HUSD Governing Board Meeting July 20, 2022 Live Stream

001good evening i'm going to call this meeting to order roll call dr foley president kaler members of the board please let the record show that all members are present thank you so much we are going to have a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance and i do hear a major echo in the microphone not sure if that can be addressed thank you one nation okay so as soon as we open up this meeting at this time the meeting will recess for the purpose of holding a public hearing on the proposed revision to the expenditure budget for the 2022-2023 school year in accordance with ars 15-905 d e members of the audience are invited to make comments and ask questions during the public hearing dr foley president kaler members of the board as

002you know we have been talking an awful lot about our budget and as you know you have met and approved this budget and statutorily you are required to do so by a certain date and then the state legislature actually within days of you finalizing this past the budget so our cfo wanted us to be sure that because we had estimated below what actually was that we want to make sure that our budget actually captures all of that as you know uh our tyler moore tonight is proudly representing us at the state conference uh for business officials but he has put together a presentation similar to as he has provided before to explain the updates he is also my understanding joining us telephonically if we have additional questions but we will play his presentation so that

003we can provide the input of the adjustments to reflect the changes that came from the state budget evening governing board president kaler members of the board i will be presenting the 2022-2023 budget revision number one virtually this evening the arizona school budget timeline should look familiar to you shortly after our district approved our adopted budget the state approved the 2023 k-12 budget in that budget there was language that allowed school districts the opportunity to revise their budgets prior to august 1st and adjust their tax levy higley has elected to pursue this option in order to capture the increases in budget capacity from the k-12 budget bill and ensure the tax rate accurately reflects the expenditure budget as a reminder the 2023 adopted budget included the following highlights no anticipated additional coveted relief grant funding however

004we did in fiscal year 23 have a second retention stipend previously budgeted a fifteen hundred dollars pre-tax arizona schools will again face potential cuts from the aggregate expenditure limit in 2023 ael conversations have not taken place yet as previously discussed it was expected a quick session would be called after the k-12 budget was passed in order to fix the ael limit for 2023 but that has not taken place yet asrs contribution rates have slightly reduced in this budget mno to capital transfer 4.4 million that is to cover the annual payment for our middle school leases that must be paid from the capital fund in addition from some of the k-12 budget increases we are transferring an additional 3.6 million for unallocated capital contingency this transfer is to set aside contingency in case the november election

005or the higley unified is proposing a bond for 77 million fails to pass if that bond were to pass we will transfer the money back to emino for its original purpose higley is also moving to his self-insurance plan we are estimating a budget savings of over 500 000 and again this plan included no increases to employ medical contributions but some voluntary changes next i want to highlight the k-12 budget that was just passed by the legislature as that is one of the main reasons why we're doing a revision this early in the year first 525 million was added to the base the new base level support for public schools is four thousand seven hundred seventy five dollars and twenty seven cents that bill also repealed teacher compensation which was a weighted add-on to the base

006level support next 100 million was added to increase special education and the various group b weights listed below tsl or transportation support level had a slight increase the k12 budget added a new ell weight also called opportunity or poverty weight for fiscal year 23 that was approximately 50 million statewide district additional assistance better known as capital saw an increase of 60 million statewide this is the first increase to the capital fund since 2008-2009 there were also several other additional funding increases not as large in scale lastly arizona approved the largest expansion towards privatizing education in the nation the empowerment scholarship account esa as we like to call it now provides seven thousand dollars to k-12 families looking to pay for private school tuition higley in all public schools are only being funded at two-thirds of

007what the esa voucher now provides i will note this expansion is being challenged and several education groups are looking to take the expansion to the ballot this november next let's look at the impact of the k-12 budget bill and the proposed budget revision first looking at the mno fund we adopted a general budget limit of 116.9 million that jbl included projecting no increase to adm in 2023 inflation projected at 2 as well as my conservative estimates of three percent to the base assume that mno transfer 4.4 for our middle school leases as well as the additional 3.6 for unallocated capital contingency the reduction in asrs percentage and the estimated budget balance carryforward of 22 million approximately 19.5 percent looking at the budget revision we can see that we're revising up to 2.1 million approximately 1.8

008percent this budget revision takes into consideration the k-12 budget bill it also still notes that we are no current exemptions to the ael and the additional increases will be added to the budget balance carry forward for fiscal year 23. still looking at the budget revision but now for the capital fund we can see that we adopted a jbl in the capital fund of 23.1 million that took into consideration the same assumptions one thing i want to highlight is that did take into consideration the additional increase of 3.6 for unallocated looking at the budget revision we'll see an adopted verse revised increase of approximately 5.8 million which is approximately 25 percent this increase takes into consideration several things won the k-12 budget bill and truing up the actual increases the additional 3.6 for unallocated capital contingency

009as well as we're taking the opportunity to revise some of our estimated ending balances which caused the k-12 budget to have a bigger carry forward for fiscal year 23. you'll see an estimated unallocated budget for the capital budget going into 2023 of 9.8 million again this amount is higher than what we've tried to limit this fund to but with the uncertainty of our november election we are holding this money to address any immediate capital needs for our school facilities pending the bond does not pass working with our maricopa county school superintendent's office i was able to receive our 2023 preliminary tax rates taking into consideration this 2023 budget revision that we're presenting tonight i wanted to take the opportunity to compare those rates to the last two fiscal years looking at the table presented you'll

010see in 2020 2021 the district property tax rate was reduced to point zero four percent from the previous fiscal year in 2021 2022 we saw a drastic decrease of approximately 8.52 and again in 2022 2023 the preliminary tax rate is showing again a decrease albeit smaller of 0.44 over the last two fiscal years the district has seen a substantial growth and assessed valuation that is the total value of all residents industrial commercial and agricultural property i foresee this assessed valuation of the district to continue to increase over the next five to ten years especially as our boundaries continue to be built out this means you should also expect a similar trend in the tax rate in this budget revision the 2022-2023 average teacher salary is the same as presented in the adopted the average salary

011of all teachers employed in fiscal year 23 will be approximately 65 717 dollars a six percent increase from the prior year as a reminder while we provided a 7 compensation increase the previous teacher salary calculation included components that not all teachers received and therefore inflated the calculation the district took the opportunity during this adopted 2023 budget to reset the calculation to a more appropriate definition that includes all employees who provide instruction to students our average teacher salaries calculation now includes the base salary and the classroom site fund finally we'll look at the 2022-2023 budget calendar that now includes the proposed adopted and revised budget on june 8th the district proposed the budget we used a conservative budget estimate based on the active k-12 budget conversations in the legislature on june 28th the board approved the

012adopted expenditure budget using those same conservative budget estimates and now today on july 20th the district is revising its 2023 budget budget revision number one to capture the k-12 budget bill and correct the 2022-2023 tax levy any questions from the republic okay go ahead dr foley one of the slides was not there that they had shown if there's a way that you could put that up that would be great um it was the green slot slide i don't know the tax rate if that could be put added to that presentation that would be awesome for anybody who decides to go back and look at it at a different time that would be awesome and then i'm just glad to see that we're saving some money in case i always like to see a little pad

013at our budget so thank you mr moore and thank you dr foley for this presentation any questions from the audience i just want to thank mr moore for definitely pointing out the esa and the seven thousand dollars per student that goes um to be spent with none of the what's the word accountability and oversight that us as school districts must account for and the lower amount that we receive so thank you mr moore for pointing that out go ahead mrs schultz i was just going to say president can you repeat what he said exactly in case anyone didn't hear just the two-thirds are doing good exactly yeah that we yeah we as a higley get two-thirds the amount of of that um the esa vouchers of 7000 is that correct correct we get only two-thirds

014of what would be provided okay with that i still hear the echo okay we're gonna move on i move that we reconvene in open session second all those in favor aye aye motion carries moving on i move that we approve the agenda second questions concerns all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries five zero next up dr foley our superintendent's report president kaler members of the board it is back to school season and we have been in the full throes of welcoming back new employees uh tomorrow morning we have our rally as you know we are so excited to have our in-person rally we have grown so large as we have as our student populations have grown so have our employees and so we have two rallies tomorrow one at 8 30 and one

015at 11. this is an opportunity for us to bring back it's going to be a way for us to celebrate our higley family give them some efficient quick updates have a little bit of a pep rally in celebration with them and send them off for a fabulous new year we look forward to having you join us tomorrow as you will be helping to lead part of the pep rally portion as we celebrate who's in the house and so we are super excited for our welcome back rally for our administrators we have been super busy doing orientations and getting ready and we could not be more excited to start the school year which begins for us on monday as we welcome back almost 14 000 students when we include also our pre-k and tuition-based programs this

016is a wonderful thing we obviously have some uh dates about meet your teacher as you know uh we're just a few days until that first day of school and we also have some upcoming board meetings as well so that you know that we are super busy and back to school thank you so much yes we look forward to seeing and i and i love that we can have all the employees from our schools present at the back to school rally so that should be a fun day tomorrow and i think it'll be the first time i set an alarm clock in a while so uh we'll all be there all right any board comments president kaler yes mrs reese i just wanted to give a quick shout out to darian sanders he plays simba in

017the lion king that's currently traveling and that's here at gammage he visited williamsfield high school today and met with their band for in marching band he was a a band guy and used to do drum corps and heard that they had band camp and said can i come and he worked with the students and he talked with them and it was really neat for him to just take that time out of his day to come and and work with students he used to be a teacher so he missed it so it was really exciting for for someone to come and just be like hey can i just come so i want to thank him for taking time out of his day because they have performances like crazy so that is awesome thanks for sharing that

018mrs wilson i just want to thank all of our custodians and all the staff who are getting our classrooms ready and clean and like up to tip top shape i know that they always don't get a thank you from us um so just thank you to them because i know that our classrooms are going to smell really nice the first day of school they might not last that long but they always smell really nice the first day so thank you and thank you to our all of the admin who did our admin retreat and all the teachers who are coming back and i'm just excited for the new year anything else all right thank you you're going to move on i move that we approve consent agenda item 7.1 through 7.18 second questions concerns thoughts

019all those in favor aye motion carries five zero and mrs reese we did not have anybody to speak correct i kind of went over that but we didn't have anybody to request to speak so i kind of passed over that just so you know we didn't have anybody just recently martens has an announcement yes friends and killer members of the board good evening um i'm excited to announce with your acceptance of our consent agenda that we now have a new dean of students at southside middle school and that's miss angie walker so welcoming her [Applause] did you bring anybody special with you today mrs walker welcome into this position i know that sosum is is excited to have you so thank you so much and i did want to point out in our 7.17 that

020there were gifts given united healthcare for our wellness credit refund that goes back to from our employees doing this wellness initiative from last year and then the chaparral pto they donated water fountain stations to chaparral which is always welcomed in especially this time of year so thank you for those gifts we appreciate them okay next up this is just our 8.1 this is our human resources quarterly esi report the board has had time to review it is there any questions or concerns for mrs martin's at this time okay thank you very much providing that information for us and we do note that there was a little bit of increase which was to be expected and we knew that because we did um keep our covid relief monies going towards our our staff when they were

021absent and we had a lot during our winter time so yes president kale are members of the board um if you remember in december or january february we were struggling quite a bit with open vacancies because of the fact that we had a number of individuals that were out due to kovitz so that's where the increase came from and we're knocking on wood that we don't have that similar experience this next year but we'll see how that goes as it seems like there's a a lot more firsts that keep occurring this year so thank you yes it used to be the strep throat and the stomach flu so we'll see um okay so thank you for that moving on we have 8.2 and we are going to hear from mrs morgan about our higley healthy

022higley wellness initiative we want to highlight miss morgan and all the work she's done since she's been here she's worked really hard to unify her team and i think you're going to learn some exciting things this evening from miss morgan so thank you mr welcome can you guys hear me okay good well good evening president kaler members of the board thank you so much for this opportunity for me to speak to you tonight about the healthy higley wellness initiatives i'm first of all excited to be back here in higley um and of course i'm happy to be the one that is going to be here tonight to share with you on this important topic turn it on don't you towards you towards me okay thank you all right so just some of the items that

023i'm going to be discussing tonight with you i'm going to do an overview of the wellness initiatives i'm going to provide a summary of the counselor additions i'm going to provide just an overview of our vision of a k-12 comprehensive counseling program i'm going to be touching on the senate bills and arizona state statutes the revised statutes as it pertains to this topic as well as suicide prevention and that mandatory training that we need to have for our district and then potential resources that we are exploring so i want to highlight one of the higley board initiatives to continue to ensure the safety of our students and employees as they return to school with the focus on social and emotional well-being of students and employees and last year the esser iii spending plan was presented

024and these positions up here were approved we had one district lead counselor to support k-12 counseling group which is myself we have added three counselors to service all nine elementary schools and i'm happy to say we have fully staffed our counseling department so it's really exciting we have mr caleb thrall miss jenny jennifer fouts miss lucretia duncan so they will be on board for us so we're really excited to have them be a part of our team and we also have additional support of a district behavior coach we hired deborah welt she's um her role is to assist teachers with dealing with challenging behaviors that are in the classroom they're going to she's going to provide professional development for staff whether that's classroom management skills or just anything that's site-based so she'll be going around

025to all the schools in the district so when i think of higley wellness initiatives these three words come to mind committed opportunities and resources so having been in higley before i know that we've always been committed to the health and wellness of our district community and our counseling team is going to be committed to engaging our students our employees our families with opportunities to receive those resources and that's going to be to address that personal social emotional well-being component we're going to take a holistic approach and what i mean by that is providing opportunities that are going to personal be personalized to each student and adult so what we have here is a family employee community engagement depiction so the plan is to develop a well-thought-out comprehensive program that's going to benefit all of our

026district community and we're going to go over that program model and just the next slide but i just wanted to highlight this diagram here we have students at the focus and we have our employees families and community that surround our students so this program that we're implementing is student focused they will have adult advocates so they're going to be able to partner with our with the adults whether it's the community employees or their families this is going to provide them with some more opportunities to grow and and succeed and academic performance behavior improves when there is adult presence in these students lives it's also a confidence builder for for our students so this is the pre-k-12 comprehensive counseling program model this is established by the american school counseling association and overall goal is student success

027for this comprehensive plan and our approach to the program enhances the ability for all of our students to fully utilize the opportunities that are available to them so there's an accountability piece which is one of our higley core values this accountability piece drives this program it's data driven so our counseling team will be looking at results based on attendance discipline and achievement gaps in order to see how successful this program is so they'll make changes when necessary or they'll keep the things the way they are and they'll just kind of build on that and this is delivered through direct and indirect services using those three domains academic personal social and career there's themes around this program and that's advocacy leadership collaboration and systemic change and the important piece i'd like to highlight is that leadership

028portion so our counselors are leaders and they're there to support students to prepare them for life after high school so we're reminded of that portion of a graduate the innovative learner or leader excuse me they demonstrate integrity empathy through awareness and engagement the socially responsible citizen that possesses knowledge and skills to be successful in life and the college and career ready scholar where they think critically creatively work collaboratively and communicate effectively and although students best interest in mind is the focus of this program as we saw on the last slide we have other players we have those adults that contribute to the benefits for the students at different times so we're getting ready to launch this framework work this fall and this could take up to multiple years for us to develop these components so

029um just to the extent that we want it to we want to be proactive and we want to take things slowly and and patiently so we are dedicated to really building this from the ground up with that kind of quality and caliber that that we've come to know here in higley and we want to be consistent with our curricular resources so we're vetting all presentations all curriculum all instruction to ensure that it aligns to our district vision and mission before we roll this out to our students educators and families so i've been assisting with the strategic plan for anchor 1-2 which is provides resources for support the social emotional growth of each student and the department or the development of positive student behavior so we are approaching this like i said before slowly with patients

030and proactively we're going to start trainings with our staff then our families and then our students we want our adults trained first so they know the facts and then they're going to know exactly what we're going to be teaching our students this is encouraging open dialogue also between the children around those themes and topics with their families it's a healthy partnership between school and families when we have those teachings that are universal so these are some of the examples of progress i know dr foley had already presented this at a previous board meeting but we're developing the healthy higley wellness initiative it involves those partnerships with those agencies and resources that we are exploring and we've identified themes that we will include parent information sessions as well as teacher and student support around those themes

031such as resiliency suicide awareness and drug prevention and for this year we're going to focus on resiliency and this includes proactive and preventative ways to overcome obstacles in life and to develop those life those life skills so these are the arizona senate bills and revised statutes that pertain to this topic the first is the mitch warnock act this was established in fall of 2019 this is the mandatory suicide prevention for all six through 12th grade educators and we know that training is critical to identifying students at risk for harming themselves and getting the help that they need so as previously stated we are vetting presentations and trainings to see what would be best for our district and we'll talk more about that and what we're doing in our district in just a second but with

032all things we're going to go through the process to ensure not only were in compliance with legislature but also determining the best choice of training for our district community the next one is jake's law this was um established in spring of 2020. this is saying that it improves access to mental health care so insurance companies are going to require um or i'm sorry requires insurance companies to cover mental health instruction and treatment costs like they would any annual physical so our counselor and our partner agencies are going to be offering free tiered services for all of our students our educators and our families and the last one is the mental health instruction that was established in fall of 2021 this is requiring health education instruction to include evidence-based social emotional learning instruction and our counselors

033again are going to partner with agencies to provide that sel instruction through various means so this is our suicide prevention tiered approach on the theme of resilience we want to be vigilant in our efforts to provide the best training and education as possible so like i said before we're going to start with our staff we're going to provide suicide prevention intervention postvention resources to help the school staff be prepared and recognize students that are at risk this allows us to intervene effectively it provides referrals to parents and guardians we're better equipped to respond to any crisis that may happen in our district community so we're currently reviewing different trainings that are practical for the school setting and that's best for our district we're maximizing our efforts to train the appropriate individuals that can assist with

034crisis as well so we're looking at training all our staff as soon as possible we're looking at an all staff some staff and few staff tiered approach so we've reviewed several programs that are safety starter programs for all of our staff these this is where they're learning um having awareness of suicide by being able to identify acknowledging personal reality of suicide and learning those signs identifying the the students at risk and referring to the appropriate resources so while legislation requires sixth through twelfth grade educators to be trained we're going to be training all of our staff we we think this makes a statement that our district is committed to devoting time and resources to suicide prevention this is super important to us and this is how we plan to differentiate for the needs of everyone

035the sum staff we are looking at a program called safe talk this is a safety connector program where staff will be engaged in recognizing and learning to understand the warning sides to ideation we are going to be training our general administration team which is comprised of all administrators across our district we're also going to be using a program called more than sad this is also a safety connector program and we're going to be training our psychologists and our counselors in this program what's special about this program is they have a train the trainer program so our goal is that the psychologists and the counselors will be trained and then they're going to be able to train the staff at the sites so it would be more efficient to do that so we'll get our psychologists

036and counselors trained on this and then they're going to be able to roll out this program for all our staff this year and to train few of our staff we're also reviewing training programs that will best equip our crisis team so right now we've vetted a program called applied suicide intervention skills training or assist this is going to be for our crisis team members it's an intervention program provider program so they're going to be able to recognize when students are at risk they're going to be working with the students to create a plan they're going to support them for any immediate safety or if they end up having to leave school for whatever reason to get some help when they return to school we're going to be able to support them also so this this

037training is is going to be for few of our staff so as you can see we're taking a true comprehensive approach to this to be sure that we're providing for the unique needs of our district community and lastly here's some potential resources that we are reviewing and one of the things since coming back to higley i've connected with additional resources and we've been reviewing them to ensure they are connected with our strategic plan and we've been deciding how to bring those community resources back to support the work that we already do every single day in our district so these are just a few of the community partners that have been providing us resources and that we're vetting right now through our process to make sure it works well for us so i've been working very

038closely with these agencies to help begin to broaden those resources that we have in our disposal here and really to do the best the very best for our students and the community and with that anybody have any questions mrs wilson um i heard you say about jake's law and that allows more mental health more people access to mental health and that requires the insurance companies to pay for it correct correct um we heard in the fall or spring of last year how many parents came in and said that they could not get their kids into counseling there was no way to there wasn't enough counselors for their children what is the legislators doing about that to get more counselors trained because i think that may be more of the problem than anything sorry yeah yeah

039sorry dr foley i think it might be a you question but i don't know that it's an i think it might be a legislator question more than anything president kaler uh president caleb board member wilson this has actually been one of the things i have sat on several state committees and while they were identifying additional ester funding one of the challenges was all of us were looking for these kind of resources the their where the the state in the system realizes the importance of of creating quality resources and vetting them one of the things that we found was also that overnight all of these abc come learn with me social emotional learning or resources were created that may or may not be at the level or caliber that that we would want to utilize as

040a system obviously the state is aware of this and i think are putting additional funding toward this the ade at the time was talking about actually creating a vetted list themselves but they too are finding that there is a supply and demand and so while the insurance will cover it you may be looking in for multiple multiple wait time in order to get these resources one of the things that dena has done a really nice job on is networking with she she she and her multiple roles both when she was here before in hindi when she left tigley and came back has established partnerships and relationships with essential resources across the state and her knowledge with those allows us to pick up where she's left off and and make connections faster so that we can

041do a better job of helping provide to our families the vetted lists of the quality resources that exist out there rather than just anything that pops up now granted um there may be wait times but we have more resources at our disposal that are high quality with partnering with these resources partnerships and with having these people than ever before i will tell you that i could not be more proud of the work i mean uh dina started march 28th of this year she came in and a lot of work was already happening with mr walker but having two people dedicated working toward a lot of momentum happened here and you've been reading about it we've been providing you updates on it but as you can see we've exponentially we had some things we are now

042far more prepared and better and more comprehensive than we had been before thank you mrs schultz um i have a question about you there's nine counselors i mean excuse me three counselors for the nine schools can you just tell me how that split up or how um how the are they going to be at certain days or how that works as far as president kaler board member schultz thank you for that question so we have the um the three counselors that are split three schools each and right now um i had the opportunity to meet with one of the counselors with the admin team of their schools and we we came up with different ideas of how to do it so right now we're trying to see what would be best where i would like

043them all three of the counselors the month of august to be able to spend as much time as possible at each of the schools and just get to know the kids and get to know the families the educators so we're in the process right now of kind of figuring out how that would work i have done that in the past here in igle and it is difficult to to balance more than one school so having that experience i can be able to talk with them and see what worked what doesn't work and and how we can move forward with that president caleb board member schultz the other thing that we have is yes you have three who are dedicated but you also now have a district person who can also assist and you have a

044behavior specialist who can also assist so you can begin to triage so you begin to learn your schools and then you begin to utilize your internal resources to where you need them most um sometimes you're again going back to that pyramid of intervention sometimes we're providing it sometimes where we're using our community partners and sometimes we're escalating it up as we need to but we're we now have we now have an arsenal of resources and individuals to do that going into this year that we didn't have prior so that is huge and to add to that um so i had told the administrators that i am also like she said available to do that so each school knows that they have two counselors so i'm going to be also going with them and assisting any

045kind of crisis or any issues that they have awesome i think this is great and i i love that we're training um k through six as well um the training how long do you anticipate it taking as far as i know we're training training trainers trainers are training others but what does that look like uh yes president taylor board member schultz um i know that mr walker and i are working on that right now we do have some dates set for the general administration team to be trained i think it's the 23rd of august and then that afternoon our psychologists and counselors are going to be trained in that that more than sad train the trainer program so um from there you know we'll we'll figure out with the uh wednesday pd schedule of when

046we can get um this training in for all of our staff perfect i'm guessing in status or something there'll be updates as far as the training goes and everything good okay and this is great so thank you go ahead mrs wilson mr schultz we shot thank you um are we thinking about our preschool at all uh thank you president kaler uh board member wilson so we are looking at a program with southwest human development that i have up there um there's a program that they have called smart support where they have a consultant come in and meet with the educators so they right now they're actually working with several of our elementary schools to bring in that resiliency that we had talked about so yesterday gateway point did a had they had a presentation on

047self-care i know that they're going to be working with hta power and centennial as well in the upcoming months but we do have a component where they can go into the preschools so right now miss gleeson is working with southwest human development to get that type of smart support into the preschool it's a different kind of consultation so but they are going to be working with that president keller board member wilson it's important to remember that esther funding can only be used for those grade levels in which the state funds and as you know the state only funds a half day of kindergarten and not preschool so the thing we utilize the resources that we have to support those and yet we can't utilize the state funding to fund positions for a grade level that

048the state does not fund thank you i've worked with a lot with southwest human development in the past is that program do they provide that free to or is that a program that we'd have to pay for for the preschool i'm sorry i didn't hear you the program that you're talking about partnering with southwest human development then was that is that something they provide for free i can't remember i've worked with them in the past but it's been a couple of years you said pre preschool the preschool do they provide that they do have um a um component of preschool it's just not the same smart support that we are using right now with our elementary schools right and is it they provide it to you they would provide it to us free or is

049that something we have to do okay okay perfect thank you president kaler go ahead mrs schultz we're our preschools are also part of a quality first program and smart support comes with quality first but miss morgan i learned of a new program just today that southwest human development is doing and it's called u3 and it is very interesting for for the preschool piece because they work with the teachers on um how to deal with trauma impacted children so um i'll keep you updated on that yes thank you board members i'm definitely interested in learning more about that it is a brand new program through southwest human development i was the first one to meet with them this morning so i'll keep you updated on it but it sounds very interesting and again that's another program

050that comes with through quality first so president kaler i did when i visited preschool today miss gleason let us know she's working with ade with that pyramid program so you might elaborate a little bit on that well i haven't had a chance to talk with her about that but she did let me know that she when we were at the admin retreat that she had something lined up so i'm excited to talk with her about that so she's going to be working with them on friday and that is free through the arizona department of education so it's exciting because we are getting more support than we've had in the past and that smart support really supports the educators which is what we heard last year specifically from the preschools that they wanted so smart support

051is really amazing to work with the teachers because they'll come in and they'll observe the class and then they will help guide the teacher on different things on how to approach different issues and and things so president kaler members of board i i would be you know happy to invite you guys to the next time that um her name is anna marie is at one of the schools and you can see the work that she does because she i i was there yesterday at gateway point it was amazing it was really a great program that she does and it was on self-care like i said for the educators and it was really good i can't applaud this enough um being an educator there's so much feeling of helplessness in the classroom whenever you have students

052in front of you that um either very vocally or very expressively show that they're hurting or they're not and you just don't know what to do and it's just been sent to the counselors and to the nurse and you're just left feeling like you haven't done what you needed so i i'm very excited for this and i i applaud you for getting this going and i look forward and i understand you said if i heard this correctly that the status updates will have the training or will we get anything beyond that just as far as how the program is working as well will that be status or would that be another update president keller board member anderson will probably be both because as you know this is directly connected to our strategic plan it is

053one of our focus areas for this year so i will i can assure you you will be getting summaries and additional updates as we progress throughout the year and roll out the plans that we have implemented as this is one of those things that we've identified goals and indicators that we're working toward and we'll be providing updates all year long wonderful thank you thank you miss morgan thank you for your time totally oh wait i'm not done sorry she was like oh i'm done would you say i said you're not done yet i'm not done yet okay go ahead she's all shucks no i too appreciate that we are training all of our students i mean all of our staff and including that kay um i did have a an attempt come to me just

054a couple weeks ago and she was only 11 years old and so that just i mean every attempt breaks my heart but that young so we definitely need that training for all of our teachers and i so appreciate that um this has been a long time coming for our district um i think christine and i kind of started years ago kind of knocking on the door and just knocking down the door knocking on the door and thank you to dr foley coming in and and making this amazing team um under her that is actually paying attention to all the things that i think some of us up here have been um wanting our crisis team i know you will put that together in an amazing way i think sometimes when we think of crisis we

055just kind of rush and send people over and it's not quite the right fit for the situation and the kids don't want to talk to that person because it's this total stranger but i know with your expertise putting that team together will be awesome the other thing i heard was just this re-entry plan is so crucial for these kids they leave for maybe weeks at a time maybe months at a time and then they want to come back to some sort of place that they can still feel safe and that is so crucial so all these things that you've mentioned i have goosebumps right now because i just know this is something that i personally have wanted more for our district and it's finally coming to fruition so thank you thank you thank you thank

056you guys i appreciate it okay all right now you can go she's like i'm out of here no you're done thank you i snorted all right here we go you have to have fun sometimes too next up we have mr lotzenheiser is going to introduce our next presentation on the higley virtual academy update ready yeah president kaler members of the board very excited to come to you tonight with an update on our higley virtual academy this has been a quite a process over the last year year and a half as we've grown this program and so tonight what we're going to do is we're going to talk about how we did build the school we're going to talk about and remind you about the elementary and secondary models that we're currently using we'll talk to

057you a little bit about where enrollments are currently as we're as well as where they were in the past mr dolan is going to explain some of the successes and some of the challenge it is to starting a virtual school from the ground up and then we'll talk about next steps and different things that we're adding for next year so if you remember there was a big need a couple years ago 2020 for us to have our own online alternative program for as opposed to in-person learning what we were finding is that we were having students within our district that were leaving our district because we did not provide an online academy like some of our surrounding districts did there was a presentation given to the governing board two years ago that talked about how

058many students were leaving to gain credits and different ideas in these districts and so the goal was to let's bring this back and have something for higley so we can provide that opportunity for our families got very much accelerated because of the pandemic and because of needs from our our families but we had already started that process it's called an accredited online institution so if you hear the words aoi that's what it means everybody forgets but that's what it is through the arizona department of education and so we need to give a shout out to our student information system department and our research and assessment particularly lori collins and brian campbell as they helped combine they gave us the data and helped build this aoi application so that we got approved to start this once

059again we we came to the governing board and said we need a curriculum for an online so we looked at the florida virtual curriculum as it was implemented um during that process we were able to hire a planning principle and the start of that mr dolan is here today as the principal of the program and then we had physical space at power ranch because while everything can be virtually we still need teachers to have the materials that they need and have a central location as well as this important factor that we do within our high schools have proctored final exams and so we had to have a location where kids came in so they can take their finals in person so we planned all of that we jumped in and we opened last year so

060what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to turn it over to mr dolan he's going to go through the models with you the enrollment successes and challenges and help explain basically what's happened within the last year and how we've gotten to where we are with higley virtual academy uh president kaler gordon thank you so much for allowing me to talk to you uh just a kudos to you and i know mr lotsa i was talking about this idea of coming out with a online programs you know i know it takes a lot for you guys to even say hey we're gonna do it it's it's not going to love the speakers but we're still recording it's uh i know that it it takes a lot to get it done and i appreciate

061you guys willingness to try and i think that you'll see some successes and again like i said some challenges but uh we'll go through that with you uh so our elementary the way our elementary is set up is it's synchronous learning so they meet with their teachers uh on a daily basis each one of my teachers we have set up where they have what they call a morning meeting every teacher teaches more than one grade so all of their kids will meet them in the morning from about eight o'clock till about 8 15. then they start to break down curriculum and the way my teachers set it up is they have they supplement the florida virtual curriculum so if my kindergarten teacher is meeting with kindergarten at 8 30 her first and second grade kids

062are now working on florida virtual so when they come back she can give them stuff that's either going to reteach or pre-teach some of the the materials they give them work on math science english and social studies the way math and english work is daily every single day english and social studies they kind of break into units so depending on the teacher sometimes it is a unit or a week of social studies and then a unit or week of science but they try to again blend it back into when it comes to our writing etc back into our english curriculums um they are full-time salary teachers uh and besides core instruction what all of my teachers have done too is they've added some clubs so my third fourth grade teacher she had some kids who

063said hey i want to have a spanish club so they had a spanish club we had a gaming club uh my k through uh i guess two they did uh some some games online uh simple uh where uh through some some platforms they had and then my fifth and sixth grade teacher uh she opened up to uh i i don't know how would i uh e e e sports e-games and stuff like that so uh all of my k-6 teachers tried to even though kids weren't necessarily in front of them tried to engage them outside of the classroom secondary model the secondary model is asynchronous learning so there are no live lessons it provides some flexibility but also provides some challenges for some kids so when you look back to hey we are reacting to

064say covid or opportunities like that for some kids who went online this model definitely was a struggle for them but the the kids that choose to to do it for the right reasons it works for them they're independent learners uh they enjoy the flexibility we have certainly have on the seven through twelve level we have kids that are concurrent so they go to go to school and they come to us but also there are kids that are full-time online the flexibility piece i think is great especially for a 9-12 you get that kid who works and would love to get out at 10 o'clock they now can get out at 10 o'clock go to work and and still get their work done our seventh and eighth grade is not they they are full-time they don't

065have the opportunities to uh kind of go back and forth and i know part of that being a middle school principal is the ability to set that up would be very very difficult and also it's travel you know for kids um [Music] my teachers they get paid they are teachers from campuses so uh i have a math teacher say from williamsfield she will teach algebra 1 in person and her responsibilities are office hours with kids twice a week and then just like any other teacher that's in person she will respond to emails between 24 and 36 hours what my teachers found out i had asked them to create office hours and they told me well john i sit in an office for 30 minutes and no kids show up what works better for them is

066the kid who sends the email and says i'm struggling and they say can you meet tomorrow at 10 o'clock so timing wise it would be difficult to say you know whether they meet an hour with kids per week two hours it really depends on the class but they found that that's worked better for them and i'm completely okay with that i think that's it from there okay elementary enrollment so we began in the fall of 2021 at 70 students in the spring we had numerous kids go back some parents felt they were a little bit more comfortable with their kids going back and currently if you look we were at 25. now the when i gave this presentation in we were at 23. so we've gone up two in the last two days we will

067continue to go up to be honest i don't think it'll go up to that level but it will go up more on the elementary level you'll see the numbers on the secondary and the numbers since the last time i did this which is three four days ago that they're gonna significantly secondary enrollment so um we started and and i have some full numbers here but in the fall of 2021 two weeks in we were a little over 200 kids um in spring that increased probably an additional 50 or 60 kids and right now we are at uh we are almost the exact number where we were two weeks in so with three weeks to go number wise we're pretty much even to where we were to begin the program last year now for us today

068tomorrow the rest of this week it's going to be extremely busy because that's when we're starting to get a lot more and then next week so what we've done is i've i asked mr watson hazard he graciously agreed our kids don't start their classes till the second week that affords us the opportunity to allow them to come in but also we have modules they have to go through before they can get into class you know how do you take your attendance how to go through canvas and then they have a meeting with me so i just kind of gives me time but it also allows them the ability to navigate everything they have to do and not fall behind you get that kid who goes to school for a day or two and then says

069mom i don't want to be here can we make some adjustments it gives them that chance to not fall behind and do that and so that's our that's our true goal we uh don't want kids to hey here's your week's work of work it's the third week you now have to do three weeks of work in one week so if we push it back a week by then yes some kids will trickle but by then we've kind of captured what we're going to capture okay so our sec set our successes and challenges on the elementary so you know you come in here and even myself i i would say i understand technology but i don't think i understand technology that i had to understand i had all new teachers to the district except for one

070she was in our district and their knowledge base was excellent but then it's trying to understand well how do i incorporate what i used to do in person with kids now online how do i make sure the kid turns his camera on because that's frustrating to me so the the the discipline challenges for them way different and also how do i engage these kids and how do i set it up so that it stays engaging so some of the challenge was well how long do i stay on at a time do i make it an hour do i do 20 minutes kind of like you know when we were probably growing up with the commercials in between how do i set that up and so they've really kind of come to that if we if

071they do brief anywhere from 15 to 20 minute lessons many lessons that support they've found that works much better than if they continue for a longer period of time to capture the kids attention on the screen um and you know the the um [Music] that's led them to start to realize well if i do that that affords them more opportunity in time so what a lot of these kids get is a lot of one-on-one time because if i meet with both grades and i'm done by 11 o'clock i still have the afternoon so i can now say okay when i look at it from a you know a tier two intervention i need to see these three kids because they didn't understand this so we're going to meet at 11 35 and then i'm going

072to have group work for this so the success is what we've seen is more touches my teachers get they feel they get the opportunity to touch more kids in a given day because of the fact that they can now say okay i only need to see you two three now or i can put you guys in a breakout room to do this and i can work on this so that's been a definitely a success for them um i also think that because of the way the model is parents have to be involved so i think and i meet with my teachers they know these parents very very well you know and uh one teacher who said to me that oh well deena did it i'm like who's dina oh misses so-and-so i'm like oh and

073you know how she now knows her and the things because of the interaction she's had about their kids some of the major challenges i kind of mentioned about the accountability is kids sometimes not coming to a meeting in a classroom i can walk over and tap a kid and say hey kind of but you how do you can't tap the screen you know you know so sometimes it's the call to the parent hey guys hang on and call on a parent while the kids are there and trying to put it on mute so hey can can you get billy in front of the screen because we're trying to do this um that was a challenge and i think just the curve the learning curve for them when it comes to technology what they're going to

074implement understanding how it is and then making sure it's going to be successful for them to implement for those kids too the biggest thing we our biggest challenge was online assessments the kids need to come in person to take acadians they come need to come into person for the sea bass stuff and uh we struggle with that and part of it was definitely some kids went online because of copied but as the year progressed we got them to realize that we need them to be here part of it is that but also the socialization aspect that we're trying to add so uh as we came into this upcoming year that that's one of the changes that we have is when it comes to testing and kids coming in secondary successes and challenges so some of

075the successes we offered over 50 classes at first you know i would i wrote this thing out to teachers and i was trying to you know be a salesman and say let me kind of explain to you you're going to get you know an allotment per kid and if you break it down as if you were a coach you're going to get paid like 15 an hour and i kind of try to pull the coach card of hey look you're not out in the sun you're not doing these kind of things i'm just crossing my fingers that i knew enough people that would say yes and i did and at this time last year or a week before i have a person who's got three kids in their class i'm like oh man this is

076not going to be good but as time went on i think we saw that for many people it was something they wanted to at least try or they thought it was going to be a good opportunity for their kids we created some consistent procedures or i did so that it made sure that every kid when they go onto their canvas page it looks the same whether they're going to go into their math class their english teacher it doesn't matter whether the teacher's at saseman whether the teacher is from williamsfield whoever they have everything is the same i wanted to get rid of the well my teacher does it this way and someone said no everything is the same and now the problem is the learning like how can we help you with the learning as

077opposed to you don't understand the setup of our system so trying to set that up and then buying into that was very very helpful um and i think you know just the idea of innovation you know a success is we're trying to support our district's uh mission about that our teacher retention weight is 87 percent um it would be higher i have one teacher who moved out and then the other three it was it was a good split you know for them it wasn't working and for me what they were doing wasn't working either i wanted to do something better for our kids um some of the challenges is just learning the curriculum you know it's easy to sit there and say okay well here's your american history curriculum but then as the teacher to

078go through it to make sure that hey do all the links work technology wise but then also do you understand it so when you're going to go grade something you're understanding the rubric and being able to kind of support those kids when they ask you questions etc it's the same thing for me because i try to make myself available for any kid so if i got a call sometimes it was like give me a minute and having to go through look at it do i understand it do i have to call you back and trying to kind of be a tutor for those kids as well staffing i kind of mentioned that before but we i was blessed our science coach gave me a person to teach science so we probably one of the only

079classes that they're someone who's teaching more than one class is a science teacher she is not a science teacher on our campus but she teaches two or three of the high school classes so blessed to at least fill that role and now she's really blossomed she helped us out in the summer too um so staffing now isn't a problem i actually was had interview people for some jobs which kind of makes me feel good um and they need accountability for student learning you have some kids who think it's online this is going to be easy and and they don't take the approach of hey i got to set up my structure i have to be able to be look at my time and and kind of map it out because if i don't it's going

080to continue to pile up and then i'm going to just not do it so i think those are some major challenges we faced and so what we did in the first nine weeks is over the break we extended for kids to hey you can make up some work but then explain it to parents this isn't going to happen again you know we understand that this is new to you it's new to us too so we're going to you know give you an opportunity it's late but we'll give you that opportunity but once that's that's done we're closed and we have to move forward so those were i feel some challenges that we faced uh summer school so we then said well we're losing some kids to other districts what can we do so we did

081some credit acceleration uh not remediation so uh for credit acceleration we offered american history we offered government economics and we offered a science class and we had about 65 or 70 kids take that opportunity every single kid who there was three kids who didn't finish but of the 70 kids 67 kids got credit this summer uh for for the work they did and it's kind of neat too to see some kids where the way this summer school is set up compared to the in person during the year summer school is open you have 13 days to complete all the work and you have some kids who like day two i'm like oh my god look how much work this kid's done and it's day seven i have some kids who've done nothing um and so

082myself and uh mrs marklin made a lot of phone calls after week two to say hey you know your kid's got six days left hasn't done any work um and yes they finished it all because you have to in order to take the final exam but it's just neat to see how kids styles work when it comes to things like that elementary changes for the 22-23 school year so we really wanted to bring kids in and we wanted to have them have the opportunity to socialize so we create uh every once a month we're gonna fund fridays now in fridays our fridays is most teachers wednesdays so instead of having our half day wednesdays to do pd's et cetera we moved it to fridays um for for this purpose for the for our social emotional

083stuff and et cetera because last year we did it on wednesdays so when the kids come in i have a certified pe teacher who's going to teach pe about 30 minutes then they're going to go into their classrooms and they're going to do their fourth lesson of the month on the character we're use uh we use a a program called character counts and uh i like character counts because i was telling everybody why we chose it i chose it first reason is i drive my daughter to school every day and i drive by railing ryan elementary school and it says character tree for the month and so i wanted to look into it and see what it was about and i really liked it because not only were there lessons but i thought it was

084something the kids could understand you know if we're going to talk about integrity i think they could relate to that and kind of kind of talk about that so on those fridays it now becomes a live lesson with their teacher if well after that then the fun part comes where each month there's going to be a different activity you know we there'll be you know games uh we talked about reading we talked about movies so we haven't mapped that full thing out yet but we're trying to make it something where we want these kids to come in so have the opportunity to socialize because they're at home all by themselves that doesn't mean i know that weekends and other stuff they're not doing stuff but now it gives them an opportunity to kind of do

085that now um what we did and uh also is on that not every kid's going to come in so we want to make sure they get something so each teacher has a lesson that they have to provide so either and we're going to talk about this tomorrow either i'm in charge of the fourth lesson which would be on those fridays and then i go online with those kids who aren't or we rotate and each teacher then would then kind of provide that same lesson to those kids that are staying at home we haven't figured that out yet we'll kind of talk about that tomorrow and then secondary changes so we're offering dual enrollment classes through cgcc we had five teachers this summer go through the training and uh you know whether it be american history

086uh english 101 government pre-calculus i know there's another one i'm sorry i can't remember but those four definitely and i know those teachers went through it uh those will be offered now if we can't get enough kids obviously we won't have it but it's kind of cool to say that we're going to be able to offer that to kids and these teachers have the training and in meeting with cgcc what we have to add is more of the collaboration piece that they don't get online because of uh their requirements for the college we have two years of sign language um teacher is phenomenal love her uh and uh i think the interest she of the kids that are uh she had in the first year only two kids are not coming back and they moved

087to north carolina so every kid that was a lower you know under senior is coming back to take her second year of it which i think is great kudos to her i felt that math kids struggle you know you're going to take math by yourself so kind of was reaching out to different people and i found a program called sophia and sophia is if you know what alex is like the program we use it's similar in the sense that sophia we will embed it into canvas for these kids in math and you can take the problem that you don't understand and you can put it into sofia but sophia doesn't give you the answer what it does is it you have two choices you can either ask for a hint which means it'll give you

088the next step or you can say i really don't understand and they'll take different numbers and they'll put the different numbers in there and solve it for you so it becomes kind of like a an additional tutor for kids but it doesn't solve it for them because if it does then the next three problems that are the same they're never going to get the answer so again this isn't a solution but it's definitely a step in the right direction to help some kids who choose to do math online that may struggle obviously they can reach out to their teacher they can reach out to myself but i you know this is something we're going to try and we think it's going to be very very helpful for them we also added a class called college

089and career readiness now that you know if we look at our you know portrait of a graduate it's it's something certain that those kids that do it there's a component where they have to meet with the teacher that i think is going to be really really helpful i did something similar to it last year that i just kind of created material for it this is going to be similar but using florida virtual i think it's going to probably be better than what what i did is i actually have a teacher who's going to do it as well we also noticed that when kids came and took their final exams there was no review guides there was nothing so this summer i asked some teachers and they created some review guides for kids so now talking

090about accountability we can say to kids hey you studied the review guide you can bring that review guide in but that's it you can't bring your notes you can't look at anything else and now you can really see if you do what you're supposed to do the way the program is set up if you you if you do not pass the final exam you do not get credit hence it affords you the opportunity to take the final exam a second time so you take it you don't do well you take it the second time you know the hope is that therefore you're going to pass the second time but the review guide um after this summer what i heard from many kids not going to say oh they said it was really really helpful what

091made me laugh is when some kids said to me well it was good but all the answers aren't on here but yeah and then you know we're now going to be kind of under the umbrella of our alternator programs that involve all of our high school students does anybody have any questions for me go ahead mrs melissa i have a few i'm sorry um standardized testing do we separate these kids out when we do our standardized testing or are these kids like put into their other school well you know what i'm sorry i don't think i'm explaining myself well president kaler board member wilson one of the things that is not not negotiable is we are required when we do standardized testing it has to be in person and one of the things that john

092has worked very hard with is how to work with these families to provide alternate opportunities and in schedules and spaces and places to help them feel comfortable and confident about bringing their child in you also one of the things he talked about is the importance of parents understanding in the elementary that you cannot be in the elementary model if you are not willing to bring your child to testing because from state state testing requires us to have a certain percentage for uh tested and if you only have a few kids in a grade level and one doesn't show up you could drop below that you would already drop below that so that's a huge component and just to add so uh this summer we went uh we're stationed in a classroom at power ranch large

093classroom for the classroom so went and got some furniture to make it look more like an office and part of it is uh sectioned off there's six computers in it plus we have a computer lab so when parents come in if they say look i'm uncomfortable with my kids testing with everybody else no problem you test my office so we have alternatives to kind of make that work and also as dr foley had shared it's a non-negotiable and i you know nicely explained to parents that if your kid does not come in we'll give another opportunity but if not i have to send you back to in-person learning because um that's part of the uh you're buying into this you're signing this this is this is what has to happen dr foley when we get

094our standardized testing scores is higley virtual gonna be set okay perfect that was more my question than anything because i knew we had called them in but i was like is that gonna be a separate line item higley virtual president caleb board member wilson yes now this is its own school and it and its accountability and its accreditation and all the things that we have to do to maintain its status it's its own school and all of the rules apply so we do have its data separated fantastic um what about graduation for these kiddos i know we have 50 something seniors president taylor board member wilson so this will be the first year we'll have graduates we have 21 currently 21 full-time students the way we've broken it out is if a student is concurrent

095whether it's two classes with me or four classes with me whatever your numbers are you have a home school um the only students that would graduate from the higley virtual academy would be full-time students there's 21 of those there's 21 of them right now yes okay great um do you still meet with each parent i know last year you met with each family just to give them the expectations of what online school isn't and what it is do you still do that this year are you still working on that president killer board member wilson yes so the way that works now is similar to last year sometimes it's uh literally myself the parents and the student 15 20 minutes other times it's they've called and i say is your daughter or your son there yes

096can you put him on the phone and we do it right there um only because it says me time but also again you've called i have a captive audience let's kind of get to the business of what you want and my last question is how do we advertise higley virtual president caleb board member wilson as you know that one of our focuses on our strategic plan is our marketing pro process and we have we have been marketing we've been advertising we've been putting things in various modalities that we are advertising in but this is one of the things we're going to continue to can focus on and prioritize and bring more information to you about what that will look like and how we are doing that thank you so much mr dolan i really appreciate

097it and thank you for answering all my weird off questions anybody else mrs reese president killer thank you um mr dolan and mr lotzenheiser so we're just i mean our high school kiddos have gotten their schedules and we know their counselors are inundated with changes and we start school on monday excuse me how are we giving some time frame within the high schools for a student to be like you know what this is not working for me um being in at school whatever reason um are we giving some time because i know we have some pretty firm change and drop time frames but now that we have this available that our counselors are inundated right now and if they two to three weeks into school have the opportunity to talk with a student and be

098like you know what maybe this class might be better for you at our online school are we allowing some of that flexibility because i i can tell you and i've i'm so glad we have this and it was even pre-covered because i know a lot of our high school students were put in a position of either you have to give something up you really love and enjoy or you find another way to take a class and you know i've said it before for mine color guard and marching band was way more important and that seems weird to say but that was her passion and her love and her desire but the other classes that we offered at school they were only offered there was a lot of one-offs you know it's like well this class

099that you need is only offered this period but this class you need is also only offered this period so you have to give this up and so we did we were one i mean obviously i didn't leave the district but we looked for a class elsewhere because this is not something that we offered so i'm excited to have it because it's a great opportunity for those kids that if they have a zero hour for something but it's only certain things offered so i hope we're allowing a little extra flexibility on some of those drop and change dates so president kaler board member reece that's a great question so what we've done is we follow the the guidelines of 10 days but remember we have one week that we're not there so we actually that's 15

100days and we've actually extended it so we're four weeks so by four weeks you should know where you're at and also by that point in time to be honest for a kid to move we don't take it's different curriculum so you'd have to start all over so it becomes difficult so yeah we have a basically a four week window and i work with a counselor at williamsfield and at higley specifically and so for them in this first week when they're making schedule changes it's not a problem for me because we don't have classes and also for them too right you know you get the kid who may not want this class and and as you said hey i really want to take this but you know ap physics is off for third and same as

101this what other options do i have well you could take government econ online i can move this around here and so i think that's probably the best part about it is the flexibility with our counselors too to help those kids get everything that they want so yes we do have flexibility thank you and i was going to say to mrs wilson too i mean from an advertising standpoint yes we're getting this out there but a lot of this started during covid so some families may not realize like no this is here to stay that we have a virtual academy and online classes for our kids so it may be that counselor having that conversation with that student trying to figure out classes and be like hey let's look at this so it may even be

102like a scan code outside the counselor's office like hey if your class isn't offered scan here and see if it's offered online so president killer board members the courses so what i did last year and i will do it again this year is right before um registration i went to both schools and both video production guys were kind enough to videotape me and it was like a question and answer and it was hey what do you offer why should a kid do this that kind of stuff so i want to do that again because i think now this year i feel we'll either have more stuff or i'll probably be able to say it better to put that out there and also when kids come online i think now i don't want them to get

103this feeling of hey i get a week off because they don't in that first week they have to go through a module that i created and it's called hva happenings i think i said that before and if they don't go through it they don't get to get in class because they have to send to me a form signed by them and their mom and dad say we understand the expectations et cetera and it's a challenge for me to make sure it happens but i'm sorry i will not open your class until you do this and those who finish i can open their class so if you finish on wednesday and you want to start on thursday to get ahead no problem so as soon as kids get in and those kids that are already have

104already done this their classes will be open probably by next thursday so they have three four extra days to get the first week's work done we all have a look from mr um curtis to make sure we're talking directly into our microphones so i'm just going to remind everybody up here that we need to talk into them so we are heard on everything any other questions or concerns oh go ahead miss anderson thank you one question simple question is uh that sofia sounds really um interesting can you apply that to your chemistry classes as well since there's a lot of math involved will will it work there as well board members and uh president kelly yes absolutely so i'm piling in it right now uh i just got off the phone with a guy today

105and he basically said to me you john you said to me these two math teachers i'm going to leave it open for anybody else who wants it so my chemistry teacher she's teaching chemistry she's also teaching anatomy but since she's not in person she comes in so i'm going to be able to sit with her and i can say to her hey you know wendy what do you think do you want me to add this to you you know for kids for that that and it wouldn't be a problem at all to add it because all it is from the canvas aspect is reaching out to lori collins she puts it in beds into the class and the kids have the opportunity to use it that's great yeah but chemistry online is pretty tough with

106the math my second question is and i wish miss morgan were still here i assume that these teachers also go through the health and wellness or the wellness initiative like all the other staffing correct president caleb board member anderson yes they do and so what we try to do for the kids online my k-6 teachers deal with some of the sel stuff for them and then i deal with the 7 through 12. so what i try to do for the 7 through 12 and it's going to be better this year so this page that i've created that they have to go to to do the first module now all information will kind of be disseminated through that and parents will get it as well what i did is i used to call it what up

107wednesdays and so we would have a topic and i would send it out two or three questions that would kind of lead to discussion and then we would kind of kind of let it go from there but it was most of it was about how are you doing how are you feeling sometimes it's about classes but i wanted the kids to get an opportunity to just have conversations with each other um and i didn't want to lead it so sometimes there's 15 kids in this group sometimes there's two my goal this time is it's going to be a lot more and i might have to break it up to say okay hey guys we're going to do 7th and eighth graders i'm going to do 9 10 11. i think most of the upper grades

108since they're concurrent i don't see them very often but uh the seventh and eighth graders are the the majority of the kids that i would see when it comes to the what up wednesdays and are any of the counselors are they going to the schools like that they were divided is this one of the schools that they're also kind of checking in on or being available for or part of the the plan or is it you or oops are you alone president killer board members so with this with my sel et cetera i'm going to work directly with uh miss morgan um and so if i need support from a counselor i'm sure she's going to kind of hook me up with that but right now the nice piece that i have too is when

109i do get calls from parents whatever my kids struggling with x y and z now i know i can easily go uh to dina to get some supports president taylor board members of the board one of the things you've heard here is that john has multiple roles one of the things that he has in in being he has multiple roles and he has assumed multiple roles and i'd like to have mr ladson hazard for just a second talk about some of the additional things that we have utilized john and his skill sets for as he facilitates multiple capacities in our online program as well as kind of the other continuum of services that we have for alternative ways for students to receive credit so president kayla are members of the board so we do have

110alternative ways for kids to especially at the high school level to earn credit hva is a part of that an alternative in person we also have what's called our rise labs which is a program using apex curriculum that we do during the day as well as our uh hlc program uh to help those kids who truly are behind that we're gonna get them to cut up mr dolan with his experience being at the high school and going through that has been an ideal fit to lead all of those programs together so when we take a look at the alternatives we have to help kids get caught up hva can be part of this aspect but hlc now john is uh tommy's the direct leader of that tommy bird is on campus but she's reporting to

111john and john is helping lead that as well as providing consistency within our rise labs as well and so the scope as we've learned of john leaving the campus and coming to the district and and leading the online school has continued to grow as we'll find different more roles to his expertise and we just want to keep him as busy as possible but but this really has helped because now he has an overarching view of different pathways to help kids who need to find ways to find credits and so those are additional responsibilities that john has picked up the advantage of this is that we're more comprehensive we're utilizing our resources consistently and we have options options options for families and that's one of the things that when you look at how we've evolved this

112over necessity was the mother of invention but this was a sorely needed component for higley and we have have come a long way again in a very short time in a very unique time so congratulations to john and the work that he and his team have done this year um it was quite a quite a lot of moving parts and pieces that have been successfully combined go ahead mrs schultz i have a uh one thing it's great how this is intimate and it seems very intimate as far as the kids have somewhere to go even though they're online and you're always accessible and everything which is great um but i have a question in regards to the k-6 and the numbers they're low as far as it goes i mean we talked a little bit

113about it um there's a question about that in our stat or in our notes sorry um is there a point where we look at it the numbers and it doesn't make sense anymore for us to offer it to kids i mean for covid i think the little kids but what does that look like so uh president katelyer board member schultz yes so one of the things is that you have families who are continuing to opt to make this is their way you notice that we are staffing this appropriately you have um you have multi-age you have multi-level preps for this would be one of those things that when we have people register back in the in the in january when we say are you coming back or not at some point we will have to

114make the determination whether or not we would continue to do that i will tell you that at this moment though with the fact that there are a lot of families who are who are still on the fence about whether they want to return to school in person next week i think our elementary numbers may still continue to rise these are still unique times a lot of these some of these families continued with us and and and they want to continue with us and so we're going to have to make that decision every year at this point the commitment was made to continue the momentum there and just staff it appropriately realizing that we're making accommodation but the reality is is that we have accommodated about as far as we can go to make it make

115sense um and yet and you've heard there is continuity consistency quality and how they are doing that there comes a point though that any beyond multiple preps beyond that is not realistic and so decisions may need to be made our hope is that we are able to continue to provide that elementary most of our districts around us do but it does mean you staff it differently but in the event that we are ever in a position where we look at the staffing and say this doesn't make sense to continue our goal would be to make sure families are informed as far in advance as possible so that they can make decisions i mean we we we know that losing them is is not it's not our is not our hope or goal but again the

116sooner we know the better we're able to accommodate does this program it makes sense for people who i know there's several people in the district who left to travel the country for the year does this program make sense for them even though they have to come in for the testing or things like that is president taylor board member schultz i think every family makes the decisions on what works for them in their schedule the hard part is is the requirement of the testing is beyond higley it's a part of a requirement for the state and so i think you know realistic understanding of the parameters that we're working with is part of the option um obviously our goal is to meet the needs of families to the best of our ability but we also have

117parameters of non-negotiables we have to work with too yeah just i guess in your opinion does it make sense as far as could they make it work so we know that they could make as much they could make it work we have larger testing windows but they're going to have to work with us around those testing windows and we will get as creative as we can but we got to follow the guidance that we've got but the good news is the testing windows because it's electronic are larger but they are in person thank you and then just one last thing sorry is that um the meeting in person for the pe for the physical education have you gotten a lot of good feedback from that so far as from the parents or have you had

118any feedback i just wonder people like that uh president kaler board member schultz i'm going to say a little bit of feedback so [Music] we have of the 25 students i would say 20 of them are returning students and so last year that was the question what else is going to be available for my child outside of the core curriculum so not all of them but i think the the the consensus right now is they're excited for their kids to have an opportunity for socialization and play i'm excited because the person that's going to do it was a k-6 p.e teacher until he moved to the middle school with me and so i'm not worried about what they're going to get i'm excited for them to get him to be able to provide that stuff

119for him so feedback not as much as you know maybe i'll get in the future but i'm really looking forward to we're doing it on the first friday which is july 29th so i can kind of let you know how it goes i think it sounds great so it's a new feature it's a new feature they kind of wanted a little more so this is something he's trying and we'll get yeah i think it's great i just wondered if what the feedback was from it thank you president kaler can i do a follow-up question uh something mrs schultz asked how many testing besides the big test in the spring what other testing is required where they're in person is cbass required in person what like i don't know exactly which questions yeah i mean i

120know that the standard test you know the big one whatever we're gonna call it because it may change right um in the spring but i was just wondering what other tests have to be in person president keller board member wilson so as a middle and elementary school guy i learned a lot last year uh there's sea bass there's acadians for our k3 and that's that window is typically in august then you're going to see similar stuff again around december time and again i want to say february or march and then of course those k-6 kids they don't have a final exam but then they have the aasa and the azsai for our fifth graders as well and that's going to be in april so they have to come in i would probably say five to

121seven times because some of them gonna take like sea bass there's more than one day of it so to follow up with mrs schultz um it sounds like they could travel the country and come back just for like one week increments four times a year or five times a year there was a young lady her family lived in uh it was a middle school kid so it's not a k-6 but a middle school kid was at sussman dad met with me and said this is what we're doing i got my job moved me to costa rica can my daughter do online school of course she can can she be back on these dates if you tell me the date she will be back for those tests so i would say you know kind of going

122with dr foley said if families want to make it work they absolutely can president keller board member wilson and knows at cadence dance that's all connected with move on reading that state statute we're required to do that it's part of even part of our k3 weight funding so again there are some of those pieces that are non-negotiable for us and we have to comply but we have flexibility and we can communicate we have testing schedules and john is willing to if it can be if it can be figured out john will figure it out thank you the reason i asked that is because i think as we move away from knock on wood from covet or move away as we move away from kobe then maybe there's people that are just looking for flexibility that

123this program may work from so thank you thank you mr dolan um i have one question so if a teacher in a high school could be already teaching a sixth fifth can they also teach online and are they and how many are doing that because that's like yes they can have a six-fifth think about if you're looking at the high school structure i'm i'm gonna say it's akin to coaching it's a something above and beyond what they do during the regular day the six fifths is picking up that prep hour class and they have that and then we're not going to deny them the opportunity then to also be a teacher at hva at the same time because the expectation is they're doing this after their work hours similar to a coach when he's going

124to practice you know or doing any of those kind of extracurricular activities it is an additional and and because we pay per student it is not just a limited stipend saying this is what you're doing so when we looked at the secondary model you'll see that it did the number of kids in the class and they get paid per student as they go through so yes they are able to do that okay i just think that's a lot and i appreciate the teachers that have stepped up into that role because we are short teachers i mean that's a nationwide issue so i'm grateful for those that have stepped up and to know that that is happening um hva we long time coming to higley i know for years we were sending everybody out to everybody

125else to all these other online schools and to keep them in our district is awesome and i know mr dolan from my own personal experience you have been very flexible and you are here to help kids and do what's best for them i appreciate that so very much and i think that working with the district i know too even at a semester change if there's a student that's struggling in person you accept them at the semester and that's huge so appreciate the flexibility but also the quality uh sign language i like i've said before i can retire now from the school board because it's here it's here to stay i'm grateful for the teacher that um returned so um yes thank you so much anything else thank you guys thank you you're a busy man

126next up we have a safety update and this is going to be presented by mr walker president kaler members of the board as you know the topic of safety and security is one that we that we take very very seriously and that we've been talking about for a very very long time mr walker will also be at the rally tomorrow talking about this topic with our employees you know last night we sent some communication to our families and this is one of the things that we are looking forward to providing an update about because again yes in light of recent events this has become a conversation that we continue to have but the priority of our safety and security is not something that higley has not been deeply invested in and that we are and

127are take very very seriously and so james is going to provide you an update of some proactive things and focuses um in this presentation and we'll be talking more tomorrow with our employees about this topic as well thank you dr foley president kaler members of the board i'm here tonight to update you on safety as we head into our new school year like dr foley said safety has been and continues to be top priority in our school district and if the focus is not on safety then everything else that we do doesn't doesn't matter and it has to have a safe environment for kids to be able to learn so i'm going to start off by updating you on some of our standard practices and then we'll talk about some of our focuses for this

128past school year and then some of the things that we're focusing on as we head into the the upcoming school year so as a school district we we comply with standards set forth by the arizona department of education as well as the arizona department of emergency and military affairs so we are we are in compliance we follow a plan that consists of an incident command system where the school district has specified roles and responsibilities to address school safety we have a district-wide emergency operations plan and then within that plan each school site has also an incident command structure that feeds into the system and then each school site has an emergency plan and then we work together to ensure that there's proper training and proper roles and responsibilities to address school safety emergency operations planning

129and preparation and with that it encompasses a lot some of it is is your your day-to-day your your standard drills that everybody's familiar with the arizona department of education has expanded their department to social wellness and school safety so it's it's connected so what what miss morgan presented on earlier today is the safety component of the psychological safety the student state of mind how they're safe in that aspect and then this component of it is more of the physical building safety and the communication safety but we work together as a team and we combine these and when there's overlap we ensure that there's their systems in place and that's a big component of the of the incident command system is that there's not just roles to address physical building safety but there's roles to address

130the students also so the student safety stays paramount in the in the planning as well as the the environment for the staff that supports the students we follow the national incident management system which is a preparedness cycle of continuous improvement so that's why we do drills so we can assess the drills and then discuss what works what doesn't work and then reassess and try it again so that that's the format that we follow and that's that's the standard that the state wants us to follow so we do adhere to that and with that has a monthly evacuation drill those are aka the fire drills we have quarterly lockdown and shelter in place drills we have a dedicated district safety committee and then we also have site safety committees and then those teams meet regularly and

131report back to one another and that's part of that continuous improvement cycle we have the emergency operation plans like i stated in place across the district we have a fully equipped emergency management trailer that can be deployed we work frequently with gilbert police and we've begun partnerships with the newly formed queen creek police department that's very exciting component to add to this because we've established some pretty good relationships immediately with them and we continue to hope to grow that as we go and then as being members of the trust we participate in the consortium they offer various both east valley and then central phoenix opportunities for training resources and then connections with with my peers and our peers just in the school operations so we have some very like-minded individuals and that's that's a very

132helpful piece of the puzzle because we can talk about what we're seeing in our schools and there's lots of similarities between what's happening in neighboring school districts and and pure areas mr walker can i ask you a question real quick on this um fire drills there hasn't been a fire in a school and i can't remember how many years of 1959 or 64. is there any talk that these fire drills would become quarterly and not monthly at the state level uh president kaler members of the board we adhere to the fire marshal's dictation for the fire drill so i haven't heard of any updates but we we don't do it just to do it we do it because it's set forth by the fire marshal so sure so you know we've kind of divided our

133our security and safety focus for the last year to to one physical building safety and security and then to communication so some of our focuses that we've worked with throughout this year for physical building safety is we've developed a reunification protocol that's specific we've adopted technology so our ipads have the ability to connect with our student information management system so within synergy there's a functionality called kiosk view and you can set up a kiosk with an ipad and then you can use it there's a specific function for reunification so we've procured ipads and we have a a system set up with our information management to be able to deploy technology and tightened up the reunification protocols we've standardized our two-way radio usage we've worked with engineers across the district and vendors we've audited what we

134have in place for our infrastructure for our surveillance and security camera usage we're crafting policy as we speak for appropriate use we've done some kind of quick fixes where we've implemented security cameras at some of our sites where we've had some incidents throughout the year and then as the bond states one of the things we're looking for is a very intentionally focused enterprise level school safety security surveillance system and so the director of i.t and myself we've been meeting with various vendors and seeing what they have to offer and and being really intentional about how we can plan to appropriately uh protect everybody's privacy but at the same time utilize these tools for to fortify our schools to be as safe as possible um we we have single point entry um across all of our

135school districts the previous bond uh was able to utilize uh modifications of all of our front offices so all the offices have essentially kind of like a stage one where they all have two-stage visitor access so anybody that walks into the school they're not walking directly into the school they're coming into an office they have to check in be permitted authorization and then buzzed into the rest of the campus i know some of the talk has come up about you know what better can be done to protect that and we're very intentional um there's there's committee meetings and discussions as we speak about how we can better assess and what we can do within reason and time and any restraints to better fortify the single entry process all the schools are outfitted with the panic

136button panic button will either lock the door and notify the authorities or lock the door or notify the authorities and the goal is in the coming weeks that they do they serve all functions they'll notify the authorities and lock the doors upon upon pressing um they all have the buzzer system and they all have the gain entry they have to be accessed through the the single point of entry um again we have an intentional district committee that looks at it and that's that's everybody at the district works together there's i.t there's facilities there's um finance the educational services and so we we take these ideas back and we discuss what's what's doable and and tyler is very instrumental in helping us to have short-term midterm and long-term planning and what we can do to better

137our schools we've ensured that first responders will always have access to our schools um it's they're also known as knox boxes i'm not sure if you're familiar but every school is outfitted with essentially a little safe and then inside the safe is is uh is key access and we've refreshed and we've audited it and we are ensuring that uh first responders can access any of our emergency or front office entrances by having access to that box and so without getting into too much detail about that it is a secure uh way that a first responder only can access access to the school mr walker sorry real fast you said that the panic button locks the doors aren't the doors already locked the front door the front door okay so before they would if there was

138an emergency before someone was or before a threat yeah okay thank you we've also conducted uh what's called tvas or threat vulnerability assessments and so law enforcement agencies work with homeland security and it's not just for schools but it's for any any entity that has gatherings that they assess and look for vulnerabilities and discuss what can be better to enhance these these facilities and so we've conducted many of those across our district and then the results of that come directly to us and then we share that with finance and cabinet discusses the results and options that are considered through the through the vulnerability assessments the second leg has been our communication focus so one of the things that that i i came across in working with mrs richards is to be very intentional with not

139just our school learning day but all the other things that are happening with our schools and that's kids club summer school athletics after school programs you know as a as a higley parent myself my both of my children use before school and after school care and i know a lot of times you know from a parental perspective school school you drop your kids off they go to kids club to start off they leave kids club and go to class they're dismissed from school at the end of the day they go back to kids club for a long time i think the lens has differentiated those two programs but i think for all of us parents it's the same thing you're dropping your child off at school we want to ensure that we're having intentional conversations

140and including everybody that we can to make sure everybody has the same uniform information and they're equipped this is a normal school day would be equipped to handle any type of situation um that also transitions into the hcpa as well because that's another component of our school district that we want to also be intentional to include in our our plannings and our discussions again i mentioned the partnerships with with our police departments working with gilbert police we're able to work with them to have an sro a school resource officer stationed at all of our secondary gilbert schools they also have sergeants who serve as roving sros who patrol along with their patrol team all over elementary schools queen creek has just formed their police department effective this past winter we have an open letter to

141the town council at in queen creek agreeing to help subsidize an sro and the hope is that we can work with queen creek to procure an sro at saseman and that also would help to connect with cortina as well additionally queen creek has has pledged to us that they do consider our schools as part of their daily routines and they have been very present on our campuses so even though we don't have an official sro in place we do have a tight relationship that's forming and they are aware of our school day and our procedures and they're there to help assist with within uh those two schools that lie within queen creek so have they acknowledged acceptance of the letter and is there any there's been no response or anything okay um well i think

142they've received the letter there's a lot of planning and policy making that has to go into making that something that's that's official president kaler remember anderson as you recall the town only was willing to provide them at a high school we don't have a high school in queen creek and hence we we wrote a letter requesting that they reconsider that and added so that we could mirror the kind of program that we've been able to provide with the gilbert we've yet to have a response yet but we know that they've received it and are considering dr foley i'm willing to go sit with you if you'd like at a meeting and we can just put eyes on them just so they know that we're very engaged in it and that we would like so if

143you would like to take me up on it i will gladly sit in a meeting with you thank you yes and and the town is interested in the partnership absolutely so they they we've had several intentional conversations it's very productive and healthy with with the department um we've also reviewed and we've updated our training materials our curriculum for what our staff receives uh and i'll address that a little bit further in a moment but we we have reviewed what our annual trainings are what our mandatory trainings are for our staff and we're working to update the curriculum so it's more intentional and more of a vetted official type of training program we've refined our internal emergency response and so all schools have a uniform essentially relay if a 9-1-1 is called from a cisco phone

144within the school district we're able to immediately identify what where it came from what classroom what school site and then the appropriate parties are notified just to help kind of heighten that level and that layer of who knows and who is who is aware of what's what's happening on the campuses we've also worked with i.t and human resources to develop a mass communication tool using our staff directory and what it has availability to connect the two together so we do have a lot of good information but we're just trying to marry the two between it and hr to be able to have a more intentional staff communication mass tool that will serve for emergency communications so coming into 2022-23 a couple a couple things that we have happening and you'll see as the year starts

145off immediately a couple successes i want to thank publicly theresa and curtis and the pr department they're very in tune with our needs and they'll respond very quickly so we're going to be implementing more intentional signage for our safe hotline so just these are a couple renderings of just mocks it's not official but it should go to print in the next couple days and be on our campuses asap so we do have a safe hotline it's it's monitored it's it's not utilized frequently uh to be honest but hopefully that we become more intentional with our communication so people are more comfortable utilizing that tool and so we're going to have signage around our campuses it's going to direct there's a safe hotline number there's a safe hotline email and we're also incorporating a safe hotline

146qr code that would that will send to a survey so an anonymous report can be also sent so you'll be seeing this information our teachers and our administrators will be given some more information on how and what this looks like in the process behind that and then we're also going to be intentional with safety uh reminders quick references throughout our schools and so you may have seen these in other school districts this is something that we've also developed it's another example it's not formalized yet but soon it will be and then this will be posted across all of our campuses so it doesn't give the the specifics of our drills so it's not releasing anything that's that's private but it also is guiding people for best practices so in a pinch it just it's just

147another tool for communication it's not the only thing but it's just an additional tool in our toolbox and included on these will also be you know if you're talking safety it's going to include the safe hotline and the qr code all the information will be on these as well just to keep that that communication um kind of consistent and and mindful mr walker is the suicide prevention hotline on that as well the 988 that has now changed would that be on the no okay president kaler mr walker that now that the suicide hotline is three numbers can we look at putting the safe hotline on our student ids as well or the at least the qr code on their id if we put a very small qr code that they can scan with their phone

148for the safe hotline um because i know we're required to have the suicide hotline and now just last week that changed to three numbers so um is it possible that that's something we can look at going forward that have it on their student id so it's right there sure uh president kaler uh um board member reese one of the things that the safe hotline it's it's not the emergency number though so we want to be intentional that because it's not manned live 24 7. so there also is language that if there is an emergency to call 9-1-1 i think we can include the new suicide emergency response number and we just need to be intentional about our communication because we don't want somebody to scan the qr code and submit uh something thinking that it's

149man 24 7. what's man 24 7 is 9-1-1 so we can definitely have those discussions and it's a good point to but we want to also be intentional to have the appropriate communication for that as well and i think talking with dr foley the other day 988 it's not quite up to speed as far as those um that that quick the the texting number is still very much up to date and there's a quicker response but the 988 is so brand new that it's not quite it's not something we might want to put out just yet but maybe in the future as it develops it would be something that we would look into further it would mirror the conversation we had earlier about the amount of resources available to support the demand and the need

150so the idea is a great one but you got to have the resources and the infrastructure funded and supported behind it to respond accordingly and i know that that's something that they are working to accommodate as quickly as possible at the state level but we are we are hopeful that we actualize the intention mr walker on that flyer does it say it's not man 24 hours a day uh president kaler yeah does it yeah does it say that it's just a reporting tool and that this isn't to be used in an emergency we indicate on there that you are to call the the police after hours if it is an immediate emergency fantastic that's all i wanted if you were just a parent or someone and thought oh this will be answered right away that

151would be obviously detrimental so thank you yeah board member wilson it is i know you're far away but it is on here i'm sorry i couldn't see it so i just wanted to make sure that it's indicated somewhere on there that it's not man 24 hours a day so somebody isn't reporting it like they would to 9-1-1 or to a police officer thank you i was just asking that number is a district line it is man by district personnel correct the safe hotline is to see something say something if you're concerned about bullying if you're concerned about seeing something unsafe and if you don't want you're afraid to go and talk to somebody but want to report it anonymously this is one of the ways we can do this we've always had this safe hotline

152but one of the things that we want to do is make sure people are aware that this is one of the ways that if you are aware of something and you're not sure report it and this is one of the ways you can do it in that during the school day um you know between seven to five a day someone will be able to see it and respond but if it's an emergency you need to call 9-1-1 but this is the helping make people aware about our safe our district safe hotline is one of the components that we're adding who's manning it or is that are you all saying that right now there are two individuals two district individuals who are who are monitoring that at this moment you have an hr director and mr

153mr walker uh so earlier i mentioned that we are intentionally working on our training um we're happy to announce that we've adopted vector solutions uh it was formerly known as safe schools that was recommended through us through the trust to us what it has is vetted developed training programs and an extensive library um back to school every year our our teachers and our staff complete mandated trainings on all sorts of topics um and and it's been kind of piecemealed in the past it's been the correct information it just hasn't been from a single source and now we actually have the ability to to work with that and it's a more intentional um easier to manage to track to communicate to send out trainings and so that's going to be rolled out for this year for

154our teachers and then that aligns with again the school safety and social wellness idea and working with with ms morgan and and counseling services uh a component of school safety is threat assessment is crisis response is is our counseling services and so that's something that's it's not really highlighted again in this presentation but it's something that's very intentional that is part of our upcoming our school year so the vector solutions uh platform is going to be something that will help us to be able to be more intentional with our with our training um we're looking to digitalize a visitor management system um and implement a process where it's you know currently we use a visitor's log where somebody comes to a campus and they sign in on clipboard and it's it's paper-based um and we

155want to advance to something that we'll be able to track and this can also connect with our student information management so we could be more intentional about who's on our campuses and when and when they leave and so we'll be able to track that and and identify that um we're consistently reviewing again talking about the threat vulnerability assessment but just our campus physical security in general we're being very intentional about those security reviews so it's not just facilities but as facilities and student services and counseling services and then also finance and educational services so we look at things like lobbies and gates and arrival time and dismissal time and we're constantly reevaluating that and we'll continue to do so throughout the school year we want to be more intentional about grant opportunities there's a lot

156of grant funding opportunities out there i'm working with miss rush camp the director of finance and and mr moore our cfo to be more intentional about what type of opportunities are out there because they can help me with the financial component of it but i can help them with the content that needs to be included and so we've been very intentional and had to have several meetings to discuss how can we see what's out there how can we explore that better how can we be more equipped to apply for and then be accepted for these grant opportunities for school safety again our bond focus has a very specific safety component i've been working with with it and and finance to be prepared to have enterprise level surveillance updated access controls key card access for our

157doors and a refresh of our two-way communication systems same thing for visitor management we're looking to advance our volunteer management as well so we currently have an individual who who manages that and does the checks and keeps it through a spreadsheet but there's ways to advance that and be more intentional and that's another thing that's on deck for this upcoming year and then um one of the things that we've just launched is we've launched a school safety web page and so that was put forth that has kind of your basics again you know some of the school safety protocol emergency response we don't want to share that we want to make sure that that's something that we keep internally so we can use it appropriately and it doesn't you know essentially fall into the wrong

158hands but our school district website is going to be a place for communication it's going to be a place for our staff for our families to go to and get updates it's going to have some information about emergency operations about student reunification and you'll find some some just some helpful things that would help for safety in general here comes the bus the code of conduct will be on there some information about our school resource officers uh so again through gilbert we have there's two sergeants who work with us and then there's three assigned officers so that's five gilbert police officers that we want to be intentional with um again some information about our single point of entry our weapons and drug policy our safety drills and then some you know some reminders to make sure

159that uh the most accurate and correct information is updated in our system so if we do not communicate that we're we're on the same page does anybody have any questions questions mrs anderson did you want to go i appreciate all the efforts you have gone through to make our our sites and staff more safe our students more safe um there's been you know there's been updates you know the front door you know the the procedures and the changes but um you know as an educator and of course as a parent you know from the incidences i've seen i don't see a lot of people just walking in through the front door so i look forward to funding or innovative ways or strategies or anything to um you know look at the other ways that these

160people are coming on campus unnoticed they're i mean you can lock a door you can build a fence people are going to get in but i i don't want to make any efforts already in place look like that they're they're minimal they're definitely important but i i we're not done and we need to do more um staffing is huge accountability for people that are either not reporting or breaking laws to get on sites and but i i go to school and you know this is always discussed with the teachers we're always having a conversation we're always fearful you know and um i shake right now thinking about it but um i i just want um everybody to hear like this is just something that's sadly that's just going to continue to be something that we're

161going to have to address and no matter what we put in place it's it's i'm not saying we're not giving up but i'm just saying it's it's a real concern and so i also want to lead into the reporting on the paper make it real don't look at a piece of paper and think oh it's another colorful diagram and i'm not going to report it or it's just another whatever like if you see something say something um we all have to work together don't leave it to the responsibility of one staff member or to the district office or don't leave it to our emergency responders um let's all take care of each other and i'll just leave it at that thank you thank you well said mrs anderson and i i was just going to

162piggyback off that and and and and i agree with what you said and and the whole see something say something and just being able to share that more freely in our on our campuses and educating our staff our students the health net the health and wellness initiative is huge um i concur that it's just not in schools it's happening in our churches it's happening in our grocery stores it's happening um in places that we don't think it will happen and so it's so important that we take those signs very seriously and um i it's hard to put into words exactly what i want to say here and but i think everybody knows exactly um what i'm thinking is that there's usually signs and we don't want to miss those so um and i'll end with

163that president taylor i was just gonna again kind of piggyback on that that goes teaching our students and communicating with our students that post on social media aren't jokes don't take them as jokes and you don't have to physically be on campus to see something you you see something on social media you know encourage our students to talk to our parents you know talk to your parents i saw this this is concerning um i saw this and i'm worried i and let get this reported and don't just think oh well you know they say this stuff all the time because at this point you don't know you just don't know you don't know what's real you don't know it's not real and as kids and people outside of it that's not our job to determine

164if it's real or not real that's what the authorities are for and so um it's really important on social media because in the past we would hear so many things oh yeah so-and-so saw something on social media they saw it on instagram they saw it on snapchat they saw this they saw that and then you're like well has anyone said anything and they're like oh no and i was like what are you doing i mean and we've been fortunate don't get me wrong but we really need to that really needs to be discussions with our students and that there is no joke and that if you see something on social media you need to report that include your parents report it to a teacher just hotline 9-1-1 but don't think it's not real so i

165agree i feel like you guys have said it all really well um i think our students can see something say something and report to that same hotline they don't have to directly go to their parents if they're afraid so i think that's would be a very encouraging thing to put out to our students see something say something as well mr walker i had a question regarding parking lots it's become a dangerous place for our crossing guards it's becoming a dangerous place for our students those parking lots are scary the school zones are we getting extra help from gilbert police to monitor the school zones like to keep it limited to 15 or to 25 35 wherever you are i was wondering if we were getting extra support from gilbert pd and queen creek pd on

166that and then how can we help do better in our parking lots for the drop off pick up craziness that lies in 15 minutes of everybody's day uh president kaler board member wilson one of the things uh you know that does come up the school drop off pick up as a parent myself it's uh it's challenging at times uh you know it is it is nerve-wracking and we want everybody to be safe and there are you know especially at elementary school there's five or six-year-old kids so one of the things that i've i've had several conversations with with the police department about what's happening we can always call the police if we feel that there's traffic laws being violated so that's one of the things that we've done you know we've had situations where there

167is specific reoccurring instances and so they'll send patrol out to come and and take a look if there's an instance that needs to be reevaluated i know uh mr crosby in transportation is very instrumental in that process because he knows the adjacent ways and and the structure of of streets and and protocols better than anybody in the district another recommendation from gilbert is uh the gilbert has a 311 app and what you can do on the 311 app is you can make a report and you can do it for all types of things like if your trash doesn't get picked up on garbage day you can you know send a notice out but one of the things you can also do is request assistance and so what that does what the way it's been explained

168to me by the police department is that creates essentially a queue and then the queue then gets delegated from the 311 operators if it goes to public works or if it goes to the police department and so if you were to call non-emergency and say hey i have i have some concerns about this the school they can send somebody out but they don't they can't really like send somebody out the next day you know they'll respond to it 3-1-1 will will create this ongoing lingering item in the queue and it has to get cleared out and so the way that the police have presented it that it's just another step in the process that it can document an area and if it continues to get documented then it raises awareness also so you know that

169that's a tricky spot because we have our we communicate we try to communicate from the school about best practices but we're also not equipped to enforce traffic laws at the same time it gets a little bit tricky so if somebody wants to disregard what we're asking then we need to work with the police to help better enforce that as well and that brings up a good point i think in the spring we had seen some people we've seen videos of people not following the bus stop for the buses and mr crosby i know who is handling that but i think that's a good point as well those crossing guard or those stop signs actually mean stop for our community members so there are kids crossing and you don't want to be the one who hits

170a kid so thank you i think that the um in my neck of the woods they just put the vehicle's picture on social media and usually that does something i don't i'm not recommending that i'm just saying it happens um in our area quite a bit but yeah parking lots since forever in children's parking lots and parents in a hurry it it just doesn't work well so maybe if everybody could just slow down take a breath and know that it's going to be over in just a few more minutes and everybody will move on or i remember from a long time ago a principal said just come 10 minutes later then school gets out it's like dead then it then pick up your kid and just go in and go out and there's no line

171but if our parents are lining up 30 minutes before school gets out then that just snowballs so any other comments i just want to say if we expect our kids to go into school and follow directions and listen to teachers we should also follow the directions because you can't tell them what to do and then not follow the directions we'll say go ahead mrs anderson thank you so is it ever possible to for all the land i'm going to talk about coronado because i'm just familiar with that area and i was crossing guard there forever there's that there's you know two lanes one forward one backwards and then it builds up on the streets children are crossing parents are crossing children walking you know riding their bikes but there's just rock and tree debris collection

172and weed collection why cannot a pool lane be put in to these areas why are we just sitting on the that's not the only school so why why not i don't see funding but is it beyond that right so so it still can't be built on ever so um president kaler board member anderson a lot of the some of those are adjacent ways in which there have been some of the schools that we have worked with to to do some of them you can and some of you can't and as you know we have had conversations we've been talking about over here at higley high school and working with the re the re-trafficking of that there'll be an update about that soon these processes take lot a long time to do because you're also working

173with the city you're working with multiple individuals and approval processes for that in additional funding so those things can take well but i know that every place that we can or need to we explore where we can in some cases you cannot but there have been several of our schools where those have been utilized and re-trafficked and repurposed for that and we find that it makes a big difference and times parents do feel like they're going in a maze around the whole school but that is one of the ways that we manage the traffic flow and the pickup take place but it does take time and there are places where we can and in places where we can't and there are multiple entities that we involve so all avenues are being explored the issue is

174and i think the important things we've talked about this a lot when we talked about bond projects these things don't happen overnight there's multiple entities permits fundings sources that require a lot of time and and poor thought so they don't happen um immediately and that's part of part of the process and and frustration um at the same time okay thank you so much mr walker appreciate your help and i see we'll see you in a little bit all right so moving on to our action items i move that the governing board approves the revised expenditure budget number one for fiscal year 2022-2023 as presented second jill joe second although any other questions on this we've beat it what's the word the dead horse like a dead we have really gone over this budget a lot

175so all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero next up some exciting news here i move that the governing board approves the extension of the term of the superintendent's contract with the requested modifications to june 30th 2025. second i think we'll all say third fourth and fifth up here i think there's no questions or concerns dr foley you have been instrumental in making higley better and better each and every day and we are grateful for you all those in favor aye aye motion carries congratulations dr foley [Applause] that was fun i move for our 9.3 i move that the governing board approves the intergovernmental agreement between maricopa county community college and higley unified school district for the 2022-2023 school year this is a annual um intergovernmental agreement that we vote on every year

176any questions or concerns all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero as you can see we still have some things coming up in august um we're also going to have a special education program update i believe that's going to be coming up soon and a cte update is there anything else that the board would like to see on a future agenda okay that's good president caleb board members as you know that these are just additional we have lots of our annual important updates that are not listed there these are just additional things that are in addition to so lots coming forward i appreciate you guys coming before the the safety update and coming in before school starts to get staff or employees and parents and students up to date on what's going on

177thank you for that all right with that we are going to move on i move that the governing board i'm sorry pursuant to ars 38-431.038 the governing board will meet in executive session with the members of the leadership team for discussion or consideration of matters relating to safety school safety operations or school safety plans or programs second all those in favor aye motion carries 5-0 and we will be adjourning our meeting in executive sessions so thank you and good night you