Dysart Governing Board Meeting - September 22, 2021

001he could come up to me and be like hi my name's john and you're like hi david at this time i'll call the meeting to order let the record reflect that all board members are present and we'll go ahead and 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 thank you and next up we have our theater performance dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board of members of cabinet we are so excited this evening to have some of our extraordinary students present some of their extraordinary talents and dr dean will introduce this group good evening madam president mr governing board dr kellis and members

002of cabinet this evening we are absolutely pleasure to have mr walgren and the willow canyon high school theater group who is going to perform for us an excerpt from their upcoming show mary poppins and tonight we're going to hear supercalifragilisticexpialidocious the floor is yours [Music] we foreign to find a [Music] of it way something quite true [Music] [Applause] [Music] sail and wild animals [Music] um [Music] delicious [Music] [Applause] [Music] which is very hard to spell [Music] is [Music] smartypants [Music] is [Music] is [Music] is even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] supercalifragilisticexpialidocious [Applause] and we would invite all interested out to see their musical on which dates september 29th through october 2nd that's next wednesday through saturday seven o'clock tickets are available very good and thank you so

003very much willow canyon theater troop fantastic job this evening give another round of applause please next we have audience with individuals we do have one tonight so i'll go ahead and read the statement this is the time for the public to comment members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda pursuant to ars 38-431.01 h action taken as a result of public comment will be limited to directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for further consideration decision a later date in order to facilitate accomplishing the business of the district in a timely manner a time limit of three minutes will be imposed for each individual or group addressing the board when you approach the podium please state your name for the

004record tonight we have reina felita bialta sorry good evening everyone my name is reyna bialta and i'm here to address an assault that happened at daiser high school last thursday the 16th my son was assaulted by two individuals even though i had previously reported to the school on the on september 13 that there was a previous harassment from that individual and nothing was done by the school to protect my son and as as a result of that he was done by this individual and now my son is scared to be at school or even to you know because he's getting all this harassment like from like the website and i just want everyone to help me and see how we can escalate this to uh you know protection for our children that's cool thank you

005dr kalis you're following up with the family madam president members of the board dr dean will follow up with his family thank you that's all we have this evening next we have student update madam president members of the board we are thrilled to invite kirsten cole to give a student update from the dicer student leadership council good evening madam president members of the board dr kellis cabinet in the community my name is kirsten cole and i'm a member of the dysart student leadership council at our most recent meeting we did a campus post check to see how all the schools are doing now that we are fully in the new school year it is great to report that all students are taking full advantages of opportunities they have on campus and are attending sporting events

006participating in spirit weeks and overall are building up the school's culture we are also so excited for all of our district councils to work together together with valley vista student council they're hosting the annual aasc arizona association of student council spirit conference this is giving us an office awesome opportunity to get to know the other councils and work together towards a common goal we all look forward to sharing your accomplishments with all of you thank you thank you kirsten thank you next we have the superintendent update thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet um speaking of student council i would just want to put an exclamation point on what you just observed that we have some great leaders in our schools i was at a student leadership classroom today i've

007been to several over the last couple months and it's just always a thrill to see that we are in great hands that our schools have students who want to do positive things and are using their leadership capacity to plan those positive things there's always something negative in them in the media and yes there are unfortunate events that happen but by and large the student experience is extraordinary and i just appreciate that again mr greece haber is taking the lead with our dysart student leadership council and that these students are doing things that impact students all across the district that's all i have to report thank you very much dr kelly next we have the governing board update i don't have any big updates but happy fall even though it doesn't feel like it and i'll

008open it up for anyone else that wants to jump in um i had the honor of visiting all the cte classes at willow canyon high school and it was very impressive and looking forward to visiting the other three in the very near future wow just want to make sure that anyone that happens to be watching please please do not partake in the tick tock craze that's going on right now across the nation arizona and it's not the right thing to do there has been vandalism and destroying of property and dysart will take swift action against anyone that happens to be doing anything like that so please be forewarned um i attended the country music um uh the weekend that was here at the vista uh one of my favorite artists uh shooter jennings was on

009there and he was he was performing like crazy and sweating like crazy so you know his heart and passion was in it so it was a great great thing i also saw lee rocker of the stray cats it was a great evening and attended the superintendent certified council where teachers can bring any issues from their particular school and the teachers were just bringing lots of ideas and lots of concerns that they had and so that was a perfect place to share that and also i had the privilege of attending uh the cactus cafe today that's over at the support services um i was looking for something different to eat and i was told that dr croto really recommends the grown-up grilled cheese sandwich that was very good the nutrition area is open to the public

010so i believe it's from seven to one 130 something like that so anyone can go in and it's at the support services building and i even had the opportunity to speak with a couple of bus drivers they didn't know who i was but i did ask them how's it going how's your day they were a little tired but they knew what their job was to actually go pick up transport the kids and they all did it with smiles even though they were tired they all did with smiles so i would recommend going to the cactus cafe and the grilled cheese grown up or the grown-up grilled cheese sandwich so thank you very much this is awesome all right i got to attend the constitution day at canyon ridge and that was pretty cool like it

011was super cool mr rosso put a lot of hard work into that it was nice because all the kids chose a founding father or founding mother and they all researched it and then they had like a little bio and so you'd walk up to them and they'd be like hi my name's so and so and they all did great all the kids were all behaved everybody was friendly it was really cool to see all these kids just embracing the constitution and really getting to know the history of their country thank you so much all right moving on to item e1 the consent agenda and i will make a motion to approve the consent agenda items as presented second i'm not sure who seconded tracy motion passes thank you next we have item g1 dr kellis

012thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet um this evening we go on to our next section of policy monitoring as we do each year we bring each section forward for a review and ken hicks will introduce this item good evening madam president members of the board superintendent dr kellis colleagues and community members this is as aforementioned our policy review section this one took it back to our department and team and started making sure they're operational so there's a little typos little changes so very minor change in all of these but just adjusting to make sure that it is aligned to what we're doing and also checking sometimes with law change sometimes state board of ed changed so all the changes that you see although all of them are minor are

013fully aligned to how and what our practices are thank you i'll open it up for discussion okay um i had a few questions then um for policy 4.2 can you give us an example of a situation where a fingerprint card would not be needed that is a great question when a valid fingerprint card would not be needed um madam president members of the board i believe statute there is a provision that if vendors are not in with around students and not with a regular contract contact they do not need a fingerprint card um there is some leeway of what regular contact means at times we we've defined that as five times more in a year that they're on our campus than they would require so certain vendors say a soda machine vendor they're changing out

014if they're there every single month that's 12 times or 10 times during the year we would say yes but there are times if they're just one time on and they're not going to be around students then we would not require a fingerprint card for a vendor madam president if i could also add that if they don't have a fingerprint card the requirement is that they be accompanied by a staff member so that even if they're there one time they're not just free to roam but they are under the supervision the entire time that they're there and they would be supervised the entire time yes that's the actually the law that says that whenever including restroom breaks things like that um they would if are not around students um well yeah so there are times for

015example where we do nighttime projects where the schools are essentially closed and they come in the middle of the night to put in air scrubbers right um so we would not require the the fingerprints for for those people to come in but whenever school's in session yes the entire time that they are there they're under the super fix the law says they have to be under the supervision of a staff member so after hours so after normal school operating hours many times we have different groups of students using our facilities still we would have choir marching band things of that nature so that would apply to those times as well would those be considered school operating hours uh madam president regardless of what the law says to that i would expect that yes that would

016apply okay thank you that would be our rule okay i may be supported by law but i would say definitely for our purposes okay um anyone else have anything on that one i just want to touch on that um i believe this law came out correct me if i'm wrong dr croto about eight years ago nine years ago about then um i think about twelve twelve okay gotta think about that um and there were um at that time several vendors that did not want to pay that price in order to do it but the law was the law and so there was a lot of pushback but it was almost like a too bad so sad they still had to have the uh the fingerprint clearance card so are you saying that this is a

017new exception no no no i'm just saying no no no no no no i just wanted to clarify your worst pushback years ago okay when this first came out understood do you think that our um administrators understand that difference that it's not just a matter of escorting the vendor back but it's actually making sure they're supervised during the time that they're there doing the job madam president miss pritchard if that's a concern of the word we can uh reemphasize that point that there's clear understanding what the law says and what our expectations as a district are i would appreciate that when you say to clarify that would you be placing that in this policy or just doing a separate communication madam president that would be separate communication okay thank you oh actually just follow up

018on that then so that's not um i mean would there be a benefit to changing that wording and just adding that in there for clarity but vendors without a fingerprint clearance card will be supervised at all times while on campus i don't think that let's send some more that's the statue so i don't know whether to be able to change a statute not changing the statute adding a future okay man press miss pritchard um you will note that there's not a reference to procedure to this policy and we can establish procedure that would include those details okay okay thank you and um we don't need to do this right now but i know there are several statutes listed here if you could just maybe follow up with us and let us know which statute that

019applies to president can you specify are you talking about the supervision right yes okay thank you um i had questions on a few more anybody have anything else on this one okay um moving to 4.28 um so this is for the travel related expenses and i just was curious whether this policy would apply to persons with contracts with an uh automotive statement madam president members of the board they are not we do not reimburse them for travel within the state okay thank you anyone else have anything on that one because you say you don't we don't reimburse travel within the state did that change uh madam president members of the board i've never approved cabinet's members uh travel reimbursement she was talking about with an automotive statement are you talking about contract employees other district

020employees are reimbursed for travel within okay okay moving to 4.29 so this is for the monies collected by school employees and by student organizations that all money should be receded accounted for and directed without delay to the proper location of deposit so because this is very specific to school employees and to student organizations does that encompass parent-teacher organizations as well as booster clubs um madam president members of the board no this policy does not okay that was it i just have one quick one on that policy do all schools have saves in them madam president members of the board yes okay thank you okay no one has anything else we'll move on to um item g2 school reports dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board this evening we are pleased to have

021two of our schools present and dr pauline will introduce this item madam president members of the board cabinet it's my pleasure to introduce stephanie lawrence principal of riverview and she will be our first presentation tonight good evening madam president president members of the board cabinet dr kalas dr polling i will start my timer to make sure i do not ramble on for too long they told me several times stephanie please use a timer because i talk too much so timer is started my name is stephanie lawrence i am the principal at riverview elementary school with me i have kathy sylvester my assistant principal and brian nowaka he is our tls on campus so thank you for allowing us to speak to you this evening we have the same presentation format that everybody is using so

022i'm using this to do this and it works so riverview elementary school is a school of about 844 students that is up from previous years with the redistrict redistricting of dysart so we accumulated about 150 or so students from luke elementary school into our boundaries there was an a section over there that was within walking distance of review and it made sense for them to come to our school so that was a consideration for this year how to integrate those little jets into our barracuda family and so that was something that we planned for intentionally our signature program is civic minded leadership so we have adopted about five years ago stephen covey's the leader in me program and we teach intentionally uh how to be a leader of yourself how to be a leader in

023the community how to work together and our mission statement is up there for you riverview barracudas believe that leadership empowerment achievement determination are the key to building successful learners we commit to these principles and we'll be to build a community that leads the way now i will preface that with when we first came to riverview and started working on that mission statement this was a very uh staff and teacher-driven mission statement we are at the point now where we are really hyper focusing on student voice how do we infuse student voice this is not student friendly at all so we have a committee in place this year for students to look at the mission statement what we do on campus and to rebuild that mission statement in a student-friendly manner questions are threatened right all

024right i'm shaking a little bit you guys are very intimidating i'm just gonna sitting up there with your we don't podiums i know i know they told me don't be intimidated but i am it's just the way it is all right so talking about the opportunities for riverview there's plenty of opportunities i think in all of the schools one of our big opportunities this year that we're looking at is closing those learning gaps we always look at closing the learning gaps this year we're dealing with the added stress of some of the loss that happens through the pandemic as all of the schools have experienced so we're intentionally looking at areas within our data um where we saw an like a like a real what we called the covet slide uh one of those things

025that i would say is from the the 1819 to the year that we tested last year in ela we dropped about seven percent and in math we dropped about eight percent give or take that's not that's just a school average that's not um like different uh grade levels we saw pockets of success other places so we're looking at those and trying to figure out okay so how do we work extra extra hard to try to recover some of those coveted slides another opportunity that we're looking into is fostering resilience within our students so we take many surveys throughout the course of the year and one of the surveys that we took dealing specific to our leader in me program really questioned the students in many different ways how they feel about themselves and their own

026capacity for learning and their own capacity to do better we were shocked actually to see that there was kind of this general attitude that um students felt like well you know if i fail i fail and can i do better i don't know not really so they had this you know this feeling about themselves like hey you know like you either got it or you don't um so it's one of the reasons that we really believe in the leader in me program really providing a vehicle and an intentional um curriculum that supports student efficacy right like they can and they should and they will pick themselves back up when they fall down so one of the ways that we're doing that is making sure that we are beefing up our student action teams and our

027student leadership finders so a student leadership binder and i did bring a few copies if you guys want to see the beginning stages of these binders have a student focus on themselves their personal goals they build wigs wildly important goals so they build a wig for themselves and then they build academic wigs so as they go through with their teachers maybe attendance is a problem they set an attendance goal and then they track their own attendance in there they set academic goals based on what it is that they're learning in class and then they track those academic goals so that's one of the ways that we're combating that so increasing proficiency in both ela and math obviously is a huge focus for our school we are using the vehicle of some of the west ed

028protocols so this is a a program that the district has brought back to dysert we've had it a focus in this for a couple years and it is in building teachers the art of teaching strengthening the art of teaching to build that core instruction in the classroom so we're using that as one of our vehicles and then another area of growth for riverview is empowering empowering parents to support student growth i don't know i think sometimes we don't give our parents enough opportunity to support student growth we think oh well the kids aren't returning their homework anyway so why give homework right it's more of a hassle than it is a benefit and i think that maybe we should strengthen some of those relationships you know so don't just throw the homework out give homework

029and then concrete strategies for parents to be able to follow i think school today is sometimes confusing to parents you know they might say um i hate that common core or you know new math stinks you know what's wrong with old math right so instead of just throwing the baby out with the bath water you know how can we strengthen parent understanding of what we do in school why we do what we do and what's a very concrete strategy that you can use to help your child at home so those are some of the opportunities that we're trying to take advantage of at riverview some of our celebrations we were very pleased to see that we got all 50 points of our growth points when the uh the data came out from azm2 we always

030struggle in that area um there's a couple of different reasons for that thank you amy for explaining it to me so but we were definitely pleased to see that the hard work that the teachers had done throughout the course of the year um did show up and pay off in um the point system uh we decreased our referrals by another 20 percent and for i don't give you just a real brief history of riverview in the past five years or so when kathy and i first took over riverview our referrals rivaled the high schools so yeah so at the time we had about 750 kiddos on our campus and you know we would have i don't know almost 1300 referrals a year it's a lot a lot of referrals um we are down by like

03167 percent now and last year decreased it another 20 so um we are back into very respectable and normal referral ranges and i'll tell you that those referrals um have moved from some pretty serious offenses now down to like head offenses you know like if i have to tell you one more time to stop riding your skateboard in the front of this school my head's gonna pop off my shoulders you know so those types of things now there's normal kid things too but we've definitely been able to work with students on how to manage and do self behavior our staff retention is really good so we keep our staff and we actually do a really good job recruiting staff now um last year was a super celebration during the uh the opening you know where

032staff move what do they call that transfer right i was gonna say open enrollment that's wrong see look how look how nervous i am i'm gonna just throw out a bunch of words don't make any sense so oh what's my time looking like oh you're fine oh gosh four seconds i told you they told me i do this all the time darn okay so we keep our staff and during the staff moving process we actually were able to move quite a few other people from other schools they were like hey we want to work with you guys so it was really nice to have choices you know we were like well let me see your scores and um you know you know do you follow procedure those types of things so we were able to

033recruit some highly desirable teachers that was very exciting for us our parent satisfaction survey last year came out favorable which was another shift for riverview um so it's good to know that our parents are satisfied um with the school the schooling that their kids are getting that their kids feel safe and the teachers are supportive and then we had pockets of increased proficiency even with covid and let me see if i can even find that so sixth grade both um i was intentional with that so sixth grade both the ela and the math were able to gain um from years previous and our eighth grade math also and eighth grade math and ela were higher than the years before so that was very exciting to see i mean they worked their tails off and it

034paid off so that was a good celebration let me see there's amy's page i printed it left it and curl it and circled all your numbers thank you amy so focus for the year we are focusing on data rich conversations for both tier one tier two and tier three um so we're trying to make those connections with the teachers in our conversations we have some extra staff on campus you know so we have the interventionist like other schools have but we also have a couple of aids that we were able to purchase with some title one monies so we use them to do hallway classes you'll see them wandering around in the hallways with their little quiet signs pulling extra kids out and uh working with them individually to help take some of that off

035of the teachers you know so we use we take the gap or the bubbles kids and we try to move them over the bubbles the ones that are a little bit easier to move and don't need that intense teacher attention so maybe we can help them move a little bit faster again we're focusing on student data binders we really want to take the students and make them intentionally intentionally look at and focus on their own data make those goals and reach those goals we set campus wigs all of the time this year our big focus is reading so just getting kids to read so we've got goals set in reading we are focusing on student-led action teams and that's coming along nicely professional development is a big thing for us this year as well we're

036trying to focus on backwards design and the west ed protocol so we've already done trainings in dok2 or higher so right how do we focus on dok how do we specifically focus on checks for understanding in the classroom making sure that we set goals uh in a 20-minute time period have you done at least one check for understanding are you waiting until the end of the class period and then all of a sudden you're like oh shoot the kids aren't listening to me well that's too late right so and then aligning our checks for understanding with the objective that they're trying to teach so those are some of the things that we're really focusing on in professional development this year and those are some of my beauties time for questions i was close super close

037thanks thank you so much first of all and do you have a copy of the binder the student i do so we can share i've got six oh wow we can pass them out so there are various grade levels thank you very much teacher understanding of what to do with these finders and just talking about student voice i was kind of laughing because um yesterday i had some boys come to my office there's three of them and they came in and they were like hey do you have a minute i didn't but i was like sure i've got plenty of time for you come in and they were like we want to talk to you and we have a petition okay so what is this petition and they handed it to me and it said

038we the seventh grade demand they used a very strong word that we're able to take our backpacks from class to class so the teachers had implemented a backpack strategy because the kids were i don't know what the kids were doing but the teachers decided to implement some kind of backpack strategy they were not happy with it they had all these signatures all over the page i was pretty impressed with it actually and i was like okay well what's going on they're like well mr sedano our social studies teacher we're talking about rights right now and you know what we have rights and he said well why don't you do a petition and we said okay and here we are okay so they set it up they talked about it and they did a little um

039seventh grade class meeting today they organized it the boys did this we didn't do it and they started talking about some of the solutions that they could implement and still have the right to have their backpacks in closer proximity to them i thought that was pretty good so i don't know they come to me with a lot of demands lately maybe they shouldn't have as big a voice as i'm trying to give them i don't know that's really cool now you're talking about your floaters your aids who float around they pull out the proficient or the higher level students no um so they pull out the lower ones they pull out the bubble kids so well i mean it could be a proficient kid that's ready to move over to a highly proficient so we

040look at the different bubble students right so the minimally proficient that are ready to move into partially proficient the partially that are ready ready to move into proficient okay um so we look at those bubble kits the ones that just need an extra little push okay and that way we can kind of track that data we we tried it a couple of different ways last year and we it took a while for us to land on something that would give us some concrete data to show that it was working um so the staff i have to give it up to them because they it was a new position and we were like look this is going to shift underneath your feet plus it's a coveted ear so um you know you're gonna have to be

041flexible and they really were you know so we would throw something out we would try it we didn't think it was working the data wouldn't support it we would say let's shift it or they would say hey what if we did this and so it was really a partnership between us and them and the teachers to try to find something that would work for the kids very cool thank you yeah i am so impressed with this binder i don't know which one you're looking at i'm looking at samir's and it's so well done but i mean i'm guessing that all of them are really well done but it really i i'm just at a loss for words because like the fluency they're graphing their own fluency on here that's that's amazing to me because most

042kids don't know what where they're at or don't care this is really just pushing them into the process and partnering with them so they can see and i'm sure that they've got to feel good about the progress that they can visually see yeah on these graphs so that really speaks to a student's resilience doesn't it right you know so i can i can not meet my goal right and i can set a new goal and i can say well i didn't meet my goal guess what i didn't read i didn't read at home so what if i really do read at home can i see a difference in how i score and perform right so the the idea then is that students will lead their own parent-teacher conferences so student-led conferences but with actual data

043this is what i do at school here's how i track myself and here's how i plan to do better and then that more in-depth look at a student can then be had with the teacher sitting there in partnership with the student and the parent wonderful thank you well this is really cool because a lot of times we just think charts like we're in classrooms and we have our charts but we don't necessarily have the kids name they have their number and then they have this and kids don't necessarily go look at a chart and be like oh where's my data but this is just super kid-friendly and it's like right in front of them and they're owning it yeah they're like internalizing okay this is where i'm at this is where i want to be

044it's not just random numbers that don't mean anything to the kids yeah you know so this is really cool very organized now not every teacher is on the same level right because teachers are like kids you know so i have um um i don't think i have really any true dissenters on the campus can i brag on my staff for a minute so they are so good i know time so they are so good you guys like it is a dream to have this staff all gathered under one roof i mean they just care about kids they care about kids and it's a hard job it's a hard job there's a lot of things that we are dealing with in a much higher rate than than is um then we're used to so we we've

045done a lot of self-injury tax and safety plans for kids that are not coping well and um we've helped a lot of parents and and community members that aren't coping well they're not coping well so it's a very very hard job and these teachers they come and they show up and they try to do the job as the expectation they try to do it and do it well so like my staff is amazing all of them kathy is amazing she deals with the kids in the most amazing way every single day brian is amazing i just had um two people compliment brian today um with the way that he knew his staff so dana k was on campus and walked through and she was very impressed with how well brian knew the staff and then

046i had a teacher say you know what i just love having uh mr nawaka as my mentor he is kind he knows what he's talking about and he doesn't make me feel dumb i mean that's great to have somebody supporting you and leading you that can take you where you are and help you take that next step yeah i have a really good staff miss lawrence question for you um not really a question but more so a um compliment congratulations on your um referrals decreasing by 20 or even more since thank you both you and ms investor have been there um but the fact that you are having the students revisit the mission statement to have them craft it and talk amongst themselves in order to have it focused around the students is a really

047big thing a really big thing so congratulations to them thank you thank you did you have a question thanks guys i just want to follow up on on two things one is when you talked about the student survey and you kept saying we who is it by grade level so do all the grade do the teachers at that grade see those surveys or is it just so we have a very shared leadership system at riverview so in fact you know they would be shocked if they do some of the things i say because they very often say we'll take care of it ms lawrence um so we have a lighthouse team um so we have two lighthouse coordinators and then we have i think like five different leaders that talk about different areas of the

048school so we have we focus on parents we focus on academics we focus on student leadership culture we have an action team for that we focus on staff leadership culture so we all take this survey and the other surveys and then we visit it together and look at that data together and then each action team will come up with an action step to support some of the lowest areas and take it to the next level and then how do you um empower the parents to understand the new math or how the whatever they're reading or to so they can help their student at home so what is the question of the day um we are trying to take a very concrete approach right so give them something that they that parents understand and know how

049to do so i'm going to send home a weekly homework and i'm going to give you an action step let's say that it is focusing on sight words for the littles so you're going to parent you can take these sight words and you can tape them to the pantry door where they get their snacks you can tape it to the bathroom mirror where they brush their teeth you can tape it to the back door and this is an easy way for you to help us practice those sight words i hear you going out the back door but i didn't hear you say your sight words right and the parent can then have them yell them back so we want to give them simple and easy ways to just help their kid at home we'll do

050anything that's complicated we want you to help with the simple and easy things like number sense is an easy thing for parents to do um and make sure that the kid knows how to count you know they that they know how to group things by 10. that's a big one right now but what about the older ones the older students or is this focused more on the younger ones uh no i think that we're trying to focus on everyone and again we're trying to focus on something that the parent can easily understand like number sense i can tell you right now that um all the way up through the eighth grade for most of the students like like they need to work on their times tables it's a thing it's been a thing for a

051thousand years and how many high schools got high school how many eighth graders are taking high school classes do you happen to know uh we get about i don't know so we started out at riverview with maybe only four or five kids that were willing to take that step into the high school algebra class and we now have a full class even during the pandemic last year a full class so 30 some odd students taking the high school test they got through algebra one algebra two some of them went through geometry as well thank you we want to expand it but now's not the time so we we i mean i feel like if they can do algebra then why don't we have them doing you know their english class so they can probably do

052it but we just need to build the road just a couple things first of all amazing presentation you should have never indicated you were nervous because you didn't appear nervous at all i really hate talking in front of adults it gives me the options if you're five i'm all about it you know so you did a really good job um and i had a few i made some notes as you were talking i'll get to those but we kind of jumped around a few areas and no no i mean in regard to like someone had mentioned how awesome your staff is and you are complimenting so on that note of it i want to say because i i have one student's book here who has miss james and her class mission and starting out with

053these very um just these positive affirmations and very the verbiage is so positive starting out their day like that's just amazing that's just so um that's awesome so i i believe that you do have awesome stuff if they're anything like miss james so good job miss james if you're watching in tvlan um so there's that so in regard to and i'm sure you're not going to get in any trouble tomorrow because we're hearing all the things we want here about your school this is the stuff we want to know so i'm sure you're fine um in regard to thank you number again for being honest transparent about your scores what in regards to your drops in ela and math have you found so far an intervention that you feel particularly proud of or that seems

054to be driving some good results to help those particular areas so i feel like um so the answer is yes and i did speak to a couple of the hallway interventionists so that's kind of above and beyond what you might hear about from the other schools um we are being very intentional i think with some of that extra staff support to try to pull those extra small groups so that the teachers can focus on the kids who need like i need that hyper focus of a teacher so that's one of the things that we're doing in intervention that we hope to gain ground with the older students the the teachers have really divided up the ela and the math and supported each other so what i mean by that is this so sixth grade you've

055got four teachers um and so maybe uh math and science they partner up and they are going to do the intervention for math and then social studies and ela partner up and they do the interventions for ela the teams have been really good about meeting together and saying look i'm still really low here i'm still really low here let's cycle that in in all of our warm up so that the kids see a united front so they've had very intentional conversations about these types of strategies where they can kind of synergize their own needs and move it along with the kids that sounds awesome let me just brag on the kids sorry one more time so some of the leadership things that we have going on with the kids too um at the beginning of

056the year this just two two quick examples um big problem with the kinders in the cafeteria because you know they can't open their milk they can't sit still they don't know how to eat without talking for a thousand years um so we were really struggling with them and i was like why are we doing this what grade level comes in after them it happened to be fifth grade and so i talked to the fifth grade team i was like hey can we get some student leaders and their what the kids were like we'll do it right they came down and they started uh being the ones who you should have seen them they were little dictators man no you walk on this line you walk this way here's your milk you only get one and

057uh made them sit down in their little spaces and all of a sudden our lunch was just moving at the pace that it was supposed to be i walked through the hallways the other day and i saw kids sitting in the hallways working with students not adults so we have some some older kids being leaders in the hallway and they're down there and they're they're running sight words with the kids they're running letters with the kids they're running counting with the kids and so we're trying to maximize and it's good for them to be leaders right some of those kids that struggle with their behavior in the upper grades are beautiful with the littles like they're totally different children and so it's really good for them to find a way to be successful and be

058a leader and it supports their own learning in the process last example and that was a dramatic decrease in referrals that you referenced oh gosh yeah how did how would you do that it was a lot hard work kathy should be talking about this but um we were very very consistent first of all um with the discipline matrix so they had to know who was in charge that's us and then it was getting all of the teachers on we trained the teachers before we trained the kids right so leadership starts with me and i have to be a leader of myself i have to be proactive i have to think when when i have to seek first to understand that's a big one right now people are not doing that they're not seeking first to

059understand they just want to be understood and they don't want to understand and so we're really hitting that one hard so we trained the staff first and then we trained the kids and we invested it's pretty expensive so we invest in the product for leader in me and then we continue to train the staff and we continue to think about it and talk about it and because teachers are leaders of themselves and they model that to students students have begun so you mentioned tick tock that's not cool but i will tell you that we have had what i would say is maybe a lesser degree of it so the kids have taken off the lid for the soap but the soap is still there so i took the lid off and i ran so they

060haven't destroyed it they haven't pulled it off the wall they haven't stolen anything off a teacher's desk we did have one little thief but let me tell you his life sucks and so um you know that is a manifestation of the terrible terrible life that child has so we're working with him on a different level um you got to meet people where they are and that that's kind of your explanation and what you just shared right now kind of kind of blends into what i'm going to say next under your opportunity is empowering parents to support student growth and another board member asked you know how do you make that happen i'll say that i firmly believe a lot has to do with you and that when you and i used to work together at

061surprise you have a very real down to earth approach about you that engages people and you're very relatable in that way and you're great at building good culture and climate and i think that that's um that's what i think is a huge part of probably that empowerment piece and getting parents involved is a lot of the work that you that you put in in the front so thank you for all that you do no you do a great job and i really again appreciate all your detail and um and your presentation tonight it was wonderful thank you thank you okay all right she can't get in trouble tomorrow do you mind shooting do you want your binders madam president members of the board cabinet and community it's my pleasure to introduce stacey brown principal of

062western peaks good evening madam president members of the board dr keller's dr dean dr polling dr croto and mr hicks i am the proud principal of western peak's k4 elementary where we don't have to worry about tick-tock challenges all right uh right now western peaks has an enrollment of about 595 students our school colors are silver and black we are the falcons and we call ourselves the falcon family where our pbis expectations are to be respectful responsible and kind our signature program continues to be innovation and we are kind of revamping that and what it looks like on a k4 campus so we have a few opportunities for this school year one of our um first initial opportunities is that we have half of a new staff um joining us from simran springs and so

063as we have created new teams then there's an opportunity to create that cohesiveness among the team members especially because we don't have a shared prep time with them we have five to six teachers per team but only for special area teachers so they're split up on their prep times but in order to alleviate that uh we met as an instructional cabinet and brainstormed and every team has now committed to scheduling a specific day every week where they meet in the mornings before school so that they can have a common team planning time with everyone together and work on building that cohesiveness and sense of team so that's been getting started now and we're making some improvements there also we have gaps in student learning of course with the covet slide so we have been working

064on identifying the gaps in learning looking heavily at data and we're also really working to find this lowest skill deficit work at that deficit and provide interventions to to seek growth in the students and so we started that right away within the first couple of weeks of school we're already seeing some good growth with our students we also have an opportunity to increase proficiency in fourth grade ela and mathematics this has been a lower performing grade level for a few years at western peaks in the 2021 azm2 only 38 of fourth grade students were proficient or highly proficient in math and 54 were proficient or highly proficient in reading which is a slide from where those that same cohort was as third graders and so this is an area that we've really targeted this year

065so that more of our fourth grade students can gain proficiency by the end of the year so we are doing week very like consistent data talks with our fourth grade teams we are doing more heavy interventions with them and bringing in some new resources to help our fourth graders because especially this year they aren't the reading level that we normally would see fourth graders and so we're bringing in a lot of our 95 group phonics support to help those fourth graders where they're at in ela also getting families re-engaged with the school community after the pasture of not really being able to be on campus and be engaged so that was really important to our entire staff was that sense of community and so we are doing a lot of ptsa events we are doing

066family nights like literacy nights math nights so that we can get a ton of community engagement our first family night we had a bingo night and we had like 135 participants it was our biggest event ever so that was great another area of opportunity is we are working on systems to support some of our more significant student behaviors um and staffing to support that we do have some students with some really special behaviors and so we are working through our pbis program bringing those students to pbis tier two to implement interventions with them and track that data and success of those interventions and then this year we're actually starting our tier three training with pbis for the students who need an additional layer of support for behaviors we're also working with the district behavior team

067to support them our social worker support and of course staff and paraprofessional support but along with that we do have vacancies in paraprofessional positions on campus so that's added to that area of opportunity for some celebrations uh we had some really great third grade uh proficiency on the azm2 in math and ela last year our third grade students uh 68 of them were proficient or highly proficient in math and 62 percent were proficient or highly proficient in reading so that was a quite a area of celebration for us also we had a successful opening of our primary campus the k4 teachers have overwhelmingly exhibited a really positive can-do attitude in all aspects of the school despite whatever they're um you know facing the systems are running really smoothly and both students and staff are positive

068and happy on campus you walk around the campus everyone is just really happy smile on their face great place to be another area of celebration is that our teachers even though we're just about six seven weeks into school they are very knowledgeable about their students and have been from week one they've demonstrated during our rti meetings that they have deep knowledge of their students abilities they began the interventions within the first couple of weeks of school and they've been differentiating support to be able to meet the students where they're at we also have a celebration because we have a real focus on learning the teachers are highly honed in on student learning not only are the teachers tracking data on all of their students but like riverview all of our kindergarten through fourth grade students

069are also tracking their own data our second through fourth graders have data binders our kinder and first don't have actual binders but they are tracking data for instance our kindergartners have little caterpillars and on each segment of the caterpillar is a different phonics skill and so when they master a skill they color that segment and they watch as they track their data while our other students are creating bar graphs and things our students are setting goals for themselves so after they take a test a fluency test or a unit test they'll track they'll graph their data and then they'll set a goal for growth because we are very focused on growth mindset at western peaks and so we want to teach students that it's all about making growth every time and so our students are

070setting goals tracking their data and really on top of that and our phonics core is already providing incredible results and growth in the phonics skills that new phonics core program that we're using for tier 1 and k3 so that's been really successful we also continue to have a really successful implementation of pbis last year was our first full year of implementation and we were able to reduce our referrals by 47 from the year prior so this year is our second year of full implementation but we got half a new school of new teachers and new students and so we had to train all of our new staff and all of our new students it's going very well and as i said we are getting training in the tier three portion of pdis this year another

071big celebration is we have created a very successful partnership with transformation community church they actually rent out our facilities on sundays and they approached us wanted to build a partnership with us at meet the teacher night they gave away 150 backpacks full of school supplies they also gave away several pairs of new shoes for students um and so parents were thrilled to get those they are going to be sponsoring a weekend backpack program to feed 20 families every weekend throughout the entire school year well they will send home backpacks of food every weekend with these 20 families and they also sponsor monthly staff appreciation meals for our staff every single month they're going to be volunteering to help with our some of our school events and so that's just been a great blessing to our

072school to have such a strong partnership with someone in the community and then our final celebration on here is we had the best fundraiser in western peak's history we started out the year with a read-a-thon and we raised 35 945 dollars in our read-a-thon so that was just mind-blowing so i will be getting slimed and coach sullivan will be getting a pie in the face and all the students will be getting an ice cream party uh we'll make sure you know when that is if you want to come see because i want to see that all right so our focus this year our first focus is on the response to intervention we have partnered with the district curriculum department both dana noble and holly johnston to revamp our rti process this year we are meeting

073monthly and having all-day rti meetings where teachers come during their preps and then we do the rti meetings during the teachers preps this has allowed us to be able to meet about several more students than we normally would have done it when we were doing it just be after school once a week it allows us to put interventions into place sooner and track the interventions and their success and then determine what the next best steps are and dana noble had said she was just so impressed with western peaks with our teachers because they came they had all their data they knew their students and she had never seen another school where the teachers were so prepared and knew their students so well so that made me very proud of course i know how awesome my

074teachers are but it was great to hear from someone else we're also focusing on effective intervention in the past we were doing intervention four days a week with mondays being short but we are on a strict five day a week schedule for reading and math intervention students are doing walk to read so they do split up amongst the other teachers in the grade level so every teacher takes a group based on a specific skill and works with those students to drill down to the deficits differentiate the learning fill in the gaps and then move them forward into the next deficit i'm sorry to the next level of deficit so like i said they've already been making incredible improvements and um it's been really good to see that we started that on august 30th and then

075we're also focusing on effective instruction using the west end dysart protocol we did already in previous year give professional development training on the depths of knowledge aligning standards to the correct depths of knowledge and student objectives we had already done training on student engagement and so this year we did a refresher of those and then we have just recently done professional development on academic conversations because those do have a very high correlation to student achievement and next week we'll be doing checks for understanding and being able to do those checks along the way so that we catch any misconceptions before it's the end of a unit we are also between myself my assistant principal and my tls we are doing in and out coaching and so we'll go in the three of us observe a

076teacher together come out debrief one of us will go cover the teacher's class while the teacher comes out and the other two of us coach the teacher on the spot right then and there so the teacher gets immediate feedback that they can then implement that's been really effective and our teachers love getting the feedback right then and then the other area of focus this year is on the plc plus structures and the plc plus really works to increase not only student learning which we've been focused on for years but also increase student teacher learning as well and so we have started that by training the instructional cabinet on the plc plus structures and in turn then the instructional cabinet will be facilitating the training with their grade levels so that the whole entire staff is

077trained on the five questions and how to use the five questions really well which are where are we going where are we now how do we move learning forward what did we learn today which really focuses on what did the teacher learn today how did the teacher improve their learning and who benefited and who did not so that's where we can really look at some of like our sub populations and um you know are we really meeting the needs of every student on campus that's all my presentation any questions thank you it sounds like you have a lot of um strong instructional supports on your campus and the more you keep talking about the different things you're doing all seem to be geared towards improving instruction so i think that sounds awesome i especially like

078that on the spot coaching that you're talking about so that way they can apply it right away or be able to relate to what you're saying rather than the end of the week it's like okay i think i might know what she's talking about it sounds sounds wonderful and then just for clarification the pbis implementation do you just mean just the school-wide program or do you guys now have pbis like behavior classrooms on your campus there's a difference so pbis is positive behavior intervention supports which is a program of positive behavior support school-wide with school-wide expectations reinforcements and um then pbs is that um like how countryside has those pbs classrooms for students that need that type of support so this is pbis okay you guys don't have pbs classrooms no okay double checking yeah

079thank you yes thank you i am just so impressed with your fundraising [Laughter] i was blown away i just every time every day it would just keep going up and up and i thought oh my gosh surely we're plateaued now and then the next morning i'd wake up and there'd be thousands more it was incredible do you think people were just so you know eager to donate since they didn't have any fundraising opportunities with kovid i don't know possibility because we really didn't do any fundraising last year we we didn't want to hit hit our community when a lot of people were out of work or things like that um i also think a lot of people really kind of attached to reading and so they really liked the idea of a readathon oh you

080know the kids are reading yeah i'll pay money for these kids to read and then i think that being just a k4 campus might have a lot to do with it too yeah we know that in fundraising in the past it's always kind of been the younger kids that we're able to raise the most and the older kids a little bit but so i think having they're cuter yeah so what are you going to do next year this year you're going to get slimed i mean come on for 35 000 you're gonna have to talk you know yeah i mean i've been made into an ice cream sundae i've had you know there's been kiss a pig this year it's slime i all i just keep saying is i will never do the ice cream

081sundae again i don't know i'm open for ideas you know they're skydiving oh boy i don't know if the trust will go for that um i did have one thing um well actually two um are you going to share your secret regarding that 35 000 fundraiser you're going to share it with other schools you can just absolutely no we actually got the idea from luke elementary who had also done the read-a-thon i think they had raised around 20 20 25 000 something like that um so i had brought that idea to the ptsa and they said yeah let's do it so yeah i'm definitely going to share it with with my fellow colleagues okay um congrats on the 47 decrease in the referrals okay we'd love to see those big numbers um i did have

082a just a question regarding um you were talking about the fourth grade um being proficient the 38 in the ela and the math and 54 in the reading um what specifically do you think it is that is making that the 38 and the 54 in reading you know that is what uh myself assistant principal tls that is the question that we have been scratching our heads and trying to figure out because we have strong fourth grade teachers who really are excellent teachers um and so one thing that i know is that with their intervention they never really had kind of a core resource to use for intervention time where as our k3 teachers like always had the certain like 95 percent to focus their interventions so this year my tls trained the 4th grade team

083on how to use the 95 phonics program they are using that in their tier 2 intervention because so many of our students are not up to speed on reading because of that covet slide so they're getting that phonics piece that they're missing during intervention time and my tls also trained the fourth grade team on another component of 95 group called multi-syllabic routine cards which really helps students learn how to read multi-syllabic words which is you know a lot more difficult as students move up into fourth grade they're coming across these more difficult words and so they're going to actually be teaching that in their tier one core content area in ela and we hope that that will help improve the fluency because as they improve their fluency and accuracy then that comprehension will help to

084follow with that with math we're looking at incorporating more like academic conversation number talks so that we get students to start being able to really talk about how they solve problems the strategies that they used being able to compare that to their peers because the more that they are able to talk about it and explain it and justify what they did then the more that they really will be able to understand the concepts and skills i'll be interested to find out your results on on using that so thank you very much thank you thank you thank you very much thank you good luck with the slime yes okay moving to item g3 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet um it is the intent of administration to ensure

085that the board is informed about school performance data on a more specific level this evening you will receive information about the high schools and mrs amy harchen will present that information good evening madam president members of the board dr kelson cabinet as dr callus mentioned i'm here to share with you high school data from um this past year and kind of give you an update on where the high schools are at all right so we're going to start with graduation rates and i'm going to start off with you'll notice that 21 last year seniors data is not in there because we haven't finalized all of the last year's senior codes so um it is very common that you spend the first part of this time cleaning up all of the state withdrawal codes and doing

086those types of things so our high school graduation data from last year is not clean yet so we don't want to share that information with you so we will share it at a later date but um you can see and i think you may have seen this at the heart of last year but there was a little bit of dip um in our graduation at dysart high school from 1920 um that was during the closure and we did lose a group of students but um a positive is that their five-year graduation rate meaning those kids came back for that fifth year um did bounce up to 92 so that puts um them back in line with where they had been previously so um a group of them did come back and finish um in that

087fifth year so the national average at that time was also 88 so um our district is above the national or um yeah above the national average and well above the state average so another component of um the high school graduation piece is our ccri indicator which is our college and career readiness it's broken into two parts blue academic side red college and career readiness or career readiness side and you can see that the high schools have done a really great job since it initially came out that first year of improving their data um each year and really understanding how these different components that are on there help our kids be prepared for what they're going to do in the future the little asterisks on each one show that the schools earned their bonus point when

088the state does their adf lettering schools can earn bonus points in various areas one of them is the ccri index if you increase your number of kids who are college going from one year to the next or you increase your military enlistments from one year to the next so for the past two years all of our schools have gotten their um increase in um either college or military attainment and the submitted to audit means that we have not finalized again with the state because we're still cleaning up seniors from last year so that is what we submitted to them based on last year's um graduation list and dropout rates um you can see all four uh or all the schools had a slight increase again due to covid we had students we've lost and we're

089still working and making phone calls um trying to get kids back in school or hoping you know making sure that they've found other schools other places so that we can this kind of ties to the graduation rates so we get a list of students who have codes that are related to consider dropout and we want to make sure that they've enrolled somewhere else or managed to get their diploma in some way so this is another piece of data that we track for our high schools um and you can see that we are far below the state average in our students dropout rates which is a great thing so cambridge um in up through 1920 both dysart high school and um willow canyon had the cambridge program on their campus 1920 was the last year that

090dysert high school had it we went away from it and um 2021 was the first year uh or was the first year that just willow canyon has it so you can see there's part of their decrease in enrollment um in the student number of students who tested um and the um number of exams that were given so um you can see the passing rate for 1920 is considerably higher than the others and that was due to the fact that the schools were in shutdown and normally the students come and sit for exams similar to an ap or ib exam they did not do that this year they didn't take exams all they submitted was their coursework so in science they submit labs in history they submit papers and then teachers do predicted grades and say

091this is how i think the students are going to score and that was all they used to score kids for that 19 year because the schools were shut down worldwide and students couldn't take tests so that um just kind of to give you an explanation of why that was such a an increase compared to previous years so for ib which is just at willow canyon you can see that um their enrollments for this last year also down we had a lot of um you'll see in ap and dual enrollment as well some of those enrollments dips there was a lot of uncertainty people weren't sure how long we were going to be in class whether or not we were going to be in and out so students and parents were a little hesitant to kind

092of invest in these exams and doing these types of things but the students who did choose to take their test willow had really high 92 percent of their students who sat for an ib exam last year passed their exams so they did very very well in those who persevered and chose to sit for those exams so um you can see their number of exams given dropped but the percentage of kids who tested from um 20 to 21 was the same so they have been very successful in getting their students to pass those exams next is act and for the board if you are not aware starting this year that is our state test um the high schools will not use azm2 this year the ninth graders will take the aspire test which is a version

093of the act test and our c um juniors will take the a.c.t so this will be our state test for um supposedly seven years we're hoping that the state holds true to that and we can actually get a good pattern of the test going but um there's two asterisks on this slide 1718 was the last time that we gave it to all students so we had a grant that year all of our juniors took it in 1718 and then um in 2021 you'll see that the numbers are even higher than that 1718 in terms of participation because our juniors were supposed to take it in 1920 and they didn't so we gave it in the fall um during their senior year last year and then our juniors took it in the spring so last year

094we tested two grade levels we tested seniors in the fall and juniors in the spring so that is why that number is so much higher than our normal amount this year just the juniors will take it but you can see um our juniors are the 2021 scores are relatively consistent with our 2017-2018 which was way pre-covered so we were pretty proud um our junior numbers actually in several schools were almost a point in a point and a half higher than they were in 1718 so our high schools have made good growth on this and we have two pilots going on some hct prep programs we're using method prep and chalk talk which are two practice programs that our juniors have access to at all four high schools to help them be prepared for that a.c.t

095test to help them be familiar with the types of questions and the structure of questions and those types of things so they were able to take a full-length act practice this fall they'll take another full-length act practice in the spring it's part of that um program that we have and then that way they'll have they get good feedback about things that they need to work on and then there's lessons within those programs that let them work on those skills and strategies in preparation for that test so we're hopeful that we will continue to have good increases in our ect scores um ap and i'm gonna when i talk about ep and dual enrollment um remember that at our high school some of these courses are taught concurrently so i may be an ap language a

096senior english class but i might also be taking it for dual enrollment so when we're talking about ap these are the courses that are all listed as advanced placement courses in our in our course sequences um so these numbers just reflect those and then when we get to dual enrollment it is only dual enrollment um it does not include any of those concurrent courses just so that they are separate pieces um you can see in 20 and 21 those are obviously our covet 19 years the change also occurred between 1819 and 1920 the college board switched when kids register for exams you always used to register right before we went to spring break was always the deadline so that kids made that decision right before testing started about whether or not they wanted to take

097that exam starting in 1920 students register about now right before fall break they make that decision about whether or not they want to take that ap exam the rationale was well kids will be more invested in the course during the year if they're going to take the exam but for a lot of our families in the community they don't want to make that decision until the kids are confident that they might do well in the exam so we've kind of noticed a drop off in some of our schools and the number of kids who are choosing to take that test because they have to make that decision so early but our numbers of students success on the test based on the number of students who scored a three or higher three is typically considered college

098equivalent um and can be usually um earn college credit when you get there most of those were relatively consistent valley vistas was exactly the same willow had a um a small dip shadows was about within a margin of error and dysart had a little bit of dip also in 1920 because they were in shutdown the kids were allowed to test from home and they gave a modified exam so the test the exam in 1920 looked very different it was very shortened they didn't have all of the essay components they never normally have so those tests really get a big asterisk um there were some universities who ended up not even taking the scores because they were um so very different than the high quality um that the ap usually has with theirs so um the

099middle column really is hard to compare to the um with the other two and last year they went back to the normal testing kits tested on campus you had to be in person um there was no um out at home option and then dual enrollment as i mentioned so any of these numbers when you see these first columns of student enrolled those are numbers of students and not numbers of courses kids are taking so one student could take one class they could have five or six classes so these are independent student numbers and these are students enrolled in a course that is being offered as dual enrollment so i may be in the dual enrollment english class but i may not be signing up for that course with rio salado however i'm still being i

100get that opportunity i just am not paying for that credit so that's why we offer um we show all three columns because any student who's enrolled in a course that is offered as dual enrollment gets to count that on our ccri rubric when we um when they file that with the state so it's really important for us to offer those classes even if a student chooses not to pay for that course through rio salado um the dual enrollment paid for dual enrollment and then received credit they obviously have to pass the class to receive credit um and for us to count that you can see our students are very very successful um the students who choose to enroll at very high percentages earn those credits so our numbers for this year as of right now

101are higher than the number of students who were enrolled district-wide last year so it looks like we are on an uptrend again students obviously register for classes as soon as they get back to school for their fall semester classes and then for those courses that are spring um spring semester separate from fall they'll register in january when they get back so some run all year and some run one semester to the next and then cte programs um so this is um a comparison of our district compared to westmech which is our um partner um cted and then all of the state average for all of the career and technical education districts so you can see um 2021 the first two columns are based on last year's cohort and the two columns before are based on

102cohort information from 2020 because that new information obviously is still not available program completion means the student started a sequence and finished it so this is the in the class of 2021 and dicer almost 47 percent of our students completed a cte sequence start to finish so i took sports medicine one two three four five six or whatever the sequence is for those courses the state tsa passing rate which is this technical skills test that the students have for each of their cte programs our pass rate was 86.1 almost 86.2 for our state average and you can see that is well above the state cte average so we're very proud of our cte students they do they're very passionate about their programs and they're really invested in those tests that they're taking the graduation rate

103for um that year was 94.86 and then our total placement rate so that is the students who complete a cte program every fall all of our cte teachers make phone calls they call their kids from the previous cte programs and they say hey i just want to check in and see what you're doing right now and the idea is to see how many of those students enter college the military a job specifically related to their program of um study or any kind of service program so if i join the peace corps or do any of those job core type things um those are all considered as being program placed so 91 of our students last from the class of 2020 were program placed in one of those five criteria so that's a really um testament

104to the hard work that the cte team does that students follow a path that is either college excuse me career or military related to those so i think that's really um well above state average as well so we're very proud of that work and then the last slide is just our skills assessment kind of trend data for you so um the state did not give their test in so the skills assessment you can see the number of exams given last year was much higher and that is because any student who was still on campus who didn't get to test in 1920 was able to test in 2021 even if they're not still in that sequence they could still take that test lots of campuses did study groups for those students to help them refresh and

105get ready for the test so that they were able to do that and um you can still see even with that gap we still had an 86 pass rate for our skills assessment for last year so um it was really great that they still got that opportunity since they missed out and they've done that whole sequence and missed out so it was good that they got to come back and still take that the following year so with that i will take questions i have a quick question so just to clarify instead of the azmerit the act is what our data is going to be based on for next year right for the junior class for the high schools it will be um aspire the state is not listed what they're going to it's going to

106be benchmarked just this year because they have no cut mark data or anything on it so act will be the high school one okay thank you on dual enrollment [Music] when a student picks a class do they know ahead of time that that's a dual enrollment class or do they find out oh i've picked an english class and then the first week of school that the the teacher says oh by the way anybody wants to duel and roll they can because this is a dorm or is it so it's both so in the um course selection process um students fill out the course request forms every course that's on that campus that is offered as dual enrollment um is tagged that way so um when i was at dysart high school it was an asterisk

107and it said dual enrollment eligible um so then when they signed up they knew that if they were looking for a dual enrollment course they had that opportunity um and then when school starts the registration process starts so then teachers will talk about that within their class and say this course is dual enrollment um teachers obviously have to be certified or meet the criteria to do that so for example you may have two teachers teaching it and only teacher a has the certification or ability to do that so what they do typically say okay if you would like to take it in dual enrollment then they will switch kids so that the kids who want to be in the dual enrollment class have that opportunity to be in that classroom and not miss that opportunity

108okay thank you it was good information it's sad to see the dips but we know you know why and and we're hearing that there's a lot of things going on to help students kind of make up that gap um will we still get uh the data we typically get in like later in the year then or something in regard to like the ela and the math how we usually get it broken up from high schools or is this in lieu of madam president members of the board uh miss pritchard um so we will continue to provide um other data um this is from last year there's going to be ongoing data i hope almost every single month that there's data coming as far as specific to what you're asking um are you referring to elementary

109high school well like usually for high school i could be dr aside dr wiefer choose to do it they'd give more of the in-depth like academic type scores to per high school we would be looking at the sometime in the second semester to show the the academic data from the first semester obviously we don't have that right now because we're in that first semester but this is all from last year but um yes we would be able to share any of the benchmarks the grade completions those types of academics thanks thank you so the items that are submitted for audit those are the ones that are going to be coming out in october i think right correct so right now the high school principals are all cleaning up graduation coats calling kids who um disappeared

110at some point last year with drew but we haven't received a records request calling um and doing those you know where are you now what are you doing so that we can clean those up with the state and then um the assist team communicates with the state and gets all that cleaned up for us okay and i i have other questions but i'm going to save them for you yes for a rainy day um but my one question uh had to do with the dips like for the act and i know we had the cove time but this was back on from 2017-18 to 2018-19 the dip from the number of tests taken was that the last year that we um paid for the okay yeah so we had to do the grant in 1718

111we were supposed to have it in 1920 and of course um the world shut down right before we were supposed to stay test so we should have had it in 1920 we did have that grant again okay so that's funny thank you i may have missed this question so i'm sorry if it's a duplicate um miss way or sink bell mentioned the the graduation rates did you mention when that information might be available i'm not sure if you did so like i said principals are currently updating um is team asked for us to have everything to them by october 1st so that they can finish everything um on the state side and then the state will get all those cleaned up and then they'll release graduation rates it fluctuates so even some of these that

112we have posted as kids enroll other places or graduate in other places the rates change so they look different um every time you go in they fluctuate just a little bit gotcha so by the end of calendar year we should have that at least okay thank you last question amy are you enjoying your new this shift job leadership and things so i actually spent a little time with luke today so i got some kid fix it okay just want to make sure all right next we have item h1 dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet at in previous discussions with the governing board administration was tasked to come up with some solutions for transportation this evening dr croto and mr hicks will be presenting a plan to address

113the the concerns with transportation thank you dr kellis madam president members of the board superintendent kellis cabinet guest as dr kellis mentioned we're bringing forward tonight a plan for some modifications to transportation and asking your approval for these so we will outline some of these along with some of the modifications that have been made already down the road that did not need your approval but we want to update you on those modifications that have taken place as well so we'll start tonight with the proposed transportation compensation structure we are asking that you approve moving from the current structure to a tiered compensation structure which i'll outline for you in a minute it's going to be valid for the following transportation employees that you can see on the screen there bus drivers dispatchers routers trainers safety

114training specialists and a transportation technician why are those positions you might ask why those positions those positions are tied to driving and you know right now our biggest need in transportation is drivers they hold cdls and they assist in driving so they were identified as priority positions for this compensation structure the pros proposed structure right now our current starting salary is 1681. it is not the top in the state it is competitive when you look at school districts it is not competitive when you look at outside competing industry and that's a shift that we need to take more and more as you can see the rather large warehouses around us opening up amazon opening up if you just saw amazon hired 300 drivers they're in our backyard and those are our employees so we need

115to take a bigger picture as we look at our compensation structure to not only be competitive with school districts but competitive in the industry and that's what we're doing with this tonight so we are proposing to you to go to a tiered structure where years of experience zero to three uh proposed allergy rate will be twenty dollars an hour if you have four to six years of experience uh twenty one dollars an hour seven to ten twenty two dollars an hour and uh greater than ten years of experience twenty three dollars an hour now some outlines so we are proposing to you tonight and asking for your approval that all current employees move to the corresponding tier based based on current years of service in this district that new employees will be placed at an

116hourly rate of the tier corresponding to their years of experience at a like position so we are asking you to allow us to grant years of experience to get get some bus drivers in here that have cdls and have years of experience in other places um and and and compensate them for those years of experience uh current employees that are compensated as we move them around on this tier structure if they're compensated at a higher rate of the proposed tier rate that we move them to we will they will receive the average increase of all the employees in that tier so we'll add up those employees take that average we'll give them that average raise and then training for our new employees will be paid at a tier rate that is much different right now

117as we bring in bus drivers currently we pay them minimum wage to go through the training they are not paid at a bus driver rate and certainly we want to attract them to pay them at their rate for their tier other pieces accruing the years of service so as they accrue years of service with the district they're going to be able to move from tier to tier or keep their hourly rate which is higher whichever is higher obviously if through the iba process and all that their continual percentage raises they will be higher than the tier rate as they get going so they will be able to stay with that higher rate they don't have to move down we're proposing to you that this pay structure tonight this evening is effective october 4th if you

118approve it tonight we will begin this structure on october 4th and after the initial launch and we place everybody on those tiers that we're going to calculate years of service in the spring of each year and we're only going to calculate one time so in the spring we'll calculate where they are for the following year before we issue their noes and go from there so in mr hicks now we'll talk about the other pieces thank you very much one additional request is to recommend an additional driver trainer we currently have three dryer driver trainers and a trainer specialist this would add to that all of our driver trainers currently do drive buses so sometimes they're covering sub routes they're covering where people are out they're covering extra field trips sometimes they're covering they're taking out

119buses if one breaks down so they're behind the wheel on a regular basis but it will allow us to increase our training capacity so if we're going to have more coming in we'll be able to provide more training opportunities as an example uh three years ago when i first got here we would only start a class every six weeks because of the time involved and training behind it this would allow more people there is a separation of duties for trainers when they're training the ones that's training cannot give the test so we do have to have at least two different this creates more flexibility so that we could start more people training quicker and not saying wait until this class is ready and then also as we've been brainstorming a lot of ideas we come

120up with great ideas but sometimes we need to make sure that it's in line with dps rules and other things an additional trainer just provides the opportunity to make sure that we're doing things with the utmost safety involved with our students and everything we're not just coming up with a great idea that nobody from transportation is really thinking about and so they need to vet it putting more on their plate this will allow them to handle more of that as well and so um additionally um as dr croto mentioned we're currently working on and so i'd just like to just hit a few of the things we've already started working on we have a plethora of options that we've already identified and started working on external exclu exploring the external recruiting assistance options a fancy

121way for saying we're working with the professional marketing company right now to look at some options to increase that social media posts hopefully everybody has seen um hr dysart hr has resurrected their twitter following and other posts and i'm liking them and so hopefully more people are like and we're just trying to increase that we upgraded our indeed.com.com account which allows us to boost it more for more people to get more uh exposure school business promotion i know i was at western peaks a few weeks ago what did she have on her marquee bus drivers wanted and new hires and other positions and so schools are putting it on their marquee we're asking them to continue to do that more newsletters social media posts more emails when they're sending emails home to parents and others

122for a great opportunity to work in our transportation department uh we are also looking at um getting some quotes on the movie theaters billboards roving truck ads um a we'll get the quotes we also want some input from professional uh marketing does that really i i don't know how much it works we're trying lots of things but the more it costs the more i get hesitant if things don't cost at all we'll do everything so i know i'm well we are ordering more buses so coming into this year our capital process allow was budgeting for our transportation department to have five yellow buses and eight activity buses we've increased that now to eight uh yellow buses with the eight activity buses he's currently working with vendors right now to get quotes and and that we

123want to increase the number of banners we have one we want a bigger bolder simpler more magnets pushing out the opportunities also flyers if things are approved tonight we'd like to print out a lot of flyers and start putting them we've already had requests from people asking can i get something to hand out we'd like to put them in our curbside meals advertising to all of our community members coming through we're utilizing uh and going to increase our utilizing our geo-targeted ads to increase visibility something akin to like a google ads words to continue to boost and promote that we're asking hr to call applicants of other prison positions maybe they didn't get the position they wanted but maybe there's a fit in transportation it could be a bus aid it could be a bus

124driver and maybe seeing if they'd be interested in coming over there we did have some that left us because of covid maybe we could contact and contact our people that left us and do to covet and see if they'd like to return back to coming back and then also we started just started this week but some people are out right now but to work with our ess department to identify uh some the targeted looking at some of our routes where they can have the most impact of some of our special ed routes and see if our parents would like to be paid to transport their own students that would then free up just taking one student off if there's three on did not save us a route so we're looking at how can we get

125a critical mass to actually reduce a route that we could then take that driver somewhere else to do something else so we're going to try to reach out to see if we could partner with with some of the parents to see if that will also help and i did not uh none of these slides have as you've been aware as i've done some updates on some of the improvements that we've made to the el mirage area with their dysart middle school we've already made those have already been implemented and created a shuttle on a few other applications so we haven't that's not listed on this slide but we have also done those improvements to help improve our situation and the transportation one that's not on the slide is the cost what does this cost so

126the the tiered structure on a full year would cost about four hundred and seventy thousand dollars um this is not a full year because if we implemented it uh about 25 percent a little bit more would be gone so it's a little bit less um and then also the increase of yellow buses is a uh 500 000 so um but that being capital the tiered structure is actually um uh an emino type expenses so it's the additional fte what what i'm requesting is that this is supported via mips this year so that it does not hit our mno budget and so what i'd like to do is we do still have a good healthy balance in our mips funds and that we would move these expenses or similar expenses over i don't want to say

127mips specifically because it could create 10 000 journal entries if i say it the wrong way so i really would just like to say mit supported which means that that will cover the funding for this year but then i would like to move this into the m o which means that it has to come off the top of our iba process so that it is now paid for so that we're not deficit spending that it has to be addressed with the inflation funding coming in to start iba for next year and that is how we pay for it mr hicks can you briefly explain uh what mips means i'm sorry yes madam president members of the board that's our medicaid and public schools there's a reimbursement of for certain access eligible students when we provide

128certain services we get reimbursed from the federal government for those services and so we probably bring in about 2.6 million dollars a year most commonly presented to the board in the most recent times was that that's where our social workers are being funded out of we had a large balance it actually has not gone down as much as i previously told the board because our revenues keep increasing because we have an amazing staff that just does not let any reimbursement go past without submitting it to the feds so we're probably going to end this year if i had to guess with still around seven million dollars i think when i we were doing social workers i said when we had seven and a half million i said in a few years this will be down

129to four or five million so i'm way off on that but to the positive side that's the good thing is that we do have a healthy balance still in medicaid and public funds public schools is fun with that we'll stand for any questions you may have so um the current employers excuse me the current employees for the bus the bus drivers dispatchers routers trainers it's going to be four tiers based on the experience right now which tier of our current employees is most saturated i mean do we have a lot of employees excuse me a lot of those employees that are four to six years are they seven to ten um madam president a member uh sawyer singh bill um surprisingly one in four um we have a lot and four that have been with

130us for a while and we have uh the lot in one so the middle is kind of thin the middle is kind of thin okay and uh if this passes tonight um october 4th you're looking to start it october 4th that's because of next payroll that's correct and last but not least um does the current staff know that this item is on the agenda current transportation staff yes ma'am we met with them yesterday cool thank you i have a couple questions just um math is not my thing so just might sound silly but not knowing i guess the higher end or what our highest paid bus driver or any one of these employees that fall into this category what their salary is now is there a chance through the averaging that anybody would be looking

131at taking a dip in pay madam president member pritchard nobody in this structure will take a dip in pay okay and then in regard to the option offering parents the option to transport their own student how much are we proposing that we would compensate for that madam president members of the board hasn't gotten to that point we do have the template that ade has for the contract to allow it we do have done this historically and do it at times it's normally private placement so this would be maybe on a non-private placement student coming into ours and so not yet determined and then you're talking about using the mips money now possibly rolling it into iba next year knowing that iba is you know consensus based if there was a problem with that as far

132as the the team agreeing to this then would you just revert back to mips or would this just be like a non-negotiable or how madam president members of the board if the board is approving the presentation and saying this is coming off the top then i i would be coming in with this as a non-negotiable unless the board is expressing other interests at this time we also have a future agenda item that we can talk about other iba priorities but for this agenda item right now unless i hear different from the board it would be a non-negotiable is that even in the motion or it would just be presented that way as presented and so that so it's in there okay thank you um you went over a lot of information thank you for that

133um but in this action discussion we're only approving the salary uh schedule and the potential um what do you call it the additional compensation and opportunities for increa increased earnings um but you also mentioned in your presentation something about the purchase of buses we're not approving purchases of buses tonight correct madam president members of the board we don't need the board it's in the capital budget okay um for that yeah just i just want to be really clear on that okay thank you all right with that i will move to approve the modifications for the transportation department as presented seconded by miss prichard motion passes thank you okay moving to action discussion two dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet in our discussions about transportation additional ideas were

134generated that could support more than just transportation definitely transportation but also other areas and so this item is to address those other opportunity opportunities and dr croto will present this thank you dr kellis madam president members of the board superintendent kellis cabinet guest tonight we'd like to bring to you a recommendation to create an employee referral program as part of our district recruitment process as you saw in the last presentation we are doing a lot of things to attract employees to this district one of the things that we know is one of the most powerful things to attract employees is word of mouth from current employees of spreading the word and trying to get people to come work for this awesome district and we'd like to put a program in that recognizes that and that

135encourages current employees to go out and spread the word about how extraordinary that dicert is so we're asking you excuse me to approve a program tonight that will reward current employees 500 for recommending employees to the district they have to be hired number one they don't just recommend them we have to hire them and they have to stay in our district i have down here for three consecutive months that is up for discussion if you think it needs to be longer if three is great three consecutive months to start so we're asking you for that approval tonight for that referral program and it would start immediately if you approve this tonight so i will stand for any questions that you may have is there a cap so if i refer you you don't get anything

136[Music] sorry you don't get it [Laughter] if i'm a bus driver and i refer a bus driver and then i happen to know somebody who's looking part-time and now i encourage them to become a teacher or whatever especially now with this ottawa scholarship program is there a cap or can i get two or three referrals madam president members of the board at this point how it's structured there is no cap so hopefully all our jobs are filled and that will cap it that is the best scenario that all the jobs get filled and there is no more room for referrals so at this point there is no cap on that is there an eligibility process for that i mean can a cabinet member be involved in this i mean or can a school administrator are

137there parameters around this madam president members of the board um at this point cabinet is excluded by choice it doesn't specify this that in here but we will recuse ourselves from that and other than that it would be any district employee and this isn't is there first where's the money coming from to fund this madam president members of the board uh we would also ask that mips support this program so this year there's an estimated cautious looking at our vacant positions this could cost about sixty thousand dollars this year on an annual basis going forward this could be something that could be stopped by the board at any time but it could be upwards to 180 to 200 000 a year going forward a lot of money so so unlike the initial guest teacher program

138um that this is creating a permanent process for this not temporary correct correct okay can we also add it into the motion that it is only for a year and it has to be up for renewal you may add that when we when we if we do the motion can we say motion to approve as presented for the 2122 school year or to be renewed annually annually to be reviewed annually or renewed whatever the wording is so we could theoretically pilot it for a year see how it goes see how much it costs us and then review it next year because ideally we would hire so many people with this that we'll just be and the full then goes to zero the more effective the program is the less the cost right yes not impressive

139ms jeff and the i would suggest that for um your recommendation that you just approve it for the current fiscal year and then the administration would naturally bring it back again but to say that it's a pilot or to say that it is renewable or just to clear up any any confusion and just put a sunset on it at this time thank you when i've seen this in other organizations and correct me if i'm correct if it's different in other school districts if you've seen it in other school districts but usually it's like six months that the the employee would have to say six months not three that's a little short in my opinion but then the other the other piece that i usually see this associated with is it's connected to [Music] harder to

140fill and i know we give must stipend for hard to fill positions but um usually with this type of employee referral program it's it's because they're having a hard time for specific areas not just maybe an easily filled position you know i don't know what the thoughts were in recommending it this way if you want to share how you came to this madam president members of the board um as cabinet discussed this and we discussed this in the terms of building this program we consider every position right now that's open hard to fill because we're not filling them so we did narrow that down at first but then we opened up the scope because right now we have a lot of positions i won't say a lot we have some positions that are harder than

141others but we have open positions and um it's you know very very competitive right now in the employment market to fill our all of our positions so you know our our goal is to fill all those and that's how we kind of broaden that scope to say you know what we want to have this for all positions and all employees madam president uh if i could ask dr croto to just um even to take some some liberty here and share with our general public what positions are we lacking and the the numbers of openings currently we are lacking our bus drivers obviously that is a huge piece paraprofessionals we have in our teaching our special education areas there's numerous teaching although we do use contract companies it is more it's more cost effective to search

142for our own but we don't want uncovered classes so we turn to contracting agencies for special ed positions um we have a hard time in our maintenance and landscaping and facilities right now those are very competitive out there so we have uh openings for those kind of positions and yeah that's probably our biggest challenge is those positions i understand what you're saying about kind of having so many open it's all hard to fill you know so thanks for appreciating that piece i don't know what the board thinks i i would personally feel better about it at least being more than three months you know maybe if it was six um we have a full school year so even six months has been asking hold up we hope people won't leave you know coming and leaving

143but to come and leave every three months potentially that's a i don't know maybe that might encourage employees to put a lot of thought into you know who they're reaching out to to refer someone that they know okay they're they're not just going to come and go every three months and um get some longevity possibly i i don't i don't want to complicate things more but i'm wondering if we split it um i know that this from a payroll perspective this could be a nightmare but what if we did 250 at three months another 250 at six months i was just about to say that because peoria did the same thing whereas at three months they got half and then in the six months they got the other half like a little carrot right if

144i remember yes that's correct we we will be happy to work this program how you would like it to work so how difficult would that be um madam president members of the board you are correct uh it puts a lot of work on hr and payroll together um but on the same chance the same tone this this isn't at the beginning of the year for next year when we have three 400 openings we do not have three or four openings right now i mean just crossing guards bus aids bus drivers parapros landscaping um they're it's not the volume of hundreds and hundreds so there is less to do on this and so um i don't think it would be there's more work just doing it once you do it once you're probably going to create

145a routine in a process so it's probably not as bad splitting at 50 50. the goal is to make sure that we have systems in place to automate it so that we don't it's not a manual process that somebody forgets the first or second and then we're then it turns into a very difficult to manage program so we're going to work really hard going backwards and clean up and i would add to that um i would rather have the program and developed it the way you are than not to have the program so if it's more work we'll do the work if you want to split it um i would just like the opportunity to have this program and attract employees so if that's the will of the board and you'd like to split it

146and you like to make it six months awesome let's do it and and we'll do what the will of the board is we'll make it work i wonder though um don if you're if it matters that this the 50 50 piece of it it's the actual employee that referred the individual that gets the reward so really the 250 and then kind of enticing them to stay that's not they're not getting any of that money it's more like if i refer you you have to so i have no control over whether you stay or not obviously it'd be me but the big secret with these employee referral programs is that you usually split it with the person i don't know those things hopefully the deal [Music] i don't know i'm more comfortable with doing the 250

147at the three months and the other 250 at the six months but i think it puts a little bit of onus on on the you know pre-existing employee too to kind of maybe hold their hand and mentor them hey just checking in how's it going and maybe having that person that's solid with them whether even if they're at a different school i mean they can just cut do that constant touch point with them and hey can i give you any direction you know who to go to for this who to go to for that you know what are your what are your barriers that you're coming across and that way it's not one of their maybe not necessarily a direct peer of theirs or a manager of theirs it could just be a sounding board

148i don't know i i think it could really bridge some gaps too in the process yeah my biggest thing was the sixth month rather than three so i i'm fine with compromising start showing up i want my 200 right wow that's a good point is there a performance qualifier with this like if they were on some sort of step counseling i don't i don't know what you call it i feel like let's just keep this pretty simple let's just keep it so i was just curious paper trail nightmare um if i am the employee and i've made a referral and i know that referral is wherever and i don't get my 250. you know they're going to call and say excuse me but i haven't received my 250. what's the problem and then it gets

149fixed so i mean the employee's gonna who the referral person is gonna be on top of it too and we have a process that we've talked about um in place or ready to put in place where during the onboarding process they have to identify in the application process and during the onboarding process so they will be asked they have to i have to say ken hicks on my application piece and then as we onboard them in hr my regionals will verify that that's who has referred them and that's how it will go so very structured procedure with that and how they get referred okay go ahead no i was just going to say let's try emotion to see how it floats madam president members of the board if uh mrs brown can read the the

150proposed language that she captured from your discussion thank you motion to approve an employee referral program for current employees with five hundred dollars in parentheses two hundred at three months two hundred i mean 250 at three months and 250 at six months for recommending employees to the district that are hired and maintain employment for the fiscal year for the fiscal for the 2021-22 fiscal year yeah there you go we got it tracy so moved second all right let's get it done i have a motion by tracy sawyer sinkhole seconded by joe grant i can't even spell my name thank you very much motion passes thank you thank you very much for presenting that to us your creativity yes we appreciate your hard work yes okay moving to item iowa and request for future agenda items

151okay i will move to adjourn the meeting second second did i miss grant you think okay i'm getting old motion passes meeting is adjourned