001good evening i'm going to go ahead and call this meeting to order dr foley can you do roll call please president vice president anderson members of the board please let the record show that three members are present and two are in route from work so we will expect them shortly thank you we're going to go ahead and have a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance okay um item 2.1 i move that we approve the agenda second uh i'll go on oh do we have any questions or comments okay all in favor aye aye motion carries three to zero all right next um item 3.1 we have the looks like the upcoming event from dr foley vice president anderson members of the board we're going to do a few upcoming events and then
002show a quick little video um here we go as you can see we have several uh meetings scheduled and we have a superintendent visit in the near future as well as an east valley board's consortium meeting that any who who are able to join can go with mrs richards and then we have our annual law conference so we've got lots of we're really busy lots of meetings coming up and as you know we will be revisiting points of pride toward november so that schools have time to get uh the school of the year started and their folks identified so those are short on their way um but one of the things we wanted to show as you know since our last meeting we have started school and things are going very well and our talented
003pr team took some pictures footage from the first few days of school and they were all over and it's very hard to capture all of it but what is so exciting is that our higley family is back our students are back our employees are back and we have fabulous things happening across this district every single day and our little talented pr team just caught a glimpse of some of the energy excitement and positivity that we saw in the very few first few days that we've continued to experience as we've been back now for two two and a half weeks [Music] so as you can see that's just a glimpse of the brilliance we have happening and we're excited because over the course of this fall we'll be bringing highlights of some of our special programs
004to the board to talk about some of the fabulous opportunities our students are having but we are back and we are excited about that and that concludes the superintendent's report thank you yes welcome back everybody love those smiles as much as students seem to complain about it they are really actually happy to be back i don't necessarily for the content but definitely for the friends and i know they're so happy to see their teachers too when they when they return and other employees um now we're going to move to 4.1 for board comments do we have any comments vice president anderson i was able to visit all the schools for curriculum night last week from preschool all the way up to seniors in high school i got to visit um every one of the classrooms
005uh one school of each of those levels i should preface that i couldn't make it to all nine elementary schools in the night i know but it was fantastic to see all the what learning those kids they're going to do this year and how excited they are the parents and kids together some of the kids were there and they were just excited to show their parents their classrooms and all the things and preschool was so fun to see they just did such a great job with preschool well as well i always forget our littlest learners sometimes so just a shout out to all those teachers for staying late and being able to give us a great presentation so thank you also want to say thank you um for all the parents online on some of
006the first time i'll be happy with social media but there's been a lot of support with parents and people running pages for a lot of the questions that got answered just through the community and not necessarily bogging on the phones in email so i just want to give a shout out to them as well to get the school year going in the comments no okay well we're going to move to the request to speak and i don't think we have any okay we're going to move to 6.1 um approval of the consent i move that we approve the consent items oh i just read it 6.1 through 6.9 second okay any questions or comments okay all in favor aye aye motion carries four to zero okay now we're going to move on to the information
007items 7.1 husd by the numbers and who we got all right vice president and anderson and members of the board we're delighted this evening to share some higley family data with you i think you're going to be impressed and pleased with what you see mr marcus burke shire out here in the audience is going to be helping us with this presentation marcus is rejoining the higley team after spending 12 years in j.o combs in combs he was a principal and a district level administrator previously in higley he was a teacher and also an ap so we're thrilled to have him back here and look forward to leaning on his expertise in terms of research and assessment as you well know everything we do should be connected and aligned to our newly revised strategic plan tonight
008you're going to see evidence of alignment to the mission the vision our core values and all of the anchors specifically anchor one this deals with teaching and learning and student success we are committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive relevant curriculum aligned to the arizona academic standards we support a collaborative culture that uses data and research-based practices our core values permeate everything we do here without these critical connections nothing of value happens we're committed to a standard of excellence that is learning centered and focused on high levels of accountability i believe you all saw this slide at the welcome back rally there's been one minor adjustment in terms of 20 or more years we celebrate the data on this slide because it tells us most of our employees have been here five years
009or more we know that research says people stay where they feel value and that aligns of course to strategic anchor number two all right um this shows position types of all the employees we had in higley last year we had a total of 1570 employees this year we have close to 1600 employees as a higley family it's important that we are aware of who we are we are proud of our students and our staff members that bring diverse experiences and backgrounds to husd this slide reflects an enrollment trends for our pre-k through 12th grade students this slide is showing a student count rather than adm these counts were taken on the 40th day of each of these school years and definitely show an upward trend however there was a dip in 2020 and everybody in
010this room knows the reason for that however look at the rapid growth that occurred in 2122 of almost 700 students so we applaud that in addition we have to be aware of special populations that we serve on this slide you will see special education percentages you'll notice a slight drop recently and we attribute that to effective intervention strategies which we call mtss multi-tiered systems of support that we put in early for our kids that are struggling the other thing that i would like to highlight is that we have psychologists at each of our schools they're valuable team members with their knowledge and expertise because of these systems there are kids that are getting supported and not necessarily evaluated for sped so we're excited about that and ms miller is going to be doing a presentation
011soon going more into special ed next you'll see a slide that reflects our english language learners i'm excited to tell you that we have 42 different languages represented here in higley this they are identified from a home language survey that every family completes when you enroll in husd and there are multiple languages represented and i know that we're all learning from one another so this percentages actually increased a little bit and feedback we've received is families are seeking out higley on purpose and they are moving here we have four el teachers and two els instructional aides that support with english language acquisition instruction is provided through the state approved model which includes targeted and integrated support this slide shows our percentages for gifted and talented students we're very fortunate to have kelly maclean is our
012gifted coordinator for the district she works hard to ensure that students are assessed and that differentiated services are provided to our students that qualify as gifted or talented all second grade students take the cogat test and on a positive note the state is paying for that again this year as they did last year so that's something new for us and we'll gladly accept it in addition to second graders getting tested new students in grades three through six that enroll in higley are also assessed to make sure that we are meeting their needs we have gifted and talented programs at all nine elementary sites with gifted coaches students at the middle and high school level are provided differentiated opportunities through honors and ap courses mrs mclean continues to provide professional development so that any of our
013pre-k through 12th grade teachers can get their gifted endorsement this fall we have 47 gifted cohort participants in addition we have a total of 78 gifted endorsed teachers in our school district next slide reflects free and reduced meals at the beginning of the pandemic the federal government provided funding to all students or for all students to receive free meals this included breakfast and lunch you'll notice a decline in our free and reduced percentages this year because things are going back to normal we've made a concerted effort to communicate with families every husd enrolled family received a packet before the start of school year with an application that's something we haven't done before and in addition i hope you saw the video that melissa garland created so we're working to get the word out there because
014these applications contribute to grant funding for title programming including specialized support for our students and professional development for our teachers i just wanted i thought the communication for free and reduced lunch was like the best communication that i've seen it was over and over and over and so that parents in the mail email and everything so it was great good that's great i heard a lot of curriculum night about it as well a lot of parents asking wait what happened and so the teachers were able to explain one-on-one to that parent how it went through the government it wasn't higly making this choice so it was really nice to hear the backing from our community to understand what changed that's great sometimes we think people understand things but we need to make sure so this
015next slide focuses on attendance this was taken on the hundredth day of school last year first you'll see average daily attendance that's the total days of attendance divided by total days of instruction next you see average daily membership which i know you're all familiar with adm it's the total of fractional and full-time students minus withdrawals through the first 100 days of school this actually determines the school district's basis for the annual budget so mr moore knows this inside and out and next you will see attendance rate and i would like to celebrate the fact that even though we were still dealing with covid last year our kids came to school and our teachers came to school and taught so you will see this reflected in our achievement data on aasa and act so as we
016prepare every student to be a responsible citizen a college and career ready scholar and an innovative learner we must also remember every campus is unique with unique challenges and new unique situations that can impact various data points our job as a higley family is to embrace and support these unique differences mr berkshire is about to go into a deep dive with data not only at the state district level but also at the campus level so please keep these unique differences in mind as you're reviewing what he explains to you also know that our professional development opportunities our plc discussions and our interventions revolve not only off of state data but those common formative assessments that our teachers give on a regular basis so i'm going to turn this over to mr berkshire at this point
017thank you very much good evening president kaler members of the board i'm excited to be welcomed back here as well uh as i was formerly here in the district about 12 years ago so it's exciting to be back and presenting to you tonight this first what i'm going to be presenting is our district assessment data from this past spring and the first thing that we wanted to remind you of is that this year our letter uh school letter grades will be coming back and so this first slide gives you a review of what makes up uh the k-8 letter grade i want to remind you that uh hba will not get a letter grade this year um moving forward they will get a weighted letter grade it'll be weighted based on their enrollment in k-8
018and 9-12 and work with both components this year was a new test for ka for the third through eighth graders it was called the aasa or arizona's academic standards assessment it's a new test in name only um it's pretty much the same exact test that they've been taking it's just on a different platform and a new name as we look at these components each component you have to have a minimum number of 10 students in order to qualify for the component so some of these some of our sites won't have that minimum number of 10 specifically the ell side also this takes into account full academic year students so students have to have been enrolled within the first 10 days of the school year through may 2nd of this past year in order to qualify
019for being included in the calculation so that first section that counts for the letter grade is proficiency that's 30 of their letter grade proficiency is based on performance on the ela and math components of aasa 50 of the score will be growth and that's student growth on ela and math from the previous year so basically our fourth through eighth graders will be eligible for growth points um and they'll be compared to their like peers uh in terms of those percentiles ell is ten percent and that's based on reclassification on the zella as well as growth on the isella and that's compared to state averages and ka the last section is acceleration and readiness and this is made up of multiple components including increasing highly proficient 8th grade math and decreasing the minimally proficient in 8th
020grade math chronic absenteeism improving that making that number go down each year inclusion of sped in general education and the improved growth of our subgroups there's also two bonus points or percentages available one is for science and that's based on our performance on azsci which is a new test as well this year compared to the state average so if we do better than the state average we can get up to three percentage extra points at each of our sites and then the last bonus point is special education enrollment compared to the state average and we can get up to two percentage extra points for that on this slide we're looking at aasa and english language arts and how we did as a district compared to the state average and as you can see we are
021consistently exceeding the state average in all of our grades which is a celebration for this district as you look at this data i was talking about with a through f it's full academic year this is actually going to reflect every single student that was enrolled in our schools taking the test at the time of the test so there will be students that were enrolled after the first 10 days that are included in the rest of this data as we go through once we get the letter grades then i'll be able to share that updated data that shows that full academic year student i also want to share with you that uh i've been working with ms lindsey and mr loudsen heiser to develop a plan to work with each of our sites and working with
022data and assessment uh so initially we'll be going doing a deep dive into the state assessment data but then we'll continue that work with looking at our benchmark results as well as other assessment data points with the goal to support our sites and districts in achieving our strategic goals so here we've got our third grade proficiency on ela and as you're looking at this eight of our sites are above the state average something else to keep in mind hva is included in these sites but they have a very small enrollment so their numbers can be impacted by one or two students so for example in third grade they had seven students that actually took the test so those numbers one kid can really throw those numbers off fourth grade all of our sites were above
023the average for the state fifth grade ela we had all of our sites exceeding the state average and at sixth grade we had nine of our sites that were above that state average and then in seventh grade all three of our sites exceeded the state average and then finally looking at our eighth grade proficiency on ela both of our brick and mortar schools exceeded that state average so now moving on to math again we consistently exceeded the state average in every grade level in math so looking at third grade math nine of our sites exceeded the state average in fourth grade all of our sites exceeded the state average some huge celebrations as we look at all of this data in fifth grade nine sites exceeded the state average then in sixth grade again nine
024sites were at or exceeded the state average and then in seventh grade both of our brick and mortar middle schools exceeded the state average and then in eighth grade math all of our sites exceeded the state average so some huge celebrations in third through eighth grade and i'm looking forward to working with the data when we get the a-through f data to start seeing where we land there now we move on to 9th through 12th grade their formula is a little bit different this year all students statewide in cohort 2023 which is pretty much all all of our 11th graders took the act and azsai cohort 2025 which is our ninth graders took act aspire this is a change in terms of assessment for the state previously many districts were able to take act or
025sat as part of the menu of assessments but they also took the eight that they would also take azm2 or azmerit this year every single student in 11th grade that cohort took the act test the difference between a normal act test and what we did statewide is that all of our students have to take the writing component of the act which is typically optional so when i start talking about ela and math ela is made up of three components in the act there's a reading score an english score that students get and with the inclusion of the writing they get a writing score those three combined make up what's the ela score and that's what a through f will be based on is that ela composite score so as we look at this proficiency again
026is 30 percent and that's on the ela and math components of the act growth is 20 percent in 9 through 12 and here they'll be comparing their performance on azm2 last year as 10th graders to their performance on act as 11th graders the ell component just like the k8 model is based on reclassification of our english learners as well as their growth on the isella in this case they are compared to the 9th through 12th grade average of the state to determine those numbers then we have a graduation rate is 20 percent of the overall score graduation rate is based on four-year five-year six-year and seven-year graduation rates and so what that means is we look at cohort 2021 and what percentage of students graduated within four years in that cohort we look at cohort
0272020 what percentage graduated in five years out of that cohort and so on for six and seven they also receive point uh points for maintaining a graduation rate of above 90 the ccri is the college and career readiness index and that's made up of multiple metrics that are college readiness metrics and career readiness metrics so those can include things like taking two years of a foreign language as well as a math course that requires algebra 2 as a prerequisite ap scores completing the fafsa taking cte courses and completing a full cte sequence and taking the asvab then there are some bonus points high school gets a few more bonus points than the elementaries do so science again az psi for our 11th graders performing above the state average we can get up to a three
028percent bonus bonus for science act aspire we get up to a three percent bonus for ensuring that above 90 of our kids took uh the act aspire uh so and if you do 95 then you get even uh you get the full three percent um special education enrollment again is compared to the statewide average up to a two percent bonus and then at the high school level they're also looking to see how what percentage of students are going on to college or enlisting in the military and we can get an up to a one percent bonus for uh increasing those numbers on a year-to-year basis [Applause] so as we think about that profile the graduate and that letter grade a throughout for the high school one of those metrics that apply to both is our
029graduation rate and so what we're looking at here is our cohort 2021 students it always lags by a year because we have students that graduate in the summer and it takes a little bit of time for that data to get to the state so the 2021 graduate cohort 97 of them graduated within four years which is amazing remember i told you we get 90 we get points for maintaining a 90 or higher so that bar is really high uh we'd also like to give a shout out to our high school registrars who have spent a lot of time making sure that our students are coded correctly in synergy related to withdrawals and where they've gone that also helps contribute to that graduation rate this slide here is our advanced placement enrollment in the 2020-2021 school
030year we had 27 courses offered during that year 917 of our students took at least one ap class which amounts to about 25 percent of our kids taking an ap class and from that same group of kids we had 915 ap exams taken by 505 of those students and 62 or 65 percent of them scored a three or higher which is again very impressive very impressive numbers is there a state average on that i don't have that but i will look to see if i can find it okay just be interesting to compare here we have uh career and technical education again for the 2020 201 21 school year we had 385 industry credentials that were earned during that year by students almost 2 100 students that took at least one cte class and 19
031of them completed a full sequence and what a sequence is is they would take for example early childhood education they would take early childhood education one and two and typically take a skills assessment at the end of that sequence i believe mr lautzenheiser and mr pearson will be presenting you with more information on our cte programs in the near future as well so all of our freshmen took the act aspire and it will be used in two years to determine the student growth from act aspire to the act so what you're seeing here right now is the percentage of students that are on target for college readiness when they take the act test in grade 11. so for example when you're looking at reading 54 percent of our students are on target to meet the
032college benchmark scores on the ac act test when they take it in 11th grade and again celebration for the district we exceeded both state and national averages you'll see that there isn't one for ela and that's because of that writing component it's not normally given as part of the act test and so at this point in time we don't i don't have either state and i don't believe we'll ever see a national average because the act doesn't track those do you know if that's going to be in effect again this year i apologize again will this be in effect for this year to the writing component it will be for every year uh it was part for the next five years it was part of the its federal accountability requires that uh writing so that's
033part of the the essa requirements and that's one of the reasons why the s.a.t was not part of considered for this year is because they've done away with the writing component can i ask you a quick question i'm sorry and i apologize i don't know this so the act you said you're looking at growth from the acts fire to the act did i hear you correctly in two years so these ninth graders when they take it as 11th graders the growth component that will be determined based on their performance on act aspire and how they improved by the time they take the act test okay and there's a portion of the act that's science correct correct the actual spire does not have that it does but it's not part of the accountability formula so azsci
034is our state science assessment and because it reflects our state standards the act test does the science component of the act test is designed differently than what our state standards are and so at the the state board level in the state department of education they've identified that azi is our state test they take the science but those and the students get the scores back but the state doesn't look at those scores for accountability purposes for a through f same goes for social studies and there's no test for social studies what act does though is they actually look at the reading component of the act and they use that to look at when they're setting the benchmark they're looking at social sciences courses at the college level and student success in those and the reading is
035and they're setting the benchmark on the reading based on that so they believe that the reading is kind of essential for success in a social science course and then the english is more about that freshman composition course thanks great question so if a child takes the um the test ninth grade in higley and then transfers to gilbert who gets the credit for the growth in 11th grade how do they track that the the the receiving school would get the credit for the growth even if they move that same year right so if like we have a kiddo who's been with us maybe freshman and sophomore and towards the end of junior year when they go they decide oh we're going to go to a neighboring school district they will get the growth points in that
036case nobody will get credit for it because that student would be a full academic year student okay so if they move their junior year at the beginning of junior year let's say if they move during their sophomore at the end of their sophomore year and they enroll in mesquite high school and take the a.c.t in the spring then mesquite gets the credit for their growth that's not fair but i guess it would work for us as well if a kiddo moves to us yeah any other questions you're welcome so this last slide is act district proficiency for that a through f letter grade um remember 30 of their letter grade is based on that proficiency um again this reflects only the spring administration of the act to cohort 2023 so there are going to be
037kids that take the a.c.t in the fall we may have had some seniors or sophomores that took the the a.c.t in the spring this information right here is only those kids in that cohort 2023 that applies to that accountability side of things because they are required to take the writing those other kids don't necessarily have to take the writing they get to choose this is the only score that gets to count for accountability again because that writing's not included i do not have national or state averages to compare it to we'll have the state average probably closer to november when letter grades are released but i can say with pretty good confidence that our scores are well going to be well above what the state average is so again uh school letter grades will be
038released by november 1st that's by statute um so we hope to be able to see them a little bit earlier than that but november 1st will be the the app the absolute deadline for us to receive them and then starting in 2023 districts will also start receiving letter grades and that formula is simply just adding up all of our site letter grades and taking in average and we get a score based on that any questions no thank you very much great information we appreciate your time and all the energy that went into this presentation thank you very much i appreciate it well done thank you i apologize for my lateness i'm usually not late to board meetings so i just want to put that out there that's not like me but today is a thing
039so it was what it was so we're going to move on to 7.2 we have some policy revisions and i believe dr foley yes president taylor members of the board as you know we continue our track through policies updates revisions we have three for this evening one we are bringing back that was one that we had a discussion about at the previous meeting this is iham the instruction and training and suicide prevention one of the things that we did was simply remove the cross reference we could not for the life of us figure out when we looked at the old the new and the upcoming why there was that cross reference there hence we've struck it and removed the copyright the two others that we are here to discuss tonight and to consider approving our
040jkd which is student suspension this one and we needed to update statutorily because of stem state statute about what you can and cannot do for discipline with certain age students as well as ensuring that we were compliant with our special education populations and what you follow in that process and this is really important it's been reviewed by our attorneys and our teams to make sure we're compliant through and through and then also the ike which is discussing promotion and retention of students we had some outdated language in that when we were talking about uh credit versus cohort because the one of the things that we've done and worked really hard at is having online account online options credit recovery so making sure that we were appropriately terming the designation for students in those so all
041of these are essential updates either statutory or procedural they've been reviewed by our legal counsel and we are asking for consideration tonight in action comments questions concerns all right thank you for that so we're going to move on to 8.1 and i move that the governing board approves the policy revisions as presented tonight second i think that was tiffany um other okay i think we're good to vote all those in favor aye aye michelle your microphone yeah hi motion carries five zero thank you i know curtis likes us to talk right directly into our microphones so it um it sounds good to us here but it doesn't transfer to online so it's important right next up we have our memorandum of understanding so i move that we approve the memorandum of understanding between higley unified
042school district and the homeless youth connection questions comments concerns all those in favor aye aye motion carries 5-0 these are kind of our annual agreements that we have to go through every year so we'll just keep moving through them here i moved at the governing board 8.3 that the governing board approves the intergovernmental agreement between higley unified school district and east valley institute of technology for the 22-23 school year second oh god it's a race tonight any questions or concerns our evit program continues to be an awesome avenue of learning for those that might not be as inclined to attend a college or they do it both so either way we're grateful for our partnership with evit all those in favor aye aye motion carries 5-0 another one i moved at the governing board this
043is 8.4 that the governing board approves the intergovernmental agreement between higley unified school district and the east valley institute of technology regarding students with disabilities in the event central campus programs for the 2022-2023 school year second again this is an awesome program and those kiddos have to travel a little bit further to receive all the instruction but it is well worth the work well worth the travel time all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero and here we go we get to discuss and may consider action to approve the asba board association draft 2023 political agenda and then also appoint our district delegate that may or may not attend the asba delegate assembly so any volunteers okay that's next so first of all the assembly packet you can see what we have here
044do we pick a few president kaler is that how we do it i thought we already picked them we did so this is just what are we doing today this is this is just to approve the agenda that the asba political packet has gone out for any correct or concerns they did change some things um if you read through the red so we already wrote in what we our highlights were so they already had those and then this is what they come up with to go after during the assembly so we can make a motion to approve this agenda the board so i would like to teach someone to make a motion uh i move that we approve the delegate what is it called i'm sorry the arizona school board association draft for 2023 uh
045political agenda second all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries five zero now the fun part is we get to um pick voluntold volunteer a delegate i'll go will somebody else well unless you want to go because schultz kind of wanted to go last year no go ahead okay okay i'm like i'll go i'm not going to law this year the first time i'm not going to law so i will attend to delegate i you'll have to tell me what to do because i've never done it but it's pretty mrs anderson's got it down okay fantastic yeah i'll go i don't mind going all right so that's one day versus the three of law i'm okay taking one okay the team awesome we appreciate that very much so i move that the governing board
046approves mrs wilson is the delegate to attend the delegate assembly to support the proposed 2023 political agenda and use the best judgment for any other issue that come up outside of the proposed agenda second all those in favor aye motion carries five zero i almost missed this meeting jeepers we're flying through all right we have some upcoming agenda items you can see here we're going to have a community education update a danielson evaluation update preschool update special education program update and cte update these are all coming plus many other items is there anything else that the board would like to um see during a meeting i'm excited i'm i'm excited that someday we will get to see dress code again for both teachers and students i'm excited for that i know it's going to be
047a little while i may not even be sitting here anymore but i'm excited to see that before the new handbook is out hopefully knock on one that it'll go anything else i i think this could be just in a status report um just i was noticing in our numbers our husd by the numbers how i mean bridges is exceedingly always on top of the list and i know that when that comes with when it comes to high achieving students many times then they need all the more sel support underneath them just because i have a high achieving student and i know what they go through is there any kind of i know we had katie here what is the support for those kiddos when it comes to their sel over at the bridges just i
048know they're high achieving great kiddos i saw some see even the san tan by the numbers some of those kiddos just making sure that we're meeting those needs of those students as well as their academics so that could be in status president caleb member support as you know too as part of our strategic plan focus areas and we'll be doing ongoing updates on progress toward all those things we can identify how we might address that in status and ongoing in our updates for you across uh systemically that's a heavy focus for us and we're working it's always been my passion so thank you i appreciate that very much mrs anderson president keller thank you for bringing that up quinn creek uh we just went through the suicide awareness and prevention training and that was one
049of the main examples was used was a student from a gifted program and the stress they bring upon themselves and everything so thank you absolutely i'm thankful that we are addressing this um head-on in higley i appreciate it very much all right with that said anything else i move that we adjourn second all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero have a good evening