001ready welcome back thank you all those who are here and those who are joining us on the live stream or recorded we would like to come back to number two and begin our work study i'll call this meeting to order and we'll begin it now 3.01 fy 2021 district spending report dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members tonight we have assistant superintendent bonnie betts and director of finance jackie matanin good evening how are you guys good [Music] good evening president ward president ward president wood dr mccord i was mixing the wood and the cord together sorry excuse me governing board members so first i wanted to let you know that the item posted on this particular agenda item is applicable to the action item which is 7.01 we thought as we were making
002the change that we would show you the exact change from the two percent adding one percent to make it three percent on each individual employees compensation plan so just wanted to get that cleared up and at the end of this meeting we will post that also to action item 7.01 and so to begin um ms matin and i are here to talk about the fiscal year 2021 district spending report which is i believe the last time we will be talking about fiscal year 21 yes and i'm very happy to hand the presentation over to jackie matin it's all yours jackie thank you miss betts dr mccord madam president members of the governing board as ms betts indicated we are here to talk about the fy 2021 district spending report as published by the auditor general's
003office tonight's report will include the fy 201 2021 district spending highlights and fy 2021 teacher salary information press wrong button here so this pie chart is from the fy 2021 annual comprehensive financial report or acfer which we received in december keep in mind that it's not necessarily apples to apples to the district spending report but this does give us a good indication of where the district spending report will take us because we receive it several months later so we receive the district spending report in march and you can see according to this pie chart from the acfer we are at 60 instruction spend this pie is from the auditor general's district spending report you can see that our classroom spending overall is 75.2 percent of that instruction is 61.6 percent and then non-classroom spending is
00424.8 percent also in that pie chart it references peer average and our peer districts are similar in size not necessarily our neighboring districts but they're similar in size here's our five-year district spending history you can see that we have increased in dollars instruction since fy 2017 we've remained steady year over year from fiscal 20 to 21 which is which is okay too dollars in the classroom first let me talk about dollars instructions so these figures are derived from our account code structure and there's an element within our account code structure that defines where the money is spent so the dollar's instruction is from a 1000 function which says that the classroom this spend is in the classroom so it's teacher salaries and benefits paraprofessionals classroom supplies instructional materials and then the classroom dollars also includes
005the dollar's instruction which is the 1000 function but also support for students so this would include attendance support guidance counselors assessment library media services psychology services speech language and also social workers and social social economic social social emotional support so you can see that from fiscal 20 to 21 there was an increase from the 74.5 to the 75.2 and that is from our the commitments made with our mno override administration is from that percentages from this district and schools so the district office and the principal assistant principal and their administrative assistants are coded here we did come down by one tenth of a percent so we're happy about that i'm going to turn transportation over to ms betts because she is living it thank you so what i wanted to point out here is if
006you look at 2019 which was our last normal year and you compare that to 2020 you can see that there was a drop in transportation even though in 2020 we also remodeled the transportation facility which would be included as our spend for transportation that year but so you would have expected 2020 to go up however that was the year in which we shut down the last three months of the school year so we were not operating in transportation there were no fuel costs there were salary costs but there were no fuel costs so we would have expected an increase in spend in 2020 but that increase in the building was offset by the decrease in the fuel costs primarily and probably mechanics cost as well our buses weren't running so there weren't needs for repairs
007so fast forward then to 2021 it's really great news to see the transportation spend go down on a percentage basis which we had hoped as we combined power base and gilbert base but that's also due to the fact that we didn't have the construction spend in transportation facilities in 2021 so i'm just cautioning you all and i'm cautioning myself to not celebrate too quickly the decrease in spend and transportation we will have a better view of what that's going to look like in the long term once we complete the the current year thank you the last category on this slide is non-classroom that includes the administration and transportation also food service and operations so that's the decrease there mr matt might ask miss betts i remember at one point a couple years ago we had
008we were inefficient in our transportation spend compared to everything else so do you think obviously it's gone down but i liked your rationale but i remember that we were saying when we had um the consultants to help us you know make some changes i i thought that selling the buses that weren't you know consolidating our buses updating the fleet he had a list of things that would help us be more efficient anyways do you feel like we're on that path and have we addressed those things or well definitely in the biggest thing if you recall is that we when we finish the 2019 school year we immediately changed the bell schedules at the end of 2019 which was expected to hugely improve our efficiency during 2020. so it would have been interesting to see how
009that would have played if we if we had a normal operating here how that would have played out um but yes and a new routing system and the new the new routing software uh all of those things but yes i do believe that in spite of the complexities we've had we are running extraordinarily efficiently right now but again time will tell on a percentage basis so if we stay at that 3.8 percent then all that work we've done would have been validated for sure well can't you see that you can see the actual spend so it's a little bit it's a little bit hard right now with salary increases with all of the overtime being worked and the price of gas right now is that we are being hit with the fuel costs etc so
010okay so there's just there's so many moving parts um but on a percentage basis it's very possible that we will be uh you know close to that 3.8 to 4 i'm just cautious about celebrating tours i think that's good thank you i appreciate that anything else members no i pitch i did want to ask if the cost of gas is having an impact on our transportation budget and how that's definitely definitely so we are definitely um probably about 10 higher in fuel than we had been in the past and so is everyone else yeah this slide shows the previous information in a graph form so you can see that we are over five years up in dollars instruction percentage and also dollars in the classroom down in administration slightly student transportation and non-classroom overall this
011slide shows fy 2021 local district spending so these are our neighboring districts again dollars instruction is 1 000 function this is the money spent in the classroom so you can see gilbert and chandler are pretty competitive there dollars in the classroom instruction included there with instructional support and student support again gilbert is higher because of the prop or the i'm sorry the m override initiatives and then administration you'll notice that the smaller districts are a little bit higher and i can show you on the next slide we've added the adm numbers so you can see that administration is slightly lower in the larger districts obviously and higher in the smaller districts such as queen creek and higley any questions on that information before we move on to teacher salary okay so going into the 2021
012average teacher salary um you're gonna drive for me ms madden for the next slide so given the newspaper articles that came out regarding the dollars in the classroom as well as the average teacher salary i wanted to make sure that that we were putting the figures that were reported into context with one another so first of all remember that each school district is required to self-report this is there's no data that verifies the average teacher salary there is no definition of what a teacher is so we do not know which staff members are being included in each individual school district's calculation for their average teacher salary and then in addition if you look in gilbert we just provided the base salary only so we are not including any stipends we are not including performance pay
013but note chandler right below includes their pay for performance dollars in their average teacher report to the department of ed on their budget every year so i i know that chandler's pay for performances over five thousand dollars per teacher just to give you a perspective of the dollar amount and then note higley includes not just pay for performance but also their stipend pays so even in mesa they indicate salary excludes one-time stipend but it doesn't define the one-time stipend it didn't say it didn't exclude pay for performance and i guess my point is it's just really difficult we're really comparing apples to apples i mean apples to oranges here we just don't know what the what the rationale is or the the um of what each individual school district was thinking when they populated their
014budget with this information so i just wanted to make sure that we were all taking care of how we use this information um sometimes it is so three so so in so when you say 301 so before in 2021 we still had the three buckets of prop so 11 and 13 were part of base salary yes 11 and 13 are in hours i don't know about the others but but pay for performance is not in hours which is fund 12 but they are in chandler and higley as an example based upon their own self-reporting is that's in terms of and you indicated up front that we don't really know how the other districts classify theirs but our definition of teacher is quite a bit different than many around us do you have any idea of
015how the other districts have defined teacher so i don't but it's interesting because we had a phone call this morning with our peers and my peers were talking about certified personnel and they were including speech language pathologist otpt's psychologists well they're not theoretically certified they're certificated but they're not teachers so it depends i have no idea at all it's not reported anywhere it might if we publish this anywhere for consumption by our public it might be advantageous for us to reiterate how we define teacher because that is pretty inclusive as far as i'm able to discern as it relates to our peer districts we do and we everyone so in our teacher definition that we've used at least since i've been here the last four years has been truly those that are certified so we
016include our teacher our technology integration educators they are certified teachers it includes our academic coaches and our instructional coaches whether they're located at the district office or at our schools they are certified teachers so we are very clear about that but they're more than just who is in the classroom but we will we were talking about that as we were preparing the presentation we will define that teacher definition for gilbert in our final budget revision for the current year so it's clear to all of us what our teacher definition includes and then we will continue reporting in that way but thank you for the question so could you i don't know if you could off pan but could you give an example of if you included stipends and performance pay what the average teacher salary
017how that would change our average teacher salary do do you have that figure jackie last year during fy 2021 on the average stipend for certified staff stipend amount was about 3 300 average and performance pay that includes performance pay okay so it should it would go up about 3 okay so 57 000 would be about equal to what you see is scott's damage okay and this also reflects when there's been retirements so long time teachers have retired and we've seen that happen maybe all other districts have i don't know but we definitely have and so that affects the average salary compared to when we hire new teachers there's a difference in that average salary i think the other important thing is that this is not an indicator of competitiveness i think that's very important that's
018what i was going to say but i think people look at it that way and that's what's difficult and so that's why these conversations we're having right now are extremely important so we're really mindful and we are working to be competitive as well as our our it doesn't always include the benefits which we have to show total package now there's a law that says that coming out so i know that we're working on that that will help also define you know what other benefits we have compared to other districts offer different benefits that's correct so but that is really important to us is to have really competitive salaries for all of our positions we've worked on that for the last couple years and are dedicated to that so i'm i'm kind of sad that this
019doesn't reflect that you know yeah for these reasons that we've talked about and if i may you know that that does look rather stark however uh there is because this is published on our website as well this is the figure that we're acquiring you know that there is verbiage that not is not a disclaimer more than it is an explainer the 3300 average stipend amount and the general benefits package dollar amount added together someone could see that and say okay because this really does reflect our not reflect but it does impact our recruitment retention opportunities if you're just looking at a chart like this and somehow or another i want to mitigate that impact because the first glance is well i'm going to go to x rather than to gilbert well and i believe this
020is the first time that we've actually presented this and really the reason that we did was just because of the newspaper article that presented it so we just wanted to make sure that we had a chance to talk about it with all of you to put it into the right context well i will say when i started on the board that we didn't pay we were not competitive with other districts and we worked very hard especially in these last few years especially since our override election of 2015 and 2019 that has really helped us to be more competitive and so i i do appreciate all the hard work that's been done on this i guess my last question would be should we change how we report it then or you feel like this makes it
021consistent with what we've done year after year so we can look at our own numbers consistently i'm just saying well i think that's a good question and we haven't discussed it really well as we've been talking i i have some ideas to be accurate but also to paint the entire picture and so i think we could put together a graphic that meets the requirement but at the same time might show two numbers here's the average salary plus boom boom boom boom oh and here's what you get for benefits because i think our benefits are better than most surrounding districts when it comes to insurance well and how long is that what's the average teacher years that they've been in the district because that also makes an impact so maybe add that in i don't know
022well and i think it's also the work calendar here for every teacher position how many days are you expected to work for that same salary in comparison to all the other school districts in the surrounding area so all those things play a role in what your your salary is yeah contract days like some districts you're working five more days you're getting more money but your average daily uh salary is actually less than probably what you're getting in gilbert public schools that's right the number one district in the state that's right for all those listening come out that's right i'm very happy to be working for the number one school district in the state of arizona thank you very much thank you all right that concludes our work study and we will now move to uh
023number five on our agenda brief board business meeting i will begin with calling this to order and ask miss wilson 5.02 for a roll call dr charles santa cruz here mr bill parker here miss laurie wood here miss sheila eugetti here miss jill humphreys here madam president all board members are present you have a quorum thank you we will begin with 6.01 the approval of the consent agenda may i have a motion so moved thank you miss humphries is there a second second thank you dr santa cruz it's been moved and seconded that we present that we approve the consent agenda as written all those in favor please vote by saying aye aye aye any opposed with nay thank you the consent agenda is approved 5-0 we will now move to our action items tonight
024and we have just one 7.01 an additional 1 percent ongoing pay increase to a total of 3 percent dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members we are asking i think a week ago we asked you to approve salary increases across the board at a two percent level and you did that and we appreciate that and thank you and we communicated that out to our staff and then of course probably the next day or so the jlbc came out on march 30th 2022 basically due to the classroom site fund per student amount of seven dollars or 708 dollars for weighted attending student count it has been determined that there will be enough resources available in the classroom site fund and in the m o fund to fund an additional one percent on top of
025each employee's base salary increasing the fy 2023 ongoing pay increase from two percent to three percent and so that is what we're asking for this evening wonderful board members is there a motion i moved that we approve an additional 1 ongoing pay increase for a total of 3 percent thank you mr parker is there a second second thank you mr jetty it's been moved and seconded is there discussion i just think it's great that we can do this and what a wonderful opportunity that we have that available for our staff i i guess i just wanted to ask miss betts so we did hear a little bit so it will come from the classroom site fund because an increase of a one percent across the whole district is about three million dollars that's correct that
026includes benefits let's also include the payroll benefits okay and so we can we're going to take about a million more from the classroom site fund and then can you detail the other funds that will sure so keep in mind that we still have a very very favorable budget balance carry forward in mno but also remember that all employees are not funded out of maintenance and operations so nutrition services will bear their own percent increases community ed will bear their own federal grants will bear their own so that will decrease the load on the maintenance operations budget balance carry forward so we feel very confident that we can very well afford the one percent in addition remember that classroom site fund is subject to supplanting so um even though the increase was more than expected by
027about five to six million dollars due to the supplanting we were only able to really use a million dollars of it to achieve the the three percent uh the one the additional one percent to get us to three percent okay thank you and then it's detailed on the you you included a presentation that it's detailed on and then by each individual employee group by each individual play and you'll you'll send that out to each of the employee groups as well and and yes and then that particular it's a sub uh subset of what was presented to you um last week okay and it will be posted to this agenda item after tonight's meeting okay great and miss betts if if you would if i understood our conversations prior to this and this presentation please reaffirm
028that you believe that moving in this direction is sustainable for at least the next two years if not three years is that correct yes sir i can confirm that that's wonderful well i'm i'm excited as well that we can recognize our staff and teachers and all who work so hard for each of our students in this way so are there any other any other quick questions or comments scene none i will ask for a vote all those in favor of approving an additional one percent ongoing pay increase to a total of three percent please vote by saying aye aye those opposed with nay it passes five zero we've now come to the adjournment of our brief board business meeting 8.01 is there a motion to adjourn i move to adjourn thank you miss humphries second
029thank you mr jetty it's been moved and seconded all those in favor please vote by saying aye aye any opposed we are adjourned thank you very much