001hmm okay good afternoon i'd like to call this meeting to order dr foley roll call please president kaler members of the board um let the record show that four members are present and one member is joining us telephonically miss schultz's via teams very good thank you so much i'm going to have we are going to have a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance all right we're going to move on do you hear that echo anybody else um okay there's a little bit of feedback but we'll go on i move that we approve the agenda second any questions or concerns all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries four zero five zero five five zero sorry i heard you mrs from schultz closet okay okay we are going to move on to
002our public hearing at this time the meeting will recess for the purpose of holding a public hearing on the proposed your budget for the 2022-2023 school year in accordance with ars 15-905-01 d e members of the audience are invited to make comments and ask questions during the public hearing thank you mr moore good afternoon president koehler vice president anderson members of the board today we have the 2023 proposed budget uh in its official preliminary forms as our state is continuing to work through the state budget um you'll see throughout this presentation we've made various assumptions on what that state budget will look like but by statute we are still held to our standards and our deadlines to both propose and adopt a budget for next fiscal year so you'll see our lovely budget timeline we
003have completely gone through the full budget timeline of now you're looking at an updated graphic for fiscal year 22 23. so all the way back to the left we are in june 2022 [Music] today we'll be presenting the proposed 23 budget and then on the preceding governing board meeting on june 22nd we'll be presenting the adopted these include several of the increases that we've talked through through this whole fiscal year and what was tentatively approved in march moving forward pending no changes and or approved state budget by the governor will present the same budget on june 22nd as it mentioned if necessary again you know in december the district has an option to revise its budget and that is if the budget if we over budget it and we need to revise down as you
004know we are very conservative in our budget numbers and in this year we did not have to revise uh down we could have revised up but we chose not to and so some several of those same assumptions is what you're going to see here tonight or this afternoon excuse me uh then in may like we just went through last month the district will legally revise the 2023 budget as required by state chat state statute again the governing board will have had five months as we can see as we will plan on being in front of the board early um next calendar year uh to talk about again everything that we've talked about this year proposals assumptions compensation increases for 2024 and then we started the process over again so there's the full budget cycle as
005a reminder so getting into the 2023 budget highlights due in part to the state not having any sort of budget pass at this point we are still assuming the same budget highlights that you've seen throughout this year so one no additional covert relief those bills have and propositions from the federal government have all but stopped and so we are now finishing up spending down what we have remaining we do have budgeted in fiscal 23 the second 1500 retention stipend um which will be expended in september and for those employees who come back to us next year and work those first couple months second um even though in every single budget bill that's being proposed the aeo limit is um being exempted for 23 there still has been no official budget so we are um i'm
006still assuming um because nothing has been no pen has hit the paper that we would face this potential cut again as it is right now so we are planning on holding a larger contingency for this just in case those bills do not go through we will be prepared mr moore um our governor has said that or the legislator at one point had said when they passed the aggregate spending limit last year that that we shouldn't expect it for the following year is that correct say that one more time we should not we should not expect that they would pass an exemption for it for the following years yes yeah but i just want to make sure the public's aware i think it would be a good thing for the public to hear that they have
007said that they won't keep passing it for us so that you should write your legislator and let them know that we would like it passed again so we can use the money that's all i'm asking thank you moving moving down the list we did have the asr contribution rates come down slightly that is going to be a small budget savings bullet point four we are still transferring 4.4 million from mno to capital to pay for the school lease payment in addition due to the additional budget capacity being proposed this afternoon we are trans transferring an additional 3.6 for capital contingency this is due in part to help provide some contingency pending our bond for 2022 does not pass again if that does not pass we will be right in the middle of depending on where
008we are with adm we may need capital at a moment's notice so rather than bringing a revised budget we would have that budget contingency available and be able to make any sort of capital purchases at a moment's notice we would like to revise this if the bond the 22d bond does pass we would bring this 3.6 back to mno in the may revision so and then lastly higgling fight is moving to a self-insurance plan for fiscal year 23. we project the estimated budget savings to be over 500 000 and as we finalize our numbers we're realizing an even greater estimated savings remember though under self-insured the plan the district is responsible for claims incurred next year so we don't know what those claims are going to be but on paper it does look again like
009we are making the best move for our district both budgetarily and then we hope to use those savings again to put not to sit in a you know district's bank account but to use those next fiscal years to enhance our medical plans and and give those back to our employees mr moore and just in in looking at this most of our medical claims good work um our pregnancies uh we have a very healthy district overall so um hopefully that will continue yeah i think preliminary you know working with ms martin's and the benefits team we're looking at potentially having a claims percentage for this year at 79 percent um and again so we are not self-insured so we pay even though we have claims at 79 we pay 100 of those and so that's you
010know 21 of our our budget that we're giving to unitedhealthcare um for coverage so that's part of the reason why we're going this direction just because we've had experience um low claims and continuously over the past couple years so um and just to note while this change did not this change you know does not change the employee medical contributions um it did change a few voluntary coverages that ms martin's and her team have been working hard on communicating out to employees sites departments and etc so we are still working through communicating that out especially with the rollover and out-of-pocket premium expenses so those are still continuously being communicated out and working with employees all right let's get to the budget the fiscal year 2023 proposed budget we'll start up top so this 21 22 general
011revised budget is what we just revised in may it was noted that i was less than one percent off but that was a total we still incurred a total revised budget of 2.2 2.7 million in increases a lot of that again was based on adm increases that we budgeted flat but we experienced growth looking at the 2023 proposed budget we're showing a major increase in general budget limit uh compared to the estimated numbers that i use tentatively in our approved budget back in march the difference is an increase of 4.1 million to 116.9 million up from the estimated 112.7 million that i project are presented in march this increase can be attributed to several things so first we are projecting again no adm increase for fiscal 23 and the budget forms is consistent with our
012budget practice in just another area where we taking conservative approach however as you know we are experiencing growth throughout our district so we are still staffing for that growth and you noticed a lot of that in our fixed cost increases that were absorbed in our estimated or tentatively approved budget back in march second we are keeping the two percent inflation as knowing that is the minimum which the state has to fund us um considering we realize the state realized in 2021 seven percent increase in inflation but by statute we are capped at two percent so we know that is a given um third this is where i'm taking some assumptions in what is being proposed and what is being talked about with our legislators as well as working with our policy groups um and what
013they're advocating in for k-12 education um we are um assuming that not assuming in every single bill that's being proposed right now um we are seeing approximately 100 million towards a group b sped weight that is a consistent and so i i am capturing that in this new estimate um we are also seeing anywhere from 400 to 600 million in additional k12 increases due to the large budget that the state is sitting on in terms of surplus and as well as realized arizona is kind of anomaly right we are experiencing growth outside of the the national realm and so um the state did not project that so they are experiencing some increases in budgets across the board and so any in any given bill that's being proposed that k-12 is seeing an increase from anywhere
014from 400 to 600 million and proposed increases to the base level support i'm taking a way conservative approach in projecting 200 million um and that would equate to approximately three percent increase to the base so while we while this is up four million from my march proposal this could potentially be up another four million um when all said and done with the the state budget so yes an increase but a conservative increase to not inflate our budget and not have us revise down i do not feel we'll be revising this down i feel if anything we'll be revising this up going forward so moving down the list we are still assuming the mno transfer of 4.4 million with the additional 3.6 for capital contingency this also takes in concern the asrs reduction and then it
015also assumes that we will still can carry over 22 million in budget bounce carry forward which is approximately 19 of the total budget so safety nets all across the board as well as our ability to to still provide compensation increases for our employees and move forward with staffing our schools for the additional increases that we are expecting for next fiscal year um in summary looking at the bottom formula you can see now that we're experiencing 7.4 million an additional budget capacity from our revised to our proposed and then adding in the 2.7 an additional budget capacity that we rise from may you'll see a total of 10.1 million an additional budget for fiscal 23. so you know as a reminder the board approved the seven percent compensation increase to all employees back in march which
016was an estimated 4.7 million with the additional 1.2 million in fixed costs that we feel that we're going to realize um next fiscal year that totaled 6 million so you can in new budget expenditures so taking the 6 off the 10 you can see we're presenting approximately an additional 4 million tonight in this proposal any questions on this there's a lot of moving parts um but again i hope that the board and you know our community feels safe in this budget proposal that we are not inflating our numbers more or less taking a conservative approach to next year and hopes to continue to provide compensation increases for years prior but also provide our schools with the necessary supplies and capital needs they need for next fiscal year yes thank you mr moore and again to
017reiterate that we are we are um we have to submit this regardless of what's happening at the state level so i can understand this flux and being on the conservative side not knowing exactly what they're going to do frustrating but nonetheless it is what it is across the board the good news for higley and and what we can do for the future i feel very confident that we can make a lot of our initiatives funded and it's it's nice to see the state start to invest some budget into k-12 in addition to their regular obligated statutory inflation percentage so that is encouraging news second [Music] in the proposed budget is also a chance where the district updates the average teacher salary calculations and so if you recall the higley formula took into consideration a number
018of things that we did not consider appropriate when calculating average teacher salary those included various supplementals that were not offered to all teachers such as leadership longevity mentoring tutoring and summer school to name a few so discussing with cabinet we felt this year was it provided an opportunity to reset the calculations so we can reflect an accurate number one that is realistic of an average teacher salary and legally unified the calculation now considers only two sources one being base pay and the other being classroom site fund you'll note the upcoming classroom site fund calculation for this fiscal year 23 7 000. of that 3 500 is in the base pay for teachers and the other 3 500 is going to be in a performance pay plan that the meet and confer team and hr will
019bring to the board once it's approved by the teacher association in august so you'll see that detailed plan on that second 3 500 and how that's earned in this upcoming months so reading the calculation you'll see our projected teacher salary fiscal 23 so that takes in consideration we have some experienced teachers and we have some new teachers that's all higley's average um plus the seven percent increase that we provided in march is an increase of approximately thirty five hundred dollars and forty thirty five forty four from the prior year and the percentage increase as you'll see is asterisks because it's showing six percent because of that um calculation reset that we are proposing today so we feel this is a better accurate reflection if somebody were to go on our website and look as you
020know this by statute a couple years ago this came about this needs to be posted on our website and so we just hope um we'll include that astrix but we just hope we are not while we did do seven percent that percentage increase is not is because it's calculation reset and not a faction of us not forgiving the seven percent in reality so i just want to make that clear any questions on the average teacher salary calculation okay so with that um tonight or this afternoon this is the proposed budget that we're proposing this will be public on our website for the next couple weeks it will also be posted by statute in our local paper um so if you do not have internet access you can find it in the paper and then we
021will bring it for adoption on june 22nd for uh the board to formally adopt our budget for fiscal 23. thank you mr moore any questions comments anybody from the public anyone all righty then i move that we reconvene in open session second all those in favor aye aye motion carries to be here tiffany do we hear tiffany mrs schultz i'm going to say uh this passes 4-0 sorry oh there she is i forgot to unmute myself but i've said okay five zero motion carries okay thank you again mr moore we're going to move on to our superintendent report president keller members of the board we are just recently off of the may whirlwind of events celebrations and multiple opportunities to celebrate the amazing students and employees in this district and as we transition into summer
022we are in full swing getting ready for next year the administrative staff is excited about the next school year we have some important upcoming events obviously we have several meetings this summer as we keep you informed of important progress on work that is being done and as we prepare for the beginning of school and we're excited because we will restart this year with a rally while we have officially outgrown the hcpa for a single rally we will be scheduling two in order to to welcome people back in person this year as we prepare for our first day of school july 25th so right now it is all hands on deck as we just finished one year and begin working toward the next yes thank you dr foley i remember getting the first calendar invite from
023mrs reach for back to school when we weren't even out of school yet so the summer goes by fast here all right board comments mrs wilson i just want to thank everyone i went to a numerous amount of events in the last two weeks of school i'm not going to name them all you knew if i was there or not that's enough but i want to thank the custodians especially because i was at an event late in the evening and they came in and helped clean up and were just so kind um and helped us all and their jobs are extra special during these times when we're super busy and our admin and our teachers and our staff and the volunteers who all came in uh to make these events happen i just want to
024thank them all because all the events were fantastic and an extra special shout out to um the htap graduation because it was really special as well as the other two graduations we had anyone else yes fabulous end of the year celebrations and i know that the schools were all excited to have so many things back in um back in play for the end of the year and so it was uh non-stop those last few weeks of school and i appreciate the board for attending anything and everything they can amongst their own busy schedules so um it was it was a lot so i don't think thank you okay sorry i don't know what happened the clown nose fell off the microphone we are going to move on to there's no public comments so we're going
025to move on to consent i move that we approve consent agenda items 8.1 to 8.22 second comments questions concerns i want to point out just a couple things one a gift donation by mrs shannon bodner for the amount of two thousand dollars we want to thank her and again i know the ptos donated quite a bit of cash dollars as well to coronado and power ranch for some items so again very generous community that we live in and we're very grateful i'm also excited on 8.15 if um thank you curtis for pulling that up um that the jmf higley foundation has agreed to help us with our funding for the roof replacement and capital repairs at saseman so grateful for that thank you for the work i'm sure is mr moore working behind the scenes
026non-stop on this so we appreciate that very much anything else all right all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries 5-0 we are going to move on to some oh we have an announcement to make president kaler members of the board with your approval of consent you have just officially confirmed the next principle of willingness field high school mr dan fox is in the audience [Applause] it's like you never left you really did it so thank you so much we're ex we're excited for you and for the williamsfield family and we thank you for your dedication and time to higley very much so appreciate you president kaler yes i was able to go to the forum and i want to thank dr foley and her whole team especially um these two ladies over here
027for putting on such a great forum for the parents and the staff and making it just a great question and answer so we got to hear a little more about both candidates so thank you yes and for the community to know that we are already working to hire a very confident um principal for saseman and that work is already happening and we are excited for what's to come there as well so um just know that we are working hard so okay thank you now we're going to go on to 9.1 and our student code of contact information item president kaler vice president anderson members of the board today we have an opportunity to come back and talk to you about the work that we can can you hear me you know i think that we
028need to perhaps have a something that we can rise the microphone on but i'll squat down today we'll we'll do good thank you i appreciate a microphone and a captive audience um so we have an opportunity today to come back and talk to you about some work that uh mr walker and a committee did in looking at a code of conduct over the last few months so when we came in february we talked about a plan that we put in place to review the code of conduct and so that's what's happening and you're going to see the results of that today the last time the code of conduct was disgusted or brought to aboard me was 2017 so it'd been a while and so were there while there had been changes that had made throughout
029the time they hadn't been formally discussed and talked about with you and i think what's important when we talk about the code of conduct is really that it's a regulation that is defined by policy that how we look at discipline and consequences and define those things and so within the code of conduct and listed for us you'll see different policies policy gic outlines student discipline but remember that the code of conduct is what supports the policies the policies are listed and so when you look at changes and different things like that there was no changes to policy that was made what was changes to us how that we are looking at uh providing a consistent and method for a disciplined matrix and definitions of the different infractions that occur and what our responses to those
030will be you know examples and questions that have been asked previously like when you look at dress code or something like that dress code is defined by policy jica and a regular regulation gica-r not by the code of conduct but the code of conduct addresses then what consequences and infractions can happen based upon the dress code and so i think it's an important distinction to understand that the code of conduct is not necessarily policy it's just supporting the policies that have already been put in place by the governing board and so when we take a look at some of the changes that need to be made they will be addressed through our policy process and through looking at that throughout the whole school year and turn instead of just turning around and changing what's happening
031within the code of conduct but i'm going to turn it over to mr walker who did an outstanding job and i want to give him credit for the work that he and his committee did about putting a formal process in place to review the code of conduct and to bring back some examples and different things about how they have made changes in order to allow for consistency and communication within the code of conduct for not just our community but for our employees as well thank you president koehler vice president anderson good afternoon as we move forward through the presentation i want to outline the process that we use to review the code of conduct so we began with an elaborate three-prong approach to review our existing code of conduct the prongs consisted of an internal
032review with our code of conduct committee we did an external content comparison with our neighboring peer districts our k-12 districts that surround us and then we had a legal examination to review the existing document as well so our code of conduct committee i just want to take this moment to publicly thank everybody for the work and discussion i was it was very productive um and that consisted of myself and then miss dina morgan assistant director of counseling services brian campbell our student information systems manager i'm mr todd berg the bridges elementary assistant principal uh miss lindsay reeves san tan elementary assistant principal miss andrea zabo gateway point elementary assistant principal and then mr brandenburg cooley middle school dean of students mr potts awesome and middle school dean of students and then ms pamela simmons from
033higle high school dean of student and miss ellner uh williamsville high school dean of students oh i'm sorry and terry pepper assistant principal from shepard elementary so prong number one of our review was the internal review so we pulled together a code of conduct committee with representation from all of our grade levels across the district and we were conscientious of including equal representation from all of the feeder systems within the school district the committee followed the process we modeled it after what we used for the course guide review process and utilized formal change request process so we used forms to request change based on changes to just general information within the code of conduct and in addition to that a form to request any changes to the discipline matrix and our committee spent over 10
034hours together we conducted a thorough review of what we have currently in existence we did a data dive to look at a five-year analysis of a number of infractions and type of infractions that were issued and the consequences that were aligned with those and then discussion about best practice and best use of the code of conduct the peer district comparison our committee reviewed content from our neighboring school districts we utilized chandler's gilbert's mesa public schools and queen creek unified school district we reviewed the layout the violations the descriptions the consequences formatting the language that was used within and the process was the committee had a month to review the peer district and then follow back up and we convened to discuss findings and in our legal review process we used miss denise low brit from
035udall shumway where she took a comprehensive look into our current document looked for changes in policy changes in federal and state statute and then she reviewed format and language of the document and to ensure clarity uh inappropriate legal language of the document so our findings the committee found that our current code of conduct was considered relevant and appropriate for our school district but one of the findings that we did the consensus was that our code of conduct is essentially a disciplinary matrix but it's being utilized as a district handbook and we found that there's a difference and that was a big thing that came out from our peer reviews is our neighboring districts have a code of conduct but it's embedded within their handbooks and we really have kind of a handbook embedded within our
036code of conduct and so the discussion led to the point that it's not necessarily a useful tool in the sense of information it's rather outlining what happens when you do violate one of the rules rather than explaining maybe how the rules come to be and how to best navigate the expectations of the school district um there's consistency in the application rather than the matrix was the desired outcome from the committee so with that in other words the infractions and the the types of disciplinary language used in the code of conduct didn't necessarily equal a consistent practice across our district so what the committee preferred was the best use of the existing information and how to be more consistent with the code of conduct and then there was some legal changes that just needed to be
037aligned with recent legislative changes two in particular there was updates to the hazing law and in our kindergarten through fourth grade out of school suspension expectation so committee discussion led to suggestions to utilize the document to align better with the infractions so we would like to convene more frequently to discuss how to use the document across the district to be more consistent and so what is defined in the conduct document is utilized accordingly so it's one of the requests from the committee was to get together more often and to discuss the sequence how to best use progressively and what infractions equals which definition within the violations within the document there were legal updates required that needed to be assigned to align with the changes there was some grammatical and formatting updates necessary and then again
038the biggest finding is we use the code of conduct as a handbook and we should really have a district handbook as a reference tool and then within that would be the disciplinary matrix which is commonly referred to in our district as the code of conduct that would best provide specific information for our community for our students and our parents within the district so our next steps moving forward we've already updated the document with with the legal and committee recommendations uh we aim to publish the code of conduct by july 1st so it's available for the upcoming school year and then move forward to conduct training for best use and consistency but then the biggest next step that we're looking forward to is convening a committee to really dig in and prepare a disciplinary i'm sorry
039a handbook that outlines portions of the code of conduct within but in addition to that more of a better use k-12 handbook for the 23-24 school year so we'll bring back to you next year the handbook to present for the upcoming school year in the year to follow president kaler members of the board as i wanted to just add a component here one of the powerful pieces uh that he talked about was the work that he did with his committee you have the individuals here who are if you will the experts of discipline on a campus when they're taking a deep dive at our own data taking a look at our patterns our trends uh how are we using this how are we being consistent what additional resources do we have how do we approach
040this better consistently that's an important process that that that transcends in value beyond just the work that's on paper and i want to commend the amount of time that um this team and committee put together because that the the conversations that that james would bring back to david and i about what we were doing and how we were doing it and what we need to do differently is powerful um and it's important and you will see is going to be reflected in additional work that needs to be done this year as a priority when we look at the work toward accomplishing goals in our strategic plan any questions for anybody yes i have a question sure thank you for working on this and putting this together and making it more manageable and useful my question
041goes to your training for best use and consistency across the district so i'm assuming this is staff related correct what you're talking about the training correct okay um can you just i don't know if you put it together or if you have some ideas floating in your head of what that will look like of course we all know that first week back it's like drinking out of a fire hose correct so we we want it as teachers want it and need to use it but sometimes it does it's such a large document with so much information like how do we make sure that it's something that's perceived as relevant very useful referred back to and then how can teachers relay that information to students like are we going to have posters are they going to
042incorporate it in their first weeks back have the students interact with that information so it's not confusing to them the expectations are understood and then parents are also on board so that they know instead of getting that phone call and questioning why why was my son's a friend told me why his son's cell phone i was put up at the front desk you know whereas sometimes it's not consistent well the first part i'll address i i think when you talk about training and best practices and things we're looking for this idea of consistency of application of it across districts so that training in different things is what's going to happen with our administration in terms of making sure that we understand what changes have been made within that in terms of definitions because what we're
043finding out is that some places they defined an act in different ways our goal by getting all of the people in the room was to go through and figure out what infractions what would a situation wanted fractions to make sure that we have consistency there so when we're talking about professional development and things it's not necessarily for the teachers right now we're talking about giving it to the administrators so that we can all get on the same page and have those discussions we have our monthly administrator meetings where james has the opportunity every time and and we'll be doing professional development surrounding this throughout the year because i think this is something that is just not a shot in the dark and then we move on right this is a continual discussion and professional development
044throughout the year yeah and then to address some of the other points so that's part of the discussion that came up is is how this is being used and what is the familiarity with with the document from both students and parents and teachers and so that's part of this the process and that's where the handbook i think would become very beneficial is that it's going to be more of a tool that's useful for the community that they would use to be able to better understand the expectations rather than just go straight to the discipline so it's going to be a work in progress to better communicate that but one of the things that we are working on is a more uniform way that our administrators communicate to the teachers of what the best practices for
045classroom management procedures would be and then also have more of a uniform structure for when the kids come back and how the you know the key elements of the document are communicated to the students um this year was the first year that we've actually rolled out having the code of conduct acknowledgement online which is the hope that it touches more people sooner rather than having to go and on their own find a document and then get the form and you know now it's all one spot and it's connected within synergy as well too sure thank you thank you mr walker um i'm so happy to see this like get brought to us i've been in the district a long time i feel like now and i've looked at the code of conduct many times over
046but it's nice to see that we're getting all of our administrators on the same page where there won't be discrepancies i guess in what we maybe laid out i think it's really good because when our littles are going up to the next grade they already know the expectation when they're going to the next school our elementary kids are going to our middle schools they should have all been treated the same at elementary to go to our middle schools and then to feed into our high schools um on expectations and consequences maybe a little different i read through the whole thing don't worry um i read every line um so consequences will be different at different grade levels but the expectation's still the same that we're following um the policies that the governing board has set
047so thank you so much i know this was a lot of work because i read it all and it was a lot of work just to even read so thank you you're welcome and and to address that point as well that was one of my uh favorite parts of the discussion was bringing in a k-12 uh team to work together to have those discussions because rather in the past it had been separated so when i was a high school administrator we would meet as a secondary and talk about secondary discipline now having k-12 in the room to discuss what this looks like and progressively speaking it was very healthy and productive dialogue and so i appreciate the insight to that thank you president caleb members of the word going back to one of the first
048things they said this is like a regulation that's kind of like a matrices to our policies this also gives window into where are those additional policies we need to work on that need revision updating an alignment so that there's not inconsistencies and this is one of those cross check components if you will in a system that has accountability that shows where priorities are that we need to address and this process kind of illuminated that so we're i think the nice thing is you have a more updated um matrices going into this year with a clear outline of an additional next steps of what we're going to be creating to make that even a more proactive part and then as we update additional policies throughout this we will be rolling this out in training like we've
049done on all other components so again a nice um lock step component of how one piece is connected to another so that our system moves forward and not uh contradictory rather in tandem president kaler dr foley i sent this question in beforehand so i know you know it's coming but um dress code will be something we address um through board policy at some point president kaler board member wilson that was one of the components that that one is actually one that's substantially old i think we looked at it at 2000 and 2001. so we have a policy that is even you referencing the terminology of clothing that our students would look at us and say what are you talking about um and so it does re it does beg the question that that may resolve
050and need to be updated thank you i appreciate you guys looking at that i know that's been a hot topic in our community and even within my own households at times so um i appreciate that you guys are going to bring that back before us to look at and possibly revise uh to be clear to parents on expectations and to students all across the board thank you president kaler i appreciate your taking the time and and that you've we've been talking about this we talked about this earlier today the players you brought in the deans you brought in the assistant principals they're the ones who handle the discipline on campuses and i appreciate excuse me that you are working on the training and getting this information to them we receive disciplinary reports every week and
051in the past there's been some times you see the same infraction two different locations and two different outcomes and i know all of us have been like what's going on here why are we you know can you explain and sometimes there's totally an explanation and and it falls under a certain term but the matter of the offense could be different but i appreciate that you guys are working with all the the administrators to get on the same page so that i know for you guys and for us as board members if we hear stuff from the community we see that consistency and then it starts conversation what do we need to change it does this make sense instead of us well i think we're going to just change this one or that one so i
052i love that you have that committee of the people who are the ones who handle it and then you're going to do the training so that we can be consistent and from what i've seen from you mr walker you're going to be surprised providing that support for them as well to ensure the consistency so i i just want to let you know i appreciate having the people that are handling it in the room and helping making those decisions so thank you thank you board members uh and and one of the things we're going to continue is to keep the code of conduct committee uh year in and year out so as as trends develop and things change we'll continue to have this discussion so the hope is that we come back every year and we
053inform you of what our discussions look like on an annual basis and so that's that's the the hope is that this remains a consistent practice will we be swapping out the elementary principles because i don't think all of them are on these elementary assistant principles are they all on there or will we be swapping them out how does that look for your committee moving forward so the committee for next year is to be determined but one of the things that we did is we have had ongoing dialogue so outside of the committee there's been discussion points ongoing throughout so the hope is to include everybody's consensus and opinion in the process thank you mr walker yeah we need to remove the word culottes or parachute pants whatever what what was in 20 years ago that
054we were [Laughter] that was probably 1970 so i'm knickers okay so anyways uh thank you for addressing an old document we appreciate that very much and moving ahead i'm just thinking ahead that you know we have parents sign a code of conduct but it might be when the handbook is created it's assigned the handbook it might be an acknowledgement of that online i won't be here in 23 24 year but i would definitely encourage um somehow that gets a signature so that's my only input for that but thank you for your time appreciate it thank you president taylor and that's part of the the discussions uh you know it's it's very um early on in that stage but the the hope is that the code of conduct is a part of the handbook so they'll
055maybe no longer be a code of conduct acknowledgement but a handbook acknowledgement and consisting of many pieces including that of the discipline matrix would be interesting it's in this district too when we when we put that rise to the occasion students this is the expectation so many do hit that mark so again it's it's getting that information out to them and saying like you say early on in the elementary years of saying this is our expectation and this follows you all of your days so i think that'll be awesome thanks sure thing and the hope is that the code of conduct remains as a point but the more important information would be for our our students especially to stay out of that chapter of the handbook and the preceding information would help to guide that
056better exactly awesome good stuff appreciate you gentlemen okay we are going on to 9.2 and our governing board initiatives and the progress made i believe this will be dr foley president kaler members of the board i i'm sharing to the next two agenda items are really important for us because one of our very our core values is accountability and one of the things that the governing board has done a very good job of doing is and historically has done is outlined strategic initiatives that they wanted us to focus on this for the year i will be sharing really quickly because we'll be talking about last year's work and then our next agenda item we'll be talking about this coming year's work and this is work that we did initially and that we started in april
05710th in this room in 2021 and then we updated this together when we did our retreat a year later um on april 9th and one of the things that we had done together as a team was to identify obviously there were a lot of priorities that needed to be accomplished and as we worked with our myself and the cabinet team to identify four core priority goals that we were going to work on this year we then identified in those goals what are examples of the kind of work and artifacts that you could be expecting to receive from us and that we can keep you updated in various ways um from email to status to presentations to ongoing community weekly or daily as needed communication so i will review real quickly the four goals we identified
058um and then we'll talk about the progress we made when you look at the slide it looks like this it looks like a file folder that we left that pi that presentation exactly as it was from when we did it over a year ago so we had identified that for this year our priority goal was to update and refine our strategic plan for the 2022 through the 2027 and to outline a road map for a portrait of a graduate so we had talked about the fact that we would develop an outline we would implement plans we would organize and gather feedback and that we would put together a portrait of a graduate as one of our goals so this is just showing the next slide is kind of a summary of progress that we made
059as a team um for toward that goal as you know strategic planning was a focus for us this entire year and um the next few slides and again we've shared this with you in our retreat but as you can see this was something that kind of summarizes over from from identifying that this was a goal to swat analysis to identifying core values to working on feedback groups to analyzing feedback analysis through multiple venues coming up with updating and those documents and resources as you know you've approved this at our meeting in may so that here again some of those artifacts that were created as part of our progress toward this goal okay um goal number two uh was to continue to ensure a safe uh that the safety of our students and employees as they
060return to school in the 2021 20 20 20 20 21 school year ironically as we identified this goal as often happens one does not have a crystal ball um at the time that we created this this goal we really truly didn't know about the next wave of kovid we had no idea about the variations that would come through our community we had identified at the time back in april had we had we had a crystal ball if only we had a crystal ball we had talked about how we would work with the department of public health how we would work with our communications and our screening protocols and how we would be very intentional toward social emotional well-being of our to students and employees obviously knowing that this is always something that's been a priority
061but obviously this was a great of knee greater need considering the reality of that we were dealing with you know a year is a long time ago i mean the month of may alone felt like a hundred years um so um when i look at examples of progress made we identified a mitigation plan we identified a progressive mitigation plan we had to modify within that progressive mitigation plan because once sites were not all the same coveted cases rise new variants came guidance from the health department changed i mean when when superintendents are on zoom calls with white house and cdc officials you know the world is unique in requiring momentum and change the health organization guidance on a monthly basis was shifting and changing needs changed for us obviously we experienced things we could never
062possibly predicted and yet we identified and kept consistent with our mitigation plan our our progressive mitigation plan and our dashboard and courtesy notifications and i think i think that you know very challenging time we navigated through a very unique unique time that we could not have even predicted when we established this as a goal some of this was within our control and a lot of this was was not obviously we provided support to sites as needed with increasing cases when december and january hit we saw numbers unlike we'd never experienced as as a yet in covid so again um a lot of progress was made that this year as we navigated through this as a team also one of the things we're really proud of is the tremendous progress we made towards social emotional support
063you've heard through our work that we did with esser and our surveys and our priorities the addition of additional counselors the work that we're doing with bringing in resources we've done a lot with outlining some priorities that will be what we build off of this coming year so one of the themes you'll see as we talk about progress made in these goals is is that where we left off we don't drop off we pick up and continue with the evolution of this which you'll see in our next presentation kristen kahler dr foley um i just want to thank you for all the work that you guys did it was daily things were changing we remember sitting in this board room and things would change the next day as soon as we decide something things would
064change so i think that this one when we originally said it we thought it was going to be one thing and it became this massive the iceberg analysis is probably very um true on this one you see the small little peak but underneath the surface it was huge um so this one i just want to thank you for the for the guidance here because this was a big undertaking so and they all are but this one especially keeping our kids safe um is high in our priorities so thank you uh president kayla remember wilson thank you for that feedback i think one of the caveats here is when we look at these goals none of these goals and all the work that that was accomplished doesn't happen without an amazing team who works 24 7
065round the clock and there was one there was never ever any one of these that was done in isolation or by themselves by by a soul person this was a combination of multiple people who without everyone's work and support we would not have done as well as we did as an entire team and so i think that's one of the things our team is proud of so thank you for that and dr foley i did hear from other people in other districts how they were looking to us and how we had handled the situation so well and eloquently and we handled it for exceeding what their district had done so i just want to thank you publicly say that that other districts were looking to us which was nice to see so our next goal
066goal three obviously the heart of what we do is teaching and learning in spite of navigation of others of other circumstances teaching and learning obviously was a big priority for us as you know that part of the pandemic focus was a surge into the implement implementation of technology devices curriculum resources and this of course had to maintain a priority so we identified this obviously as a core goal where we identified initiatives that we would be or you know outcomes of this including multiple things we are really proud of i got to go the right direction we are real proud of the fact that we officially launched and did our virtual academy we had universal access for all students with devices this is huge we sustained and improved the use of canvas and are our resources
067that allow us to more personalize and customize professional development as well as curriculum for students as well this is huge this is kind of those foundational pieces that need to be in place um we know with the addition of a previous year you're one of your focuses had been to identify a professional development uh director that was hired and that individual and the coaches and the work that they did not only with teachers but also administrators was huge and customized professional development this bullet alone doesn't do it justice and i know that you had opportunity this year to see in multiple updates the kind of work that was happening the success we had we had started and have always been professional learning communities but again that this did not stop we also realized that it
068had to be reasonable and flexible when we're minimizing contact with individuals how do we in rise in cases of certain cases of covet how do we continue to also focus on how we're using our data how are we improving and how are we using it it didn't stop one of the things i'm really proud of about higley is urgent and important always continue to move forward even when we were in the middle of crisis um it would have been very easy to just stop and say you know what um we'll get back to this when when kovitz stops now it's a part of our ru it's a part of our world um and this didn't stop obviously we are evolving are we there yet no we're always room for improvement but we didn't stop striving
069and working hard to keep making this a priority and obviously one of those components is the multiple tiers of support mtss what do we do when students aren't being successful how do we use the tools we have now that we have invested in this technology to be sure our interventions are targeted specific and yield results for our students we're getting ready to get state data and that state data will allow us to continue to use this framework that we've put in place to be sure that we continue to ensure our students are achieving at the level of success that they need to that is our goal that is our priority that has that must remain our number one focus and there are tons of examples of how this was um how this work continued and
070finally our final goal that we identified for you for this past year was our ability to identify processes of procedures and accountability the theme of the last two years has been processes procedures and accountability and and consistency follow-through and ensuring that that if things need to be addressed that we do so that we don't just do it to fix it for now but that we put systems in place to ensure that they continue to happen beyond a particular individual who's in that position so one of the things that we had identified for you that could include were handbooks emergency plans support processes and alignment of budgets and and fiscal accountability there so this is one of the things we implemented right away having goals identified right up front that we begin dealing with right away
071as we're planning for the new year is what is so important you saw as we came to you and shared with you what we did with our admin retreat we have a administrator handbook that's alive and well canvas we've added to it all year long as we're building this year's admin retreat guess where it's going in the admin handbook so that this becomes where we go and how we function our emergency site plans obviously the this topic is one of significance and important and in recent days has only been more of a national conversation across one of the things you'll know is that we'll be bringing additional conversation about what have we done what are we doing and what are we continuing to refine and improve when it comes to safety and security because in
072addition to academics safety and security is the most important thing we do for all of our for all of our students and our employees for our community so again those are have been worked on substantially and again a great thank you to the multiple people involved in that especially under the leadership of mr walker again suicide risk management protocols and resources were established this was a huge component that needed to be done systemically and that's something that we're actually proud of that we were actually training our administrators in february something we're planning to roll out in july again another sample showing of trying to not work behind but work ahead and again there are lots of ways that we can show you that we have documented evidence of accountability that we are truly living our
073core value and and when we identify a need we are working to put a process in place to fix it but we're seeing more of a symbiotic relationship in this component rather than others you will see in our upcoming goals um we've identified priorities and focuses for us this year that build off of the work that we've done this year overall again going back to oops going the right way none of this happens without substantial effort of an entire team and i am so blessed to be surrounded by some amazing talented individuals who work their tail off um and i'm lucky to be part of that and and um we are proud of the work that we have done but we're also excited to show you the work that we are outlining for next year
074as if these weren't these goals weren't very high efforts and challenging but they were accomplished in a pandemic so um thank you again and we'll talk more about that later on when we have another motion in a bit but um well done higley and your team and dr foley under your leadership really really knocked all of these out of the park so on behalf i know of our entire school board well done very well done president kaler i just want to note that none of these goals are or were a one and done um although returning to the classroom or or returning to school in general isn't necessary um i'm hoping for anything in the future but we implemented just different social emotional awareness that will continue health and safety protocols still ongoing that's that's
075going to be here to stay um how we clean the classrooms and and things like that it's it's made that shift so while next year this isn't a goal and the different goals are we'll see but it's something that started and will continue it was just the beginning of certain areas but they're they're not done they will now be part of an ongoing process so i just want to make it clear that we have obviously lots of evidence that the accomplishments you guys have made and even though the school year's over these goals aren't just oh we can check mark that that we were successful they're ongoing and i mean you made that clear in mr walker even today like there's a lot ongoing that because of these goals and i won't say only because
076of these goals but because of these goals we were able to get the process going it's stuff we've talked about for years and years but we've never got that ball and process going so now that you have it's moving along and they'll they'll continue and just be part of the normal um ongoing improvement process so i just want people to understand it's not just a checkbox like yay we we were really successful in that these are not done thank you i just want to encourage the community and students and even staff members to take a moment in in the summer time or any time to send an email or just a thank you to the staff in this district to thank them a lot of the good that happens and a lot of things you
077see your the children doing comes from the behind the scenes um and i i'm not saying you have to i'm just saying if you have a brief second just just send just send that email make that phone call and it keeps that momentum going as well and and share your stories of success we get a lot of emails of concerns but what what's good that has happened um if you and send it to us the ccs so we can read about it too and know know more about your experiences through the hard work and efforts of all the stuff here all right thank you now we're going to move on so we can just keep moving on to the next which is our 9.3 focus areas for the 2022 and 2023 school year so off
078and running again off and running again perfect so this is this is a continuation of this is a continuation and our first chance to publicly present to you and to the community a conversation that we began back at our retreat um in april where we historically identify goals for the coming year which is an important component and one of the things that that i came to you at that retreat was said listen we went into a deep dive of all the work that we had done with the strategic plan as you saw in those goals the strategic plan consumed an awful lot of our time as we focused on what do we need to do and how do we need to do it and how are we going to get there and one of the
079proposals we brought to you is we wanted to bring our initiatives for you from this year to be directly connected with our priority focus areas in our implementation of our strategic plan going back to our core value of accountability this is the one way that these things connect and overlap again so in a very similar fashion obviously we took our strategic plan and we identified we identified a priority for us in every one of these areas from each of the anchors to also our portrait of a graduate so one of the things that i had come to you with was saying is um we've got um focus areas in each one of these and and and wanted you to understand this idea and you said come back to us with examples of implementation like we
080did before so that we can walk through this so myself and of course as you know we don't do anything in isolation we do this together and in multiple meetings over multiple settings we brought in various individuals from our team to begin to highlight out what is the work we're wanting to do i want to compliment our team for a minute by no means at any point is anyone looking for the easy way out we are presenting to you probably one of the most progressive aggressive plans of what we want to accomplish this coming year as we work toward working toward achieving our strategic plan not only just to check a box but to to put it into practice at an exceptional rate um so one of the things that we did was our first
081thing when we look at our portrait of a graduate go back here our portraiture graduate also our strategic plan number one our strategic anchor one we talk about teaching and learning talks about how we are going to maximize academic social and emotional growth of each student as aligned to the ports of a graduate as you know our work that we're proud of in our strategic plan now has a portrait of a graduate that defines a who or what and how so one of the first things that we wanted to do we said one of our focus areas we want you to know is that we're going to work on defining our portrait of a graduate so that we identify what pre-k-12 opportunities to students have that build responsible citizen college and career ready scholar and
082innovative learner so here we're coming back to you with what we have identified as work that we know needs to be done in order for us what are what are the examples of progress that we will do systemically to align to our our focus area of a portrait of a graduate that's aligned to 1.1.1 where we're going to identify upgrading our pre-k through 12th grade instructional maps to ensure alignment to our arizona state standards and our resources this is essential work that needs to happen some of the work that we have done is outdated some of the work that has done been done is done been done virtually remotely not all in the same thing we've added additional resources we just did a massive science adoption it is now time to update all of those
083we also did a massive realignment of all of our resources that we're using instructionally this is how we're going to work with our teachers across all of our areas to update our maps this is huge i will tell you if all we did alone was that this is a massive undertaking that's going to require hundreds of thousands of combined hours of individuals as we do this but this is essential and this is important and that this is work we're going to need to accomplish we're also going to identify specific ways when we're doing this when we begin to look at how are we ensuring all of our students regardless of their program have access to experiences that we've identified in the porch of a graduate we're going to start by focusing on identifying specific ways
084that students in husd at all grade levels have developmentally appropriate opportunities to engage in the community what are the themes experiences and opportunities all students have regardless of their school or program that will allow us to be sure our students have these experiences going back to conversations of consistency not identical but but consistent types of experiences that ensure students have access to these that's huge we have an amazing community we have a lot of resources here in some cases perhaps an untapped opportunity this has been discussed multiple times before as we emerge out of to covid covid nor normal but navigating that world this is something we want to finalize and identify we also one of the focuses we're going to have on professional development this year when we talk about going back to innovative
085learner you'll notice that parts and pieces of this college and career scholar working on the alignment across the board a responsible citizen the community connection and we talk about innovative learner that's the how what we're focusing on this year one of our themes for our professional development while we will customize as needed is engagement how we're utilizing our tools how we're engaging students to ensure that that we are making learning more relevant and meaningful and engaging that is going to be a focus so what you'll begin to see are examples of the types of professional development that we will be focusing on with our across the board on how do we engage um so that is our examples of progress for this one for focus on 1.1 now i'm going to go into each of
086the other four anchors unless you've got any questions on this one this is how we're going to help connect to that portrait of a graduate and and its alignment to 1.1 because you see that the two are connected so then the next thing we came to you is said we want to focus on 1.2 by building the district's support for systemic resources for social emotional positive student behaviors this is huge this is something we've talked about you've just we've also just now or finalizing the hiring of additional individuals who are being hired for this support so here is when we taught when we brought the people in the room to say what can we reasonably do what knowing in mind that we're shooting for the moon but we're going to land among the stars what
087are the stars that we can be sure we can accomplish this year as we move this momentum as we move this needle we have identified that we are going to develop and you're going to learn a little bit more about this in the coming informational sessions these take time to put together but we are developing a healthy higley wellness initiative where that identifies partnerships and agencies and community resources that we have to help support and to to customize as needed we've identified themes that we're going to begin to put parent information you kind of got a sampling of this toward the end of the year but what we're looking to do is actually build a more comprehensive component not just an awareness component but also what will students at what grade levels have access to
088and what instructional or online resources will we have vetted as part of the conversations that happen around this one of the things we know is that there are a lot of things out there but there's a lot of controversy around the things that are out there what we know is that we can do this so we can do this well if we do this ourselves and we do it in the same way that we do all other curriculum reviews we're going to identify we've identified some themes we've identified topics around resiliency which we're going to talk about in just a minute suicide awareness and drug prevention those are going to be kind of the community additional resources and things that we build on our website that we provide fair information for that we have triage
089support so that we can we can begin to be a conduit of supportive resources as needed for for anybody in our community for this year we're going to begin focusing on resiliency which includes a proactive and preventative ways for to overcome obstacles in developing positive life skills this is one of those foundational pieces that we can do pre-k-12 that talks about self-esteem um healthy behaviors ways that we set up proactive for success this is one of the first things that we're going to start where we build the as you know it's one of our three themes resiliency will be the one that we do a teacher component a student component and a parent component while we maintain developing the other components this will be something we add to this will be our priority for this
090but as you can see that our we're not putting this on as a we're going to check a box here what we're doing is showing you our development toward reaching this goal in its full capacity a lot of work needs to be done here but it's exciting i will tell you just having uh dina started with us i remember it was because it was my birthday march 28th she started with us march 28th um and it was she came in and she and james had a meeting and coming with ideas resources support someone who is full-time dedicated to this to be guilty infrastructure behind it it just matters this is something having people dedicated to this will help us do a better job of helping support our sites our students and our families so this
091is something we're excited about dr foley i'm excited to see this page because i think healthy can mean a lot of different things and i'm glad you said that um different community members think a healthy is different thing but the resilience the suicide awareness and the drug prevention is awesome to see um it's awesome to see i know we were working pre-coping on some of these but now that we're kind of through that little trench of craziness it's good to see that we're bringing these back and i was able to attend the drug prevention at the end of the year lat at the end of the school year i don't even know when it was it's kind of a whirlwind and a lot of parents did want more resources more more and more so it's
092exciting to see that this is one of our strategic situations thank you any other questions about our proposal for anchor 1.2 so again this is a real this is a nice focus on the kind of work you're going to see not that not that the other parts on our strategic plan aren't important we're working on them we find this to be a foundational piece and when we get this part done remember this is a five year plan but if we do this part and we do this well and we build on it it will only allow us to really truly take it from where we are to what we're all envisioning where we need to be um president keller dr foley just something that came to mind as as you were going through this is
093maybe seeing about getting some sponsorships from local businesses for the parent meetings that can help us maybe do some additional advertising use their own avenues for advertising we have we have done several different parent forums pre-covered we did the it only takes one pill and everything and currently they're not very well attended from a parent or community standpoint which is i know sometimes discouraging to staff because they they put a lot of time and effort in getting these speakers and um preparing the rooms and and whatever they need to do it takes time out of their normal work day to set these up and so sometimes it can be frustrating when you have two and three people that show up for what we feel is a a huge important topic unfortunately when something happens then
094we do have a large voice outcry on we need to do more but we do have these and so maybe something to look at local businesses one to offset some cost maybe to supply some additional cost for additional advertising and again to use their advertising methods however they may advertise if they're sponsoring it i don't know bring some cookies or what whatever but maybe that that can help drive some additional attendance because it i know the more we do hopefully the more we'll start to come and attend and and the more consistent we are instead of in one year we only had one and in two years we had like four parent meetings but then we didn't have any and i'm speaking even pre-coveted so um maybe as we create this program we may look
095for for some of that not just the partnerships that can help with the topic but just some financial support for trying to drive more attendance great idea thank you that's a great idea you're right it was interesting in our last form we didn't have a large attendance but it was an interesting diverse attendance we had some individuals who were coming from a neighboring district to see how did that go well you wanted to preview it with us we had parents from charter schools who were in the room we had some students and we did have some of a few of our own parents but you're right our ability to to bring more in and again we are open we want these to commit community events whether you attend our schools or not please come but
096we're also looking to how can we increase the attendance but also have those resources available beyond the meeting that are easily accessible because you're right sometimes when you need it you need it and you need it at your fingertips and i think we're working to build our own internal resources that we are that we are comfortable with that we've vetted from agencies to to websites that we can then begin to offer for families um that'll be important that we that we heard from from what we've heard from our community that they would like president taylor to follow up on what mrs reece said we've had um business partner breakfast in the past and we had some hospitals be able to come in and talk to us and maybe they would be a great partnership for
097something like this where they would be able to advertise differently than we can even but that might just be an avenue to also venture down just to back up with mrs recents that i think a hospital might be a really good place and doctors offices dentists i mean there are many many many options there so our next one that we've identified um great suggestions our next one that we identified was for strategic anchor two we talked about the importance of culture matters um we want people to feel valued we want to focus on our strategic anchor 2.3 by supporting our employees through meaningful feedback and interactions to build a culture where employees feel valued we have identified that some of the examples of progress and again by no means is to say in all that
098we will do but we said here are some indicators of the kinds of things we are going to work toward we're going to be implementing the danielson teacher evaluation instrument as you heard several months ago you approved this instrument this is a substantial shift for us to have a more comprehensive instructional tool to guide feedback and conversations with teachers to do this it's a substantial amount of training as you heard we had administrators and you read we started with having administrators come in at the end of may because literally two of our days in july at our our admin retreat is going to be dedicated to the training of how to use this instrument and you go that's a lot of time but when we are using a new tool with integrated reliability and being
099able to make this meaningful we're going to invest a lot of time in that we're then going to turn around and work to provide teachers the kind of training that they need now they don't need a two-day full training on how to understand and use the instrument we need it to be a meaningful component for them there's a difference between using this instrument and having this be the feedback tool you have but in all cases we're going to do this in a very meaningful thoughtful approach so that it's also not a one and done frequency over duration is always a much better always much better received and it's also when you need to know when do you need to know and how do you need to know that we're working on making that as meaningful
100as possible we're going to also ensure that employees questions and concerns are addressed in a timely manner when and capture voices whenever it is possible to do so it's not always possible to do so sometimes we have to communicate things that in some cases we didn't have a choice in the outcome it's it's it was directive uh informed told but changing and sharing that communication one of the things we received positive feedback from our employees this year that one of the things we implemented as you know is after every board meeting there's an employee summary where it says here's what we did here's what we talked about here's what we're working on here's how you can access more information that was well received people actually i've appreciated that um and so however wherever we can
101communicate answer questions and make sure that people know that um we're wanting to hear now not always can we give you exactly what you want but we're not we're always receptive to hearing and trying to understand and then even when the answer is no trying to help you understand why that's one of our goals and priorities the other thing we're talking about is make decisions when possible that will contribute to employee satisfaction for example employee benefits our salary compensation and acknowledgments and recognitions we're going to continue to work on this again not always possible but where we can this is one of the things we're going to really work just drive and that's one of our filters how do we make this right with what can we afford to do and then how do we
102make this right uh what will be well received i think one of the things that that overall we are really proud of our employees we are really proud of how higley has done what they have done we know that we would not have been able to accomplish all we accomplished that this without everyone throughout the organization giving all that they did this year um and making sure people know that is something we're going to continue to work at so those are some examples of how we're going to focus on those that culture and feedback um and being valued strategic anchor number three one of the things that we've talked an awful lot about is is developing a marketing plan to help us enhance our relationships in the community this is a big one for us
103um and this is going to take an awful lot of time and this is one that is going to consume a lot of time that we're going to work on and obviously as we know all big things are a process and sometimes it's one step forward two steps back as we as we get it just right know that this is one of the areas that we're going to strive to get just right and may take us quite a bit of time to do it but this is what we're going to focus on we are creating a comprehensive marketing plan that will guide our district for future communications to better showcase our accomplishments and achievements we're looking at a redesign of our website and our company that we're utilizing to do this so that we can
104make this more of a go-to more user-friendly and i mean we've had some challenges and communication when one system is down that relies on another system to pull information to communicate you can be end up with a lot of interesting challenges so this is one of the components to put a systemic piece behind the scenes we're going to be relaunching this business partner events business partner breakfast we're going to work closely with um you know sarah watts with our town council with our with our um i mean when we were back in covet we were doing good government events virtually when we started even beginning the conversations of strategic plan we were on a zoom call with business partners we are now evolving out of that i'm going to go back into reestablishing these business
105partner kind of relationships and opportunities and this is something that we're excited about implementing this year we're also working on this again this is something we've worked on but we're continuing to work on is the establishment of those various circumstances to guide when when where who how do we communicate with as you know that in an ever-evolving world with social media with um with unique circumstances the best ways to communicate for safety as far as need to know when to know how to know and when you don't have students in our district what do you need to know um this is something that we're working on so that we have kind of like a matrix if you will of our communication matrix so these are the things we've identified this is this is huge this
106is a big one yes dr foley a massive undertaking that you have put yourself [Laughter] to take on uh may i just suggest that when we reach out to our uh district business partner and events that we include um chris clark from the queen creek chamber of commerce as well um we have two schools in queen creek and we have a huge um you know queen creek marketplace is right next door and there's a lot of businesses that just love to support our public schools and i know chris clark has his own children in higley or had i think they've graduated but um just keeping them in the loop as well would be um i think really important thank you yes and and with all the new businesses that are literally becoming in our backyard
107really close we're going to have a whole lot of very close new partners relationships to build and form so that's kind of exciting too dr foley do you have a timeline on when we would have the business partner breakfast is back do you have a thought on it at all we've been working on an outline of a few things that are looking more like a like a fall in a spring thing we have some additional dates with some other opportunities to highlight other events and things that they would be involved and included but we will provide additional information yeah um on as we kind of uh work through that with again multiple individuals yeah i'm excited to see this back because it was missed this year and i understand why it was missed i just
108missed it i have a quick question about the business partner breakfast can you briefly tell me what do you do at the business partner practices and our students ever included yes president caleb vice president anderson historically business partner breakfasts were scheduled on the calendar that allowed multiple businesses to come learn more about higley and we established an agenda and it did sometimes have prior to covet i can remember in 2019 we actually had like a student panel that was talking about the opportunities that they have the wakeboard surf um things that were happening at higley high so our students were one of the things we would want to do is make sure that our students were a big part of that i mean think about the lovely connections with our strategic plan this is one
109of the ways our student leaders can be part of connecting with our business leaders in our community a beautiful thing so these agendas we control usually there was a little bit of academic there was a little bit of upcoming events some student highlight and focus i can imagine there will be factual information about potential bond events coming up that kind of thing has historically been what those look like obviously depending upon the size the scope and scale we're going to be taking a look at venue because the larger they get the faster we outgrow this space particularly when we involve food or those kind of things but um there's all kinds of different opportunities that we are looking and talking about and exploring and and i know that sarah watts even has some ideas herself
110and so that's one of the things we're kind of working through and they did a it allowed the site administrators to be able to do networking with businesses who were like hey tell me what you need i want to be involved and and things like that so it also in one room gave a lot of networking and connections so as we i'm sorry no so sometimes we receive emails from businesses or people that own businesses in our community and this would be a great opportunity to say hey who would who would i send them to to you or you can you can send them to me you can send them to darlene get their names and make sure that they're on the list often times we work with the gilbert chamber of commerce we could
111work with queen creek because they have businesses associated with them who automatically get those invitations but for those who may not even be part of that yet we we can we can invite them i mean it's our party if you will we can invite them to our party um and network so it's an opportunity for us to know who else is out in the community and what they might have to offer dr foley maybe we should reach out to our pto and ask if they have anybody that's been super supportive because as a pto president i had a couple people i remember sending up as well and i don't know that rptos know that that you know we involve our businesses this way too and it's a good way for those businesses to network with
112other schools within our district so maybe contact the ptos and ask if there was outstanding partnerships that they may have that they want to share and i think dr foley too we have our asu connections as well so mr schmidt comes over and um so we have that asu poly campus connection and they usually attend or send somebody from asu over so it's really it's a really great event and we have missed it so i'm glad to bring it back what's interesting is we've had an opportunity to network with these individuals at other things with undercover protocols but to host it ourselves and come back in to our own party if you will is kind of what we're looking at we re relaunching with a with a real heavy focus on helping people understand what
113our strategic plan is what we're working on what our priorities are and how they can help and just be aware of the great thing another way for us to help share the wonderful things that are happening in hindi because you know word of mouth and reputation is one of those things that is this is an opportunity to help connect and getting those realtors involved as well is a good way to keep our community growing [Music] true so then strategic anchor four notice this one rhymes an awful lot with one of our focuses that we had in our goals for this year so going back to when one not one and done this actually is pulled right out of our strategic plan this is an area we found is a real focus for us systemically and
114noting that one component fits nicely with another and the stronger we get things become more automatic and this is a big piece of who we are and how we are so again when we talk about focusing on here's examples we're going to continue our formal review of our policy through our district process you heard a little bit today even our code of conduct component is deeply part of a triggering piece for our for our policies you will notice that it's connected a lot with number bullet 3 with the creation of a comprehensive student handbook that encompasses the code of conduct applicable policies procedures and discipline expectations one of the things we noticed is that student discipline our own data how we're documenting it how we're reporting it how we're responding is an opportunity for us
115to get better not that we're doing wrong but we can get better we also are going to provi continue to provide intentional professional development and resources to administrators employees through successful implementation of policies and procedures just changing it and informing them of that change is not enough one of the things that you will find is that we establish annual calendars of when we have our meetings we've also began to establish the list of all of us know that that you can you can have a massive meeting for administrators and put a thousand things on the agenda and you can say you covered it and you did formally but it won't change what you do and how you do it and one of the things that we know is is that this is frequency over duration
116ongoing so one of the things that we've established similar to what you see when you have upcoming board agendas there are some things that are annual things that always happen every time of the year but we also now begin to have our annual our other plugs that are standing in where we're going to work with our administrators so that timely need to know as we reform one of the things we find is it's better to get their input and make them aware of what's coming and what's going before we make all these changes and then make them and go oh wait i wish we would have known and should have thought about so this isn't going to be embedded as part of our ongoing training so when we have our calendars we also have our
117timely topics and working agenda where we're putting these things in which is another strong component of processes and procedures documented and ensuring implementation not just a one and done and it's in the handbook but rather part of our ongoing training and response so again this is this is systemic ways that we ensure that that we are becoming more consistent yes there is autonomy yes one size does not fit all but we are part of a system and policies and procedures and help us to be stronger as long as our system in getting those to individuals is established and set and this is one of the things that we've outlined in our strategic plan so as you can see a lot of work went in very thoughtful with the words around this where we identify those
118examples of what we're going to do and how we're going to do that this year i have a team of overachievers and we work hard and you can see we've where we've got a lot outlined for us this year but those are what we are proposing to you from our strategic plan as our focus areas for the next school year and why we wanted to bring that to you now is these are big and a lot of the work that needs to be confirmed needs to get going and in place as we prepared next school year because as you know you've heard me say if you're not six months ahead you're already a year behind and we want to get going and get on top of this and and a lot of the work we're
119doing this summer and preparation for next year is an alignment to the strategic plan we took our time putting these together for the strategic plan and entire year process so that we could bring this to you but we're moving really well we're kind of proud of this dr foley we can appreciate very much that you brought this to us already in june knowing that it was going to be a big task for you and your team but i can understand the importance of it being done so that we can start moving in july already towards these hefty goals so well done any other questions or concerns for dr foley i just want to mention just so people understand these goals that you just brought to us the board initiatives is what we hold you accountable
120to so everything you just laid out as board members and what your performance of your performance evaluation is are on these goals and these are huge there's a lot of work to be done um so it's stuff that you're willing to to tackle and take on and have prioritized but this is what we base our superintendent's performance evaluation on so i just want people to understand that as they go through and read this watch it look at it there's there's a lot of work to be done um and you're up to the task you and your team and you're prepared and you're ready to go um even down to the examples that we should expect to see throughout the year not just at the end of the year as we're about to talk about this
121past year but you we see the work and um all the progress throughout the year so i just want people to understand these aren't just we're going to talk about them and and they sound good which i get but this is what your performance is held to so i just wanted to clarify that because you have a lot of work yes i do we we do we do and i do and as you shared this is one of the focuses you had us aboard um from an october retreat was to update and refine the superintendent's evaluation which now includes an entire component on the completion of these goals which is something you will vote to approve so i bring them to you as a proposal this is um our first meeting discussing the examples what
122we will do we've heard your feedback and better understand kind of what you're thinking and looking as far as implementation we will bring these back to the next board meeting on the 22nd for you to officially um adopt them we will start we are already started work on them they're directly connected to our strategic plan but then my evaluation for the following year will be reflected to have these as indicators of a accomplishment and of course no no superintendent does it alone but but i will ensure that this work gets done with this with myself and this amazing support team that i have all said anything else all right moving on to 10.1 it is my absolute pleasure to announce that dr foley's evaluation from our gourd goals and initiatives from last year she was
123deemed highly effective so with matching this amazing accomplishment and it was done like i said not just in a regular school year but during a pandemic as well it is my pleasure to move that we approve the top percent allowed per dr foley's contract which is a six percent which is six percent for her pay for performance second questions concerns comments mr schultz did you want to say something no okay all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero [Applause] well done dr foley we are blessed to have you and moving on to 11.1 any future agenda items you can see we still have a lot coming up president kayla yes um i just wanted to mention i've been in quite a few schools recently and i know we've talked about it but publicly
124want to mention how bad our carpets are getting i know that everyone keeps saying that our schools are just fine but i just want everyone to be aware that how big the runs are and how they're going about that so maybe look around your schools because i know that that's been a hot topic that our schools are just fine but carpets are getting a little worn so thank you mrs anderson um can you please remind me um the last time the employee code of conduct was reviewed i'm sorry i didn't ask this sooner but has it been recent i cannot remember there's a policy and a policy is that what it goes by say good afternoon president keelar vice president anderson members of the board um there's no formal employee conduct separate of the policies
125that are listed in g so as we continue to work on policies we'll continue to address that but there's a staff conduct which is policy gbeb and then there's some exhibits that go with it okay and that's included how so is that included in contracts where employees are made aware of their expectations and so every year we send out an email and communication that happens at the various uh first of the year kickoff that just directs individuals to the policies to let them know that all employee policies are listed in the g section okay so and then if there's any changes um misreach and or if anything happens here it's communicated out to them separately too okay and if you say this i apologize when was the last time that policy in the agreement so
126it was pre-covered um where there was a review of the g policies but i do know that there's some additional components that we need to revisit so we'll be revisiting that throughout this next year okay that that was going to lead to my future question vice president anderson one of the things is that if they are updated statutory or legislatively those usually come to us through asba if we make or to make sweeping changes to them obviously we would bring them to you for approval but when when people are hired they're obviously referred to this their expectations and those kind of things but those are the policies that govern us as far as employee conduct and behaviors and just to follow up on that all of our policies are public record anyone from the public
127can review any of our policies at any time it's within the governing board section of our website under inboard docs they can go in and they can read any and every policy and see the regulation that goes with it so our policies are very much so public record so if anyone has ever wondered what our policies are they can access that through board docs on on our website so okay thank you and the reason i was asking about that is you know we we have these reviews and trainings and involvement for students and their expectations of behaviors and then we say stuff just go read it you know and follow the rules so i just didn't what first i was making sure is updated or current and then um if there are any helpful ways
128that we could stop should know how to behave and should have good expectations but um should we also just say here's everything now go find the way to behave you know like just like we hold our students and give them a way to learn and and give them a chance to learn their what was expected maybe we should do the same for our staff as well and just a good reminder yeah um vice president anderson so we do do our annual trainings every year and that happens in the beginning of the new academic year and those highlight the most significant areas like sexual harassment um if facilities there's some lockout tie out so certain specifics of that um in those are as dr foley mentioned kind of more compliance components too not all of it
129but some of it where some of those other areas i i struggle in the sense that it would be hard because there's there's just so much that you really could address it would be so continuous and unfortunately we're not appropriately staffed that way to do that but it could be in the future that we have some more ability with the onboarding of the new assistant director to where we could focus more on training if we've got somebody else to support the day-to-day operations of the department so i wanted to also add in board docs there's a searchable feature that makes it pretty easy if you want to find a specific policy you can search pretty easily the word you know the words that you might think are in it and it pretty much does pretty
130well on pulling up this specific document you're looking for so just for the community as a whole there is a searchable feature all right i move that we adjourn second all those in favor i i i hear mrs schultz can you hear me motion carries four zero zero i move that now we are going to sorry getting there uh i move that the governing board could be in an executive session for discussion or consultation for the legal advice with the governing board's attorney pursuant to ars 38-431.03 a3 all those in favor aye i motion carries five zero and we will be adjourning from that in executive session so thank you and have a good afternoon you