their way to make sure that they're comfortable and most students don't care what particular lifestyle anyone chooses like i don't care what you can identify whatever you want to don't really care live your life but most a lot of students do not feel comfortable and i'm sure they're students in our schools who are using restrooms not with their biological sex that administration and parents don't know about um i guess it just seems to me like we're having to cater to one small group of students the cisgender students are going to have to go through this whole process just to make sure that they can use a restroom without having to be in front of somebody of

072the opposite biological sex but that's assuming that that that that that person hasn't already made accommodations you're assuming that the other person has not made accommodations are you talking about are you talking about the transgender student yes so if a transgender student gets accommodation to go into the opposite sex bathroom so now we have cisgender students who are going to counter that to go to a private restroom it just it seems kind of complicated it seems pretty simple to me they can they ask her transgender whoever has asked for an accommodation through the parent and there's the procedure has the district received any complaints from anybody regarding this procedure about a student going in inappropriately to the bathroom or locker or whatever madame president miss grant um that's a impossible question has the district hypothetically

073the if any individual in the district has received a complaint i can tell you that the superintendent's office has not received any complaints about this um as far as as has a teacher received a complaint has a custodian the district is everybody so i i would i would has that made it to the superintendents uh madame president mrs grant no it has not okay thank you well maybe it hasn't made its way to the district office because people just don't know that it's happening on a regular basis maybe you can always assume but maybe maybe people just haven't been made aware people like who maybe haven't been made aware maybe but you said earlier that most students really don't care so most students probably don't go home and tell their parents oh by the way

074so if there is a student that is uncomfortable i'm sure they would have i would assume they've told their parent and it's not been i don't know if a principal we haven't surveyed the principles to ask them but if there's a problem i would like to clarify that most students probably don't care about somebody's choices but they do care they might care when they have to use a restroom with somebody of a different biological sex like they i mean they don't care what you do as long as i don't have to use the same restroom and as you do whatever you want to do but then when it starts coming to them using the biological the restroom with somebody from a different biological sex that would make them uncomfortable because then it affects them and

075again we're going to assume that i i think according to all of this these students the transgenders etc have asked for accommodations and i don't know if there's other students out there that have never asked for an accommodation maybe but i don't think they want to bring attention i mean there's a whole lot of other things we're going down a very slippery slope right now i'm not i think we could what if forever and a lot of what-ifs can happen today and it has nothing to do with um that person's choice of life it can happen just because so this is a restroom and locker room safety plan um so getting away just from the gender piece for a moment yep it in step three we're talking about employees and students must report misuse abuse

076or misbehavior in restrooms or locker rooms to the school administration how are those things being handled right now um potentially for bullying or vaping or maybe some other inappropriate activity that's going on in the restroom spitfalls i don't know something ripping out sinks tick-tock challenge right madam president miss densmore per the discipline matrix there are different violations of of behaviors so depending on what the violation is if it's bullying we have a bullish bullying consequence if it is destruction of property then there's a vandalism consequence the discipline matrix outlines multiple pages of behaviors that those behaviors could apply to and that isn't necessarily specific to the bathroom but anywhere if it's vaping the same thing tobacco all those would fall within the designated discipline category but do we have a schedule where some staff members

077are really truly monitoring those restrooms or you know those hiding spots where things tend to happen madame president densmore i think it would be dependent on school by school generally if you look at the lower grades they're the students walking online escorted by a teacher from place to place as you get older into the middle schools and the high schools um typically the general supervision is um is assigned for before and after school lunch time there are duties that teachers have they tend to rotate those then or depends on the school okay um but as far as one of those assigned duties being the restrooms i would say probably not but that would be the general you're in charge of this hallway you're in charge of that hallway for supervising that would be dependent upon

078each school's plan okay in regard to the locker rooms um again not violating anyone's being careful not to violate anyone's rights or putting restrictions on anyone how does that look as far as if [Music] male or female identify as one or the other they're in a locker room with their peers and you're disrobing we can't make them [Music] separate out to go somewhere else but we can't that how is that handled then madame president with regard to locker rooms i think you would see that there is definitely some pre-planning that happens and that we consider the privacy of all students in that plan probably have some very close communications with our attorney on that one okay so what does that look like when you say um each student has a plan can you kind of

079give me a little bit uh more specific what that what that might look like man president chef and i would say right now with the plans that we currently have in place that schools have with the various categories that were mentioned with medical safety and and gender they want to use the nurse's office and then for those monitoring locker rooms are the pe teachers responsible for monitoring locker rooms am i president miss chaffin yes yes so they're the ones um when they get these requests the pe teachers especially have to accommodate them whoever it is in their locker room and while they're monitoring it the pe teachers are basically kind of enforcing these uh procedures in the locker rooms and president yes the pe teacher if it's a pe class is the adult supervis responsible

080for supervision of the safety of students if it's a athletic team then the coaches but the employees of the district the adult employees of the district are responsible for the safety of students in the locker rooms on the court anywhere but yes absolutely in the locker rooms and then how how do the pe teachers feel if there is a male pe teacher and he has a biological female and this biological female is trying to just stay under the radar just really wants to identify as a male just trying to keep their head down what if that puts the male pe teacher in a compromised position where he doesn't feel comfortable being monitored over this biological female memphis chaffin as as i mentioned just minutes ago that plan would have to be very carefully drafted with

081the assistance of the attorney and typically we would make sure that the rights and privacies and the supervisory responsibilities and comforts of the staff are all taken into account just a couple of quick questions dr kellis um we don't have locker rooms in elementary schools correct um madame president of source think bill i'm looking tour the person who knows every inch of this district mr hicks i would say no but as soon as i say no there's going to be one somewhere not that quick but i would say no no so we are looking at the high schools for this and in the high schools speak into it you had just said miss chapman we have not only male high school pe coaches and female high school pe coaches so i would like to think

082that they would be part of that plan that if the male pe coach was not comfortable in supervising or that particular area i believe i hope that he would be he would be able to team up with that female high school coach in order to alleviate anything like that well my question to dr kellis mr hicks what would that look like because typically the men's locker room was over here the women's locker room was over here the boys were over here dressing out and then the girls are over here dressing out so if you have a female who identifies as a male and that male pe teacher is uncomfortable but this person has an accommodation to where they can undress in the male locker room i want to make sure our staff members are protected

083too because i mean anybody can make any sort of accusation madam president miss chef and you're correct and as i mentioned that that would be a significant part of the plan and just to clarify also there are girls and boys locker rooms absolutely for pe and there are also athletic locker rooms that are very closely and separated from but close to the the pe locker rooms so there are two boys locker rooms two girls locker rooms and there could be some some greater privacy it could also be done in the nurse's office it could be done in other private areas in the area typically as as you mentioned most people don't want to draw attention to themselves and they want to [Music] have the the discrete protections of their own privacy and are very willing

084to find private areas where they're not making other people uncomfortable or drawing any attention to themselves i i appreciate that i just want to make sure that our staff members are protected too yes and if our staff members are uncomfortable then we would do whatever we could to accommodate them also yes i guess i just want to just want to add that this is a not about because i miss grant had referenced just as far as maybe things happening or whatever i this isn't about criminal behavior or criminalizing this whole situation this is just speaking to discomfort people's perception is their reality and i wouldn't want a transgender student going to school in fear with anxiety of going into a bathroom where they feel they could be bullied or harmed and i don't want a

085cisgender student going into a bathroom where they have in their mind a real fear of maybe being a little girl taking her clothes off or rosin right next to another male student who comes in just going to the bathroom but for that child it's upsetting to her and that's her reality and whether you're transgender and worried about being harmed in the bathroom or a little susie going in and feeling uncomfortable knowing there could be a boy right next to her it's very real to them it's going to impact their ability to learn and focus in school and that should be our focus is making sure our kids are getting educated properly and i just feel like we need to be sensitive all the way around so it's not like oh we need to do all

086these things to avoid these headline awful things from happening it also just comes down to everyone feeling comfortable everyone feeling like they have an option available to them without judgment and not being because i to be honest dr kell is my my biggest fear is if a student if a cisgender student feels uncomfortable and asked to go to the nurse's office they're going to be told no or they're going to be told to wait and i just want to make sure just as everyone else has opportunity to choose their bathrooms that means everybody because i don't want anyone feeling uncomfortable for one second because again it's their reality we can all say that the statistics say it's not going to happen it doesn't happen in our district and we can firmly believe that our schools

087are safe but for that one student who you don't know what goes on behind closed doors in their home or their traumas or whatever they may have gone through that that's their reality or that's their biggest fear i feel like if it's just a little accommodation to allow them to go into a bathroom that makes them feel safe if it's a nurse's office then that's the least we can do so they can focus on their academics and their social growth when they're here you know it shouldn't be a headline issue or a criminal issue it's just everyone feeling safe and comfortable regardless of what gender they identify with madam president yes absolutely as i mentioned earlier no student will be denied access to the private use of a bathroom okay thank you i just have

088a follow-up question it's a follow-up to ms densmore's comment about safety and vaping etc what are the sro's roles in all of this especially now in middle schools how will they fit in with this guideline madame president grant the sros are an exceptional resource that we have resource school resource officer but they're an exceptional addition to our our schools and provide extraordinary assistance to the administration to the teachers and they develop amazing relationships of trust with students so that they can assist them but the role of the sro with the bathroom usage would only rise to the level if there is a crime committed but they are also part of the adult supervision on the campus they also monitor hallways and inside outside corridors and so as another adult on campus they would share that

089responsibility well i'm sure they hear i mean when we're talking about bathrooms we could be talking about kids going in trying to vape or smoke a cigarette or other things so i'm sure that that's where the sro would hear from other kids the rumblings of keep an eye on that bathroom or whatever that's a good one to go into [Laughter] so i know this was an information item but we did talk about some things that at some point would we'd have to take action on if we wanted to move forward as far as any construction or retrofitting current bathrooms things like that so at this point dr kellis i guess we would just determine whether the board wants to either have a continuation of discussion specific to construction or an action item at some point

090or what were your thoughts on the follow-up to this item madame president thank you for that clarifying question this absolutely is an information item to provide the board the opportunity to discuss the matter together and to ask questions moving forward the intent is that if there is direction tonight we will proceed but we could bring back recommendations based on the conversation that we've had this evening for a future agenda item with possible action i think i've um and i don't know what the rest of the board thinks but as far as i know i'm not interested in spending 2.5 million dollars on renovations for bathrooms um especially like for you know patching urinal hall ripping your arms out maybe if we start with um again for making all everyone feel comfortable maybe one bathroom i

091think dr kellis you and i had a discussion about um starting maybe with one on a campus that has the stahls go all the way down might be a start to get some information on maybe what that would cost as again a starting factor maybe starting at our middle schools high schools um i don't know i just like to get maybe more kind of now narrow type pricing on what that would look like and present we can bring that information back i i agree as far as the getting the pricing on something like ms pritchard said i guess my bigger concern is if we start having all of the restrooms completely closed off what that looks like in the opposite you know the safety perspective if someone gets locked in there we there's no way

092to access so if they someone barricades themselves in because they're having you know a mental issue whatever uh what does that look like so do we do i mean if you looked at the actual materials themselves or i mean do we have doors that can be unlocked from the outside madam president miss densboro as you can imagine this is not a unique question to dicer this is a national topic it happens with the new construction of airports movie theaters college dorms and as you consider the market yes there are products that are now very explicitly designed for this type of of accommodation as with our current bathroom stalls right if there's an emergency happening then whatever steps are necessary to take we will make sure that there's we will do what we have to do

093right all right anything else all right thank you for the information next we'll move to g3 school report west point elementary thank you madam president uh members of the board members of cabinet dr pulling will introduce this item mr president members of the board and cabinet it's my pleasure to introduce miss amy michaels principal west point elementary good evening madam president members of the board dr kellis cabinet and community as stated i am amy michael so i am currently the interim principal at west point elementary and been serving in that capacity since the end of august i would like to have my team you heard them do a little hoop and holler if they could stand i'll introduce them as well i'm joined tonight now they're embarrassed by miss jennifer evans our assistant principal laura

094orcad our tls teresa de long our our fourth grade team lead lisa salas our first grade team lead and heather berner our second grade team lead so i appreciate them being here to support tonight so at west point we currently have 706 wildcats on campus our colors are navy and silver and we are very proud um to offer the arts academy you saw a little picture of that this morning or this afternoon when our dancers were performing and we that is one of our pride and joys at west point as we've talked about and discussed opportunities that we've taken this year and needed areas of growth we've narrowed those down into three areas so first is academic growth and achievement our student behavior management on campus and building instructional practices so i just want to

095talk briefly about each one of those so as we analyzed our azmerit data from last year we noticed that there was going to be a need to focus on our proficiency levels in both ela and in math as well as our student growth levels while our growth was actually really in good shape our proficiency levels were needing some significant intervention so our goal was all has been all year to reduce our minimally proficient students and help them move along in that proficiency so to do that we have worked to establish an instructional support team which we are thrilled as a as a title one school we have two reading interventionists on campus that are full-time we have two full-time math interventionists and we also have a full-time data specialist and so that team has been

096instrumental in moving learning forward at west point not only are they working with students right to get them moving forward and making growth but they've also been providing their expertise with our teaching staff to help again build that instructional practice on campus we've also been able to have a lot of district support um our focus with that district support and that's with ms dana dana noble and her team has been it's very hard to not say dana k um has been to focus on our third grade reading and eighth grade math and while both have made improvements through that support process we were thrilled to see that our third grade reading scores um the growth level was the highest in the district when we looked at benchmark one to benchmark two another area of academic

097growth and achievement has been what we call our pick six so each teacher on campus has identified six students that are within that minimally proficient category and um they have committed to moving those students forward so there's a variety of ways that they've done that but um tier two interventions um working with them independent individually so that pick six has been um an area again that we've that we've been to target our growth and achievement so the second point is student behavior management so as we came into the year this one honestly cut us a little bit off guard but i think you've heard throughout the school year that behave that student behavior has been a concern across campuses not only at district the dysart district but across the country and so are we are

098not unique to that our students we see them struggling in the classroom to engage in their learning we're seeing adverse behaviors that have been a challenge and so while our referral data really has stayed consistent we're seeing that some specific behaviors have intensified so disruption defiance and disrespect in the classroom have been kind of what we're targeting so to do that we've revisited our sparks if you've ever been to west point we have spark logos throughout and spark stands for being safe productive always responsible respectful and safe and so we've revisited these core values with our staff and our entire staff to make sure that we are having common and consistent language we are teaching those expectations as well to our students and then re-teaching and sometimes teaching again we've instituted an adult mentor program

099for students who are struggling and so they're connected with somebody outside of their classroom teacher again we want to focus on relationships and connections and helping them feel safe on campus and so that extra person that extra familiar face and happy face is one way to do that we have a positive referral system where teachers can nominate students for exhibiting spark on campus and so administration will have that positive phone call home to do a little celebration for that referral and then we are thrilled within the last month we've been able to hire for our sst that's the student support technician and she's already made a world of difference on campus with some of our students who have we've been seeing some high behavior needs i'm so that person that's dedicated to checking in on

100behavior interventions has been really crucial for campus and then our third was building instructional practices so we've been uh very stro focused on west ed protocol and so when we walk through our classrooms we're gathering data specific to the west ed protocol and then planning professional development based on the needs that we're seeing and the data that it shows um we're also noticed that math scores were a little bit of a were a struggle more than ela from easy merit and so we've utilized again those math interventionists to do some professional development specifically on how to use math manipulatives and that conceptual understanding of math so celebrations arts academy is always the the pride and joy of west point and so whenever i talk about west point with anyone in the community it's always let

101me talk to you about the arts academy but we're always looking to to grow that which we'll continue to do but we have expanded our dance program to include kindergarten through eighth grade so if you ever want to feel a little joy i would invite you to come see kindergartners in dance class um it is an exceptional experience um our play for the year is going to be little mermaids so you'll be receiving invitations that is the end of april and then we also have a before school dance club and a choir club and so those are just ways that we we continue to roll out and expand our arts academy the second celebration is our mtss routines so we've again had a lot of support from district on how to just have a separate

102set of eyes look at our systems and routines and how can we improve those to make sure that we're using our time wisely and so rti routines have been realigned and and we have a team in place that's really focused student by student on the interventions and be able to track their progress and then we're focusing on tiers of instruction and how we can really help support teachers in lesson planning as well for the uh to to to improve those instructional practices and then just back to data driven decisions everything we do is based on what we see and what the numbers tell us to do so those professional development opportunities are planned from data as well as our tier two groups our win groups so you've talked about when so we also have a

103win time on campus of what i need and so those groups are planned by what the students truly do need as we're looking forward and the focus for the year and actually moving on to next year again it's those three core areas so student learning and achievement spark school expectations and building our instructional practices so we believe at west point that change happens by degree and so we're taking step by step to make those changes that we need on campus so that we are having a positive impact on our student achievement we want to continue to foster a love of learning that i feel it was lost a little bit during the pandemic when students were at home on a computer and so fostering that love of learning is important to us at west point

104we also want to refer back to our mission and vision which is to have authentic learning experiences and then continue to expand our arts academy by really looking at what's happening inside the classroom during the day can we have more arts enriched opportunities for students so again with spark we're just going to continue to focus on that tier one what is our core expectations having that common language and consistency on campus and then building our instructional practices you've heard in previous presentations about the plc plus so how can we um help provide structures within our plcs where the plus is also valued which is that adult learning opportunity so with that do you have any questions for me thank you very much it was a great presentation and i appreciate you taking the time to

105outline your interventions that you're implementing so thank you thank you anyone else just just really quick i'm glad that you are utilizing the win intervention uh like i said i really liked it over at rancho so i appreciate you using it there tell me just a little bit more about that adult mentor program i know you team up one of the students with an adult what does that look like a little bit more well it really will depend on each student's need so students might be recommended for that program for a variety of reasons maybe maybe they come from a single-parent household and so they need that mentorship in a different way maybe it's because of behavior adverse behaviors that we're seeing in the classroom so the expectation is that one to two times a

106week that adult mentor will check in with that student maybe it's before school and they have a standing appointment at their classroom door while they're greeting students to come check in see how their week is doing maybe it's to set goals for their behavior and check in how they've done on those goals and just be that follow through for that student awesome awesome and you had mentioned more arts enriched programs what besides dance and music classes what else is there well we have a vision that arts would be used in ela math science and social studies so for example if it's in the social choice classroom we might make sure that we are incorporating art from the different areas that the students are our genre or air is i'm sorry the areas that they are

107studying so that that is also part of that arts enriched opportunity for them okay thank you all right thank you thank you all right next we move to information [Laughter] for board monitoring of adopted policies section 10 students 10.0 to 10.34 dr cullis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr croto will introduce this item thank you dr kellis madam president members of the board secretary kelly's cabinet and guests tonight we continue with our monitoring of our policies our governing board policies and we bring to you tonight section 10 on students 10.0 through 10.34 and at this time we do not have any changes to that so we'll stand for any questions you may have or comments any questions or comments from the board all right thank you next we

108move to item five board bond dream adopted policy section nine instruction nine point two five to nine point five zero first read of an additional update to policy dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board of members of cabinet um this specific policy 9.29 is brought to the board with a modification and is presented as a first read the added language says permission to volunteer in the dysart unified school district may be revoked or suspended due to current misconduct or unreported previous misconduct happy to answer any questions again this is the first read any questions i appreciate the language being added thank you i have a question regarding um how we're defining misconduct does that need to be outlined or defined in some way i'm asking like an open question do you think

109that that should be in the governing board policy or in the procedure i don't know that's why i'm asking yeah well either i think i'm from what i remember i mean normally the procedure tells us how to carry out the policy correct so it perhaps makes sense to have it in um i guess i don't have a preference either way i just feel like it should be in there um for when it's time to take action on it madam president just as an fyi typically when we reference misconduct um there are multiple policies that refer to staff conduct which would apply to volunteers so staff conduct misconduct it's there's ethics there's there's multiple pieces and parts that could be included within a definition of misconduct but generally it would apply to the same [Music] expectations

110as our employees when it comes to conduct so we can before it comes back for action you can maybe attach that whether it be in the policy or the procedure for review madam president yes we will include that in our procedures thank you thank you any other questions i'm a little confused in the the procedure is the policy just to clarify more of the procedure because the procedure says oh heck i just lost it any volunteer whose actions are not in the best interest of the school or students will not be permitted to continue to volunteer unprecedented grant yes that is covered in procedure but it is codified in policy with this recommended language i think for something as big as potentially revoking a volunteer badge i think we should not leave anything i think

111we should we should not have it remain like a subjective i think it's misconduct you know i like that we're gonna be more clear because i think it would be a big um a big deal to revoke a volunteer badge so i wouldn't want it to just be a a subjective type thing i think it'd be good to define exactly what that is whether it be pulling like you had mentioned dr kalas if we have language about misconduct or staff conduct already then perhaps we use the same thing you know why couldn't we just use that sentence the one that you just read yeah because i think it's still subjective you'll never be able to cover every every type of misconduct i don't think it's every misconduct i think it's what we put in staff

112already so what is good for our staff should be good for our employee for our volunteers and if we already have defined that within our staff policies then i think it's an easy fix unless there's a reason why you don't want that attached no i just as the best interest of the district and that they would be let go so well what if we what if in the procedure we include that verbiage like all school volunteers are expected to adhere to the same conduct that we expect from our staff if i'm a volunteer i'm not going to go and look that up so we'll just attach it just like we attach our staff conduct then madam president miss chapman miss grant um the reference at the bottom of the policy makes has links to procedures

113we could include the links to the staff conduct policies and procedures as well but we could also provide some additional language in the procedures that is copied and pasted from from other policies thank you all right next we move to item six review of policy 2.17 agenda preparation and dissemination dr kellis madam president members of the board and members of cabinet at the request of a board member this policy 2.17 is presented for discussion and thank you dr kellis and the reason i had asked for uh this to be an agenda item um is quite honestly i feel that we are not adhering to this particular policy and um as it regards to the second paragraph for 2.17 says the superintendent or board members may place items on the agenda any board member desiring to

114place an item on the agenda will notify the superintendent of the board president in writing of the particular item of business at least five working days before the meeting um i feel that we are adding items to the agenda um one maybe two days before the actual meeting and quite honestly i don't think we're adhering to this we have had a couple of instances where an agenda item has been added on a monday and we've been asked to review it and act upon it on a wednesday board meeting one of the things and this just came to mind when we were talking at our last board meeting and quite honestly i know that consent agenda items may be removed for discussion and we can talk about it just like we did tonight we removed something

115from the consent agenda and we'll talk about it during our action discussion area um but i'm just wondering and that's two separate issues right there but i'm just wondering just so all board members can have the opportunity to review it even further like for instance the last board meeting ms chapman had pulled the expense vouchers for us to discuss a particular book that was purchased under the expense at voucher and i had no clue what that book was and quite honestly i probably would have looked it up if i had um proper notice because i couldn't make an informed decision on that particular book to see if in my mind i would have voted for it or against it but i don't think that we are following some of the things in our own policies

116now i know we can change our policies at any time but quite honestly the one especially with the five days five working days before the meeting um it would give the entire board the opportunity to actually review that item instead of just one or two board members so i would like your feelings on this so i'll give just a recent example that seems very appropriate right now on item g5 the volunteer policy that we just reviewed those were suggestions that i made during the last meeting and i assumed would be presented to the board instead it was brought forth in the consent agenda and i asked for that to be moved yesterday okay so is that within the 24 hours or outside of the 24 hours well when you're moving consent agenda items it doesn't

117have to be 24 hours before you can move it 24 hours before or you can move it during the meeting with the majority if the majority approves right so again i was just going back to the book thing regarding you were the only one as far as i know you were the only one that knew the information regarding that restorative justice whatever the name of that book was or there was two of them i believe teaching tools and then in education or focus on education and um so i understand what you're saying miss jensmore but um in order for all of us to make i mean it was more like it was being zeroed down to a certain thing and quite honestly i would like to have more information before walking in to the board

118meeting if i'm supposed to zero in on something that detail does that make sense um kind of i i honestly i sometimes i don't decide to pull it until the last minute other times i just kind of want to deep dive into it and then i don't think i owe anybody an explanation as to why i want to move things well wasn't that on that was on a that was a consent agenda that was consent agenda item that i moved to action discussion yeah that wasn't a new um that wasn't a new request for a new agenda item less than five days prior that was moving something from consent to action right so technically we all had the information and we're all responsible for reviewing the the information provided in the agenda yes and i

119spent hours looking through those expense reports line by line as we've all seen that was regard with regards to the ex the consent agenda item um but we did have and like i said once it was gelling in my brain during the meeting i'm going okay so we even had an instance last year where something was added to action and discussion that was put on the agenda two days prior um and i've actually just had a conversation with this with dr kellis because i didn't realize that i had not requested an agenda item and so i requested it 24 hours before thinking um within law is is that correct by law we have up to 24 hours before the meeting to post it so i went oh i forgot to ask for this item and

120i forgot to submit it i wonder if i can get it submitted 24 hours before as long as i make that request now to my understanding and my correspondence with dr kellis and miss brown that as long as it's able to be posted 24 hours then it is within law to add it up until 24 hours before consent or action or adding anything adding anything so it says any board member desiring to place an agenda item on the agenda will notify the superintendent or board president in writing of the particular item of business at least five working days before the meeting so do we need to change the policy to coincide with the law i'm just telling you that that says five working days and yes we can change our policies at any time but

121as like i said as i was thinking a little bit further when we were talking about the book then i started thinking a little bit further that one particular item that was added to the agenda on a monday and we voted on it on that wednesday and i have to say it had to do with policy governance that it was added to the agenda on a monday and we voted on it on a wednesday and that was not five working days before the meeting well there are some instances where we make requests for agenda items and they are denied and so we go back and forth and then two days before sometimes we get them added and sometimes we don't but even when we submit them five days in advance sometimes they don't always get

122on the agenda can i just clarify as someone who's involved in creating the agenda that i have not denied any board member requests for an agenda item thank you i didn't think you did okay i just wanted to and i never said you did okay no i never missed saying that they've been denied i wasn't denying anybody right and even as board president before i never denied anybody to put something on the agenda but my thing is that if something is added on a monday it's sometimes not going to give us enough time to review it case in point it was the policy governance that was added on a monday we had two brand new board members and we took action on it on wednesday and quite honestly that was not enough time for all

123of us to digest that particular agenda item so i'm just saying that we need to kind of watch this we need to kind of be careful um but two days prior um yes i understand about the 24 hours but it's really kind of hard for the entire board to know what's going on when only one or two actually know i'm just putting that out there and i know this was an information item we can change our policies to fit the way the agenda is completed do whatever but i just we just need to be careful i think the other thing too is that board members always have the opportunity if they feel like like in your reference to the issue that happened a year ago um if ever there is a feeling of the majority

124of the board that they don't have enough information to vote we can always move to table and i know i've personally never denied an opportunity having been board president in the past ever denied the opportunity to table an item if it means giving a board member more time to research or consider some action so if ever something happens because it sounds like um there's been some from what little miss schaffen is sharing some maybe circumstances to agenda item requests that have maybe impacted how soon they get on or not that if ever then they get on late i guess just board members knowing that if you feel like hey i this didn't come on until two days prior and i haven't had time to read it then talking to the board about can we table

125this because i don't have enough information that's just always an option for people too because um like i said i i haven't denied a request so whatever conversations that's happened between the superintendent any board member i may not know i perfect example i didn't know an item was going to be added tonight um you know until after the fact until after a gender review so things happen where maybe you know it's not within that that five day time frame so knowing that things can happen just knowing board members can just you know speak up and ask for more time or more clarification then i would say we need to look at the policy then we can bring it up i mean if you want you can bring it for action we can change the policy

126is it correct so then um dr kulas that i know that agenda needs to be posted within 24 hours so does that technically mean that legally an agenda item can be added up to that 24-hour mark because as long as we have time to change the agenda then technically it's allowable what by law is this or is that five days in law madam president the five days is district policy that is not in statute and the timeline if the board wants to have well-informed conversations on these topics administration appreciates the time to be able to prepare the information for the board meetings and currently the president and the superintendent meet on fridays to discuss the the agenda so that it can be ready for the board to receive on friday afternoon so the board has

127plenty of time to review it if you consider the spirit of of transparency we want our public to have full access to board agendas we've been publishing those on mondays so that our community knows that the business of the board is open and transparent and for that reason it's it's posted when it is and when there are changes that doesn't always get communicated out to the general public who think that they have seen the packet when they saw it when it was first published as far as the 24 hours and going right up to the 24 hours just as a note of time that the board meeting starts at 6 pm 24 hours prior to that is 6 p.m offices are closed around 5. and it would not be possible to have to repost an

128agenda if the an item was requested to be added when there's nobody here to to do the work um so luisa doesn't live here so i to your to your point can it be added up to the 24-hour point [Music] logistically no legally yes but logistically we would not be able to get it updated revised and posted when there's nobody here to do that after the offices are closed so maybe we need to revise some things with this policy anyway i i know that um because i understand what you're saying something to consider too though like there might be a time when a board member wants to have an agenda item added and i understand the assumption is well administration has to have time to prepare it but there could be things i mean i

129know typically like dr kellis you pretty much have the agenda how you'd like to have it presented when we meet because it's a lot of administrative presentations but but technically a board member could have an item that they want to present that wouldn't require any preparation on administration's part and just kind of knowing that give and take that that technically even if administration wouldn't have time to prepare if there were ever a board member that says you know i want to have time to speak about this particular issue that you know we don't always have and like even gender reviews i don't always have all the supporting documents at that time um and until and sometimes we don't get them until up until 24 hours before the meeting there's little tweaks or sometimes we see

130the presentations for the first time when we come here so just kind of keeping that in mind um there could be times when board members one percent on their own and they don't necessarily need you guys to to put a lot of time into a presentation where you'd have to worry about that piece but since we're talking about the agenda preparation part of it um obviously board presidents change and so this would apply um moving forward and that's why i wanna at least bring it up now if there's a possibility that um cabinet can have or whomever administrators whatever's going to be presented to the board sometimes during a gender review it'll say like in workflow so it won't necessarily be ready um if we could work to have that ready by the time of

131agenda review because in this we could look at the agenda it's like okay that sounds okay no questions and then things are added or the supporting documentation maybe changes what i might have thought or the future board president may think is going to be presented that might be like oh i don't know if we're ready for this yet maybe let's put this on a different agenda because i have thoughts on you know it doesn't really allow for um there's not a lot of not all the information is available so would that be possible to ask that all the information is submitted to you by thursday night or something so by friday morning everything that's going to be ready for that agenda review is there madam president that is a reasonable request thank you i would

132also like to point out that it says the agenda and supporting materials shall be distributed to the board members not less than 24 hours prior to the meeting so district is asking for it for five days but policy says not less than 24 hours i'm sorry what what area what part of that policy are you looking two point one seven three four five the agenda and supporting okay to the board members not less than 24 hours yes okay all right um but it still says in paragraph two submit in writing five days working before the meeting right it says that it re it would like it five days but it also says 24 hours well then i guess we just need to sit down and actually go through this i mean i see it both

133ways and quite honestly so that we're not contradicting each other or anything and we possibly need to sit down and do this maybe so because i've had other board members pull things and i go over my packet and i feel prepared so when another board member pulls something and brings it up then i feel like it's a great discussion with everybody and it gives everybody an opportunity right and i wasn't prepared for what you pulled last last board meeting because i had no idea what that book was so i stopped by and i read it not page to pay by cover to cover but i did review that book um so it would have been good information beforehand but i did not know you were offered the opportunity to read the book to look at

134the book yes they were sitting on luisa's countertop i didn't call her she didn't call me i just happened to be at the district office and i said oh these are the books and so they were sitting there and the rest of the board wasn't notified either i'm the same i'm not saying i was i wasn't notified they were sitting there and i just said oh these are the books i did ask that everybody get it receive a copy of that book you did yes i'm just saying we need to look at it that's all any other questions or comments thank you next we'll move to action discussion item each one oh actually do i need to refresh um please look at your agenda flow and see if you have numbers eight and nine added

135oh refresh no i don't okay then hit your refresh does anyone need to take a break yes okay all right we're gonna just take a short recess five minutes all right this time we're going to resume the meeting moving on to action discussion items h1 recommendation to add an interim middle school principal position dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr croto will introduce this item thank you dr kellis madam president members of the board superintendent kel's cabinet and guests earlier in the meeting you approved the resignation of our one of our principals at ashton ranch middle school tonight we're asking to cover that position by the addition of an interim middle school principal and we're also in the same agenda item asking you to appoint ms lisa

136parachini as the interim middle school principal for the remainder of the 21-22 school year so with that we'll stand for any questions any questions from the board all right then one of the last of the valley girls is she here tonight i know is she here with that all moved the board approved the edition of an interim middle school principal position an appointment of lisa parachini as interim middle school principal for the remainder of the 2021-22 school year second motion made by christine pritchard segmented by dawn dunsmore i hope it's approved is she here she is here i will stand her open congratulations next we're going to move to action this session item h2 recommendation to approve the appointment of principles dr croto or dr kellis sorry thank you madam president members of the board

137and members of cabinet as just a point of housekeeping as we introduce the next couple of items our public relations department has requested that all the approved candidates please meet over at that blank wall for a group mention madam president members of the board members are cabinet it is right um dr crudo will introduce this item thank you again dr kellis madam president members of the board superintellis cabinet and guests we are proud to present to you tonight our principal recommendations for the 20 23 school year before i name our names these candidates went through a very comprehensive selection process used to identify them to fill these positions the positions were posted for a length the amount of time they went through a paper screening they also went through in-basket activities which includes a video

138that is graded by some of our district employees as well as uh clinical supervision activity of evaluating teachers and that's also graded um by our employees additionally they went through a very comprehensive interview had 20 in this room actually with about 20 panel members that consisted of parents teachers classified staff and our administrators dea and there was 20 of them on this panel so and then after that those candidates came through then they went to a cabinet interview and then they were selected in this process so pretty extensive process over a great amount of days so tonight i'd like to present to you these seven candidates they are here with their family and friends so everybody welcome we are great to see you i'm glad you could be here tonight when i call your name

139if you could please stand up and then we will wait for a vote so to begin i'd like to introduce to you mr kevin kashat who is being recommended for the principal at shadow ridge high school if we could hold our applause to the very end so i know you want to stay here all night with us so but please hold your applause till the end and then we'll let the governing board vote and then we can do our applause this candidate you meet but lisa parachini will be recommended for the assignment of principal at ashton ranch middle school if you could stand please again chantelle mcneese is being recommended for the assignment of principal at countryside elementary school karasair is being recommended for the assignment of principal at luke elementary school charlene clark is

140being recommended for the assignment of principal at rancho gabriela elementary school and scott kerr is being recommended for the assignment of principal at thompson ranch elementary and amy mycos is being recommended for assignment of principal at west point elementary and these are your candidates [Applause] any questions or comments from the board i'll entertain a motion i move to approve the appointment of do i have to say all their names i hope i don't i'm sorry kevin cashette lisa perettini chantal mcneese car cara shear sarah sarah charlene clark scott c scott cure and amy michaels as principals for the 2022-2023 school year i will second motion made by joe grant seconded by tracy sourcing bill ocean carries welcome congratulations uh welcome aboard and time for your first assignment hit the wall over there congratulations to all

141of you um those who are already with us you you know this but for those that are new to our district you have um just accepted a position in what i believe is one of the best districts in the state and we are just thrilled to have you if you're here it's because you are just phenomenal or as dr callous would say extraordinary so welcome and we're excited to be working with you or continuing to be working with some of you so congratulations they kind of coordinated their outfits all right next we move on to recommendation to approve the appointment of assistant principals dr kalas thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr croto will introduce this item thank you again dr kellis madam president members of the board superintendent

142kellis cabinet guests we continue tonight with our administrative recommendations for assistant principals for the positions of 2022-23 school year we have a number of them again i will read them off these candidates also went through a similar can a similar process on the assistant principle level that i explained in the principle item before so they went through a very extensive process to get here these are some excellent candidates we're very proud to have them and proud to recommend to you so again welcome family and friends please stand as i call your name and i will go through the list so first is cedrica hester and she will be the assignment of assistant principal at dysart high school jason wilkie is being recommended for the assignment of assistant principal at dysart high school kelly smalley is

143being recommended for the assignment of assistant principal at shadow ridge high school samantha centeno is being recommended for the assignment of assistant principal at valley vista high school alissa moondyke is being recommended for the assistant principal at countryside elementary school cali cashat is being recommended for the assignment of assistant principal at marley park elementary sarah casey is being recommended for the assignment of assistant principal at riverview elementary shane and doherty is being recommended for assistant principal at sunset hills elementary school andrea hazer is being recommended for assistant principal at surprise elementary school ralph quintana is being recommended for assistant principal at thompson ranch elementary school erin ireland is being recommended for the assignment assistant principal at western peaks elementary school and jennifer evans is being recommended for assignment of assistant principal at west point elementary

144school and that is our candidates for assistant principal so welcome everybody and congratulations [Applause] madam president back to you i'll entertain a motion i'll move to approve the appointment of please forgive me if i've got your name uh siddiqua hester jason wilkie kelly smalley samantha centeno elise alyssa moondyke cali cashette sarah casey shannon doherty andrea hasser ralph quintana aaron island ireland and jennifer evans as assistant principals for the 2022-2023 school year second motion made by tracy's story sink bill seconded by john densmore i don't know it's a tie it's okay rock paper scissors she can have it rock paper scissors easy she carries [Applause] congratulations you guys are smiling now photo time i'm waiting to see you later there's some tall women in here all right next we'll move to action discussion item four discussion

145on possible action on dysart's phase retirement program dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr croto will introduce this item thank you dr kellis madam president members of the board superintendent kellis cabinet guests tonight i bring to you a presentation on phase retirement for the dysart unified school district so to begin what is phase retirement phase retirement is a state approved program that allows arizona school employees that are eligible for retirement to continue employment through a third party contractor currently dysart has entered into an agreement with educational services inc otherwise known as esi what are the benefits of phased retirement for dysart unified school district we believe there's a following value obviously there's a cost savings to dysart in that those returning on phased retirement we typically pay

146them 80 percent of their current salary and there is some savings in there to the district for that it provides a continuation and retention of experienced employees employees not leaving our system that have multiple years of experience and have been with us and it's a it's a positive benefit in today's day and age when we're looking at benefits of why people stay with employers definitely a positive benefit for our employees what are the qualifications for phased retirement so individuals participating in phased retirement they have to meet the following criteria they must be eligible for normal asrs retirement per the statute you can see there they have to be a contributing asrs employee of the district and they must have achieved satisfactory performance evaluations without an adequate performance rating during the exit year prior to retirement

147that's important so they have to have a great eval before we let them go on this qualifications continued they must not be a candidate for a potential riff they must be in good standing and they must have recommendation of their most recent supervisor current practice for entering phase retirement so individuals intending to seek employee employment with esi the third party company partake in phase retirement have to re have to submit a phase retirement form to hr 60 days prior to entering the program i have included that in the presentation tonight if you take a look at that form you will notice that request it states that the crests have to be in 60 days prior that the employee must fill it out and sign it and then they must take that to their supervisor and

148their supervisor must approve it again it has all those qualifications that i outlined earlier and they must sign off on those that form then after their supervisor signs off on that comes to myself i verify that all that is true and then i um sign that form and allow them to go into phased retirement and seek employee with employment with esi bullet 2 there the district attempts whenever possible to place esi employees in the employee's most recent district position we try to do that all placements are subject to availability obviously and our discretion our current practice for returning from phase retirement program so at the conclusion of 12 months of phased retirement the district currently places employees at its discretion and subject to availability uh following all our district policies and procedures those policy and

149procedures obviously are staffing policy and procedures there has to be an open position there and all that so after turn returning from phase retirement employees are considered new hires and that's an important piece with that tonight we're recommending um actually there was two on here in looking at one of the recommendations and seeking more advice and talking to our attorney who is here tonight one of the options may not be viable but we can discuss that but we are recommending adding an additional step to the phase retirement process of one of the following and i mentioned the first one was entering uh interviewing before entering phased retirement with esi again there has been some concern about that and we can answer any questions with that or interviewing from returning once an employee returns actually an

150employee of esi they are not an employee at this district at that time their employee of esi and they're wanting to return as a regular employee to dysart that we would institute an interview at that time so with that that's a quick discussion of our phase retirement program and an overview of the process i'll be glad to answer any questions or take a recommendation from the governing board i guess i would like to i know um dr koto i talked to you about this item and during a gender review i talked to dr kellis about it and i was i you know notified this evening that there was a problem possibly legally with it so that could change everything so if i could just get an update on what the specific issue is that would

151help me better understand what the options are or so um adam president could i ask jennifer to come up yes thank you good evening madam president dr carter members of the governing board so the the concern with respect to interviewing to go into an esi position is that once an employee chooses to retire with the district you don't have control over whether they then choose to go work for esi so you have some screening issues but you are not the employer so there you would be interviewing somebody who would then no longer be employed directly with dysart the only thing that you have control over is your agreement with esi to obtain services for whatever the position is administrative teaching classified you have that option to continue to receive the services from esi or not

152but i do have concerns about you interviewing because you wouldn't be the one hiring esi would be so that's my worry okay so the employee would already be an esi employee the former employee the retiree would already be an esi employee um at what point at the point that they choose because you've elected to use the services of esi when that employee makes the decision to retire if they're in good standing according to the criteria that dr croto laid out they have good evaluations they have an improvement plan they have the recommendation of their supervisor the district if they were going to implement an interview process at that stage i'm not quite sure what you would have them be interviewing for because it's not for their existing position they are choosing to go through retirement

153and to go work for the third-party contractor okay so what usually happens in dysart is people stay in their same position so that they're actually and that's why dr cody you had mentioned during your presentation that there's you know if a position was available or there's no guarantee we'd try to get them back in that position but i'm wondering how often that happens because it seems like people kind of announced that there it's more like a personnel or hr type transaction where it's just their phased retirement but they're still in their same position and we're just no longer their employer it's esi so um i didn't realize that there was that they ever really truly left that position to where it may not be available if they came back unless i misunderstood that part madam

154president currently that does not happen at all because of the vast amount of positions we have and the availability of positions it could possibly happen in a situation where we had to cut positions or reduce positions in the future but i don't foresee that in the labor market right now but it could be in there and that's why that statement was built in there many years ago probably we were in those situations where um employment sometimes reduced we had a riff in the district or things like that okay i see and i understand um what you're saying as far as if if the person is already an employee of esi then obviously there wouldn't they've already been hired by the company so i understand that piece of it so thanks for explaining it that way

155then maybe we call it or you help me uh formulate a possible solution to what what kind of brought this to my level of concern for me it's just more of a safeguard for our district and our students we always pride ourselves in dysart to make sure we have the most highly qualified staff and usually you know when someone is retiring it's typically when they've decided to stop working cut back on work have some other specific reasons for retirement whatever the reason is that i just feel like we still need to do our due diligence to make sure that the retiree is still the most highly qualified person for the job i also want to make sure that the practice doesn't cause any negative impact to maybe some other employees that we have here or

156make them feel like they're not eligible to be considered for a promotion because that position is always held held by the retiree as far as maybe denying career advancement for someone else if there is a concern with is that still is that person still whatever the retirement needs or plans or whatever would maybe make them no longer the best fit but mainly just creating that equal opportunity because we've had other employees that are currently in a position and then if the jobs reclassified to what would be considered a promotion we've had those current employees that have that job actually apply under the premise of we want to make sure we have the most highly qualified person in there so um i know in the past in some of our discussions there's we've had an interview

157piece at some point in this process in the past so how is that how was that conducted then madam president previously before i arrived here i understand in researching this that there was an interview component at the at the return of the esi employee so as they go on to esi they're no longer our employees if they're wishing to return from esi to a district employee at that time they must be interviewed for that position so that that time the position would be posted we would have an interview process whatever that looks like for those positions and if they were the best candidate at that time then they would be selected to come back and they come in as brand new hires and they are now a district employee and treated as such so then

158perhaps could it be a possible scenario where um you know because they're not because they're an employee of another company and in the beginning then we maybe change our process our screening we call it maybe something else like a screening or rather than just have that form maybe there's a little more conversation or review with that person um to make sure that we're kind of still getting that sense that okay we still believe this person even though they're retiring we still believe this person is the is best able to meet the needs of our students and um eligible or meets the minimum requirements whatever almost highly qualified in the beginning and just call it something different it's more of a screening then or it's more of a more intense um more than just a single

159piece of paper that is just a check box and then have that going back to our previous practice of having a re-entry interview when they are applying because technically if they left our district anyway to go somewhere else they'd have to apply to that district too because that district's going to want to make sure that and and like we had discussions nine times out of ten this person has proven themselves in our district they've got um you know years of experience but they have years of dysart experience probably they're going to be the best qualified i just feel like we there's a lot there's a lot of people that maybe want to have an opportunity to maybe be considered or um or maybe like i said maybe there's some people because everyone talks about double

160dipping and oh i'm going to double dip i don't i know it's about money i know it i mean i'm a person that has to pay bills too i get that but i want to make sure it's not just about well i want to double dip and i want to continue to that's why i want to do this i want to make sure that that person is not truly in the retirement realm of i don't want to work anymore i'm just double dipping i want to make sure it's the right person that still has those great ideas those that are getting those go-getters that are going to do right by our students and make sure we again have the most highly qualified person so that was my purpose not to not have esi anymore anything

161like that i just again i'm always looking to see how we can improve our processes and do what's best for kids and for our employees who are looking for promotional opportunities that may never be available as long as we just allow the same person to stay in a position like forever man present one thing i want to add to that too is and miss mclennan can correct me if i'm mistaken but when you go on esi too you just need a certain amount of notice for that position if you're not working out so it's not the same evaluation process if we do not think you're performing correctly we give a notice and we're allowed to quit our employment with that person vice versa they can leave too as we have people under contract now they

162can choose to leave or we can choose to terminate employee employee relations if something goes wrong it doesn't we don't have to wait that year okay it's good to know i mean but um ideally we don't want people leaving mid-year or because if that impacts a classroom or someone's team or department you know ideally they'll they'll work out and they'll you know correct madam president if i may make just two quick points one is that when an individual retires not only is during that year that they're providing services via the third party contractor are that that relationship is easily severable as dr croteau noted but secondly that individual when they return to the district not only are they considered a new hire but if they're certificated they've given up their rights to have a hearing

163upon dismissal to be entitled to a contract for year to year which is why dr croto alluded to in years past they were the first layer of employees who were subject to a reduction in force because by retiring by state law they've given up their due process provisions as an employee of the district so some of the concerns that you're raising regarding are they the best fit could be addressed either during their phase and the esi process or during their return to work either through an interview or through subsequent evaluation to if you front load it so that you are trying to screen out individuals that may not be the best fit for the district when they retire for esi then you're not applying that benefit uniformly to all your staff and that would create

164more risk because we would have to well ideally though um we they all everybody has an evaluation every year correct so if if if they're so if and maybe i'm assuming but the nuances of what you're saying is that the individual might not be the best fit but surely they've been performing to a satisfactory level or they won't get to the point where they could apply for esi or apply for phased retirement because one of your criteria was that you weren't on an improvement plan right oh by getting the um approval of the supervisor right correct another another you know another another and i understand to your point that's those may be easy criteria to make they still might not be the best fit but my point is that trying to evaluate at least on

165the back end if you're doing an interview process you would have that is a as you've demonstrated tonight with the assistant principles and the principles you've hired that's a betting right and you have documentation as to why the person was not chosen so that's why it's less risky okay so to miss uh pritchard's point um and that brought up a question for me who reviews the esi employee esi over the ssi employee they and they discipline their own employees they need that right and they they evaluate they move them out so are we privy to those evaluations and reviews your you can give input and that's part of the esi contract the district administrator that your district administrator would crack madame president if i could just add a clarification to that answer that that is

166true except for the case of the superintendent and the governing board is the evaluator so how do they evaluate though how do they how do they know anything about that employee's performance to evaluate them if they're not um observing them in the classroom or really interacting with them daily so in the in the contract that you signed with esi it has a provision that they would take input from the administrators who work for those individuals i don't know a great deal about what their evaluation process is i have worked with esi in districts when they have to remove employees of esi because of unprofessional conduct and that operates just like it does in the district except within easier due process because they don't they're prep companies so they don't have to provide hearings and whatnot

167dr crudo is there a way that um are there just hearing this discussion do you have any thoughts of how there could be a potential revision to your form that won't cross the line of what our attorney is advising but be a little bit more than just a quick check box and like yeah go ahead we're you know it's fine just a little bit more accountability there and you don't have to can it be done yes i can work in conjunction with um jennifer to do that yes to add more to the form okay and then as we're speaking the form which is one really quick question too um the the let me let me just pull it up it's the last i think one of the last bullets okay so they're signing off saying

168you approve this employee's participation phase retirement at your school cider department and their return to dysart employment at the conclusion of 12 months of phased retirement i'm a little uncomfortable with that because you're basically signing saying that they can come back that you're proving them to come back when we don't know what's going to happen during that 12-month time madam president that is our current practice so um if they're they're permitted to come back or they're in good standing they have good evaluations during that 12 month they're permitted to automatically come back without the interview that's our current practice so if we would like to change that tonight the board can certainly do so and not hearing from the rest of the board yet i guess just to conclude my thought i would prefer to

169have the returning interview taking that last sentence out and then just curious as to what dr croto you you and possibly with in conjunction with the attorney can come up with in regard to a more um formal a way to have some more accountability into this agreement i guess you want to call it in the beginning certainly i thought but definitely what are the thoughts of the rest of the board on esi and faced retirement i i agree that the forum needs to be just altered or modified slightly to to include an expectation that there would be a process to return to dysart as a as an employee of dysart i i don't want that to just be to miss pritchard's point just an assumed thing um i mean i don't i don't know whether

170it should be an interview but it should certainly be a process um and i i assume that there is already a process i mean as far as would you because they're not an employee of dicer you still go through a background check and make sure their certificate's good you do all those normal new higher things right and president a member dance more that is correct okay um so is this something that we should wait on until i think they actually get together in order to figure out something for that last bullet unless um i mean i would be fine with that unless the board had objection to what i would prefer administration do yeah i mean if people are okay with saying let's see how we can add a little bit more to our form

171and then have them reapply at the end of that period um then i'm good with waiting to see what they bring back but if someone isn't comfortable with that then i guess we you know we wouldn't be able to do that you said something that just triggered a question and it just went out um can i speak then that's why you're thinking about it well i'm thinking it was something she just said go ahead um double dipping is not a bad word um people when they reach their retirement age because there are some people that start in the district at the age of 21 and in their mid 50s they now have 30 years of experience and that's the magic number 30 years and they can retire so what and it's state law i mean

172this is a benefit because we were having i mean especially like with the shortage of teachers this allows a teacher to retire and come back so it's a benefit for the district and it's a benefit for the employee we even have people that probably tripled it because they were in the military that but you're you're illustrating my point perfectly in that this those are adult benefits i want to make sure our students benefit i think a student benefits to having a highly qualified experienced person perfect yeah then we're talking the same language yes we are if they're if they're inexperienced then and great that's what we're looking for but i don't want it to be i want to make sure that the person that's in that position is continuing to be the the best qualified

173and to serve our students the way the expectation was and at the same um the same and the same dedication determination whatever that they had initially really better because they've had all this experience now so what's the difference then with that same scenario that you just gave what's the difference of an employee who does not opt to go on esi that has we'll say 35 years of experience what's the difference do they still have the same uh enthusiasm to come i mean it's the same thing whether they're on esi or not you still want them to come to work and want to be there um you just the same thing because people that go on esi are leaving our district and going on with a third party company and then they'd have the choice to

174come back as a new employee to dysart that's what the difference is the other one and your other example is a continuing employee yeah but you still want them to have that same dedication so if i have 35 or 40 years of experience they you still want them to be dedicated to the district i do and if they're not then they'll be written out if i may same thing that i'm saying with this i want to make sure that people are here because they're going to do right by kids and they're going to be the best the highly qualified person double no one said double dipping was a bad word all i'm saying is those are adult issues and i want to focus on student issues which is making sure we have the best qualified

175person and that is some people retire from different reasons some people want to retire to cut back some people want to travel maybe not be here as often i mean there's a lot of different reasons and i want to make sure and because we deny other employees that we have in certain positions to just move into positions because they're already doing it we have them reapply because it's considered a promotional opportunity then to be consistent and fair to everybody then i think this is aligned with that and so when this person comes off of esi and is coming back as a dysart employee then just like to provide equal opportunity to anyone else who may want that promotional opportunity whether it be within dysart or otherwise they should interview i don't have a problem with

176them interviewing that's the only thing i'm talking about miss grant okay i don't have a problem with them interviewing but you did make a comment earlier about people retiring and for reasons if i'm going to retire i'm not and want to travel i'm not going to go on esi i'm going to go travel or i'm going to enjoy i'm going to enjoy my retirement but um anyway that's that's fine well i would like to add that there is a difference um because ms grant you're asking about that employee who's continuously being employed for 30 years not retiring just staying on with their job there's this little thing called tenure and arizona doesn't technically practice it like other states but unless that 30-year employee is evaluated out by their administrator then they can just kind of

177skate by and they can kind of coast in and out but i think what miss pritchard the difference between these scenarios is they are hey i'm retiring i'm leaving and then they want to come back and interview so that is the difference between those two scenarios i understand but i think that for the initial part it would be very difficult because and i'm not sure how it would work because let's say i've signed my contract i've started my job and then in november i now have my 30 years and my points and all of that now i want to ask for phased retirement so they're going to go on to phase retirement in the middle of they can do that right in the middle of their contract so that would be hard to sorry i

178thought you were finished interview for how often does that happen when they request to go on esi in the middle of a contract or i mean in the middle of a school year that does happen madam president member densmore um a lot or is it when that was currently we have 15 employees uh working for esi in our district currently um so we're talking about 15 we may have 20 total actually that's misinformation we have 11 we have four more who have already applied for 22-23 so we currently have 11 employees of those you have five uh that are on different dates so six or not five are on different dates they're going to be carried over into 22-23 so somebody can retire september 14th i mean i'm just all depends on your status although

179it depends on the status well in the personnel report it's always talking about today's retirement there's always several yeah i like the idea of having an interview after returning from phased retirement i like that other piece because even though they're probably the best candidate it's just that check-in not only for [Music] the teacher but also for the administrator to just kind of say hey howard how are you doing how is this program working it's just that check-in point and then if there are any red flags then we can address those madam president that can be done very easily if a motion if the board wants to make that motion and add that piece that would be great and i can add accountability to the form that would be very easily done so i'll make a

180motion the board direct administration to revise the current form to include more accountability in the process and also add a returning re-entry interview prior to becoming a dysart employee second motion made by christine pritchard segmented by dawn dunsmore before we go further is um are we still going to get legal advice on this or not yeah okay just want to make sure i want to make sure our ducks are in a row thank you we will i will have her help with that thank you very much i will send the form to her for her opinion okay did you say motion to direct administration to update the face retirement request form and add an interview step to the selection process for positions vacated by your entire employees yeah and you're clear on you didn't mention

181the accountability piece but you're clear on what the revisions need to include okay for returning yeah discussed or returning hires no we're having that we're changing the form to include more accountability okay and then yes the interview pieces for the re-entry it's kind of like a heads up thank you okay yeah like motion carries next we move to information item information action discussion item five discussion and possible action to address google mail integrity dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr polling will introduce this item good evening madam president members of the board and cabinet um there's a situation last week where a parent's uh email address had been flagged by google so we're not receiving and the board was not receiving their emails so i had asked

182our chief information officer diane howard to investigate to see what the issue is and she would like to make a report on google's process for for filtering emails so sorry good evening madam president governing board um did you want me to talk about the specific or just how quarantine works in general all of it okay so all email services like google microsoft yahoo they have security features to help prevent spam data loss and to protect confidential information this is built into email services based off of their own algorithms and their or rules their own rules we can also create our own rules for dysart to protect our staff and students based on our needs so we are we need to remain sipa compliant that's the children's internet protection act and one of their requirements is

183to ensure the safety and security of miners when using electronic mail so quarantine which is what happened to this specific email is a temporary holding area for any emails that are flagged as a security concern so that's either flagged by in this case google before it even gets to us or once it gets to us and we have rules in place you know we don't want certain information coming in especially if it's a threat or it's a threat to our cyber security so if an email address has been flagged by the email service it could be based off of prior activity or a reputation of that actual email address it'll go into quarantine if the email looks suspicious or has suspicious content or has been reported as threatening by others meaning the email address the

184sender and it'll also go into quarantine so once it's in quarantine it can be released and the sender's address can be flagged as acceptable in the future so that that email can come through again but it does go into quarantine as a safety matter and that's basically what happened last week we there are only a handful of it staff members that can access quarantine and we only access it upon request if somebody says hey i'm expecting this email maybe you know i talked to the sender they said they sent it i never got it we can go into the quarantine to see if it's sitting there for some reason uh it'll also list why it went to quarantine um if they thought it was spam or if it had been flagged by google and again

185we can uh go ahead and we call it whitelisting it so that the next time they send it it can come through is there any i mean that's basically how it works we do receive about 60 000 emails for staff a day about 20 000 of them go into our quarantine as spam it is a protection our filter it protects us from cyber security issues or phishing emails or spams there's a lot of them sitting in there they'll sit in there for 30 days and then they'll go away thank you is anything more specific that i'm sorry did you say that you were getting about 60 000. we get 60 about we average about 60 000 emails for staff each day and twenty thousand thousand going to they're spammed yeah they are marked as spam

186when you say they're marked to spam who is marking them okay based off of their history um the google end or if it's uh something that has been sent to all dysart users then chances are it's spam and it'll go there in in the case that that dr polling mentioned with the parent do we know why that was quarantined it was mark on the google end it was already um flagged for suspicious activity before it even got to us do we know why it was flagged as suspicious no they won't give me the details of what that email address was tagged to in the private world so it's not dysart it was already marked before it even got to our filter do we have a process to regularly review the quarantine hold to see if

187there are valid concerns questions complaints so we have so what happens to is that if it's a new i'm gonna if it's a new domain so let's say you have a business and you've had the same business name for 10 years and you decide to change the name to something else and you make your email address at the new name.com a lot of times google will flag it or all emails will flag it because it's new and it's unknown so what we do is that vendor should contact us to let us know they're going to be sending it with that new uh domain and then we whitelist it and let it through that's what we do with our vendors now as for parents or gmail account users we don't i don't have anybody that's looking

188through the quarantines every day it's basically by somebody says hey i sent an email nobody got it i'm not getting a response and then we'll check the quarantine only because it's 20 000 that are sitting in there and that's just staff not students a day it would be hard to have somebody going through and deciding this looks legit and this doesn't would that possibly be one single email sent to thousands of people and are those counts for the individual recipients it's um no it's count as the email that comes in because it's based off of the email address of the sender um you know my biggest concern is that again with the incident that dr polly mentioned already there were legitimate legitimate concerns um from that parent that were shared at multiple levels it was

189not just one email it was a series of emails and then um emails to the governing board so emails to elected officials to so that's the first amendment violation so that's where my concern lies but also if this were something of a really urgent nature then the district was not able to respond to that so um i know that dr kellis you had mentioned maybe having some other options for the board emails to kind of live without these rules madam president densmore it's possible to separate out a receiver account and that receiver if i'm correct can opt to have the filters removed um there's a few challenges with that one is as horizon mentioned the cyber security threats that the filters catch um we could potentially look at a modified filter i don't know if

190such a thing exists where um if it looks dangerous then it catches it but if it does i don't know what those exist but essentially we could remove the filters for for the governing board if the governing board doesn't want to have any of those emails filtered but that would absolutely increase the volume of emails and the board would then have to manually go through and and check which ones you want which ones you don't so was this a threatening email to the governing board what was the nature of this email madam president miss chaffin this email was a parent who was trying to communicate some concerns about i believe masks that's my understanding it wasn't the the filter didn't stop it based on the content of the email that actual email address from the

191recipient had already been flagged on google's end before it even got to dysart so that differs from what i was provided before this meeting was it of a serious nature i mean i would like to think that if anybody was wanting to email something and if it was a serious nature they would have contacted the principal and or the district i mean if it was serious that was done but they never received the email okay but i'm just saying as far as phone call contacting the if it was a this particular person did contact the district and that's how we we looked into it to find out it was sitting in quarantine and why and we can release it from quarantine and we did on this particular email i did white list his address so

192it should come through the next time but what happens is if enough people get it also within our system and they market spam because you can mark if you start getting a lot of emails that you don't want you can mark them as spam then eventually that'll flag that email again same thing that's it's so you released this email i don't know no no i did not release the email i was not asked to release the email i whitelisted his email address for future emails okay because i'm just for clarification is spam the same as quarantine no so you can still get a spam email um as you know you probably still get a lot of ads and uh sales people those are spam emails so that's different you can still get that unless you

193start marking it spam so once you market spam then you'll no longer get that email from that particular sender but the quarantine is what google has said this is shady or this person's done something in the past and it's flagged or we don't recognize this domain it's too new so we're not going to let it through those types of things it's just for security okay because i thought you said um an email goes into quarantine by it staff members upon request did i hear no it's released from quarantine by it staff members upon request it's sent to quarantine from google so who decides what goes into quarantine and what doesn't because if if we flag as flag it as a security risk and all they want to do is talk to us about masks then

194i feel like we have a very big issue right here well it's so google and microsoft and yahoo they all have their own algorithms of how they decide what is secure and what's not secure based off of the email address so like a lot of times somebody will try to send us something that's not good and it'll go into quarantine and they'll change their email address to get it through and i just now told the world how to do it but but because that particular email address is not flagged by your email service so it all depends on what the person is doing a side in their personal life so miss dunsmore you are saying the information we're giving now is not the same information you were given when you originally addressed this i don't

195know when was that it was offline it was not in a public meeting um so this is my understanding of this parent's concern initially is that the parent reached out to a staff member at a school the staff member responded not to that parent's liking um at that point the parent then reached out to one administrator and then another administrator and was getting no response so so here's my concern with that the initial staff member that responded to the parent did they mark the email as spam and then go and then it just triggered this domino effect where no one's going to get the guy's email it could have because that's that's but another thing too is this particular email was sent to many people with the same subject which then google looks at like

196wow all these people are getting the same email with the same it was one word in the subject masks right right that's the that's the rationale right so i'm just saying for because it's one word and it was sent to multiple people then it goes through google's algorithms it goes through their rules and they say this is potential spam okay that can happen as well back this train up you are saying that this original email with this sender with that code word made its way to one administrator no no no a staff member okay so it made its way to a staff member the staff member responded not to the parents liking some way the parent didn't like it and so they went to escalate so then they were like for the process i'm gonna

197take this to the next level for the grievance process correct so it made its way to one dysart email but it didn't make its way to any other another dicer email but it might not have been the same subject line it might not have been masks it all depends on what that subject is and how many they sent to but this particular one i did look at and it was sent to multiple people with the subject line and how did is there any way to tell which people those were that they that it was to go to yes because a lot of people send all of us emails at the same time they'll see the super they'll cc they'll send it to tracy joe don chrissy me the super and then sometimes either dr polling

198or dr croto or dr dean so there's there's times where we receive all emails and we get all sort i mean we get people emailing us using swear words so how do swear words make it past google i don't know but math still don't swear words i'm not sure if that's that's part of their algorithm madam president ms chaffin short of having google representatives come to answer their questions about their algorithms um i think what we have been able to decipher from our own research is that there are times in cases where emails are filtered and sent to quarantine and we can as sorry said we can whitelist those so that if future emails come that they are not filtered but to your your question we don't write the rules for google to determine whether

199it's a swear word or whether it's masks or whether it's any other target word but we do have the processes where we can go through and if it's been identified that a sender isn't getting a response then we can look for that there have been other emails from i'll give an example the accreditation agency was concerned that we weren't responding and it turns out the accreditation agency emails were being filtered so as anybody with email knows you your own home systems have filters typically that that will put items in spam and sometimes you get those requests hey did this go to spam please check it so i um as far as the the intent of the it department to support the emails as ms densmore mentioned there's opportunity to change some of the filter rules

200for the governing board if the board wishes to to do that otherwise we do have those those filters in place for general emails if i could just ask a question just for my so i can feel better about this too i um when i had one that had first been brought to my attention i am not savvy in technology as far as how things are filtered not filtered things like that so i actually looked it up um just to kind of try to educate myself on email quarantines and this was on the google support website and it talked about the fact that you must be signed in as a super administrator whatever that is to perform these tasks it says as an administrator you can create settings to quarantine messages sent out to and from

201your organization you can also assign admin privileges specific users to let them manage quarantine messages so even though there's a and this is where i'm asking for your clarification even though it sounds like there is like this um automatic process for which google for whatever reason decides to quarantine items it makes it seem as if as an administrator of your uh organization you can create settings or filters or rules for these things too right that's it so it is the google administrators so there's not individual people yeah right um so what kind of rules or filters do we have in place that counter google's process that could have resulted in something like this because initially i'm glad you also clarified because initially what i was how was explained to me was okay maybe it's the

202word mask if a lot of people are spamming but i have i have emails right now in my folders that have masks in the subject line and they're not quarantined so um it just it doesn't make sense so it's in i wish i had more concrete to tell you but it is a formula basically that's at google so some things are caught and some things aren't with the masks ones we did reach out to our google uh for education representative and did ask if enough people were to click on in dice art were to click on this mask as spam just the word would that word then get flagged and we were told yes so that's what we're thinking happened with that one word masks but when we did some more research we found that

203google had already flagged that email address anyway there was already a flag on it saying hey watch out for this so maybe it was for that reason or the the address reason because i it wasn't the mask reason because i have emails that have masks in them but still even though they have their own process like you're saying where google automatically does it it sounds like they're saying that our i guess i t administrators can create settings and roles and filters to offset that so like we have our own rules for because we're a school district and we're governed by specific ferpa and and sipa and all of that so we do create our own rules so if it's something that looks like a social security number we might quarantine it going out or in

204so that we could go hey we don't want to send uh social security numbers that aren't encrypted in case somebody else grabs them or or sees them so we can create our own roles on top of google's rules but do you think that there are any rule from your off the top of your head your knowledge of what rules and filters we currently have in place do you feel like we have any now that could cause this to happen again in that or in general where message emails from our community members are not reaching the board i would hope not and believe me i understand what you're saying it is if you don't especially if you're depending on the community to tell you and you're not getting the emails it is a concern i have

205looked at that at our quarantine i look at it every time somebody asked me to look for something there's not a whole lot of missed emails in there most of them are kind of disgusting and or something you really don't want coming across your computer especially if you're at work just bad stuff so i have looked so i i do get it and even within um we get you know people from uh different departments that say hey this vendor is trying to talk to me or like you said the accreditation and then we look and as soon as we figure out that it's being quarantined for some reason we we say hey let it through is it possible to share that documentation with the board as to the original email that was quarantined and then

206any subsequent documentation with google about that i can release the are you asking to release the email from quarantine so it comes to you guys not only the not only the email but can we also see what time it was sent having documentations like the original day was sent and then can you show us where it went into quarantine on what day and can you also share with us your communication with google where they told you these parameters they yes so i will i'll be full disclosure google is not going to tell me what their algorithm is they just will not because it's a security issue but i can give you uh the information that we got from our rep our representative but they will not they're not going to disclose i just i i

207would just like the communication between you and google not not you personally between us and google i i i realize this might not be your personal responsibility so i don't mean to mislead you that's fine i'm just saying it's our google representative for google education there's no google is not they're they're not going to release believe me i tried who has been contacting google google for education uh i have oh and phillip okay so could i please have that conversation between you and our google rep yeah they they won't release the parameters i understand that but could we could you guys share that with us yes their findings and what they told you well and adding on with that because um i i was able to review like the google chat transcript and it's really

208not very clear you know it doesn't i don't feel like it really addresses um what the main concern is here as far as like why why was this flagged and then just getting information on and i understand they might not tell you exactly why but any um any filters that we maybe me we may have put in place that could have impacted or could have future impact on other emails that we get that maybe we want to you know take off yes i can i can do that that's true and and i will say that our google rep will look at this specific event if you want any more information i just have to tell him to dig a little deeper he will look at this it has to open up a work order and

209we have to wait but we can do that if you want that specific information will that address your concern that will and who is our google rep oh my gosh you're going to ask me his name he's new i don't have his name right now do you remember no i don't remember i'll get it for you i'm sorry maybe include that with the other information thank you when you talk about doing um i don't know what you called it the allowable emails you're taking out of quarantine and now you're refreshing and allowing that email to come through going forward is there a way maybe like just to run like a basic macro or something and get all of our parent emails and make sure that they're on that list so we never deny a parent

210yeah i would have to look at that because we'd have to pull parent emails out of infinite campus and then run them i don't know how we would do that i have to look to see but um yeah i'm not sure okay because they don't they don't talk to each other google an infinite campus okay well right i understand that so but so this would be like a manual entry then into it would be yeah we'd have to pull yeah we could we could pull from quarantine and pull from infinite campus and try to match them up right okay that's just off when i talk to these guys i'm sure they'll tell me yes no whatever but it's off my head that seems logical okay anything else well this is admin quarantine yeah that's the

211quarantine it says event admin quarantine does that mean we quarantined it or google admin google admin so google admin is so we are there's certain people in i.t that are google administrators which means they're administrators do we all have access to that information i was actually doing a gender review that i was given that so i okay so it's it's not our it reps with google it's google's itreps no it's that's out google admin is our google is our google um information so we have access to that quarantine the admin quarantine is what it accesses that's the quarantine i've said so is that our own item that's ours so this says our i.t employees quarantined this email no no google quarantined the email based off of rules from google and could be rules from us

212if there was something in there that we had placed like social security numbers so it could be rules from us too yes so i'm just looking at this where it says admin quarantine and i'm trying to figure out if it's our admin or if it's google's admin it's our okay sorry we are the google administrators for for dysart so we quarantine this no we didn't quarantine it because this particular we have quarantined some things we do have rules that we do quarantine this particular one was quarantined because google already had a flag on it before it even got to dysart this specific email not all of them the specific one madam president uh miss chaffin what documentation you're looking at right there um would probably be best put in context and with the information that

213you have requested ms haware is going to be receiving the information directly from google which will probably encapsulate it more in detail i think the the screenshots that you're looking at would need to be placed in context of a discussion that i mean picking pieces here and there without the whole picture is going to be confusing to everybody and if you want to dissect these documents these screenshots we'd be happy to come back with a another either agenda item or in a weekly update or if you have questions specifically with these documents i would just caution about pulling one screenshot out of a several 15-20 pages that you have there without miss hawaii being able to identify those and go through them very specifically i understand it just says event admin quarantine and so i'm

214trying i'm getting two i'm getting two different messages here i'm getting oh google quarantined it no admin quarantine we quarantined it no google quarantined it no well we have our own administrator if it says admin quarantine that means we quarantined it so we quarantined the email no google quarantined the email so which is it that that specific email when we ran the report it was already flagged at the google at google before it even got to dysart so that specific one but we do have rules also in our quarantine that to prevent malicious emails from going through as well so it's not all of them if they might not be flagged at google at all but yet our rules will say hey this looks malicious put it in this holding pattern but we don't know

215why google initially quarantined no i do not know why okay and they will look into it they will if i open it we can open up a work order and have that information for that specific email for sure so um from what i'm hearing though this is so this is not something that is specific to dysart and it would be impacting every single school district that uses google or gmail school district company it's not just gmail it's microsoft yahoo any of those they have these in place although we're responsible for creating our own rules and filters we can add our own rules and filters on top of google's algorithm because i don't know what their algorithm is so when it comes to us then we do more specific type rules so we just got to

216figure out what caused the problem and so if we if it's one of our rules then we can lift it well this specific one was already was google so we can ask them why they said they'll they'll dig deeper into it but if it's we're talking about that specific one that's what we were told so if someone were to submit a foia or public information request would these quarantined emails be part of that discovery um as far as i know any public records requests go through um our archive but are the quarantines checked i guess that's what i'm asking it wouldn't no it would not go because it never i don't even i don't think it would have gotten to our archive i'd have to look because our archive is somebody else it's not google

217i don't think it would and it tracks all in and out emails who is our archive gaggle i hate to say it in public because when we say that we're kind of opening up our security event it's gaggle not google gaggle are they affiliated at all no okay okay we good i'm good for now but i i'm i this is a big concern for me but it's an action item so um staff to bring back the information to us i want to dig deeper i want this information i personally want to see all this documentation that you're talking about i i want to dig deeper i want to know names i want to know um who we are talking to i want to know who's talking to i want to see the communication i want

218to see when it went into spam and i want absolute proof that google says we put this in quarantine not anything the district did because i want to make sure that since we have the opportunity to flag certain emails and quarantine them we can quarantine them i want to make sure our district is not quarantining emails from our parents and our public when they're trying to send them to not just us but anybody which is what i was just saying can we just direct staff to bring that information back to us well i was just since this was miss dunsmore's item i was just giving her the opportunity to reflect on i'm reflecting she wants to take her um i i really had every intention of taking action tonight i mean or at least attempting

219to with um giving direction to remedy these concerns which is how i wrote this but um but now i i don't know that we should do that if you're saying that we potentially could get thousands of obscene emails have you looked at your spam folder at home i do i actually check it regularly i do too and there's a lot on there that i delete well in my district no i've never had one straight three in there yeah i usually have like one or two in my district one um and i expect that and i don't see how we can take action on this as of right now without getting i need more information maybe that's something i would like to table it did you have a list of chef and that you want to

220make a motion on as far as what information you'd like to direct administration to bring back i would like to make a motion that district provide us with all the supported documents regarding to this email quarantine the specific email quarantine matter i would like district to release the email to us i would like to see all communication between our district representatives and google and i would like as many details as possible on who and when this got quarantined who quarantined it and when why well there's a motion second okay motion made by crystal chef and segmented by don densmore any further discussion before the vote i'd like to know why what what is it that all of this information is going to solve they're going to release the email i guess i'm just trying to

221understand what the problem is i understand it's an email it's a first amendment issue and it's just a regular parent issue and if i could say initially when i was advised of what happened i was told that it was because masks were in the subject line and i'm i'm sure that that was the assumption you know of correctness at the time um my concern is with that so that we have students so just hypothetically we've got students walking down this down the street with masks and guns and that is some something in the subject line of an urgent email and we miss it from a concerned citizen is that i don't know i mean i don't know if that's a rational thought or not um but if we have something okay like a bomb threat

222or a shooting threat are we going to because it has a violent word in it are we gonna start quarantining those emails and when i say we i also mean google are we then gonna get our hands slapped or have a horrible incident because google quarantined something google censored something that never got to the administrators and i think that's a really big issue too censoring censoring a first amendment right something that clearly wasn't a threat and wasn't spam but yet somehow someway it got censored and i want to make sure that a it wasn't us and b if it's google we need to make sure this doesn't happen again and it's again it's not just dysart this is other school districts this could be happening so it's bigger than ourselves so that's the why you

223know i just would like a clarification that's all okay all right well i'll call for the vote then sure don't uh don so just to let you know i did not catch that motion promotion will be read back when i listen to the recording okay so the motion is not going to be there it's just going to say motion presented to provide all supporting documents regarding this particular and that's all i got sorry people that's okay i'm sorry well she carries yes she moved to action discussion item six approval of the shared use agreement between the city of surprise and dysart unified school district for countryside elementary and countryside park dr carlos thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet mr hicks will introduce this item thank you very much good

224evening madam president members of the board superintendent dr kalas colleagues and community members tonight i'm requesting approval of this shared use agreement with the city of surprise the city has been working on developing a park on a site as you can see that sits between countryside and greenway greenway road the facility will have eight full-size athletic fields this agreement will allow for the fields to be constructed by using some of access and actual district property for parking district can be also then the district can be using the city lots for our parking and also provides for city improvement of the district ingress egress so they will improve our facility our property the city will also provide some landscape improvements on our property as well and the city will enforce to ensure that the ingress and

225egress to the school is undisturbed and that there will be no traffic obstacles during the school day and so this still this agreement protects all of our rights and reservations and you can see allows for the nice development of i think people used to call that the gravel fields that were across so very nice we've been in in communication with the city as this plan is being developed and giving them feedback to get to this place that still preserves our bus loop lane and our ingress egress to the school coming along and allows them their access to those parking lots so we have sent this to our attorneys for reviewed and approval and administration is recommending approval of this agreement thank you any questions or comments from the board i just had one question no

226way they can put in a swimming pool in here and they no for the purposes of our swim teams as to have some place that um our swim teams at all of our schools can have a place to compete and whatnot madame president sourcing bill i think that the city is aware of the need and actually we have had conversations about another pool in the area okay all right as long as we're having conversations because our swim teams are ouch they're vital too but this is a much needed part i know i know but i'm still thinking of the other any other questions or comments can i move the board a motion to approve the shared use agreement between the city of surprise and dysart unified school district for countryside elementary school in countryside park

227shared uses unauthorized the assistant superintendent of business services to sign the agreement and any affiliated documents second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by tracy sorosinko i gotta stand up i'm sorry motion carries this room to action item seven recommendation to approve the 2022 2023 governing board meeting schedule and the 2022-2020 policy monitoring cycle dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board members of cabinet each year the board meeting schedule is presented for board approval also you see the schedule for the policy monitoring cycle this is just our regular every month bringing another section of policy to the governing board which we have done for many years the governing board meeting schedule is essentially a replica of our current year and it's presented to the board for approval any questions or comments i

228moved the board approved the 2022-23 governing board meeting schedule and 2022-2023 policy monitoring schedule as presented exactly motion made by christine pritchard seconded by don densmore motion carries okay okay next we'll move to action discussion item eight board monitoring of adopted policy section nine instruction 9.25 to 9.50 second read dr kalis thank you madam president at the request of the board member this item was pulled out of consent and is available for board discussion i won't take long i just kind of want to confirm that we are following up to make sure that all of our students are saying the pledge every day they have that opportunity and that our grades 4 through 6 are we are making efforts to ensure that they're being taught and saying the preamble is this not the policy no

229oh sorry okay was that one did we move the wrong one because i thought that was one that that was the one that was just brought up for discussion there was no recommended changes it was going to be discussed in the summer okay so i read the wrong policy no because this is for 9.25 through 9.50 yeah but this is recommended this is for second read of 9.35 honor roll this all it is a second read during first read not the policy on school celebrations was brought up as a discussion there were no recommended changes to that policy this is second read to change policy 9.35 okay so even though it says 9.25 to 9.50 oh it's but my but my policy regarding the volunteers was in this same agenda item right and then i

230requested it to be moved out into and we had to add it to information as a first read because it was not being recommended by administration as a first read so this was second read which was in consent agenda your request to add a change a policy your request to change policy was added to information item as a first read crystal shaft and only discussed the policy there was no recommended changes to the policy that's why it is not on here i thought there was some recommended changes i could be wrong but would you like me to read back the meeting minutes crystal do you remember i thought you had mentioned that and i could be wrong because i'm not the one that reckon i didn't madam president um there was discussion about what ms

231chaffin referenced and it was suggested during that meeting by another board member that that be deferred to the summer and that was i believe about the end of that conversation i was just following through to make sure that we were actually making sure that that was happening in our schools madam president ms chaffin yes we will continue to reinforce until the policy changes to include or to be expanded to other grade levels if that happens but within the parameters of our current policy we will and we are and will continue to emphasize the expectation and arizona state statute that these things happen thank you all right so i move the board to prove revisions to policy as presented motion made by christine pritchard seconded by joe grant motion carries after moving to action discussion item

232six review of policy two point oh wrong hold on nine um nine recommendation to approve overnight and out of state travel dr kallas thank you madam president this item was pulled from consent and is available for board discussion i was just curious about if you look at the travel agenda it says it's a revision on may 9th through 13th american payroll association in las vegas nevada conference training and expo i just kind of wanted to get some clarification three thousand dollars three three thousand three hundred nine dollars seems a lot of money for a conference do we i mean is this just an expensive conference or is it just because it's vegas that it's more expensive that just seems like a large amount of money madam president miss chaffin i will defer to mr hicks

233madam president members of the board on the backup documentation you could see the conference itself cost two thousand dollars it is for five days we do have an extremely talented uh payroll manager that we have been looking for relevant professional development a lot of others are not she's already exceeded their abilities and should be teaching some of those classes so we finally found one and so this is one that we're very excited for her to go to it is long it's five days i'm going but it is a very expensive conference registration on the front end okay thank you for that clarification welcome any other comments or questions i moved the board approve overnight and out-of-state travel requests as listed motion made by christine pritchard seconded by joe grant motion carries next we move to

234request for future agenda items does anyone have any items that they would like to request i do i think there's a lot of confusion within the district with what the board wants or is looking for so maybe we can get a legal definition of what crt is so that everybody understands what it is and is not to kind of go along with that um i would like to it doesn't need to happen immediately but i would like to have a study session um regarding curriculum so that we can all be on the same page and this doesn't have to be like the next agenda but for the future and so it could we could maybe yeah yeah i would like an entrance an actually an action discussion item um i might be i might be

235okay with an information item but i would like to know what we decided to do with the book of restorative justice and the little book of restorative justice teaching tools madam president mrs chaffin is if you want that as conversation or if that's just a piece of information to put in the weekly update or do you want to have conversation about that i would like to have a conversation about that please okay thank you then can we all have a copy of the book to read prior to the board meeting and president miss grant yes as those have been sent to surplus we will pull them back and pull copies for each of the board members do we still need to have a discussion then if it's already been sent to surplus i would still

236like a discussion on it okay well is that the book though that we were joe asked for us to review that tracy saw yes and it's been sent to surplus yes so we don't have opportunity to review it and present yes we will pull those and the board will each receive a copy as requested and i also have an item and this can be an item for maybe a month from now or maybe for april um i would really appreciate an information item from administration outlying a very detailed plan regarding interventions to promote student growth in our title schools being specific to not just increasing tier three instruction increasing i don't want the same canned ham type interventions i want innovative new interventions or what our plan is to start moving our title schools forward

237and ensuring that our students are achieving growth and like i said it doesn't have to be for next meeting if you need a month and a half i can wait that long but that's what i would request maybe if we give him up maybe if we shoot for april that'll give him plenty of time to is that enough time a month not a president miss chaffin we can have a information item prepared for april thank you okay so next move to j1 call for executive session pursuant to ars section 38-431.03 a3 and a4 to receive legal advice and provide direction to the attorney for the public regarding the superintendent's contract of employment so i move that we recess for executive session motion made by christine prichard seconded by joe grant madam president while the board's

238voting i would beg your permission to be excused at this point from the meeting yes thank you for all your information thank you thank you you