Governing Board Meeting, June 9, 2020 | Gilbert Public Schools District | Gilbert, Arizona

001hmm um [Music] good evening board members dr mccord staff and members of the community who are watching us on live stream it is tuesday june the 9th and this is the gilbert schools governing board work study session and brief board meeting we have several albums on our board regular board meeting short agenda and we have a couple of items on our work study session however before we begin i would like to make a brief statement and please understand that i speak as an individual i do not presume to speak on behalf of each and every board member however at the conclusion of my statement they are certainly free to endorse the statement should they desire to do so in thinking of the events of this week and the last two weeks exactly i felt compelled

002to pen something and to address it i would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the events developed in our community our state our nation and indeed the world the struggle for equality and justice has been a part of this nation's history since it's in as a society we must continue to strive to become that more perfect union we all desire gilbert public schools is not immune to the challenges that have sparked the protests that have occurred throughout our country we must always seek to establish a climate in a culture that is inclusive and just we must become a community that honors and respects the contributions of all people regardless of their social economic status a community is rich when it embraces its capacity to utilize the skills and the talents of all individuals as

003dr martin luther king jr stated human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice suffering and struggle the tireless ex exertion and passionate concern of dedicated individuals in recent days and weeks we have all watched events that have reminded us that the progress we have made as a society is not enough we have witnessed the passionate demonstration of people of all races and ethnic backgrounds joined together and demanding equality and justice for all people in the words black lives matter we have been reminded that there is still a great deal of work that must be done to establish that more perfect union in our schools our communities our state and in our nation the gilbert unified school district is deeply committed to fostering and embracing the ideals of

004social justice equality and inclusiveness we reject the and repudiate the discrimination hate and racism in all its forms we will continue to promote and endorse the positive efforts educators parents and community members to establish a climate and a culture on all of our campuses that honors and respects the dignity and worth of all human beings in closing i would like to echo desmond tutu exclusive exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice the events of the past days and weeks sparked by the death of george floyd should serve to remind us that our work is not finished until we truly accept the truth that america is beautiful rich because of its diversity thank you we will now move to our work study session we'll call that portion of the

005agenda together dr santa cruz yes miss eugenie dr santa cruz i would like to do the same thank you for taking the time to convey the what many are feeling it's been a great opportunity the last couple of weeks to reflect on our own belief systems and the way that we treat other people and we we acknowledge as you've so eloquently done the the need for the golden rule and to treat other people with kindness love and respect thank you mr carl dr santa cruz i would just like to concur that was very eloquently said thank you mrs humphries and i as well dr santa cruz thank you your thoughts they represent how i feel as well thank you miss wood and we appreciate that support from each of the board members for a statement

006that is so critical and i think reflects and represents the sentiment that is held by those who are working for the students in our district doctor can i say a word yes dr mccor first thank you for your words um i know exactly where they come from knowing you for the last 20 years and as an administrator as a human being and as a friend um for those of you that don't know you in that capacity please know that every single letter in that statement was from the heart so again thank you and i appreciate our governing board members all of them for recognizing uh what this country is going through what the state what this town and what this school district is going through by no means have we looked in a different direction

007we have a lot of work to do in gilbert public schools and i want to make sure that i recognize that publicly to anybody out there watching or that will see this later we had opportunities already to speak with students at highland high school on monday and we gained a lot of information and a lot of understanding of what just a handful of students go through not just at that school but in all of our schools on a daily basis and i stated in my letter on thursday moving forward we're going to do a lot of listening to begin with because formulating a plan without listening is just a waste of time so as we move through the next month month and a half we'll be putting together teams to be able to listen to

008our students to our families to make sure that we understand what the issues are in gilbert public schools but we can make sure we take care of not just those students but all of our students so again thank you dr santa cruz and governing board members thanks dr mccord and my apologies i should have recognized you from the onset in my rush to get the statement read i failed to do that but i appreciate those remarks and i know you and the team will be working hard to make sure that we touch as many bases as we know to touch during this critical time so we move to our works portion say again do we need a roll call gabby i think we're we're okay but go ahead miss wilson go ahead and wrote that's

009okay so we moved item two a presentation and discussion of and there are two topics on the work study session tonight item 2.01 is task force update and item 2.02 is global academy update dr mccord your introductory remarks please thank you dr santa cruz governing board members uh tonight we will have uh our assistant superintendent of teaching learning doctor newman she is heading up our task force and within our task force we have several subcommittees i know over the past couple weeks in particular everybody's been working extremely hard just for the public i know that school districts may be surrounding us or found in the east valley or in the valley in general are coming out with their plans and um and and i'm happy for them but we also take the approach of looking

010at every angle that we possibly can making sure we had input from our staff as well as our parents uh to make the most informed decision as possible uh we sent out an email on friday i believe that just kind of give everybody an update where we're at and um as situations change uh related 19 throughout the weeks we want to make sure that our plan is as uh yet fluid as possible moving forward so uh i'm very happy with where the committee is at today and we're looking forward to it i know in the past uh when we talked about instead we would present on june 23rd we would like to extend that deadline to june 30th in order to give the committees ample time to put together all the information needed to open

011up as safely and securely as possible for our students and staff so dr newman all right good evening dr santa cruz governing board members and dr board uh first thank you for this opportunity for us to share with you the progress of the committee as well as some of the considerations that have been made before i formally move to my presentation slides i'd like to ask dawn please to share with you the results that she has compiled some of the summary for our surveys first and foremost that is most important as dr mccord mentioned and so um thank you don if you will begin that'd be great thank you dr newman um i'm gonna start by sharing the employee survey results beginning with a quick summary we sent the staff by all staff at gilbert

012public schools the survey via email on may 31st and followed up with a reminder june 3rd the total number of staff as of may 31st was and we received total number of responses was 3420 in the slides that follow i can show you a little bit more detail but here are some of the key pieces that came out of that survey we did ask staff where they had been working during the school closure 71 had reported that they had been working from home and 29 had been working a combination of on-site um and home or on-site completely we asked all of our employees their level of concern with returning to campuses and offices 30 percent reported no concerns 45 moderate concerns and 25 percent very concerned i'll show you a slightly more detailed slide in

013a moment but we did ask we shared a range of measures that may be put in place to support a return to our campuses and offices for employees and we asked our employees to respond um how they felt about the importance of each of these measures increased sanitization and health screening were by far the top measures so with the largest number of employees reporting these as very important as part of their consideration and comfort with returning to work and on our campuses and offices and in our offices we also asked about preferred teaching model this was around this three scenarios that were presented to uh by dr newman at the last governing board meeting stressing that these are not in stone but these are the scenarios that were being are being researched by the task

014force and by far the most favored model was for students to attend school full-time here's a breakdown we asked our employees the departments or school that they work in their role um where they had been working during the closure and their current level of concern for returning to work on campus and in offices and here are the different measures we asked for feedback on there was eight measures and we asked the employees to mark whether these were very important to them for their somewhat important or not important as you can see number three and for our hail screening and number seven is regular invisible sanitization uh and again this is the data that we received with regards to the uh favored teaching models and the number one preference there with close to 2 000 votes

015was a student's attending school in person full-time with appropriate safety measures in place we as part of the as part of both surveys we did provide ample space for employees and parents to provide their feedback it was very important for us for them to have their voices heard and for them to be able to share their thoughts and opinions some of the themes in the comments that we received from employees the importance noting the importance of support for high-risk employees and those with health issues concerns were raised regarding shared offices and spaces and how that might work the need for cleaning products in classrooms and features to have access to these questions over what happens if there is a positive case of colvid19 on campus or in the department to achieve social distancing on campus

016the need for clear expectations it was stated multiple times that the feeling that kids need to be back in schools and that importance of supporting our students with special needs i'll now move on to the parent survey results the survey was sent to all parents monday june 1st via email that's a total of 41 000 parents and a reminder was sent out on june 3rd we ask the parents to complete one survey per student and the total response is received reflecting 22 405 students again we asked our parents to gauge their level of concern with returning to school in person in august 42 no concerns 39 was reported moderate concerns and 19 very concerned we also shared a number of measures that may be put in place and by far the uh rather than rate

017as very important somewhat important or not important we asked our parents to respond to each measure based on whether it would make it more likely less likely to send their child back to school in person or if the measure wouldn't impact their decision either way by far the measure that was most likely to uh support them sending their student back to school in person it was health screenings for employees and students and again uh similar to the employee survey results the preferred teaching model out of the three scenarios was for students to attend school full-time and this was and this just shows the levels of concern and here is the more detail with the 11 measures that were presented that we were exploring including um physical distancing limiting the number of volunteers and visitors on

018campus as you can see five and six in blue more likely to support sending students back to school in person five is employees having daily health screenings and six is students having daily health screenings and here as i noted earlier based on current family situation and personal concerns about safety and health if you could use a learning model for your child next school year would you choose and we have 67 choosing a 10 school in person full time with appropriate precautions in place we also asked questions around riding a bus to school 30 percent responded that the child does ride a bus to school and these are the responses regarding whether or not they would choose for their child to ride the bus at the beginning of the new school year and we have sixty

019percent yes thirty two three percent maybe with appropriate safety precautions and eight percent no again we sought we sought to provide ample space for our community to share their views and opinions with regard to this and we did receive over 8 000 individual comments from parents which was incredible and very helpful and here is a summary of some of the themes that came up the importance it was very frequently stated the importance of balancing safety precautions with the mental health and well-being of our students also that returning to school may be [Music] create vulnerabilities for higher students and family member members and that there needs to be options questions around how health screening would actually work the need to ensure no more breaks in students education as they have perhaps already suffered academically concerns over

020the number of students in a classroom and how that might work um again similar to mirroring what we saw in the employee survey it was iterated many times that kids need to be back in schools that we need to support students with special needs and again we heard from a lot of parents commenting please make the return as normal as possible and that concludes my sharing from the employee and parent survey you don let me i'm going to uh governing board members do you have any questions about the survey before we get into the presentation dr newman just a clarification for me the number of uh the percentage of folks who on the teacher and staff side said normal as usual and the number percentage-wise of folks who said normal as usual i think it

021was pretty close if i recall it was 19 or 20 or something dawn can you give those specific yep so for the can you clarify what you mean by normal as usual do you mean returning to students uh on campus yeah yeah so for the parent survey it was 67 responded to be uh back in person and i'm gonna have to go back and check the data for check the presentation just for one moment to confirm what it was for employees um it was close to i'll have to check the percentage but it was close to 2000 out of 3420 responses so i will follow up with you with the exact percentage okay but they were close is that right yes and in both instances it was the clear front runner preferred uh return to

022school would be in person on campus thank you don thank you dr newman thank you anything else before we move on okay i'm going to share then my presentation there we go so as um as you can tell we're very impressed with um the responses that we received and we know obviously that um it's so important that we listen to um our community and regard to making some decisions and that really goes along with what our guiding principles are so i just wanted to start the presentation just reviewing some of those um we know again that we're obligated to serve our students even during those times of disruption so it's important for us to look at all scenarios to make sure that we are ready to serve our students and our families in any way

023that we find ourselves necessary we also need to be sure that we're meeting the needs of all students including those that have specific learning or other needs whether that be their situation at home students with disabilities and our english language learners and then lastly as i mentioned our decisions are best made when we consult those closest to the problem so we do appreciate all of the feedback that we received with that too we are going to operate again on assumptions we will be reopening in 2021 school year we know that there may be some modifications that are needed based on guidance national state health officials and we are going to create plans that take into account both short and long term solutions and i wanted to spend a little bit more time this as we

024really started working through our subcommittees and talking daily at um our leadership meetings and working with our advisory committees as well we really were able to perhaps um clarify what some of these scenarios might look like so scenario a would be our return to campus full-time and putting some safety precautions in place our scenario c would be our online instruction utilizing gilbert public schools global academy and we know that as we move through this process we will probably be hiring or relocating some of the staffing so that we are able to meet the needs of students if our numbers are what the perhaps the survey suggests and we'll need to hire more teachers um and then lastly our hybrid our blended learning model really is more of students that are attending full-time and then there's

025a disruption in their life whether that be specifically related to their health or um their home or something happens in the state or otherwise so we need to be able to seamlessly move from our scenario a to our scenario b and that's where our conversations have been for all of our various subcommittees again these are our subcommittees we moved from um initially thinking we're going to need 11 and um mr ryan and his team very very um wisely decided that we probably need to separate one of those committees into two so all of the subcommittee leaders are here during this evening on our webex presentation so at the end if you have any specific questions they are here and ready to answer those for you it was important for us to be sure that we

026share with you what we're sharing tonight are our considerations um relate some of the conversations that we're having some of the areas um that we're discussing we don't have the set plan in place we are meeting again as an advisory team on thursday and that is when all of the leaders will come together with what they believe would be the plan for their specific area and then the advisory committee will look at those recommendations we'll be able to really um solidify what our plans are once we see and hear more specifically about each subcommittee's we know that so many are interrelated that we're going to be going to the advisory with what we believe is our best plan listening again to all of them and then making adjustments accordingly before we um share out what

027our final plan will be at the end so our subcommittee focus areas first and foremost um it was perfect that dawn started thank john for the information because communication is going to be key so as don leaves this committee it's important to make sure that we are addressing and presenting information for all of our audiences our students our parents and our employees and that achieving the consistency and that clear district we have been doing that since march we've been trying really hard and circling back to that message what is that message that we want to deliver make sure that it is clear and message for the entire district and then also making sure that the communication channels the existing ones continue to work um and then already her committee has looked at the importance of

028providing um parent website specifically to this task and for that reason um they are developing it right now and then we'll be sharing it out as soon as it's ready but that will be um begin it will begin with the information we have now and it will be continuously updated and more information shared as that information presented to it dr newman this is mrs wood can i ask you could you give us a brief description of what the subcommittee is um the representation on the subcommittees who's involved working on this yes i will thank you and actually i have my notes so thank you for asking for them i should have given those to you um the subcommittee is um comprised of members on our advisory committee with that those are staff parents and governing

029board members then the subcommittees are there are 12 of them there are over 100 members that are representative of the same groups um and then in addition to that we have additional work teams so we have about 20 individuals that um do not sit on the sub committee but they are doing the work that then guides what those individual subcommittees um do and the decisions that are made so essentially we have 135 individuals that are providing and working with that individual process with the feedback and then in addition to that we circle back out to various stakeholders as we continue through that process thank you thank you i appreciate that our whole child supports um that's why we're here we're here for our kids and so it was really important for um susie kadena and

030her team is working on that what is that social emotional learning and those trauma and four practices that we need to be sure that we are ready we have that tiered approach for our students um what will the identification of needs and even more so how can we do that quickly so that we can provide the supports for our students and our staff um re-engaging the disengaged we have some students who maybe did not engage not maybe we do have students who did not engage in our quarter for learning and so therefore it's important for us to re-engage them in this and in their learning and as well as addressing the grief and loss so dr santa cruz um so eloquently put it we not only do we have students that have dealt with um

031coven 19 and being away from friends in fourth quarter and suffering losses in that way the world is looking very different for them and they're experiencing some things as well and so it's really important that we have supports in place for them and we are able to do that in addition to that um we are um really pleased that we are able to already um thanks to our override put some mental health supports in place for next year so we have our social workers and our mental health counselors that will be at our secondary campuses we continue to have the support of our social workers at our elementary campuses and just being able to provide that continuum of care for k-12 elementary through secondary and also continuing with our community partnerships that we have and

032the third thing as we're looking at is that committee's looking at whole child support what is that professional development what is the professional development being for our administrators for our teachers for our support staff um we have our behavioral health teams and they are there what professional development and what guidance can we provide for them as they're working with and supporting our students and then also our district crisis team as they're engaging in various activities that they have for academics um that's the committee that i and um actually miss wood you're on this as well that's a committee that we are on um for academics who are looking at that continuity of learning we know that we need an accessible platform um for our students and families we know that we um we did our

033best in fourth quarter but it's important that we um have a platform almost like as i mentioned before one-stop shop so our we are not um having our families our students our parents looking at all different kinds of apps a compilation of apps well we have some really great apps we want to be sure that we're able to put that all in one place for them as they access we also as we look at the continuity of learning we want to look at our curriculum when we are looking at scenario a which is where we know most of our parents and families and staff want to be back at school it's important that we continue to use our district approved curriculum it's important that we continue to engage our students in that we also know

034that um if we do have to move due to a disruption to a blended model that we continue to also use that blended and that district approved curriculum with some online supplemental resources and then lastly with scenario a we know that we have our florida virtual curriculum at through global academy that we have been using and you'll hear more about that from dr barton this evening the committee also looked at addressing the learning gaps so as we continue to remember and remind ourselves that our students did not necessarily progress in the learning as we would have wished we need to be sure that we are looking at our priority standards this work has really begun already back in march and so um as i've talked about the work teams there are there is the curriculum

035work team that has been working knowing that this would be something that would definitely be a priority for us and so as we look at our priority standards see which priority standards our students were not did not receive in-person instruction for during this closure and then also determining with that we know we're not going to take fourth quarter and we're not going to pop it into first quarter of this next school year so instead our team has worked on looking at our curriculum guides looking at our scope and sequences and saying so if i know that students are going to be learning this concept in this school year meaning the 2021 school year what scaffolding do the teachers need to have in place for them to be able to progress at this grade level standard

036so we want to make sure that we continue with the grade level that the students are in while providing those supports and then also for the learning support and services we look at that in two different ways for example in special education we need to look at what does instruction look like for our special needs students but also what are the services look like um same thing with our students that are on 504 plans our students that are receiving title services and then as well for our ell services so we are really looking at two things for those what are those learning supports and then what those services are and then john castellano is leading the remote learning technology team um the teacher training we know will be super important whether that be the platform

037or the um the curricular pieces that we use and also though also training our teachers on best instructional strategies for online learning how to engage we're just having this conversation how to engage our students in a platform perhaps if they have to move to an online or a blended situation parent training and support training and information when a lot of this will be able to be to be placed on our website um for platform access resource navigation and then also strategies for student support that's probably one that we really didn't address corridor for but we do know need to know that that's important for us to do that for our families and for our students and for teachers as the students keep um as they perhaps um continue with their learning through the classroom work

038as well um technical support i'm continuing to help our families to ensure that our students access to the resources and the devices that they need and then also distributing that device at a case six since our 712 students already have that and looking at perhaps um moving their our insurance options that we provide for our families at the 7-12 level offering some of those those are as a consideration that the committee is making right now do we want to offer some of that similar things to our k-6 parents and again that internet accessibility working with our um both with our old child support team and with our title team and looking at the resources we have like we did this past quarter of um seeing what funds are available for title four so if our

039families do not have internet accessibility how can we do that and support them in that way campus operational management is led by jason martin and marcy taylor and they are really the this is the nuts and the bolts these are the things that the parents the kids are going to see what are the schedules going to be like on a campus what resources are are needed for them and really a lot of this is this campus processes and procedures what is it what is the classroom setup going to be so that it is um providing opportunities for us to keep our students in a safety a safe and healthy environment when we have common areas in our common areas what will that movement look like they're talking just even about students moving from classroom to

040classrooms students moving from a classroom to another area cafeterias what will that environment be do all students need to eat in the cafeteria so there's been some great conversation that they shared with us at the advisory committee and even with us in our leadership meetings every day about some modifications perhaps can be made um at that time so that we don't have a large group of students in a particular area playgrounds what are playgrounds going to be what are some of the access to our students getting some physical activity office areas we know that um we have our office staff and what what precautions and what procedures and can we put in place specifically for our staff but we also know we have families coming in and we have staff they love to come into

041the office and they love to you know interact with their staff members that are in the office and so it's really important to establish procedures about how they can do that and ensure that they are doing that in a way that is um the best for all of our individuals on our campuses and then lastly cleaning and that cleaning um really ties directly also into the operations that's just to the right of this section um what does that look like what resources are needed when will that happen how will that happen who will be responsible for that those are all of the pieces that that subcommittee is working on right now with operations uh bonnie betts is leading this committee and looking at the financial impact on the karazhak grant and how that money might

042be utilized i know that it's going to cost more for us to um this next school year just because of some of the things that we're going to be putting in place monitoring the funding and that can also mean the monitoring of the funding for our adm and how we're funded as a district for our students and then just making sure that in the warehouse they have um there's protection equipment for our in for our staff the cleaning supplies are available and how does that translate when they need something so putting processes in place so everyone knows where to get things how to get things and looking at how those are going to be paid for nutrition services i'm looking if there needs to be some modifications to the lunchroom as i mentioned these are

043all considerations more specifics about decisions will be made when we talk later and as the advisory team does provide additional information and um as when they look at our recommendations from a subcommittee they'll be able to guide us as to where that might be transportation the cleaning of the buses making sure that we also in addition to full cleaning of buses on a daily basis also looking at hand sanitizers at the bus entrance and also through a facilities mine perspective providing and putting some duct work inline infiltration within cleaning protocols and materials making sure that um what is the best protocol how is it done how often should it be done who should be doing it as similar to the campus operational management team is looking at some of those and then also making sure

044that sanitizers are throughout the building so for example we just had a conversation um the other day of at an elementary campus where are the important places to make sure that we have sanitizers is that the same at secondary no it's not and so as a secondary at a junior high where are those places at is um high school where are the best places for those the next two subcommittees are led by jared ryan and um they really are these two are interrelated but they're also very very different and unique so our extracurricular looks at the athletics our performing arts our special areas and also the activities that they may do so here we're looking at the phased approach that he presented prior to that we can look at some of the phased approaches that

045they've already looked at for athletics some of the phased approaches they're looking as they're moving into some of our summer camps and learning a lot from what they have already been doing and experiencing and that really does help us get as to where we might do as we try to replicate some things in different situations the other thing is to for this area this might be performing arts this might be special areas we just communicated today cte is one that while that's not extracurricular cte does involve activities and things that are look very different so those are the components of that extracurricular committee and then the programs the before and after school vik enrichment preschool are we looking at a modification of a schedule maybe or offering that option for parents that's they'll be considering

046that's what they have been talking about in their subcommittee some are in holiday camps and specialized programs our employees group this is this committee is led by miss udall and sean mcintosh this group really touches and is very insulated to all of our areas as you can imagine first and foremost i'm looking at the susceptible personnel making sure that they're surveying the at-risk members to gauge their intentions we want to see who is able to return to work in the situation like coming right back to our brick and mortar wanting to be sure that they're maintaining confidentiality they are consistent with their americans with disabilities act and some of the other state privacy laws it's important to also offer some accommodations um such as maybe an alternative teaching assignment so as i mentioned before as

047we look at some additional students perhaps going due to health reasons or others to online institution we will want we will need to increase our staffing there so a reassignment of staff in that way adhering to our ferpa and hipaa requirements um adhering to state and federal employment laws and offering that employee assistance program that we have making sure that staff members are continue to be aware of it and just remind them of the support that they get in that area for teacher certification they are going to um and they continue to look at making sure that we're using appropriately certified teachers for the online scenario for in-person scenario and perhaps for a blended if we do have to move to a um due to a disruption whether it be um as i mentioned before

048if students are absent that might be our scenario for blended learning or if we become in a situation that's outside of what we can make decisions about and our school needs to be perhaps closed for a brief moment for some time then what types of um reallocation of staffing can we do to ensure that we are supporting our students and our staff both making sure that we have students and teachers in front of our student our teachers in front and staff in front of our students but also that we are supporting them in their learning when they're working online staffing and adjustment costs just the consider is there a need for us to employ additional staff in certain areas whether that be nurses healthcare aids custodians full-time substitutes and other employees and what might that

049look like and so they as they gauge some of that and get feedback for example from some of our parents again we'll have to be circling back and see what their choices based on the choices what their options are what do they want to choose and what is best for their student and then that will again circle back to the employees so we can be sure that we are ready to serve them in whichever way um is best for them and the determining the vacancy rate of employees so um if we do have a need um for um a substitute or there's a vacancy in a classroom making sure that we have that in place for all of our staff and students also as we return to work making sure that precautions and procedures are

050in place allowing our vulnerable staff for health reasons to order some personal protective equipment establishing a process for check-in with um vulnerable staff so our administrators there'll be a process for them to check in with with those staff members and see if they're what and help guide them with the questions that they could um be asking so that they can best support the students or communicate needs back to that employee subcommittee group or to our office of talent management all as well they will establish a point of contact local health department as needed and is appropriate the next area that they are looking and considering um what our processes will be is that return to the reporting of identified coveted cases with employees whether that be establishing the procedures and training with school administrators school

051nurses and other health care providers so that we can maybe they have covered like symptoms and what procedures place to utilize and to remain healthy inform those that have had close contact with a person diagnosed with coba 19 to stay home follow the state guidelines and the state department of health guide guidance as well there will it'll be important to have an easy to read flow chart for employees so when they know that they need to report a possible diagnosis or exposure they have that readily available to them so they know exactly what to do and talk to it about that and then also to report those confirmed cases as appropriate our family's first coronavirus response act and our american with disabilities act um it's important to establish easy to follow guidelines for the employees

052who qualify and also to inform and educate employees of their rights under those acts as well so that would be our in all of the considerations and obviously not an all-inclusive list we learn more every day about some of the areas that we need to so um that will continue to grow i'm sure just as some of the others will and they will work in close contact not only with the subcommittees that i've already mentioned but with health services jen frost is leading that committee looking at what our department of health guidance and cdc guidance guidances what directives or developments occur and what is needed for that and also to develop guidelines and protocols for district offices for campus campuses for their offices as well as their classrooms making sure that students receive protocols we're

053educating their students we're providing protocols for treating our students and protocol calls for giving them more information about prevention same thing with that staff that education the treatment and the prevention um some of those will be put in place by this committee developing modeling education for students and staff regarding proper hygiene whether that means signs and symptoms of illness positive practices to stay healthy and in addition to that looking at protocols for procedures just as the employee group will doing that we'll be working with her and her team at um what those procedures are for illnesses what the procedures are for outbreaks and what those prevention modalities whether that be mass or barriers are most appropriate for the various groups our last two subcommittees um accountability that's led by brandy burton and accountability really um

054talks about various types of accountability for example assessing student growth we have we will not have spring 2020 instruction or assessments and we won't have spring 2020 instruction and so how do we assess where our students are and what they need um we know what we want to teach them we know we have a plan for that but what are we going to use in order to assess and and provide information to our teachers to inform what that instruction will be in addition we know that for our teacher evaluations there's an accountability piece related to um part of that is school letter grade and in absence of that or in absence of a letter grade that is more than a year old it's important to look at that and so she will be working and

055she has already been communicating as i mentioned interrelated work all of the time she's working with vicki jones who does a lot with our evaluations and some of the guidance and development of working with the office and talent management as well um what would also would our um evaluations look like in regards to some of those indicators we learned that it's very very different for in-person in-seat kind of instruction and engagement it looks very different when we're looking at virtual or online and so making sure that we do provide some of that for them attendance requirements and reporting right now currently we we report attendance differently for in-person and for online and this year the state did allow us to submit a comprehensive plan and by submitting that they allowed us to continue with our

056in-person attendance reporting will they let us do that later on we know and so um it's important for us to be aware of that in in-person brick and mortar our students we have report attendance based on who's absent that's considered negative attendance when we look at online learning historically and what we um currently do for our aoi for for our global academy is we're reporting the number of minutes that students are working on a course and so obviously those are different and so if we're moving um from a brick and mortar and we have to move to a blended setting for a disruption whether that be because one an individual student or um a group of students are no longer able to learn for the moment in time or for those weeks during our brick

057and mortar can we still continue attendance reporting like we would just as if they were on our roster because they are on our roster or are in person and so those are some of the things that they'll be looking at and giving us guidance with that as you can only imagine yes related to that and student attending obviously as you stated previously we are encouraging students who are showing any signs of health issues to stay home uh or even if their family has potential health issues yeah we tend to send letters home and track attendance if they're excessive attendance how will we balance that where we want students to stay home in certain cases to protect themselves and others but we have limits on how many absences they can have we that would that goes

058along with our next um subcommittee and that legislative advocacy um we have talked about that we talked about so are we going to send that 10-day letter right that 10 that the students need to be um once they miss that we generally will send a letter home to them um i think and we've talked about as the guidance is provided for our families um as far as when it's important for them and as we educate our staff well it's important for them to stay home as you mentioned that we are hoping will work in tandem with that um and then also looking at making sure that the legislators and our state officials understand that um there will need to be some modifications and adjustment to that because we certainly want our students to be healthy

059and it's important for them to do that as well dr mccord is leading the legislative advocacy group and that does tie directly into our funding identifying the needs as we are all finding many of them and communicating that as he already has been doing to our legislators we want to be sure that we're getting full funding regardless of the service delivery of our instruction and we will continue to advocate for that and ask for that as well and also our school district and our accountability grades our letter grades we need to look and see we have some things that are connected to that so it'll be important um for us to continue to communicate with dr mccourt as we do of course all the time but communicate specifically about those things that we know we're

060finding hiccups that perhaps our legislators can help us out with that as well our timeline we know we've been working long before june but our official task work task force work began in um at the right at the beginning end of may beginning of june um there will be ongoing updates throughout june for our to our families to our staff and also to all of you um june 30th will be our formal governing board presentation at that time that is where we will have a very very clear plan in place for you um based on after listening to all the considerations as i mentioned before we we know as our subcommittees as we're doing our work what recommendations we want to make but there's so much interrelated components to all of this that we need

061to go to our advisory get guidance and then go back and refine some of our plans and so that's what we will continue to do um throughout the month of june and as i mentioned there are um i'm obviously here to answer some questions and we have all of our subcommittee leaders as well so if you have any questions um i'm going to get out of this so that we can see everybody a little bit better that's okay just an observation and perhaps a thought to consider and that is similar to what we do with our special education students where we have uh documented service hours and points of contact per student if we can do that without being too onerous on the teacher and actually make it as automated or electronic as we can

062just in terms of the accountability piece and the finance piece and how those dovetail uh that we can document service hours per student somehow automatically as tracked by computer if we have to modify the attendance thing to some degree just a thought thank you um dr santa cruz i have a question or i have a few questions mrs humphries so dr newman when we're talking about our extracurricular activities specifically our music choir band and general music what are some of the protocols that they are discussing as this is one of the issues that we have to deal with is the you know when you're doing band and choir you're producing more and greater volume of sound and more um breath mr ryan hi we're fortunate to have members of both high school junior high band

063programs marching band program particularly concert band programs as we've discussed the kind of the size of the group and the the nuances of that um a number of things have come up including uh the goal of reducing the number of instruments that are shared between members of different bands and musical groups we've discussed not utilizing the same stands between members of the groups one of the concerns that we have right now that we will need to address is actually where they store their instruments and go and pick them up whether we have them going in in some sort of rotation or keeping them in smaller groups within their sections and whatnot but um mr bennett has has been kind of a leader for us and a voice for the group from the high school level

064um which has been great to learn from him and his perspective is the band director of one of our largest groups at highland high school um and so we're addressing those uh we have another follow-up meeting on thursday we were actually really excited about the governing board meeting tonight and to hear the questions that you all had and and to kind of push us forward to finalize some things but those are all discussion points and certainly things that that we're looking to address to to minimize the contact students have between one another but certainly extracurriculars pose a new unique challenge yes and and they are very important to the students and um choir and singing has definitely been an issue in the church setting so i think it's really important that we work to address

065those issues i don't i don't want to see kids miss out on choir or band i mean it's a little different in orchestra it's a bow it's not your voice but those who are using their breath and their voice um that's going to be uh something we really need to work on and resolve um especially if we consider wearing masks because you can't play a band instrument with a mask on and it may be hard to sing as well um another question i had was just for the um legislative advocacy committee um part of the thing i think is very difficult for us as a board is we don't have guidance from the legislature and the governor at this time about the flexibility for example with attendance or additional funding or what the funding might

066look like how are you addressing those issues because you have so much you don't know it's difficult to figure it out bill what we have done and what i'll continue to do is communicate with uh representatives not just from the legislature but uh other groups that represent asda asb uh oh as well others who work on behalf of school districts and like you said there are not any ants as of yet uh but i i guarantee you um they definitely know our concerns uh things that are being thrown around is is funding us off of last year's this well current school years but for next year's 100th day number because uh we're very concerned about um adm dropping and being built accountable for uh covet 19 and how it makes an impression upon our attended

067on a daily basis again a lot of things that uh dr newman spoke about a few minutes ago and other subcommittees plays into um what we would like to accomplish in terms of just making sure that um all school districts are treated in a in a fair and respectful manner when it comes to funding again and and i don't have any indication that anybody in the legislature wants to do anything to damage that we just want to make sure that we're continually in their ear and they understand that this is important to us and you know another example is how will online classes be treated uh currently we're not funded at 100 for students who are taking online classes and if we're forced to go in that route or we have options for families because

068of health issues or primarily if they're just they don't want to send their kids to school because of cobit 19 they want a different route for them how will we be funded for that and uh we're pushing for 100 on that as well all right thank you i appreciate that and then just uh another one was when we talk about internet access and i wanted to know kind of what percentage of our students are we helping to get internet access are we able to um provide enough that we have a hundred percent of students who want that are we having some students who prefer using packets how are we dealing with that did we deal with that in the spring with the remote learning as far as having internet access or desiring packets since we

069are such a large district what uh mrs kadania mrs connor did was reach out to the schools because the schools know best who really has access issues at home and that's how we work that program with the cox connect to compete so i don't we don't have exact numbers on that but we're going to continue to offer that uh and now we can get access points as to where before we couldn't so that could be another possibility that my subcommittee is discussing at this time okay all right thank you can i jump in on that just a bit not about connectivity but the city of mesa i spoke with their uh city manager today and their council has um decided that with some of the money that they receive from the federal government for coven

07019 they are going to purchase a little over chromebooks for gilbert public schools and what will happen is that we will purchase them and they will reimburse us uh for those dollars used for that which comes to about right around a little over 140 000 and that's for uh elementary schools that reside in mesa so a big thank you to them and um for their efforts to make sure that even though we're gilbert public schools they recognize the fact that a third of our district is in within the city of mesa uh limits and so again thank you to them that that is very generous i'm really glad to hear that they're uh being proactive in helping us out in that way so thank you dr mccord and ms wood if you would uh extend

071our appreciation for that generosity and consideration the next time you see councilman thompson we'd appreciate that i will just sorry one more thought i just i i do want to thank um the committees for all the hard work this is a lot of planning that we're doing in a very short space and um you know instead of taking two years to do it we're going to smash it into two months so thank you to dr newman and all of the committee members for that hard work other board members any questions or comments dr santa cruz yes miss wood go ahead so uh barbara dr newman i had a couple questions i've noticed and have received emails about um what i noticed on the surface of the teachers and the parents mentioned the idea of would

072we have any reduced capacity in our classroom or would we reduce the numbers in our classroom to kind of help with the healthiness in our classrooms do you have any comments on thoughts about that that would be our campus operational management team um jason or marcy do you have any hi there um we have studied that right now from our perspective we are not proposing to do any of those things we do know that possibly with some of the students wanting to go to online learning that could reduce the overall population in the classrooms with with that but as of right now that is not a consideration um just because of space and staffing and all of those other implement implications okay i need to yeah go ahead go ahead i was just going to

073say same a larger discussion with that committee for both levels if we could just keep that in mind um the best we can first of all we've committed to having more teachers in our override as far as you know i think we have some ability to have that staffing and then i think if that's something that's been mentioned by teachers and parents if we can find any way to just have even just a you know a little bit of reduction and it sounds like we might just naturally is kind of the idea but if we can kind of keep an eye on that and just see what we can do to manage that i think that would be important and then um i also we received many emails and feedback um that and you mentioned

074it dr newman that we want to take into account the health and prevention but we also want to return back to school as normal as possible like we received several emails about masks we received several emails about different things like that that might be prohibitive to the wellness and the normalcy of school i just as you as you went through the health subcommittee that was kind of mentioned and i just wondered what's what's the how can we have a balance how can we try and you know find a balance the right balance of that um the subcommittee is working on that to give that guidance but we also um just as our guiding principles we want to be sure that we are listening to what our um families are saying and our staff is saying

075um dawn sharon you know when she shared the statistics um our families really said that it was important for their students to not be required to wear masks um and so um that will be in that information will definitely guide some of the decisions that are made um as well inc in relation as you mentioned um two health services and gen's committee great just so they'll take that into consideration that's great and i know we're all doing the best we can and trying to do this i just want to make sure that was mentioned and then finally i just want to um mention again and i know we've talked about this in subcommittees every single person every single subcommittee has just that we are mindful of our teachers and what we're asking of them as

076we you know try and accommodate the best that we can and add different things on them i just i i just want us to be mindful that we are realistic and supportive in what we're asking our teachers in their classrooms um and not adding and adding and adding to to what they're trying to do they can focus on the students and the learning and those basic things and and not i mean there's going to be some you know here and there but just how do we best support them be mindful of them and what we're asking of them so thank you thank you board members any additional questions mr carr mr jenny i would just like to go ahead mr jetty no go ahead i would just like to thank the committee and the various

077committee members for all of their work um i i think has has been highlighted there there is some consistent feedback that we're receiving i spent some time really looking at the apparent the parent survey and the faculty survey and and certainly there are some consistencies there regarding the desire to have some type of health monitoring sanitation seems to be very important uh you know there seems to be some real mixed feelings on on different categories and i i know it's difficult to take into consideration the needs of all so thank you i look forward to seeing some of those recommendations and i very much appreciated the comments up front that we recognize we're trying to balance the health associated with covet as well as the mental and emotional health and physical health in other ways

078with with these students and as we said it really is a focus on enabling the students to be successful so thank you mr jetty yeah i just want to say thank you um for all that you've done i i think uh obviously we're i think we're between a rock and a hard place and you know just listen to all the things that you you know that you've talked about you know looks to me like it's going to cost a lot of money to make all of it work and at this point don't know what's going to happen in terms of the legislature helping us out with that so just have to do the best we can do and thank you very much for you know for all the work that you've done thank you board

079members uh and to all the subcommittees and to dr newman and dr mccord uh you are moving with all deliberate speed to come up with something for june 30th and make the appropriate recommendations and again i echo what this board has already stated we appreciate the hard work and all of the effort that is going into getting us back to a sense of a new normal dr mccord we can move to item 2.02 on global academy your introductory remarks thank you dr sanders governing board members um this next presentation uh will be headed up by peter barton and i will let um dr newman introduce him from there but this is directly related to uh forced work and ensuring that we do have options for children moving forward as we go into the fall of

0802020. dr newman thank you um dr barton if you don't mind um sharing them starting to share the presentation that would be great um as dr mccord mentioned this really is an opportunity for us to um share with you as well as um to our families that what type of curricular options we do have for our students that will choose an online option or scenario and we also know that you we maybe haven't always shared with you about global academy i know we've done a couple presentations but just for you to better better under um be able to see what our students see what our parents see and the type of curriculum that we're using so i'm going to turn it over to you dr barton thank you dr newman um dr santa cruz uh

081governing board members and dr mccord thank you again uh for the opportunity to share uh what global academy looks like and what some options are uh going down the road um when we talk about global academy there's really two components to our program we have our curriculum provider which is florida virtual schools and our learning learning management system which houses our curriculum called agilex buzz so i'm gonna kind of divide my my presentation in half and show you what each of them looks like from both the student and teacher perspective and go into just a little bit of detail about uh what we've done with each of our components here so to begin uh agilex buzz is our learning management system and it is the preferred learning management partner of florida virtual schools um so

082it's included with our florida virtual school license um blood agilix buzz is compatible with google which is obviously our district standard in terms of what students and teachers use and then it's also compatible with turnitin which is a anti-plagiarism software global's been experimenting with turnitin with good success this year and i know several of our high schools use it as well buzz provides us some robust tools for content creation it isn't just a place where florida virtual lives but there are some tools which i'm going to show you the teachers can use to really customize their courses and personalize it for students and also bring in some of the adopted curriculum resources that we have in our district so in addition to those adopted resources teachers are able to import content from every other florida

083virtual course within our catalog so even if a teacher is teaching ninth grade algebra if they need to bring in some content from pre-algebra for example they're able to do that very easily and bring that in from another class from our florida virtual curriculum through buzz teachers can also import curriculum from khan academy as well as open ed so there's some resources automatically built into the system and then obviously like i mentioned we have lots of adopted curriculum that teachers can link to or import and we're really we're researching ways on on what that might look like specifically for all of our resources from kindergarten through 12th grade over the past few years our technology team as well as global academy we've worked to really make buzz a part of what we do in our

084district especially for students and for parents so for students buzz is right on their rapid identity home page so all they have to do is click that tile and press launch we've been a we've customized our homepage and we plan on customizing it further if we have to have a larger audience of of students joining us but we've tried to build out our social media we've tried to um you know build out some some videos and training materials for students and parents when students log in this is the kind of the the first thing that they see and again what you see here is pretty customizable and we've put things up here that our global academy full-time students definitely need like i mentioned we've i've been building out over the past few months a set

085of orientation videos so that any student who's never taken an online class before or who's never taken a class with global has something to look at and you know model their first steps after we really want students who are new to this to be able to to jump in and get going as quickly as they can within buzz we have the ability for teachers to communicate with students and students to communicate with teachers so there's a communication component built in that capitalizes on student email accounts but there's the convenience of having a communication piece within our platform over the past couple years i've developed a technology help page all the questions that we get all the things that we know that students need to to know how to do when it comes to their chromebook

086and online courses it's all here and we've compiled a frequently asked question page with screenshots with videos and helpful tips for students and parents again so that they have ease accessing our content and doing their courses my favorite part of having a platform is the fact that when on students home page they're able to see all of their classes in one place and get a snapshot of their current grade and their current progress and they're able to see how much time they have left when and and they can click right into the course and go students and parents are able to see this and they can click on this if you see the bar chart icon on one of those course cards that takes them to a very detailed grades page which i'll show you

087momentarily when students click on or into that grades page it looks kind of like a pretty standard progress report but there's some important functionality here first of all if you see at the very top assignment there's a little bubble which indicates that the teacher has provided feedback our teachers are able to provide either written or verbal feedback to students on their assignments and so all that feedback feedback is compiled here in the grades page and students can go back and look at that at any time over on the right hand side you'll see a set of due dates our the way that a global academy is set up is that students are enrolled at pretty much any day of the year and can move through the course at whatever pace they need to these due

088dates are a benchmark for students to follow in order to finish the course in that default nine week time that we give them in our in the way that global set up right now students are definitely able to work ahead um and there's they can also turn things in past that target due date with no penalty but we really wanted to give students a guide and you know to help keep them organized and help their parents keep them accountable towards finishing their work the best part of this grading page is that there's a lot of information embedded when you click things so students when they click an exam for example that they've already taken they can see the questions that were asked they can see what answers they got correct and what they got incorrect

089they can see how much time they spent teacher feedback there's just a ton of information and analytics built into every single assignment that's available for students to view once they've completed that assignment students also have access to a comprehensive to-do calendar so this calendar lives with within buzz um and the beauty of is is it that it shows all of the assignments across all of the different courses that a student's taking so at any given time a student can head over to the calendar and see exactly what assignments are due that day so it's a great way for students to stay organized they can even in terms of personalizing their calendar they can even set their own blackout dates you know so we have students for example who are professional athletes and are going off

090to world championships and if they know that they're going to be away from the computer for a week they can block out on their calendar and everything will readjust for them so i i think that's a good way for for students to who need flexibility to be able to do that and not lose their organization i wanted to highlight our google integration buzz is able to integrate with google docs and google sheets and slides and all of the productivity tools that our students and teachers are able to use one of the popular features of google classroom that our teachers love is the ability to create a template in google and push it out to all students so that students are working off of the same document and turning in something that's consistent but it's also

091giving students an idea of what the expectations are and what they clearly should be producing well buzz also has that ability and so within buzz teachers are able to create templates and push those out to students when students are ready to do those assignments on the teacher side it's a very similar interface obviously the first thing that teachers see is a little icon on their front page that just tells them how many assignments currently need grading and when teachers open that up they simply get a list of the assignments and a little interface to enter points and provide uh oral or written feedback to the student we can also customize the landing page as much as we need as you can see i've put up a couple resources for our online teachers that they need

092pretty much every day our teachers also have access to a a pretty robust editor so this is just a glimpse of it here but this is essentially a drag and drop tool so if teachers want to move things around it's just as simple as clicking and dragging and moving it to a different spot you can see the eyeball that's where teachers if they want to hide or make things visible to students they can use that function this is a list of all the things that teachers can create within within buzz and that would be in addition to the florida virtual content that already lives there so on the left you can see kind of static resources that teachers can add everything from files that they've created to youtube videos and on the right are all

093the different kinds of activities that can be created and as you can see several are collaborative and interactive everything from blogs to discussion boards surveys and wikis but the most powerful piece is at the very top called the library and the library is is where teachers can import lessons from other florida virtual classes they can import content from open ed and khan academy so really they have access to a lot of resources right at their fingertips and can import them through the library here's an example of just a couple uh basic customizations that my full-time teachers have done um my full-time teachers they're they're a part-time basis so we really don't expect them to do a lot of modifications to the curriculum that's already there so what they do is customize their their classroom really

094make it a place where students get to know their teacher they're able to access their content information or contact information uh and some teachers they have even gone so far as really uh providing more direction on assignments that are there and giving students specific things that they need to do and just some help in addition to what florida virtual tells the students other features that we provide through buzz we provide parent portal accounts to all parents uh if they have students who are taking a class with us and that parent portal account gives the parents access to everything a student sees parents can do everything except turn in assignments through their parent portal account and so we really value that transparency we want parents to be partners with us and supporting their students and so

095we want to give them access to everything so that they can use it we also through buzz are able to provide parents with email and text alerts um that are pretty much instant the parents can be texted or emailed when when their students grade falls below passing or when the teacher grades an assignment or even when the student turns something in students uh can also get those notifications as well as they if they opt in to do that from a from a more district level and even at an administrative level we are able to run detailed reports on activity and grades and mastery and we're able to align standards to whatever activities are built in in the buzz shells so next i want to flip over and talk about global academy's curriculum provider florida virtual

096school is a non not-for-profit entity it's actually a school district a statewide school district in florida and completely online and so they have teachers developing their curriculum and engaging in a cycle of refreshing and updating that curriculum so a florida virtual course will get updated every couple of years which is great the curriculum is does meet standards it's advanced ed which is now cognia accredited uh and it meets the quality matter standards so it is very high quality uh it has lots of engaging activities lots of rigorous texts as you're going to see um and it's i wouldn't say it's the easiest option out there but it meets the standards of gilbert public schools we purchased a 6th through 12th grade license beginning in 2016-17 global academy is always or at least as long as

097i've been there been 7th through 12th grade so we haven't really used that 6th grade component but we now have the possibility to do that thanks to you we're also interested in taking advantage of the kindergarten through 5th grade license which has been piloted for over a year even by some districts even in the valley here and became available for public consumption on may 1st we are not the only school district in in arizona or the phoenix greater phoenix area who use florida virtual i we we have about five or six districts who are joining us and exploring the kindergarten through fifth grade curriculum uh and you know really exploring how it would how it would work and i'm collaborating with them on what are some best practices that we can put in place to

098really meet the needs of those students because it's going to be a quite a bit different from our secondary crew this is a pretty typical florida virtual lesson this is i chose a lab biology class on uh classification of living organisms as you can see it's a it's a pretty friendly user interface students have access to a glossary in many courses they also have access to some videos that will help them practice essential skills or or you know brush up on something that they might have forgotten from a previous class the next slide shows this is the same lesson so i just wanted to give you an idea of how much content is packed into these lessons and it's not just reading it's not just videos there's interactive materials there's virtual labs um you know

099there's lots of things that students engage in before they have to produce something and to show their mastery a typical florida virtual unit is laid out like this you can see those icons that look like blank pieces of paper those are actually the lessons so students spend the most of their time engaging in those lessons and practicing and then move right right down the list into their assignments so you can see quizzes you can see drop boxes for students to produce work and turn it in for feedback you can also in our in our units you'll also see discussion based assessments which are designed for students to have conversations with their teachers and really verbalize what they're learning in their course and showing their teacher that they're indeed learning the material i wanted to show

100you the a a glimpse at the elementary curriculum you can see that the user interface is definitely more elementary friendly and florida virtual has even integrated more tools for students including a text-to-speech tool that's built right into the curriculum as well as quite a few more resources for elementary teachers to scaffold learning for students lastly i wanted to share the catalog offerings at the elementary level we know that the curriculum will provide core classes and i've also seen electives including physical ed technology spanish and visual art at the middle school level we again have core classes as well as some credit recovery classes and our elective offerings are a little bit broader including pe reading study skills spanish coding and art and then at the high school um our course offerings are quite a bit

101broader we have a full suite of on-level core classes we also offer some honors classes and then our electives include pe languages we have several languages that we we have the capability of offering we have technology classes including a few in-depth computer programming classes we have art history as well as social science classes including psychology the catalog also includes curriculum for pre-calculus which we currently do offer and ap classes which we currently do not in the full-time setting um i wanted to note that those pre-calculus and ap courses have an added cost of a virtual textbook that we we do have to purchase when students enroll in that class that's really what i wanted to share um i'd love to answer any questions and and share my experience further dr parkman thank you very much

102for that presentation uh one question i have is in your view how difficult is it for the educator at the brick and mortar facility to transition to a global kind of service thank you for that question dr santa cruz um what i have found is that the functionality that teachers have learned within google classroom is transferable to the buzz environment i buzz has many of the features that are found in google classrooms and the tools look very similar but buzz off does offer a little bit more and i'm excited about the possibility that teachers would be able to bring in potentially resources that would supplement our adopted curriculum um so you know i i think there will be some transition but i think it's doable because our teachers do have experience in that google classroom

103environment thank you dr bartman board members any additional questions so um a couple thoughts that i have um one could we go through some type of a curriculum approval process or at least um as before in in conjunction with looking at the elementary addition to this global academy especially if we're going to offer that to our students as an option we definitely this is what we definitely would um not only would we want to provide some presentation and some opportunities to look at the resources for us to get feedback um prior to students beginning but also we would be able to um for sure continue to go through that process of um answering questions and providing additional resources for them to look at and to ask questions during that time that we are implementing okay

104and that that would be sooner than later if we go this route great um i was thinking about it and i thought could be almost if we if this is the route that we're going for the online to include um the elementary students as well could we like you said post presentations maybe open up some of this so parents and families can see kind of almost have like a tour you know how we have those tours of the schools and stuff could we have kind of a tour of global academy to give people some idea of what this will look like the best we can and i know with the elementary you mentioned dr barton that it would need to look different than the secondary because there needs to be more hopefully teacher interaction is

105what i'm guessing is that what you would anticipate thank you miss wood yes absolutely i think um when i envision elementary i i think that there has to be a significantly higher level of teacher interaction uh with students obviously there needs to be a lot of onboarding with students and parents at the start of a course so that parents are comfortable supporting their student and the student develops a sense of autonomy with the platform but you know i i think it would be imperative that the teacher is communicating if not once a week perhaps more because online curriculum is just it's a different a different way of learning and for students who've never been exposed to that or or maybe have less of a sense of of individual organization and motivation the teacher definitely needs

106to have a larger role than perhaps we do with the secondary well and in addition to that kind of some feedback that we've received as well would be people would appreciate especially if we can hire more full-time teachers people families would appreciate more interaction in general even with secondary that it's you know a daily or a video class that you join in here and there or regular hours that you know your teacher will be there just a lot more of that hands-on interaction more maybe more of a hybrid feel if we can work toward that i think would would be a really good addition again i know we're trying to put this all together to provide this option you know by august but just maybe if we keep that in mind as we keep working

107toward that absolutely thank you finally um another suggestion that i'd heard too is could we look at offering rolling start dates especially for secondary maybe in providing more and tell me if maybe maybe this is what you already do but i don't think so like every two weeks or three weeks a course would start so that or two course you know you could start every couple weeks rather than just by the semester um thank you yes uh we actually enroll students pretty much every day of the year um so and we get like we get usually a hundred hundred plus enrollments a week and so we enrolled immediately the next day um again because we want students to get in and going so you could if a student's already um involved if they finish their

108class they could start a new class as they go okay that's great so we encourage just the summer school has specific start dates though yes and and you know that's a result of our we have to have a certain calendar with summer school especially this year um the way that the state is funding us um so yeah and we have a lot of pieces that are happening at the same time as summer school is a lot of uh technical things that our technology services office is doing in terms of rolling over to the new year um getting everything set up for the next year so we we have to somehow have kind of a an end date for that summer school session so that we can make sure everything's ready to go for day one

109of the school year okay i appreciate that i appreciate that you're working toward flexibility and i know that you have how many students do you have enrolled for summer school this year we have 3 200 students how's it going very busy but it's so far so good i think thank you board members additional questions doesn't sound like it dr newman dr bartman thank you for that presentation dr newman you've been very busy sorry you has been extremely busy for sure thank you for that dr santa cruz sorry dr santa cruz i do have some questions i forgot to unmute my mic so could i go ahead with my questions too late go ahead ms humphries well i'm learning technology too and and doing the same thing i have to remember to unmute myself so i

110did have a couple questions i really appreciated seeing the curriculum i know that when we upgraded our online curriculum that this was a much better option than we had previously um are we able to help students finish are we getting a better percentage of students who are finishing their courses and going through to completion yes uh over the past couple years and especially leading into this year that was a priority of mine so one example that we just launched is that we have a referral system for teachers if they spot a student who's struggling they can fill out a referral which goes to our staff and we're following up with students immediately and that's you know intended to really target students that could in other ways fall through the cracks and just really making sure

111that we're helping them and making sure that they know what they're doing and what needs to happen next all right thank you i appreciate that because i know that sometimes with online in the past it has been more of a struggle to make sure that students finish the class and complete it so they can get that credit so i really appreciate that that's a priority and that you're working on it the other question i had also had to do with teacher interaction um if we have students completing the course at a time that's convenient for them and then teachers reviewing the assignments or working on that course at a time that's convenient for them how do they overlap or how do they communicate when there is an issue or the student needs help from the

112teacher so their model is asynchronous right where they're they're not you usually matching up in terms of the time that they're working our teachers work extremely hard to try to connect with students i we have teachers who create videos for students who ask a question so that you know there's some personal interaction and some direct answers to the students questions we have most of our teachers have a voicemail line set up so the student can call leave a message and expect that the teacher will call them back um and so you know it's hard because our teachers are also teaching during the day right they're they're doing this part time and kind of doing the best they can with with the time that they have but i i can tell you that our teachers really

113are are there to help students and are doing their very best to connect with them even at all hours that's good to know i appreciate more information also what kind of a ratio do we have students to teacher when we're considering how many teachers we need to hire these students in their coursework can i jump in on that one that's all right this that is what the committees are looking at right now because we know that there will be some um teachers that will not um perhaps be able to work within the brick and mortar setting and so the reallocation of their um or their reassignment of them to the global academy and that will also provide that will be their full-time job so they will be working during the day while our students are

114working so that will be a little different than what it was previously because we've had teachers working part-time working really really hard to support kids but working part-time so we're looking forward to that opportunity but what does that look like what does that load look like that's what the committees are working on right now okay and so when we did the summer school the virtual summer school did we pretty much use the teachers who would have taught summer school at the brick and mortar to do the online classes or how did we um scale that up so i used uh obviously the online teachers who were slated to teach online and then hired uh the brick and mortar teachers as needed so we weren't able to hire all of them unfortunately but we were able

115to get quite a few to come on especially in social studies where you know that that's by far our most popular subject this summer okay all right thank you for your answers and and thank you for the hard work i i know i've really seen the difference since we've been able to adopt this curriculum and how much better it's been for students and and to hear that they're doing better at completing the work and getting that credit that's really important thank you thank you thank you ms humphries anyone else doesn't appear so dr mccord anything for the good of this particular session no i just want to thank uh dr newman our task force uh committee members and dr barton wonderful job excellent uh explanations about what we're doing and how we're moving forward okay

116it appears that we have reached the conclusion of this work study session we're at item three which is adjourning this work study uh i have had a request in the past to take a brief break so we will take a five minute recess and begin our brief board meeting after that it is currently 8 17. thank you for your indulgence we will reconvene and is everyone back we will shortly know that we will call this brief board business meeting to order mrs wilson please call the roll mr read card here miss larry wood miss sheila eugetti here miss jill humphreys here dr charles santa cruz mr president all board members are present you have a quorum thank you mrs wilson we are now at item five of the board meeting agenda and we are ready

117for reports dr mccord item 5.01 thank you dr santa cruz governing board members it's that time of year again when we start talking about next year's benefit and tonight we have uh this bonnie beth and her crew to propose the 2020 2021 budget these vets a good evening dr cruz governing board members so i wanted to you know that as um first of all uh jackie manning and pat donahue are on this uh call or webex with me as the three of us created the presentation this evening we wanted to provide all the information to you that has been shared over the last couple of months but as i go through the presentation we will go through them fairly quickly as you have seen them i thought it was important though that we have a

118lot of the content there as we are posting the meeting notice for the public hearing to be held two weeks from now so the public will have all the information as well so to begin i'm going to go ahead and share my screen nope that wasn't it there it is okay um also before we get started i wanted to let you know that through the last couple of days we have made some modifications to the presentation and i will point those out as we go through it and these uh so this revised presentation will be posted tomorrow morning to the board meeting agenda so so to begin we're going to stick primarily to the maintenance and operations budget and the unrestricted capital budget however there are some notable items associated with some of our other

119funds i wanted to share that with you and also i wanted to share the risks and opportunities in these very difficult times of trying to figure out what the start of school is going to look like and which of our students are going to attend so i thought it was important that we at least talk a little bit about those risks and opportunities and finally to share with you the estimated tax rates we set the tax rate in august and the tax rate is set based upon this proposed budget so first this is all of the introductory information that we've shared in the past that the proposed budget is fully aligned to the strategic operating plan and as ms wood has already indicated we did make some commitments during the november 2019 override and bond

120and all those commitments are also reflected in this budget so to begin what is our proposed maintenance and operations budget capacity all these items are consistent with what you've seen in the past except for the teacher experience index so we did have a small decrease in the teacher experience index to 1.0214 from 1.025 again we talked about this earlier about the adm that we are anticipating a lot of adm and then the other notable difference from what we've seen in the past is the fact that we were expecting increases in classroom site fund but in fact saw a nine dollar per student decrease so to reflect all of that i wanted to share the uh the differences so starting with the fiscal year 2020 revised number two versus the 21 projected which you've seen in

121the past as well as the 21 proposed most of these items are consistent except you can see on the tei where the tei decreased for this proposed by the 1.0214 and also the classroom site fund so in the current year we are receiving 434 dollars per weighted student count we were projecting 465 40 more per student and we ended up with and twenty five dollars per weighted student a reduction of nine dollars from the prior year but a reduction of forty dollars per student from what we anticipated so all of those parameters are reflected in the final budget capacity or available monies we have to us here in gilbert the good news is we've been able to make some modifications to some of our projections so when we gave you the 2021 projected budget this

122spring we were assuming a total increase year-over-year of 19.4 million dollars and we still are at that total 19.4 million dollars the most notable change was in the budget balance carry forward the revised number two of the current year was a nine million dollar carryover we projected a 10 million dollar carryover and we now believe that we will easily reach the 11 million dollar carryover which does offset the 900 000 loss in the classroom site fund contribution that you can also see in the one two three four in the fifth row down in this table so before i go any further are there any questions about any of this miss butts to santa cruz could could you remind me why there's been a reduction in the classroom contribution so the um the jlbc that's the

123joint legislative budget committee makes an estimate of those revenues uh every spring and in fact they were about a month delayed this spring it's due directly to the covid so when everything shut down for a period of three months the sales tax revenues were greatly decreased and classroom site fund is nearly fully funded from sales tax revenues thank you you bet thank you miss wood dr santa cruz i had a question go ahead mrs humphries i do believe this is probably the first time i've seen a decrease in the classroom site fund um in the time that i've been on the board so is that then a decrease to the teachers because i don't know that we'll be able to make that up with the other issues that we're dealing with due to covet 19.

124so with an abundance of caution we did decrease the dollar amount per teacher associated with pay for performance but we have no intention of decreasing the classroom site fund portion that's in base salary and we're actually hoping that we will be able to use a little bit of the budget balance carry forward to maybe further close that 900 000 gap so we have some opportunities with budget balance carry forward in both 11 and 13. all right i i appreciate that i i know it's difficult because we've got a lot of things on our plate but um you know we want to help our teachers so thank you very much thank you miss humphrey please continue mrs thank you sir the next section are the spend increases so we've shared this before the non-discretionary budget increases

125and decreases and you can see the total increase projected is 1.33 million note that that does include the the lesser need the potential lesser need of fte associated with the 400 student loss so again 1.33 million dollars predicted also again as ms wood uh indicated we of course have made our maintenance and operations override commitments these are have not changed class size reduction allocation of two two million dollars that represents about 25 uh fte of teachers the social emotional supports that we've been talking about for some time uh which is divine intervention knowing that we will absolutely need those given the environment that we're in right now and then finally to retain and attract high quality personnel note that those total the total dollar amount of those commitments is 18 million dollars but we're only

126expecting about 11.6 million dollars from the override so obviously we're taking additional state revenues into consideration to meet to meet the eminent override commitments as well so i would like to spend a little bit of time on this employee excellence so these are the four parameters that we've shared in the past just to share that that all functions of gilbert public schools contribute to the achievement of our students all employees regardless of their role contribute to the achievement of this vision so our strategic operating plan is to retain and attract high quality in all portions of our operations and so we really strove to make sure compensation increases are as consistent as possible across all employee groups so those four parameters really gave us some information about these details about the salary increases by job

127class so our teachers the five percent pay increase has been prescribed pretty much by governor ducey with the 20 percent by and in addition again to striving to keep the teachers in the classroom we did back two medical days and added to each teacher's base and then we applied the five percent pay increase to them support staff due to the compensation study that was done largely by otm and all the efforts that they have made to make sure that we're analyzing salaries of all of our of all of our employees we did we did make substantive increases to grades we've made equity adjustments to many of our employees and then we made the decision to add four percent on on the base on top of that that particular issue addressed the compression associated with the

128minimum wage increase but the overall salary increase for every support staff will be a minimum of five percent and then finally administration and other professionals again moving everyone to the new minimum and plus a minimum of four percent on the base every single individual will get a minimum of five percent regardless of their circumstances so that leads to that concept that all employees are very important to meeting the needs of our students throughout the school district so bets can i ask one question about that with our with our increase our minimum wage employees they automatically get an increase each year do they also get the five percent on the base or just the automatic increase written into statute for that we did make a recommendation that our minimum wage employees are minimum wage employees and

129would be eligible just for the minimum wage increase as each year passes the idea is that with their minimum wage jobs we'd like to encourage them to move into other higher paid jobs so we did make that decision this year as well okay thank you you bet and then dr santa cruz if i may ask go ahead mrs wood we've talked about this before but just want to clarify since we're presenting it all tonight um with the salary study and with these recommendations we feel confident that we now have competitive salaries offered for each grade of employee competitive with our surrounding districts and other things like that correct so yes we are we have definitely approached the competitiveness we are probably a little bit under competitiveness in some areas of our job classes um we

130had always anticipated that we would be addressing the competitiveness over a two to three year period depending upon available resources but we made a huge dent into becoming more competitive and we believe that it's setting us up it's setting ourselves up very positively to go in 2021 thank you you bet thank you miss wood go ahead ms betts okay thank you so now to balance the budget you can see the total budget capacity increase is 19.4 million the class size reduction in social emotional supports is 3.81 the non-discretionary increases are 1.3 the teacher compensation increases with the sick leave buyback is just over 7 million our classified hourly increases are just over 5 million and finally our administrators and other professional increases have increased by 1.9 million leaving us with a fully balanced budget for

131the 2021 school there before i go any further are there any questions about any of that any further questions that was quite diligent of you miss betts and it is no magic it's just hard work thank you not just me miss matt and miss danny you've played a big role as well so thank you dr santa cruz if i may ask a question or make a comment please go ahead mr carr thank you um miss betts thank you for all this information uh and summarizing things that we've been discussing over the last several months i do want to point out to the public that in that teacher compensation increase in sick leave buyback by buying back those sick days as you indicated the the the effort is to encourage our employees to be in the

132classroom where they're most effective but it also has the effect of putting a an expense of the current year into the current year and removing it as a liability if they were to carry it forward so we're helping reduce cost in the future that's correct um second and you talk to a little bit the assumption going back several slides driving the uh the budget and you don't need to switch slides but is that our enrollment will decrease by i think it was 400 students if i remember correctly that's correct we do point out that that this last year we bucked the trend we are very hopeful that we will continue to buck that trend uh and see an increase which would mean that we would have additional capacity within the budget if that happens but

133taking this conservative approach especially with covid and we don't know if people will be hesitant to come back and so many you know how they'll fund people who do a hybrid or an online enrollment this year so i appreciate that conservative approach and i expressed to our audience and to our public and to the our parents uh we we want to serve you and we want to earn your trust and we want to continue to reverse that trend as we have this last year so thank you to you for this presentation and thank you to the parents who are supporting us thank you thank you mr carr is there any additional question so um so this next slide is a very important one we are required to post this to our website the very front

134page of our proposed budget it's uh definitely a summary attributable to the governor ducey's 20 by 2020. so we recalculated the other salary of all teachers employed in fiscal year 2020 so this is the current year now at 52 000 446. we have increased that by five the pure calculation because we really don't know what's going to happen this summer and which employees are going to be here or not but you can see where the percentage increase is 5 the average salary of all t employed in fiscal year 2018 was 40 761. so now when we calculate the change from forty six thousand seven sixty one to fifty four thousand eight eighty four it represents a seventeen point four percent but we know that the total sell percent increase awarded by the governing board since

1352018 is 18 and a half percent so what's the story why is it not the same and also note this is one of the slides that was modified coming into the 1819 school year i had i thought that the pain was nine and a half percent for teachers but it was nine percent so on the posted presentation it shows not 19 but the actual is 18.5 so to go to that story how do we explain story so i'd like to go to the next slide so we took an example teacher in elementary high school and junior high and and these were three teachers were here in 2018 still here in 2021. so we looked at each of them individually and then we looked at their average so you can see when you look at the

136average salary the overall percent increase from 2018 to 2021 for these particular three individuals that have been here all four years it was eighteen point six nine percent which you would expect for two reasons it's above the eighteen point five percent that you know that we awarded but also the eighteen point six nine percent reflects the additional two hundred dollars put on the base for teachers for next year as well as the compounding effect of giving a percent increase um in year in year one and then that dollar amount going up and then the percent increase in the following year is giving a percent increase over the increase you did in the prior year so it's a compounding effect so so the 18.69 is what you would expect so what that says is that when

137we look at the average salary globally this is the average salary district-wide every year we calculate the average salary in the spring during the summer is when all the retirements occur and when all the separations so you can assume you can assume that we have many higher cost teachers that are retiring in the summer some as high as uh 65 70 000 that are going to be replaced over the summer with a teacher between 48 and 55 000 say where you can see where those savings would occur due to that so that particular occurrence on an average basis across 1800 teachers results in the calculated percentage of being 17.4 percent instead of an expected 18.5 or 18.7 percent so are there any other questions regarding that my hope was to um to make sure that

138we clarified that and this came out of our discussions with the leadership team uh yesterday mrs betts i do have a question go ahead ms humphries thank you the question i have is the percentage in fy 2018 was nine percent but the uh i believe the governor was also counting the percentage the 1.2 percent that was given in 2017 so that that came to 10 for 2018 and then the 5 in 20 19 and the 5 in 2020. so i believe that um if you could if you added in that 1.2 and maybe um you could do that for us and send it to us in an email or something um i think that would clarify that we're much closer to that 20 percent um than we realized even though there was one year when

139we the teachers accepted a lower percentage so we could give that a little bit more to our support staff so um i don't remember the details in particular ms humphrey however the actual page on the adopted budget shows the reference year of 2018. so it doesn't oh it does it it is true that the governor used the base of 2016-17 to do this but the major if you remember he was 10 going into 19 5 going into 20 and 5 going into and so from from his base year was 2018 and that's what's on the proposed budget okay but i i do remember him at the time including that 1.2 that he previously given so that's fine okay doctors and occurs if i comment go right ahead mr carr and i i i too recall

140miss as ms humphreys does that there was the one percent from the previous year before his plan that he included in that but i would also call out that the governor's plan was based off of a state average and each district received based on the state average of a teacher salary because we were already above the state average we actually received less than the 20 percent even though this board has decided to do all it can to meet the 20 even while we're receiving less than that so that is correct that is definitely correct doctor santa cruz speculate as well go right ahead miss wood going along with um mr carr i just wanted to say so i just want our public to know on our teachers to know every penny that came from that

14120 by 2020 that came to us from the governor has gone to teachers it just like mr carr mentioned we didn't have that full 20 um for our teacher average but we've given everything we've had and more as well as added in and expanded that definition of teachers because it is that important that we could um have that salary increase in and provide that for our teachers so that was my my adding as well and i i wanted to share your point to ms wood the fact that our teacher definition so the governor's teacher definition is the classroom teacher we did expand the teacher definition to include our technology integration educators our academic coaches our librarians and our counselors so um so the counselor position the um the technology integration educator position are all really

142higher level positions and our our promotional opportunities for our classroom teachers so all those have played a role in uh in why we're not at that 20 or above it okay thank you all thank you ms betts anything else did you have something else nope i'm apologize i should have already put this on the presentation sorry about that um so i'd like to move into the 20 proposed capital budget so this is the calculation of the budget capacity you can see the parameters there you can see that we are anticipating a budget balance carry forward of a little bit less we do anticipate earning some interest though in the current year and restricted capital and then because the reduction so you can see the district additional assistance adjust is going from -5.2 to a minus

1432.5 giving us an additional about 2.6 million dollars in addition you can see that the budget increase over fiscal year 2020 2020 is 2.8 million dollars so that's reflective of both uh the reduction in the cut to the district additional assistance as well as the occurrence last year where we actually saw an increase in students so the district additional assistance is calculated based upon prior year average daily membership so i wanted to make sure that that was clear and then as we go into the next two slides regarding the unrestricted capital spend please know that our intention is to prioritize unrestricted capital through a zero-based budgeting process we do treat unrestricted capital as a one-time revenue source so therefore should go to one-time expenses so in year one you might have a situation at highland

144high and gilbert high where they need to replace baby grand pianos but they won't need to replace them next year so that would be a one-time expense that would not be repeated year after year but we don't want to give them the same amount of money if they don't need it so maybe that that additional money would go to campo or to mesquite high in a subsequent year so going to the to the next slide these are what we would consider non-discretionary unrestricted capital expenditures so keep in mind that unrestricted capital is also used for what we used to term soft capital items so instructional technology as well as business technology such as our ivision software you can see that we've got infinite campus up there as well under the various software licenses that are

145district-wide those are ongoing expenses that we need to account for annually note the curriculum ongoing plus the one-time for science kits and the english language acquisition adoption for 712 that is planned for the 2021 school year it is plus some special education testing increases it's about a 1.86 million dollar increase to curriculum again that is a one-time expense increase though um because we're only going to adopt a ela curriculum in in one year we're not going to adopt every single year so the subsequent year we might adopt a social studies curriculum as an example assessment platform and ongoing assessment costs is a 30 thousand dollars as you know you've approved a new assessment platform i think it was in the may meeting and so that increase is accounted for here global academy we just had

146a presentation of the florida virtual curriculum platform that is an increase of 360 000 allowing us to expand to k5 as well as to expand to a site license which in the long run will save us money as an example in the current year we were budgeting 125 000 or 150 000 for global but we had such an increase in students wanting to use the global academy platform primarily this summer that our cost is really going to be closer to 300 000. so that's just an example also that global academy expansion is on the board agenda for your approval tonight and then finally in in transportation there's a decrease of 1.5 million dollars an ongoing 200 000 dollar expenditure for the ongoing various equipment costs associated with replacing engines or or air conditioning compressors on

147our buses the decrease of the 1.5 billion dollars as you know you've approved the remodel of of the building g and in addition you also approved the um the replacement routing software uh leaving edgelog and going into tyler versatrans and then finally instructional materials we did make an allocation for instructional materials in the current year for performing arts physical education and art and we believe those are important to be ongoing these are instructional skills um such as uh even a a play pamphlet or um music needed at the high schools for whether it's choir band or orchestra so all those things um we would consider non-discretionary and ongoing um for a total of just under 8.5 million dollars so as you saw on the prior slide though we have over 15 million available to us

148so moving shoot so moving to the the next slide so these are the items that we would talk about on that zero-based budgeting prioritization process so it's available is about six and a half million dollars so these are the items on the list school marquees it's my understanding that we have four outstanding schools that do not have an electronic marquee that will probably be prioritized going into the 2021 school year we have performing arts needs over the last two months our high school performing arts staff members to include stage needs orchestra needs band needs performing play you know theater needs they were they received a google document to identify all of their ongoing needs or replacement needs or whatever it might be in terms of capital for all of our performing arts district-wide and we

149have a meeting scheduled tomorrow with uh karen coleman to start the process of figuring out how we're going to collect these needs and how we can set them up for prioritization for the leadership team ongoing needs for athletics and then finally general school capital needs all those things will be requested and vetted through a process to determine how the how the remaining six and a half million dollars will be spent so that's all i have on the unrestricted capital i wondered if you had any other additional questions before i move to the next couple of slides board members yes i just want to mention that when we talk about the district additional assistance we have not totally received the amount that was cut in um over the past few years starting in 2009 but some

150of those cuts were made more recently and this is the first time in eight euro eight years that some of these things have made it into our um district additional assistance budget because we've been using it to meet other needs so um while we are a little leery of what's going to happen next year with possible cuts because of the um economic downturn it is nice to see us actually have some funds to put towards these very important needs including pianos which will be um is on our consent agenda later and those are really important needs for our students to have the the kind of education we all desire that they come out with um having had leadership experiences and opportunities and develop their talents so thank you very much mrs betts you bet thank

151you ms humphries please continue okay thank you darn it now to go through and talk about the uh the funds so classroom siphon we have talked a little bit about classroom site fund so the budget is just over 24 million dollars going into 2021 it does include six million dollars of carryover funds providing gilbert with some flexibility in moving additional salary out of mno custom site fund so our goal this summer is to maximize the amount of mmo carryover to give us as much flexibility and and as many available dollars uh to help get some of the risks that we will talk about on the next slide instructional improvement a budget of 3.1 million dollars last year it was 1.5 million dollars and this is reflective of jerry carry over in instructional improvement that we

152have captured catching up with our cash reconciliation process this has given us an ability to hire the instructional improvement coach for to the benefit of all of our student staff members district y that that fte is fully funded out of instructional improvement title 1 due to the work of the federal government and the um the cares act they're they're allowing another year in which we can carry over all of the available unspent title one dollars we believe this will give us more flexibility also uh the cares act we are working on get an application completed we anticipate that we will spend about five hundred thousand dollars in the current year to offset the additional cleaning materials that we've had to offset possibly the revenue in community school those kinds of things and so we've budgeted

1531.8 million dollars in the care for for next year and then finally the bond fund you all approved the the resolution to sell additional bonds late july early august so we've included those amounts in the bond fund any questions on any of those go ahead miss bets so again as i um as i shared this budget does assume a loss of 400 students could be more or could be less there's lots of questions about is the state willing to fund us at a full a full fte level for our online students presently our full-time online students are funded at 95 percent and our part-time online students are funded at 85 percent so so we don't know whether we're going to see an increased loss of students a positive or opportunity uh vacancy savings nor turnover

154savings are identified so turnover savings is what we talked about when we talked about the average teacher salary where in in this year we might have a seventy thousand dollar teacher that's retiring and being replaced with a fifty or fifty five thousand dollar teacher those are turnover savings vacancy savings are associated with those positions that might be open for a month or two and so we budget a full year's worth of budget but we don't need to spend a full year's worth as we're trying to fill the position this also assumes a zero dollar decrease in indirect fund revenue it's a question related to whether nutrition services and community ed will be able to make the contributions to the indirect fund they've made in the past and then finally we um we have started to

155quantify the increased costs associated with cleaning personal protective events etc um so some of that is still a question as to uh how quickly will we go through the supplies additional monies will we need out of the cares act as an example to offset some of those costs so then finally to move into our estimated tax rates as i indicated before the proposed budget informs our estimated tax rate that we would set in august of 2020 so in doing that analysis we're sharing what our fiscal year 2020 tax rate is and you can see the total was 5.9 million dollars the november 2019 election pamphlet indicated that our total estimated tax was thought to be 0.46 percent the change over prior year is about 56 cents however the estimated tax rate which does include the

156class b bond sale that's expected to occur in july or august the total is six dollars and 25 cents change over prior year of an increase of 35 cents or a 21 decrease from what we estimated when we passed the election in november of 2019. so that is the end of my presentation and i'm prepared to answer any questions you may have thank you ms betts and thank you for any additional questions or comments mrs batz i i do have a question go ahead ms humphries so if we have someone who's looking at the previous chart where you showed um the tax rate they would they could figure out their approximate tax um liability by their assessed value of their house and then crimes in that this is per hundred dollars correct yes yep for

157a hundred dollars okay thank you miss humphries ms betts once again you've been very clear and very judicious you and your team with the information and with the presentation and we appreciate the hard work thank you what remembers anything else if not we will say thank you and we will move to item six the consent agenda item 6.01 is approval of the consent agenda board members we entertain a motion um i move to approve the consent agenda as presented thank you mrs humphries is there a second second thank you i think that was mr jenny it was any discussion seeing none hearing none i will ask miss wilson to please poll the board all those in favor please signify by saying i all those opposed signify by saying nay miss wilson please continue miss laurie

158wood aye mr reed carr hi miss sheila eugetti hi ms jill humphreys hi dr charles santa cruz hi mr president you have four five eyes thank you mrs wilson we will move to item seven action items item 7.01 is the advertisement of the fy 2021 budget summary and hearing notice dr mccord do you have introductory remarks please thank you dr santa cruz governing board members this approval will allow the district to advertise the fiscal year 2021 proposed budget summary and schedule a public hearing on tuesday june 23rd 2020 at which time administrators will make a presentation to the governing board and the public the advertisement will appear on the arizona department of education website the call for the public will be held on june 23 2020 at 6 30 pm for consideration of the residents

159and taxpayers of the district thank you dr mccord board members you have item 7.01 before you is there a motion still moved thank you ms eugetti is there a second second thank you mr carr any discussion go ahead miss wood with this being a call to the public how are we going to accommodate that i think that dr mccord will have some instruction and some recommendations for us after our vote any additional questions hearing and seeing none 1.01 advertisement of the fy 2021 budget summary and hearing notice is before you all those in favor please signify by saying i those opposed will say nay miss wilson please pull the board miss laurie wood i mr reed carr i miss sheila eugenie hi miss jill humphries aye dr charles santa cruz hi mr president you have

160five eyes thank you mr wilson dr mccord do you have recommendation for us relative to ms wood's question i do thank you dr santa cruz governing board members uh because this is a budget item and and i think it's important that we make ourselves available in person with appropriate distancing within our meeting like we started off during this whole process in march and if the public wants to come in and have any thoughts about the proposed budget uh i believe that having that face-to-face meeting will allow for that and board members i would concur with dr mccord's uh recommendation and would also support the idea that we have a board meeting in person on the night of this budget hearing any questions or concerns i have a question um would we would this be a

161resumption of in-person board meetings one one night um of an in-person board meeting due to the public hearing go ahead go ahead mr dr mccourt my thought is is that if we continue to adhere to the social distancing uh guidelines that um we would continue to meet face to face and so we would step back into the what we had done previously for board meetings rather than doing this correct i'm a little concerned because the numbers in arizona are spiking but i think as long as we have um sanitation and social distancing and i may wear my mask i think that would be a problem dr mccord is prepared to offer the community instruction and information relative to how we will conduct the meeting where we will conduct the meeting and how many folks will

162be in attendance at the meeting i would also like to add that if if at any reason just like when we open up our schools if if there are board members who are out of town for whatever reason or don't feel comfortable you can always call in telephonically and we will make arrangements for that to happen board members i would open you if you have some strong concerns after this evening's meeting given the recommendation and my endorsement of that recommendation please make contact with dr mccord and discuss your concerns 7.02 on action items approval to purchase the grades k-12 commentary yes sir uh dr santa cruz governing board members to assist gps in providing an online curriculum platform for all students as an additional educational choice it is recommended to expand the use of florida

163virtual online curriculum platforms to grades k through 6 to upgrade the license to a site license avoiding the first charge we also have dr newman here to expound if you have any further questions during your discussion thank you dr mccord board members item 7.02 is there a motion still moved is there a second second thank you ms eugetti item 7.02 is on the table any discussion i am dr santa cruz i do have a question um upgrading this to a site license so we don't have to go on a per student basis how much of a savings is that for us we are saving around 135 000 is that correct dr newman you're muted thank you sorry about that um there have been overages due to the additional licenses um we have been encouraged for

164several years to go to this um as a savings and we had not and it makes thank you mrs humphries yes yes thank you dr santa cruz so how do we how are we anticipating to pay for i know it was part of unrestricted capital but we are hopeful that this will also will also have some funding per student through the state of some adm toward this or does that or does the funny place go to cover the teachers this is just basically the license for the expanded program correct um mrs what this is and bonnie please go ahead so um so one of the things that we we were not sure about we are we are engaging in a k5 platform that we have not engaged in so is that going to be one

165time or is it going to be ongoing so it is possible that we would consider paying for the k5 likes that sort of exact money depending upon the other priority it is possible that that particular dollar amount could buy some of the karezak money and so this is just a one-time work this is a contract for one year correct we have chosen to engage in just a one-year contract um for this for this for the purpose of just finding out if this is going to work for us yes okay great and then just if i mentioned it before dr newman if we could put a plan together for a curriculum overview or curriculum review thank you yes thank you absolutely we will thank you ms wood board members okay seeing none item 7.02 is before

166you and those in favor please signify by saying i those opposed will say nay miss wilson please poll board members miss laurie wood i mr reed carr hi michela eugenie aye mr humphreys aye dr charles santa cruz hi mr president you have five eyes thank you ms wilson we now move to item 7.03 approval of vacation days in excess of the two 2020 memorandum of understanding allowances dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz governing board members it is recommended that the governing board approve the vacation days accrued in excess of the 2019-20 allowances as outlined in our memorandum of understanding be rolled forward to the 2020-2021 school year and are to be used prior to december 31st 2020 in lieu of rolling to sick time by july 1st 2020. each year those that accrue vacation

167days and don't use them in their in excess of the allowance we required and have required those to be rolled at this time but because of covid19 because of of the inability for most of the staff being unable to utilize those days we didn't want to punish them and we wanted them to give them the opportunity to utilize those at least for about six more months uh assistant superintendent of otm uh mr macintosh will answer any further questions thank you dr mccord thank you for that introduction item 7.03 is is there a motion so moved thank you mr jetty is there a second second thank you mrs humphries or members any discussion um i i have a question uh what happens what happens dr mccord uh if because of circumstances with proven uh perhaps this

168falls uh people aren't able to use their vacation i mean march um getting shut down was pretty unexpected so we really we're just pushing the deadline back to december 31st and then if for some unforeseen reasons you might need to roll those back again we would do that if we feel we need to revisit it for unforeseen circumstances we will definitely bring it back to you as the governing board okay all right thank you thank you ms humphreys thank you dr mccord any additional question commentary dr santa cruz if i might go ahead just could you give us an example dr mccord or mr mcintosh of some of the employees and typically uh what they would use when they would use this time and then what the circumstances have been with kovid specifically why why

169that hasn't been why that hasn't been a possibility sure i'd be happy to um normally during march april and in the summer these are 12 months short and 12 month long employees that accrue the vacation that's usually when they take them is over the course of the summer with the inability because of covet and operations maintenance custodians etc working hard to clean the buildings and keep them safe for hopefully the start of school year they don't have the ability to take the vacations that they would normally take this would give them an opportunity to roll it forward for six months take it over fall break and over the holiday winter holiday thanks and thanks to those employees for their work thank you ms wood any additional questions or comments saying none then we will move

1707.03 all those in favor signify by saying aye all those opposed we'll say nay ms wilson please pull the board miss larry wood hi mr reed carr hi daddy i mr humphreys aye dr charles santa cruz hi mr president you have five eyes thank you mrs wilson now moved item eight we are at adjournment for this brief board meeting i would like to thank staff and the board for your patience and moving through this agenda it was quite significant in scope and the business was important as they all are so with that i will entertain motion to adjourn items 6.01 i move to adjourn thank you miss humphries is there a second oh second thank you mr carr and with that information we will take a voice vote we will not bother miss wilson ford

171all those in favor of a german please signify by saying aye those opposed will say nay all those in favor of adjournment please say aye aye i believe all members have had the opportunity to vote and we are adjourned we thank the public for their attendance we thank board members for their diligence and work and we thank all staff and dr mccord for their hard work in preparing us for this board meeting have a good evening thank you very much thank you guys for everything have a good night you