001good evening we're going to go ahead and call this meeting to order dr foley roll call president reece members of the board please let the record show that all members are present thank you we're going to go ahead and have the pledge of allegiance after our moment of silence of the united states liberty all right on to our agenda i move that we approve the agenda as it's presented second any questions or comments all those in favor aye all right dr foley the superintendent's report president reece members of the board we begin the superintendence report with our favorite part of the night which is the honoring and celebration of our amazing students and employees and volunteers and tonight we're so excited because we have our littlest learners and those who support them in the house
002so tonight we're going to have the joy of inviting the fabulous mrs gleason and the wonderful wonderful stay see mrs stacy utley up to join us and they are going to celebrate and what will happen is that they will call one of one recognited time and we'll have them come up here and stand here for pictures so that way that we can carefully socially distance while still celebrating each and every one of you so tonight we will turn it over to mrs gleason to honor her special people here tonight thank you so much dr foley good evening president reece members of the board and our cabinet oh my gosh so excited and our community is so excited that it's our turn tonight to share our special nominations with you so we're going to begin with
003cooley because c comes before us so um and i'm a little i'm sorry but our amy scott jones who is our teacher um point of pride is not here today she had surgery and she is home resting where she should be so she could be back in school on the 29th so i did want to share a little bit about her with you though so amy scott jones is an early childhood teacher in our brilliant beginnings classroom at cooley preschool and she's been there for eight years she loves the littles and continually connects with our youngest learners building a foundation for all future education experiences i'm so excited i take my breath she is always willing and always helpful and can always find the humor and the laughs in situations that arise and mind you
004there are plenty in a brilliant beginnings classroom every day she is joyful and a positive model for her students she is a lifelong learner and continues to elevate her practice and share her knowledge equally and without hesitation focusing on safety and the best developmentally appropriate practices she stimulates and encourages curiosity engagement and creative play her upbeat attitude inspires her class and school family and we are so happy and proud to honor her today so for our classified point of pride michelle brennan would you please come [Applause] forward all right so michelle joined the front office team at coulee back in 2019 she has been a blessing right from the start she quickly learned the ins and outs of the position has been and has been a true asset to our cooley school family her smile
005and sunny attitude brighten every day and she has a wonderful sense of humor she loves all the children and has made a special effort to get to the know the names of our stars and our best students to greet them by name every day she's part of our social committee treating our staff to special birthday greetings and treats she is very organized and very creative but i knew she was going to be during our interview she told us she has 10 children and so we immediately knew how organized this lady would be and that's right and she did not disappoint in fact almost all of them are here today to congratulate their [Music] [Applause] let me get a mother [Applause] and next we have our volunteer from coulee brandy krause johnson will you please come
006forward please [Applause] okay so we're very excited and very proud that brandy cross johnson stepped into the position a pto president just this past november and she rescued us and she's actually helping to keep our wonderful ecdc ptos afloat during this school year so brandi has been a wonderful breath of fresh air offering idea after idea to inspire and take care of my teaching staff and bring joy to the children since this is her last year in preschool she has been very busy recruiting other parents to volunteer for open board board positions and committees so she wants to make sure that we're not in the position that we find ourselves in this year she's a lot like the energizer bunny so full of energy and ready to get the job done i barely have the
007idea figured out in my head and she's asking how she can make it happen which is so refreshing and wonderful she's always focused on the positive and yes we can do that seems to be her motto we are very proud and excited to honor her with our points of pride this year and then we would like to recognize our student nico will you come forward please let me go come on up [Applause] oh my goodness this is nico patel and he is a student in mrs campazano's pm class this year and mrs c was very excited to nominate him for points of pride nico is a very kind friend building relationships with his peers daily nico's smile is so bright it shines right through his mask as he connects with his class and school family
008see you can tell right now he is always willing to wait take a turn and share with his friends he continuously seeks out new learning opportunities and shares his interests with his teachers and his friends some of his interests include fish the sea and rainbows nico has a love for math numbers construction and engineering it has truly been a pleasure watching niko play learn and grow this school year and the other years he's been with us too because this will be niko's final year at coulee preschool off to kindergarten he will go and what a gift he will be thank you mr mrs patel for sharing nico with us [Applause] can we hold that yes and then over here we're gonna do one more is that okay yes [Applause] okay all right next it's sassamin
009all right so our certified oh and i got my speeches too all right i wrote them down this year because i was afraid yet yes so our certified um staff member that we're honoring today is sarah splickel sarah come on up so sarah is our speech therapist at saseman ecdc she has worked in our district for 12 years and opened sussman preschool with us in 2013. sarah is considered a communications specialist around preschool she is the ultimate professional as she interacts with students and staff and she was truly born to teach preschool at any time in the classroom you'll see her singing and playing with her students as she works on speech and communication goals and everyone loves the way she tells a story using all kinds of different voices for the characters and reading
010with such expression everyone is captivated and even you dr foley you'd really enjoy it too i know so um when we had um excuse me um when we had to close last march and begin online instruction sarah immediately was starting to research the best ways to reach and teach our students when we started the new school year she was ready she had created a green screen in her office to make her lessons interactive and fun for the children she is one in a million and we are proud to recognize her tonight so our classified um points of pride is amy kimball amy come on up so amy was a substitute teacher for us for many years before she decided and came to me and said i'd love a full-time position in preschool this is where
011i want to be so we actually had her start this year as the paraprofessional in our spanish classroom over at saseman well our spanish teacher left suddenly back in october and without a teacher we had to move all of amy's children into the other kinder prep classrooms well she responded so quickly helping those children to adjust to their new classrooms she developed a schedule to help support the full-day kinder teachers with her students in those classrooms and then she even created a schedule and found time to pull them from those classes to do their spanish lessons with them so they got to continue to do that which has been such a blessing she has spread joy and positivity in every situation and every classroom and she has enjoyed seeing all the different teaching styles and
012has learned so much from being able to observe everyone she is loved by the entire staff and all the students she truly deserves the points of pride recognition tonight [Applause] and next we get to honor patty lamb for our volunteer of points of pride for this school year okay so patty lamb is currently our pto vice president she gives endlessly of her time and talent for our ecdc staff and students she is willing to do anything we ask of her and happily works behind the scenes to get everything accomplished sometimes she's in and out so quickly that i think she operates in stealth mode because we hardly ever see her but everything is done she loves our school so much and is so dedicated to our students and her own students on her own children
013and and our staff that she travels from gold canyon to saseman because her son is in our think gifted program over there so every day oh hello yes so she does all of this with amazing kindness and humbleness and she is very deserving of this award [Applause] and then last but not least hannah will you come on up please she is our student point of pride from sasebo preschool [Applause] [Music] so hannah vander linden is a student in mrs stahl's think highly gifted academy at sussman preschool and an absolute joy she approaches each day with a smile and an eagerness to learn she's only four and a half but don't let her size fool you she has maturity level that is well beyond her age she is kind and helpful to and needs to be
014she's kind and helpful to everyone and puts the needs of others before her own she is sensitive to her classmates feelings and finds ways to include others hannah stands out as a role model for the other students in the classroom always showing patience and looking for the best in others she brightens the days of her friends and her teachers with her warm personality and smile that shines through her eyes she is truly one of a kind thank you mr mr mr and mrs von der linden for the gift of your daughter this year um [Applause] thank you so much for this opportunity to share today thank you mrs gleason and mrs utley we always like to let the audience know at this time that wow we would love for you to stay for the meeting
015we don't want you to feel obligated to do so so if you need to leave feel free to do so at this time foreign president reese members of the board our as our preschool our peaceful friends leave so quietly we'll continue um they're so quiet um i have some upcoming events and we're actually excited about a couple of these upcoming events we want to make you aware of so the first thing obviously is we have we are on the verge of spring break and we are happy to share that we are on a verge of a very different spring break than we were last year as you know communication will go to families encouraging them to enjoy their break but also to help us keep our schools safe and mitigation strategies stay strong because we
016look forward to returning and finishing this year very strong and we're real proud of our community our students our employees for everything they've done together during this time so that's that's one of the things we are happy about the other one is something kind of something cool that has come up so this past saturday we have had this on our agenda for a while uh this march 31st there's this good governance event and this past friday uh mrs reach and i had an opportunity to work with sarah watts to plan this event and we're actually very excited about this event because on this day we're going to be hosting with the gilbert chamber of commerce with a group of business individuals a good governance event and it will be hosted through a zoom platform but
017what we're excited about is in developing this agenda with sarah and the business chamber businesses that will be part of this we're literally going to have rooms where we're going to set um says two it will go two by two including myself so for instance myself and mrs anderson might be setting up up as a group and we'll have a zoom room each of you would have a zoom room you'll have also cabinet members in there but we're going to have conversations with our business community one of the things we've been talking about is our strategic plan we've been talking about portrait of a graduate we're talking about what what are the desired skills and abilities that we want our graduates to have this is going to be the conversation that that we as governing
018board engage our local businesses in in these zoom rooms so each of you will have a set of questions and an agenda again we just talked with sarah on friday she is on spring break but sent us the agenda this morning and it will be at 8 00 a.m and we will provide more information to you but the setup of this is going to be a really great opportunity for the higley district leadership to work with our business community as we go into other events coming up in the month because you'll notice the month of april we've got lots of meetings we've got two regular meetings and we also have a retreat in which we talk about our goals and plans and those kind of things so we'll have had an opportunity to talk with
019our business community and their thoughts and feelings about those things as we as we engage in that conversation next so some exciting things to look forward to uh for the next month here and that concludes the superintendent's report um president reese asked a question real quick yes mrs anderson i apologize if you if you said this um will there be any um teachers or a part of this i didn't hear good question so this is we work and this is one of the very first um first school districts to do this this way in a zoom session normally this is like a running board having a conversation or leadership with business and community members so this will be something we have lots of dialogue and conversation about but those who are member of the chamber
020who come to these conversations and we're just happening to be hosting it with them and this will be the first zoom one like this they've had normally they have breakfast where we come and we highlight and we do a presentation the structure of this one the agenda that we started with looks more like there will be a message from srp there's some business people who are part of the chamber and those who can attend we'll learn a little bit about our new board members yeah your new board you know your new district leadership and the fact that we are working on an agenda with them to have a dialogue with that audience we'll obviously have multiple audiences in groups that would be part of hearing this but this allows us to talk to the town
021of gilbert's business commerce group around this topic and it's a really good event attended by a lot of just local businesses as well as larger corporations and it's a good way for us to share where we're at what we're doing um and kind of what our vision is and it's a good way for businesses to help us um stay on top of what they're looking for from a workforce so at that point that information is gathered and then we see what we can do to take back so president reese members of the board in fact one of the questions that allow us to do is what kind of opportunities do they have in their businesses that we may not know about that we should be aware of so that we can bring it back to
022our leadership to our teachers when we're looking at how do we build and grow these partnerships so the chamber is is a city group that is business leaders and this is a bridge to talk from leadership to leadership and then build upon so you all right then we will go on to board comments anyone have any board comments not a lot happening i did have the opportunity williamsfield wintergarden drumline hosted a higley only event for their winter lines their winter guards drum lines winter winds things like that so they did host a higley district only event so that the kids could have the opportunity to perform and that was it was really neat to go and see again since the entire season last year was canceled so it was nice to see those kids really
023work and they enjoyed performing so um i did actually um via zoom for some form of live stream skip parts of the higley choir performance and if anybody knows the history of choir within our district the program has just busted out and the whole stage was full of children and it was great to see even in masks you could hear and understand them um it was very well done and what is kind of neat again there's not a lot of great things coming out of covid but i could sit home in my jammies and watch it and so it was really great mrs wilson uh i actually did see the orchestra concert for the littles i got to go to one and it was kind of nice to you know there was just families and
024they were on their own benches in their mass and they did a good job i want to applaud our families for listening and just really taking it to heart that this is the only way they're going to get these events um and they did they listened and i just want to thank all the families who decided to come out in this scary time to watch their kiddos and our orchestra program at the elementaries they are doing so well and i can't even imagine that these kids some of them have only had really two core two quarters to perform one quarter was online but then two real quarters to work on that these songs and they play so well um it was just it was very fun to see these littles work so hard on music
025and just to see the program grow from where it started because this is only a four three or four year old program and it was really nice to see seeing and listening and hearing all of these performances and that we're we're moving not to normal yet but moving in a direction but i think the biggest part for me is even with the masks and everything else these kids are lighting up performing i mean it's so important to them and they are just thrilled and are willing to do and sing with the masks on and do whatever they can so that they can perform and so it was it's really nice to hear about our performing arts and that we're we're getting concerts and assemblies and everything going again so because you can see it in
026their face that you can that it means so much to them so thank you for everyone following what we're asking them to so we can continue to do this i know we will continue to do more and add more all those conversations are happening so thank you for following the guidance and suggestions and and the requirements on our campuses so all right mrs reach do we have any requests to speak okay then we'll go on to our consent agenda and i move that we approve our consent agenda as it's presented second questions or comments on consent all right all those in favor aye aye aye motion five zero and just a little note um president reese um thanking again for the gifts and the donations i see that it was a preschool pto donating balance
027beams and again maricopa donating that's a little stretch of a gift but still we we appreciate our pto so much that do so much for our schools thank you for pointing that out all right we're going to go on to our informational items and so we are on 7.1 for our summer school update all right president reece members of the board cabinet community we're excited to give you an update this evening on summer school and somebody just said a lot of good things didn't come out of covid but i'm going to say we got some funding here and we're going to use it so next slide tonight we're going to share some information with you about credit recovery pe boost courses and of course elementary my favorite all right credit recovery our main focus is
028for these kids that have failed one or more courses to recover that credit get them back on track to graduate on time and fill in those gaps like i just mentioned we're going to use sr3 funds to cover the cost of summer school these are all in person and we strongly believe in person is the way to go some of these kids have been online and it's been tough so we know smaller groups of kids feedback from teachers and intentional targeted focus on areas of struggle make that difference so you'll see these classes are free they're held at higley high school there's two sessions monday through thursday 7 30 to 11 30 each day these are the courses that are offered they're for ninth tenth and eleventh graders sometimes kids might be in algebra one
029past semester one and not past semester two so they will have an opportunity in session two to recover that credit um i think that's important because maybe i was a lot of cases it might have been reversed because i wasn't in person that first quarter i had some gaps i didn't do so well but then i caught up so we're going to get them in shape to move forward i think this is an amazing program because it is free and we're going to get very highly qualified teachers to support our kids mrs richards is it just for fs or if somebody um maybe in ninth grade got a c second semester of their world history and they wanted to up that grade for possible scholarship opportunities are they allowed to do that dr foley yes
030that's a very good question so i'm glad you asked that because other people would have had the same one all right next slide all right we do offer pe and this is for credit and that's why we charge for this course a lot of our kids are planning ahead they want to get this credit out of the way so that they have more opportunities during the school year it costs 250 dollars it's also in person at higley high school it's a three-week session the dates are the 7th through the 24th the hours are 7 30 to 11 30. and then our boost classes are for kids that need possibly some front loading is what i would call it or maybe a little remediation going into seventh grade or going into their freshman year of algebra
031this is specifically related to math and they selected math because sometimes those foundational concepts are where our kids struggle so if we have gaps in math we're in trouble you know ela spans across the globe in my opinion k-12 that math if they have some concepts they didn't get or they learned it incorrectly we've got to get in there and help them be successful in middle school and high school heather jones is our administrator for these courses being offered at higley high school one thing elementary's doing is we're going over data very closely and putting it in some excel spreadsheets which will help these recommendations that will go forward for kids to help them qualify or know about these courses so i'm excited about that there's no cost no credit um i like their name
032boost but i like our elementary name wait till you hear that anyway it's a three week session same hours we are going to be able to offer transportation for kids that need it and breakfast and lunch so that's good there are some benefits to this crazy pandemic all right when you think about elementary traditionally we've offered summer school for our title one campuses and those are gateway chaparral and power ranch we're going to continue to do that but this year we get to expand it and i'm really excited because i know we have some learning loss due to this pandemic go all the way back to a year ago this time when everything blew up all the way through september 8th so miss felicia malloy is going to help hire these teachers and it's scheduled
033for the two weeks in june of the 7th through the 18th our hours are 7 45 till noon transportations available for elementary kids as well as breakfast and lunch lunch is going to look like when you're done learning grab your lunch and you can go we're going to have to teach them not to eat on the bus so anyway matthew's crossing is going to help provide snacks staffing at elementary will include a health aide secretary somebody that's trained so we don't lose the ground we've covered this year with all of these safe practices and then a lead teacher to assist with administrative duties advertising for this will begin in april all right just like i said we're extending this to all campuses this year we worked this year this year this week it's been a
034long week [Laughter] we worked yesterday to start drilling down on our data to see which of our kids are going to benefit from this opportunity we're going to use chaparral power and probably gateway but we're going to have to see the numbers of kiddos we have one of the biggest challenges is to make sure we have teachers so thank goodness i think we have an opportunity for our teachers that have worked so hard this year not only will they get an hourly rate they're going to get a stipend on top of that so hopefully well i have more than enough teachers because i don't want to turn around children miss amanda day the dean of chaparral is helping us with all the paperwork and communication and curtis helped design the logo and the name of
035the elementary summer school is schools in for summer and we have a really cute logo for that [Music] pretty much the same information there we're going to focus on ela and math and like i said those stipends probably are going to hopefully make our teachers know how valued they are thank you mrs richards i know that this um the boost classes are excellent my own daughter took it and um so i just want to make sure that everybody understands that it is really helpful to those struggling in mathematics making those jumps from especially i thought for her my daughter middle school to high school was a big jump and it was a great program so i'm glad we've kept boost president race board member taylor thank you for sharing that one of the things we're
036excited about is one of the things we're learning is that sr3 is going to require that a percentage of this go toward learning loss i expect you know last year if you remember the governor and in the budget there was an incentive for summer school um and that isn't there this year but the expectation is that you use esther for this and so what's really nice is that we will have if if there is k-12 or if you've got a need for remediation recovery enrichment support you will have a free opportunity with transportation to take something this summer to support you and we will use our esther funds to do that and this one time we have this additional funding we will use it as an incentive to encourage our wonderful teachers to for their
037time for providing this opportunity because our hope is that we have more participate in this than we have historically had so we're excited to be able to provide this opportunity and get the information out there so that those who are interested we can get it staffed we can get transportation ready to go and and and have something great for our our community and our students this summer can i ask a question is that okay um is there a plan in place just in case i hope not but if a student needs to quarantine will they be able to do watch anything online to get keep on task and maybe finish either the programs credit recovery boost whatever it is or just so that they can have the opportunity so they have that opportunity we can
038work on that because we have canvas but we weren't going to go both ways with it if it makes sense i think it's i'm going to hope that's not happening because i know they need that interaction that we can definitely work on and plan if they're out so just i mean if they make it so far and it's just like a week left or you know a few days left it'd be great yeah you don't want to punish them yeah okay thank you every day we have about 15 new questions so it's like okay we forgot or we didn't think of that so president reece board member anderson and i think there's a difference too when we're talking about credit recovery there's multiple platforms that we could we could modify and work with the student
039on when it's enrichment to support what it may look like is a communication with the parent and and resources it will won't have the same interaction opportunity but certainly certainly we're being very intentional to work look at our data to identify students who would benefit from that so we'll make sure that we do whatever we can because following those mitigation plans and if you're not feeling well we would not want you to come to summer school so we we would want to everything that we have learned about how to mitigate during the school year will be alive and well in our protocols and expectations in our summer classrooms reece mrs wilson quick question i'm sorry i did not send this prior um elementary will they get the same opportunity if let's say the kid is
040getting a c in a class and they want to come in the parent wants them to come in are they going to be able to or is it just going to be failing kids just like mrs kaler said for the high school will it be open for elementary or we're going to do everything we can to support all kids okay i'm just going to be honest i got to get teachers first that's my yes first and the applications actually went out today so we're asking that the teachers get their applications in by the monday after spring break so the answer is i don't want to turn any kid away thank you like the kid with the c yeah i mean if the parent feels that the kid could we'll do everything we can that's how
041i'm going to answer it that sounds like a great answer thank you well considering we're looking at this as a learning loss i mean the grade doesn't always reflect everything that right they haven't learned so they may be passing but that they did have a loss of learning there and mrs anderson thank you for that question i think that i think that will be difficult because it's a three week time frame and the time you would have to quarantine and with it being the purpose of trying to to catch them up but i think looking into our different options is a good idea and reiterating more so the importance of following social distancing masks and not just when you're at school because we have found and we know that the kids that are the majority
042of the kids that are contracting covid is not happening on our campuses so um you know keep our fingers crossed we're here to try and help kids catch up make up a deficit something that um they missed and it's three weeks but it's like keep our fingers crossed and please help us get through three weeks to try and help the these kids catch up a little bit thank you for making us think ahead though all right any other questions regarding our summer school update all right then we will move on to our salary schedules good evening i think i have to move that a little closer good evening president reese members of the board my fellow colleagues as well as our community tonight i'm here to discuss our salary schedules and our pay rates for
043our different employee groups next slide please so um in addition to the salary schedules we're also going to be talking about supplementals and we're going to be looking at them at all of our employee areas so our certified our administrators are classified supplementals and substitute pay one area we are not addressing tonight is our educational professionals and that includes our psychologists our ots occupational therapist our speech language pathologist or speech speech language therapist i have to make sure that i spell out those alphabetical words alphabet soup and the reason for that is because of the fact that they were our most recent group of employees that went through our reclassification and compensation projects which i'll talk a little bit more about in which we were able to really look at a competitive increase for them
044as well as competitive changes into their salaries and the salary bases that we had so to give you a little bit of history and context because we do have two members of the board who weren't here at the time that we looked to do this in the fall of 2018 the district joined with seven other school districts in the east valley to compromise and go out not compromise pardon me to come together and go out for a rfp in regards to our request for proposal related to a classification and compensation study so these are common within organizations particularly in education and human resources because at some point when you look at your job classifications and your salary schedule sometimes you have to address are we paying equitably have we addressed any paid compression that might
045be going on and the impotence for this was because of prop 206 that had occurred and passed in november of 2016 which not only had a piece in relation to sick leave for employees but also in terms of minimum wage where the state of arizona was going to see an almost four dollar increase within a four-year period of time so not only districts but certainly private employers were going to have to look and address this challenge for higley a large component of that for us was prior to my arrival our pay schedule particularly for our classified most of our employees were making under 12 an hour so if you were going to look at addressing in four years going up to 12 an hour with approximately at the time 700 and some employees you were
046going to hit salary compression to where you probably had employees who'd been here at the district four five plus years who weren't making twelve dollars an hour to individuals right off the bat needing to address that twelve dollars an hour and that wasn't something that we could look to do on our own um in terms of manpower as well as the fact really needing to find somebody who could look at the scope of other labor markets within the state of arizona and additionally expertise in other areas within our region too and through that we interviewed three different organizations jb rewards was the organization that rised to the top and had done work within education on the west coast as well as in health care in terms of cost and scope of project had experience in
047which all of us pulling our resources together and the different dollars that we had that made sense in the bigger picture and so some of the things i already talked about and the main reason why we did this was to look at our in equities our pay compression and really the structures in which that existed and the like i said the impetus of it was our hourly employees however as we took advantage of it we also knew we had to take a look at our administrators our educational professionals and our supplementals we did not specifically look at our other certified in regards to our teachers because of the fact of governor ducey's 20 by 20 plan we had done a lot of work in moving the base rate of our teacher salaries and the time
048that i've been here and what you're about to see later tonight in today's presentation you'll see that it's our third if not fourth time in about five years that the teacher-based salary has increased so next slide please so looking at our certified um as i said we did not have it as part of our larger project in relation to this class and compensation area however we did know that if we were going to stay competitive particularly around the fact of the governor's 20 by 20 plan we also had to take a look at these areas so just recently within the last year we did increase our teacher certified from 40 to 41 000 so tonight you're seeing that we're looking at increasing our teacher our school counselors and our district coaches by 2.5 percent which
049will then be those recommended changes that you're noticing and the reason for this is because of the fact that again if we're going to look to recommend which is coming up later today in action a five percent increase based on the conversations that mr moore as well as mr gad has presented in our mno budget over the course of the last few board meetings we do need to take a look at these areas so that way we could look at again distinguishing that pay compression from our first individuals and coming on board with us to individuals who have some time with us and some people refer to it as also kind of a loyalty tax i tend to say internal equity because of the fact that we want to view the individuals that have been
050with us and their time and value the time that they have spent their tenure and have chosen us you see differences some of this is because it's been modeled within higley certainly before my time here i'm on my fourth school year i can't identify how far back it goes but i certainly understand that goes back at least a couple years before i arrived where there were different base rates for these different groups so we just continued in that area our school counselor and our district instructional coaches actually have not been addressed as part of the governor's 20 by 20 plan because they did not fall within that area but historically because they had higher rates we didn't address them also but it is time to look at that as we look at other components related
051to our certified other items i want to note is that our school counselors they do have the opportunity to get an additional 15 days of pay at their daily rate particularly at the high schools we utilize our school counselors for our master schedule there's some dynamic of that at the middle school too so they do come on board help with various things and we pay them their daily rate as a result our teachers our continuing teachers our school counselors and our district coaches let me rephrase that our continuing teachers our school counselors if they're returning they're on 186 day contracts our district coaches and our new employees are 190-day contracts and the reason why our district coaches are always on 190 is because of the fact that they are heavily involved with new employee orientation
052in that first week prior to starting the school year and we utilize them to really help support our new teachers and modeling good practices best practices procedures practices within the district and we need them for that and that's why they're on longer contracts as a result also next slide please so modeling our 2.5 recommendation you'll see that not only here but in the other schedules that we present in terms of the classified we looked at our administrators and professional exempt and again when we did this and we implemented it it all seems like a long time ago but really it was actually only a year ago um for formal implementation this past july one um when you take a look at it at the time when we embarked on this project we had a number
053of meetings and for some of you that were on the board remember that we did multiple updates in relation to the project where we're at where we're going and what we're doing a lot of you may or may not recall that i shared that based on budget in terms of planned capacity we looked at a 40 to 45 percentile increase for our different employee groups because that's what we could afford um so we implemented our our project as a result of that 40-45 costing for us with our current employees and so um our schedules and everything else reflected that what we've learned and what has been great with mr moore and mr gad is that we have additional budget capacity as they have mentioned in our previous presentations with their mno in which we have
054the ability to look to increase these and we need to stay competitive something that i learned as we were looking to address these schedules mr vance jacobson who is the project team lead for our jb reward system has actually been brought back to the east valley because there's some other school districts within the seven um the seven that participated and then we're in addition to that which makes eight felt as though they went conservative on their salary schedules and what they implemented so he's actually been back reassessing some of those other districts and the salary schedules they have for some of their positions and then shared with me as a result that if we want to stay competitive we're going to have to address our schedules a little bit more too we certainly know and
055understand in terms of size for our comparable districts we were larger and we're growing with some and others we're never going to match up to in terms of who surrounds us so budget capacity always has to be taken into consideration in what we have and the dollars that we get per student however the reality is they are still our competitives because they are next door to us and although we may not be able to hit their percentiles or hit their rates we have to do our best to make sure we stay as competitive as we can in addition to pay i'm also looking at what other benefits or what other things can we offer in terms of value to keep our employees with us or to attract individuals to come to higley and in the
056time period that i've been here i think we've we've done a great job in terms of what we've done and what we've put out there and how we've handled things to where i think higley's being recognized as a district of choice or a district that individuals want to come and work for and i'm hearing that in lots of different levels certainly in the searches that we've done but also um as individuals have shared with us through colleagues that they've working with at other places and other committees outside of higley um you know like higley's doing great things and you know we're keeping our eyes on that so that's wonderful to hear next slide please miss martins real quick can i just ask um on our on the previous slide we also determined that people pretty
057much were coming in at the midpoint no matter what and that kind of threw off this the salary schedule and this kind of addresses that does it not yes it does not so much at the midpoint what we discovered um was that there uh for lack of a better word the practices weren't consistent um so we discovered to no fault of any of us currently um and there had been people who brought in at ranges and salaries that we couldn't explain when you then looked at internal individuals who'd been with the district longer maybe had more experience so that was something that was confusing as well as the fact that we did have people who were brought in um at the midpoint of the salary schedule but then when you looked at again why compared
058to other individuals it didn't make sense and then when i came on board and the practice that i was using based on the salary schedules that existed looking at experience looking in other areas not knowing um not having gone back to research the history of some of our current employees and their experiences and what they were brought in at discovered that there was a large discrepancy in terms of what i had offered based on what i could tell is experience degree impact versus what had been previously done so that is correct thank you next slide please president reese members of the boardwalk one of the things i think is important that we also talk about is that tonight when we're talking you know this is an information item and this is addressing salary schedule so
059obviously we're talking talking about a budget we're talking about increases potential increases that is for for this year this is looking at the salary schedules and you will be looking at these and voting on them on april 7th so this is an information item but one of the things is when you address the salary for right now you also have to look at what the schedules look like to to align with to be part of whatever you do for a salary decision and and i think the mum is kind when she says we we we coined the term coopetation we're in coopetation with other districts because we cooperate and we collaborate but we're looking for the same we're going after the same high quality employees so it's important to within our range stay competitive and
060keep our salary schedules updated as whatever we do with any any salary decision we make our salary schedules have to be part of that piece so we kind of do one and then the other no thank you dr foley that is very important um to note in this bigger picture that this is an information item for you guys to process and that we will come back um you know we listened and heard from previous meetings that you like an opportunity to hear the information process and reflect on it and then be able to vote at a different time so we understand the importance of it and it is different in the sense that tonight later you'll be voting on continuing employees where this is for anybody new coming to the district that'll take effect july
0611 of 2021 for our fiscal 2021-2022 school year so in regards to our classified non-exempt we also did look at them too in terms of that 2.5 starting percent to all of our starting rates that we have and all of our classifications and our grades you know we're looking at just the schedule of pay right now we do post on our website and you have seen drafts of what we have in terms of what grades and positions match and online so you can see where they would fall if looking at for example a bus driver or classified administrative assistant or anything along those lines and if we were to go back and talk about the administrators and the exempt positions you'll see where those fall within those grades also so one thing i do want
062to note um which is unfortunate but something we might need to consider and i would like to give the board a heads up is that you know we did a lot of good work in regards to what we did moving this direction and creating a new salary schedule that provided competitive in my opinion competitive rates in terms of grades and steps and this year our employees which is wonderful we are looking at five percent for our classified too even though you are recommending for our administrators and our certified and our educational professionals tonight will come back in that april meeting that first april 7th meeting to make a recommendation for our classified that would also recommend that 5 which i do have to say is wonderful because in the 10 that i have been here
063our classified has not seen the same percentage as our other employee groups and certainly five percent for them is different than five percent for our other employee groups but to be able to see that the same numbers being used consistently across the board is is actually huge and i think they'll see that and value that in the bigger picture but going back to what i wanted to say was that we may have to reassess whether or not we can continue to operate on a grade and step system or we may need to look at whether we go to ranges or quartiles for our classified because it's quite likely beyond this year we're unlikely to provide certain percentages that were built within the step and grade system based on budget so i don't want to be
064surprised if we look to change that a little bit up more in the future so our next slide is our supplementals and this is an interesting area i certainly know right when i arrived i was approached by a number of people in terms of our supplementals and what we offer and what we do and understanding that as well as the fact that dr fowler through having previously been the athletic director trying to work with my predecessor and looking at this and seeing whether or not we could change processes and systems up unfortunately at the times even though certainly not from us not trying to champion it we just when it came to the bigger picture in terms of our budget and spending weren't able to be successful at changing or increasing any of these so
065it's been a minimum of five years since these have been addressed potentially more again i can't speak to that since that was prior to my tenure so really kind of changing our models completely so this is not just a 2.5 percent this is actually looking beyond what we had previously had in regards to what we had was formulaic based on an old base salary of thirty six thousand dollars um so like i said it had been at least five plus years as when i started here the district salary for teachers was thirty eight thousand dollars um and getting comments of people not understanding well why is it not based on 38 000 um and it's 36 although it says it's based on a base salary so we had to look at changing language to help
066people understand you know yes at one point it was a base salary but now what we're saying is based on a factor um from 36 000 and addressing that but through the work again i can't say enough about mr gad and mr moore in regards to what they've helped us do and what they've been able to realize for the district we understand that we can model this differently and this model of these levels and steps um actually are comparable to three other districts around us um i think i shared this before uh through a status report but i'd like to share again too mr jacobson as part of his class and comp study actually was requested to do this for two of the larger districts in our area because they had had models that had
067not been reviewed and looked at and or models that really were going to need to shift because of growth that they were anticipating so he was kind enough to share this data with all of us even though we didn't specifically asked for this so i was able to work with him to identify levels in which we being what i would describe a midsize school district and what could be competitive for us and then shifting our different groups like our coaches our spirit line areas again athletics as well as activities student council yearbook robotics etc to where they could align with this we are going to have to do some more work and there's going to be other layers here as most of what we've offered um i'm not changing that model yet because there could
068be other budgetary impacts that we don't know about i know some questions had come up in regards to are we interested in expanding the number of items that we have and again that's a larger conversation which will have to involve finance as well as mr lutzenheiser in terms of the director of secondary and our athletic directors at the sites so that way they can be part of the conversation in terms of where our priorities need to be but i think it's great that we're able to look at a different model that i think those that have been with us for a long time coaching whether it's our current teachers and or other individuals who've come to higley interested in coaching for us to help us be competitive will value in this process so the next
069slide please leadership and department chair um i did specifically put this separate because it had been done separately back in 2016. the board had approved on only the number of leadership and department share stipends that could be handed out they also approved rates you can see what those rates are because they have not changed since that time period and putting these off of that other supplemental will have a larger budgetary impact so looking at it and looking at a 2.5 percent increase so then again we're not going outside of what we we think we can handle but yet showing that we do understand and need to address there needs to be an increase because four to five years of not seeing that certainly can raise questions i also put on there as miss richards mentioned
070you know we are looking for s or three money um looking at getting s or three money and since that is one time money looking to do that for the supplementals for a one-time loss um you know we're still working on i know we've identified a potential number that we think that we will attract those teachers who may want a long break but this might attract them to want to come our way and maybe instead of picking up something for the summer somewhere else they'd be willing to teach a little bit more for us so wanting to make sure that we we do our best for our students but also making sure that we do what's right for our employees in that process and then our last slide um it has been an interesting year
071uh an interesting year yeah a little a year um i wanted to say a year and a half but here um in regards to our substitutes and our teacher coverage you know something great that we implemented this year and certainly something that we wish to continue next year but we know has a large budgetary impact is the fact that we identified what we called these rescue subs so at every school site we had one or two or more our secondary schools have more rescue subs to help they're full-time positions so if individuals needed to be out because of quarantine or other reasons they were able to be placed in classrooms to assist right on the spot additionally we always still have our just subs in general that come in daily but we needed to let
072our sites know not only in terms of our employees and our teachers but also our administration that we're here to support you but what we've learned in terms of the daily component is that um we're all going back to this the term that you had dr foley which uh i can't remember but co-co-petition yes that is a great term competition we learned that large school districts again understanding they have larger budget capacity raised their substitute daily rate as well as their long-term rate by 50 this year to attract substitutes to head their way because they were struggling and much larger districts do struggle differently than we struggle right but again going back to that coopetition they are going to leave us and go elsewhere so i do think it's time we also address our sub
073our long term rate and something new that we have not done at higley but other school districts do is that those employees that are their retirees they offer the higher rate from the beginning and not just offer them the the flat dollar rate for any other area so i think that will attract potential husd retirees to pick up subpositions for us if they know that their daily rate will be that 145 right away versus building from whether it's the 100 currently or the 125 which ultimately would be the recommendation so that will be helpful as well as teacher coverage teacher coverage for those of you who don't understand what that term means so when at the secondary level only we try to find a substitute and we were unsuccessful in finding a substitute to cover
074a course or section we then reach out to our current employees to see whether or not they'd be willing to give up their prep time to then cover that course we have historically been paying 18 per session i don't want to say per hour but per class per session um and looking to address that to be more competitive and i did take a look at other comparable school districts around us and see that they did increase some of theirs too some of them are still around 17 18 per section some of them have recently increased them again this year to reflect the other challenges that we've had this year and so that 25 rate reflects a more competitive component for that um and something again that we have not addressed in my tenure here with
075the district and then questions that you might have that i can address i just want to say thank you for for doing all the hard work for this looking at the budget and possibly depending on what goes really motivating and showing value to the staff especially after this year um so this is great this is good to see i've i've been there with the 18 coverage and might as well just give me a nickel that stinks so it's nice to see that there's a potential to increase that um so i appreciate everything seriously um one question um on the teacher coverage you said that's just for secondary so if an elementary teacher covers them there's not any compensation for them correct that is correct and um i'll explain what i understand and miss richards can
076certainly elaborate on that so at the secondary level they teach five courses and have a prep time at the elementary level because they don't have different sections you're with your course the whole time you don't your prep time is typically their specials which is class goes to that separate and the teacher then works while their student is in specials and so um when a teacher doesn't show up and we don't have coverage what ended up happening prior to covid is that we would split the class and so then if there's four sections of fourth grade and one teacher was unable to make it then we take that fourth grade classroom that might house 25 to 30 students and distribute them amongst the other grade levels and miss richards if there's something else to add to
077that this year that's been a little challenging that's why the rescue subs have come to the rescue and they've been good about sharing because if coronado needed one then sometimes gateway would send theirs the other thing we have and we don't like doing this but if we have to we have lit coaches that can cover in our gifted coaches um and we've sent our district coaches to support this year so it wasn't a good year for us to divide kids up and mix them in so we've improvised so it's worked out so in a normal year then the teachers in elementary school are still getting a break than what you're saying correct okay so that's why yes they don't have that five courses in a prep time they are all day with the classroom however
078they get a break during when they're going to specials and you can't divide you can't have them be pulled in a different area like you can at the secondary level and just so i could really understand rescue subs there always are rescue subs well this year was the first year that we implemented them but we are going to advise that we continue them for next year and then we'll have to continue to assess from there because certainly um as you've noticed and paid attention to our quarterly reports with esi um you know our sub budget and our cost for them has you know risen quite extremely thank you uh i'm sorry are you is there still the school budget like site budget that they only have so much so many dollars for subuse is that
079still in place no miss anderson so it all runs together but i believe my second year with the district so 1819 through the meet and confer process we decided to look at subs as a big picture across the district and not per site so you are correct that previously for lack of a better word that sub budget was kind of divided by sight and they were told they have x number of dollars that they could utilize for subs unfortunately right or wrong each site then implemented that in their own way which came to become challenges in a bigger picture so through long discussions we said you know our our teachers are professionals they'll make decisions that are best and what's needed as a district when we looked at our total budget expenditure we weren't spending
080it total you know some sites certainly needed the subs more than other sites um and so let's look at a bigger picture we would still behind the scenes keep an idea of how much we we would quote unquote allocate per site um but really looking at the larger picture of the budget so if one school let's say a secondary school started to run up a little bit we would then call them up and say hey just so you know you're you know you're spending this much money in sub areas and just wanted to give you a heads up because it's a lot more than you typically have spent and or what might have been traditionally allocated to you um in that same process what we did was we actually revisited our quote-unquote blackout calendar and
081we really changed that to where we were only focused on areas that we felt really needed to have all of our employees here in other areas that had previously been you know i think before each holiday every wednesday to where there was probably a good chunk of blackouts each month we went to a model in which we're only doing blackouts during the month of july november and may um and that's it um on april depending on the site in terms of uh testing that occurs so the site would have to make that decision in terms of additional areas that was needed for their area and so through a combination of doing both of that we said okay we're going to look at a hole and not divide it up so then one site doesn't tell
082their teams that you only get to use two days and another site's not telling their teams that so and i check in every year and it's been successful and we've not seen any large concerns so mrs martins i too want to echo what ms anderson said even reading from our strategic plan of our goal number two 2.1 recruit hiring retained quality educators 2.3 ensure staff feels valued and supported and i think there's no better way than to somebody to feel valued and supported other than words of affirmation if that's your love language but also financially and so i appreciate all the hard work that the whole team has done on behalf of higley and i hope that our our community too is hearing all the good things coming from their support as well supporting our
083staff so again thank you thank you miss kayla but it's been the work as you said of the whole team cabinet other district administration our collaborative processes with our certified and i would be remiss if i did not say the work of the human resources and payroll department too absolutely any other questions thank you for essentially it's a follow-up and continuation with um looking at our salary schedules to ensure that we are where we're supposed to be and we can remain competitive so thank you for being able to follow up now that covid has allowed us to to go back to that so i appreciate it all right then we're going to move on to 7.3 which is the second review of our 2021-2022 capital outlay budget and president members of the board you have
084seen this capital outlay budget on one previous occasion this is the second round of showing you this budget it is the budget that's ongoing from the state the state funds about per student it's an annual capital budget um and sometimes it funds less than that because the state has had a budget problem and this is the first place that they'll go in which to balance their budget so it's an easier one to to do that rather than mno so um the increase is significant from that where the current budget level is it adds about 15 20 percent of additional funding that was removed from the formula back a few years ago when the state needed during the recession when the state needed to balance its budget the budget balance carry forward um was significant and
085and i we believe that was very uh significant and is kind of indicative of if you don't have a long-range plan and you just keep collecting this money and not allocating it to something then you know we we have a lesser effect on the students program so we have taken the 16 million and reduced it to 8.6 with the budget that's shown here when we think that given that we only get we get about 6 million a year we think 8.6 is probably an okay number to have it's more than 100 percent of what we get annually from the state is new money i would think most people would think that that's a much it's a much more defensible number than 16 million it does offer a significant emphasis on technology a one-to-one ratio of
086devices and you heard that when robert presented to you at the last meeting the technology plan it reduces the mmo transfer from 4.4 million to 2.9 million so we're trying to restore to mno as much funding as we can this is in general kind of capital items that we felt could be a transfer so that we would stop that transfer and use it directly to balance our m o budget for next year and we think with the dollar amounts here we think that's reasonable to do for the first time it does decentralize the furniture and equipment budget directly to schools so this this decentralization is the administrative staff and the teachers at each school receives monies to buy whatever their program requires it's ten dollars a student so it does provide um some additional funds
087for library books it's up to forty dollars a student for furniture and equipment it's got two or three items in it that were not previously there and i think generally speaking it it takes the decision making process directly to the school rather than us deciding well i think we should buy telescopes or i think we should buy microscope or whatever it allows the individual campus to decide whether they need computers whether they need whatever it is and that i i think will be a more effective way in which to allocate that money mr gad on that same note i know that one of the areas that some of our teachers that i've heard may be struggling for items is our labs our our science department i know that many of our teachers have bought their
088own you know oreo cookies for their science project and whatnot and you know i just don't want to ever nickel and dime our teachers in that area so having this now i just hope that we get that information out to the schools and especially our science departments that i know teachers were buying their own lab experiments when we weren't providing for it so thank you for that thank you and and i know that sherry and david both have been active with the schools and telling them that they have this money on the way yeah dr foley have our admin been receptive of the idea of having their own budgets president reece vice president wilson one of the things i'd happy to share with you is that we had a general administrator meeting several weeks ago
089where we had an opportunity to to talk with him about the work we've been doing with with you as a governing board and talk about again more details for the presentations we've been doing here and i will tell you that our administrative team was very pleased about that um feels that that'll be a very important thing and we also talked about the fact that obviously there are still the things that the district is supposed to fund is still going to continue to fund the curriculum the resources but this allows them to have a budget to address those specific needs that may not have been there before so there was a very positive reception to this and i thought that sounded great the question was how soon can that start okay in addition to this capital
090budget the board will be applying as it has in the past for school facility board funding of various projects and also using e-rate as it has in the past to enhance the technology program so those two funds will supplement what you see here so hopefully to the extent that this fb has gotten more money in the last couple of years that's the reason they can approve as many projects as they have as the state is restoring money to them so you know the district should fare well with this one because of that restoration okay oh and i wanted to mention one more thing there's a there's a dollar amount in here for curriculum adoption it's fairly large it's about three million dollars so now the district has the ability to start implementing a plan deal
091with whatever textbook whatever form that takes for future years and that money hopefully will stay there then every year as a as an allocation amount to make sure that our curriculum is up to date in terms of its age and mr gatt if we didn't buy curriculum that year would that be part of our rollover money yes thank you okay moving on to the next page this is the summary that we've created from the detail and you received a packet earlier at our first review with those page numbers in a larger document they explain to you and what those allocation amounts are intending to purchase and we've covered i think a pretty adequate list of things in addition to providing some contingency if we need it for an example as i come down this list
092about the third second item in is we've run out we've not allocated 1.5 million okay so that's that's again a cushion for us to do whatever we need to do and find out whatever changes are coming about we have enough money there to probably assign whatever amount we need the building leases you're familiar with those for the two middle schools the technology plan was presented to you by robert um and so was the 729 000 was in that plan we do have a safety and security budget set aside of 65 000 it's primarily for cameras uh so that's you know that's just to try to keep up with the needs that we have in that area major maintenance mr fowler dr fowler and others will be administering that 1.7 million along with the major project
093amounts that are that are also listed there in the million and 1.5 million so we're in the neighborhood of over well over three million dollars of this budget being assigned to maintenance and major projects that we think need to be done so we've allocated quite a bit of money to that side we have to remember that without bond funding then this budget will be the only support that they have and so we want to be sure that the district annually includes enough maintenance money uh especially to i've had questions from voters before as i spent all this money on the bond and you tell me you don't have any money to maintain it that's not the answer that you want to give so this hopefully avoids that the forty dollars a student i mentioned that
094earlier that f e allocation to the schools that's almost half a million dollars so they will be you know they they have quite a little sum of money in which to um do some enhancing on their campus the upkeep on equipment that's again maintenance buses there's 350 000 set aside in the current bond to keep the fleet up to date that's over in the third column the white fleet we're beginning just now to have a an ongoing allocation we set aside 108 that's basically for trucks and you know vans and things like that that don't seem to get a lot of attention over time we have a 10 uh per student budget for library books it's intended that that that each librarian would have you know basically a list of books they believe that should
095be added to the collection at their school they have this amount of money in which to work with fine arts we've we put a line in here for primarily musical instruments they're in bad shape and we want to start a program to get them replaced so we've set an allocation it's at the district level so we will review what the needs are at each school and and we we think i think rightfully so we did not sign it on a per student basis because my suspicion is some schools have adequacy and other schools have none so we need to assign this based on need and that's what it's here for moving on down athletic equipment an allocation for achievement and assessment that's primarily software uh i mentioned the curriculum adoption earlier 2.9 million online academy
096we've got 55 000 set aside for equipping that uh carry forward we're still pushing even though we've got a lot of items in here where we are hopefully and and the math indicates that we will be pushing forward um eight million dollars uh to um next year so we've built in a carry forward it's not just hoping that everybody doesn't spend their budget and there's money left this one forces a carry forward so again a conservative view of what we need to do to be sure that the district doesn't get into difficulty the budget capacity amount is 6 million that is only the new that's the new money that you could probably expect to receive each year so when you try to get some sense of of size this is an important budget but it
097doesn't have on an ongoing basis a lot of money so budget balance carry forward becomes important now we're talking to you in a minute about covid ways in which we can enhance this lower amount and and the good thing about it is the state is kind of guaranteed it's not totally but it's but it's a lot firmer than some other funds and then we just need to find ways to direct other funds toward this budget so that we can continue to do in the amounts indicated here those kinds of things on a more multi-year basis [Music] and then um the total that we have here then for um we're bringing in we're projecting to bring in 16 million from this year it's not over yet but that will figure into then our total balance for
098next year um and that's the part of the revenue that supports this 24 million dollar budget adjacent ways is 2.6 million and and i believe the board is aware that we should proceed in allocating that money to those projects that need that help and and move on i think it's adequate for a while you'll remember that if you have new construction and or building additions or things like that you tend to involve this fund because it's infrastructure and it has to be approved as eligible by the sfb they're not passing judgment on what the need is they're just you know passing judgment on what the statute says in terms of what you can spend the money for and then at some point you're going to need to levy add a small amount to the tax
099rate in which to replenish this fund because it's a hundred percent property tax and the only way it gets there is for you when you adopt a budget you have a larger budget than you have in cash and then the county will levy that different so that you have that amount of money to use and i and i think you're fine because i don't think there's a plan to spend a lot of money on new construction although there is some and so at some point as that depletes itself you may need to add a little bit of money to the tax rate so that you can replenish it and the current bond is 3.5 3.6 million that we're assigning out to major projects and to equipment upkeep and to um the um basically the the
100school capital projects i kind of skipped over that one it's on page eight it says capital project schools and district that schools have requested um monies to do some improvements at each of their schools we gave them that opportunity the the request of course came in fairly heavy as you would expect and um sherry and david went out looked and decided what the highest priority items were that's what this amount represents so it's another effort toward allowing a voice on the part of school staff and school administration to not just not just furniture and equipment but i need to do this and it doesn't get lost in the process and if it makes it to the list i think there's a strong commitment on the district's part that it will do the projects that are
101listed here you don't need to worry about that it's funded it'll get done and all we need to do is after your approval develop a schedule to make it happen okay the last slide is the calendar same calendar that you have seen before tonight march 10th you'll see a part of that item is your second review of the capital budget and then i'll be talking to you shortly about covet after um and then on april 7th we will be asking you to give tenant approval to this capital budget so that we can move ahead with planning projects and doing actually some purchasing that will be dated july 1st so that the the obligation for payment occurs in the in the next year that will help everybody especially campuses who have some real desires to try
102to get some things done before school starts and and your earlier approval will help us get underway with that okay then um on april 21st we will talk to you about the potential bond we may even talk to you on april 7th depends on our schedule but beginning at least on the 21st and then extending to may 12th we will be talking to you about a possible bond and what that might consist of we've studied the alternatives for the last probably three or four months so we spent a lot of time trying to take a fairly reasonable unlimited amount and stretch it into what we think were the highest district priorities and then on june 9th and that's the date that's pretty important because if you if you don't take action to approve a resolution
103for a bond we don't have the we will not have the the latitude of calling that election later nor will we be able to do a november election it's the lead time required in the statute so you know that's coming and and so i wanted you to be aware with no surprises and there are a couple of meetings that we'll be talking about those projects at a fairly extensive list uh totals 95 million dollars so it's a significant budget over the next five years that we'll be talking to you about and and it comes from bond if you choose to make to make a decision to have an election so remember the board that summarizes the capital budget and any questions that you might have any questions okay president reese members of the board one
104of the things i'll share with you is that we started talking in october about what you've asked for we had to approve uh looking at our democrat an updated demographic study we also did a facilities indexed and as you've read in your status reports there have been walking our all of our facilities to figure out where is our space where is our growth the wonderful thing is we now have this information that we are compiling so that starting in april and may up leading up to june we're going to be able to provide we've done a lot of background information so that we can help make informed decisions about what is our future growth look like what are our priorities and needs what are our greatest maintenance projects and plans um what would be i
105what would it look like if we were to pass a bond what would it look like if we if we did not and what are some different options and you've also read about looking at things like uh is the potential for paying off one of the middle schools and saving a substantial amount of money and so we have a lot of information that will be coming to you for you to help make those decisions so that when we go in uh to call that we would know what we would what we would be looking at what it would look like if we did what it would look like if we didn't um and again a lot of work that's literally been compiled throughout this whole year to get us to this place where we have
106a real clear well we'll have the information to help make the most informed decision as possible all right thank you with that we'll go to 7.4 which is our overview of covid grant funding thank you mr president members of the board all three essers are here um sr-1 the first round the districts allocated 3.2 million dollars we have chosen to assign that to mno and how do we do that is we simply pick up expenditures that we've already made from mno that applied to covet and moved those expenditures to a fund for sr1 then what that does is it allows the district to have more balance at the end of the year in mno we've made a transfer okay so it's a way to another way to describe it it's a way to bank money
107for future use and you know and probably have that occasion so that's and it's one time money but also it's being used i think wisely in making sure that it's it's banked in the right place with the right um emphasis so that's that's sr1 and we've already transferred all of the 3.2 from mno to sr1 sr2 is 2.7 million that was passed by congress a few months back that has been assigned generally to capital you saw earlier just a few minutes ago the the use we were making a budget balance carry forward this re reinforces the net amount by 2.7 million so it brings back into the budget balance carry forward for capital a cushion is something that your district can use later on uh for capital purposes um and um and so again it's
108banking 2.7 in this case it's we're choosing to bank it into capital where the first one we chose to bank it into mno and then the last one the one that just passed congress today i believe um is uh from sr3 and that is estimated at 6.7 million it's a big one and that sr3 along with the other two brings the total over 12 million dollars so that's the district's benefit from the cobit legislation you see on the far right hand side that there are there's a time frame we'll easily you know meet that and then some i mean we've already started sr2 and we intend to get that done by june 30th so that only we'll leave outstanding sr3 and the likelihood is probably by the time that money funnels to us and we
109get it in the bank we're probably talking summer or fall and and as you can see from the footnote of that amount needs to be used for regression and and mrs richards talked to you already about some of those subjects with summer school so sr3 has some flexibility we know that we have a quarter of it that we need to set aside for regression we have some money that we will use for indirect costs that's permitted an indirect cost remember offsets mno directly and then whatever amount remains i'm guessing three to four somewhere in that range million that's going to be a district decision at the time decision from you about where do you want to assign it what do you want to assign it to uh you know and it's it's fairly large sum
110of money and we've i think we've covered well uh the m1 capital budgets already so it's it's really money is that more discretionary as to how what the board feels the district's needs are so that's an update madam president members of the board on covet funding and remember it's one time but if you strategize making sure that you're building your bank account i think that's a good way to go and have the federal government pay for things that we needed to do and had to do in order to comply with the health department we might as well get the maximum benefit from that by transferring all of the and get creative in that transfer at times uh all the items we can into a federal grant so mr gatt is there an sr4 i'm sorry
111is there an sr4 according to the newspaper they are going to propose i the one i read we still don't have enough and there's going to be an sr4 and everybody the businesses and everybody said oh yeah we need an sr4 so it could be could be we're going to run out of numbers here pretty soon and keep sending more money you know any other questions nope all right so we'll go on to 7.5 which is the presentation for the tentative approval of the mno budget for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. president members of the board mr moore has spent a great deal of time on the mno budget as you know it's the largest one we have and um he will be presenting to you this powerpoint i think we're in wonderful shape we're
112giving a salary increase that's more than anybody i know of we're so we're rewarding staff a lot through trying to use the money in the best way we know how and mr moore will present to you uh what our what our expenditures are and what our balance is and what the salary increase recommendation is that we've told you about in the past and i just wanted to compliment him publicly he's done a really good job with it new to the district had to learn fast but you know he's done a really good job but excellent job thank you tyler it's all yours you put me on a high pedestal there mr ghetto good evening president reese members of the board um this is i believe is the fourth time uh we'll be bringing this to
113you guys as information then as you see later in the agenda we'll be asking you for an action uh for approval um so we'll go to the mno highlights um as mr gatt just went over our covered relief funding we have a little more clarity on some of the amounts that we're receiving as we mentioned esr1 has been fully expended and reflected in this mno budget that we are recommending for tentative approval sr2 we are working on moving that into our capital budget so that will not be reflected in the numbers that you're presented here and then sr3 while we have an estimated amount that amount is still being determined and we have not received any funding for that currently but and like mr gad mentioned we'll determine where that greatest need is whether that
114is our mno budget for next year or a capital budget second bullet there we've recognized a 117 adm loss which is less than one percent of our total student population um if you've read the newspaper or seen other districts they're experiencing a lot larger losses so we're grateful in that um we're not in that position and you'll see that reflected in our budget um that we're going to be presenting here and our revision and then our projected 22 budget we are estimating that we are not going to we're not going to budget for an increase in student enrollment nor a decrease we're going to keep it flat and like i've mentioned before any increase in student enrollment will go directly to benefit our budget for fiscal year 22. uh we are still reflecting in this
115budget the three million dollar reduction in funding for online learning um as we mentioned that was not a a board decision made based on funding but this is the reality of how the state is funded those online sessions so we are looking at an update in may they have asked for an updated numbers in terms of what students we have online versus what we have in district and they're going to take an overall average of our yearly totals and determine that reduction so working with student information services i think we're going to look at roughly like a one million dollar reduction we're looking at about 20 online for the total year and that's an average and again that's an estimate but so we're expecting this number to come down it's not reflected in our budget
116we're still recognizing the three million dollar loss so keep that in mind as we move through this presentation the state state senate has passed senate bill 1433 this still has a way to go through the house and then to the governor's office a lot of this bill would fund fiscal year 21 at 100 what we've heard though is is with these cova dollars that schools are receiving there's a lot of pushback on to whether districts need this funding or this one-time funding at 100 if it was up to me we need this um this is estimated 268 million for all districts uh this is a huge loss that all districts are receiving and again this is not based on uh you know decisions we're not based on on budgetary these were based on student needs
117and safety and so i think you know it's a little unfair to see districts punished so to speak for for this kind of choices they've made so we're hoping that moves through um the house and and passes but we're still monitoring that second bolt there we're implementing again a phased plan to reduce mno transfer to capital mr gad touched on that on the capital budget currently we're we're budgeting in this current year 6 million we're going to be bringing that down to 4.4 in our may revision and you'll see that reflected in this next slide and then again we're not going to project any increase to the employee and to their benefits rate for next year the district will be picking up all the the increase and i believe we're looking at if ms martin's
118give me a number four percent increase in medical in this next year so i've reduced the uh formula to two three lines that was a little easier to follow and it makes the math really simple so we got the first bullet here is our estimated 22 general budget limit so this is considering the faith reduction that mr gad mentioned in the capital budget of 2.9 million taking into consideration the base support level for next year that we know the inflation that we've talked about we're looking at a jbl of 104 million and then we look at bullet point two there this is going to be our may revision so this is our current year budget remember school districts are funded on current year so we have to do a revision in may to adjust our
119adopted budget our may revision is going to include the reduction from the mno transfer where a budget be budgeted 6 million we're going to bring that down to 4.4 it's going to include right now currently we're including the distance learning adjustment of a 3 million loss we're hoping that changes so then this will increase this jbl difference hopefully by may we'll hope we'll hope those numbers are reflected by may uh but currently this is our loss so we've included it in there and then bullet point free three it doesn't include sr2 which we've we've talked about moving to capital and it doesn't include potential s or three relief funds that we may recognize in this year but more than likely will receive funding going into next school year so you take two those two numbers
120and the difference is 8.6 million that is our general budget general budget limit difference that is excess budget that we have to use for next year the next slide you'll see this slide here this is what we've recommended that we utilize this excess budget for in the action item you'll see preceding this information item the district will be recommending a five percent increase and so we'll look at that five percent column there you'll see the five percent the total cost of the district with benefits is roughly 3.5 million you'll see the 8.6 million dollar that's our jb that's our budget difference so if you reduce the the cost for the five percent and then you take into the consideration the fixed costs that we've talked about the increased medical benefits um the reclassification of some
121ftes and additional ftes that we're looking at for next year you take those two numbers minus the jbl difference and that will give you a budget balance of 3.6 million so that number right there is a conservative number that we're looking at maintaining as our budget balance difference our budget balance carry forward for next year that's a conservative number of roughly you know 3.5 percent and again that's considering [Music] the full learning loss adjustment no s or 3 funding or contributions to the budget so this this 3.6 would allow for any unknowns next year any sort of budgetary items that we have not projected this is what this remaining balance would be used for excuse me and then some highlights that we've talked about tonight ms martin has mentioned dr foley has mentioned this five
122percent increase to employees would really go a long way in showing our support as a district especially this year it also maintains competitive salaries with our neighboring districts in order to retain and attract teachers a lot of districts are having a hard time fulfilling or filling teacher positions thankfully here we are we're fully staffed as ms martin just said but this reiterates that importance that higley has put on staff and teachers with this increase again this regulator this recognizes no additional employee benefit costs maintains the current benefits benefit amount i should say and then it provides a contingency like i just mentioned of 3.5 again that's not considering um the as the distance learning adjustment or sr3 funds 3.5 is a very conservative number and we believe it provides enough budget contingency for any unknowns
123that we may face next year and again it also allocates for the additional fte and reclassifications that we are looking at doing and then another highlight again it projects a flat enrollment for next year so again any increase in student enrollment that goes directly to benefit or increase our budget balance carry forward so with that do we have any questions i just have one and i'm whether miss martens or mr moore can answer with what we've been presented for our new salary schedules has that been factored in with all of our new uh our new hires the change of our salary schedules that was presented tonight that we'll look at um on april 7th i'll a natural uh answer initially and i'll let ms martin's request so what we budgeted in this five percent here
124is a five percent increase not only to all current employees um but to the salary schedule but due to some equity and um the change of the the salary um the base rate we're only ms martin's only recognized a 2.5 percent increase to the base so any new hire would come on at 2.5 which again prioritizes any current employees um and not kind of puts an equity in there but it also is a budget savior because we're not budgeting the full five percent to our base rate only to encourage employees eleven smartened to elaborate well and just to kind of clarify because i mean mr moore's been really great he's spent some time with me and going through explanations and um because of our contracts we do have to um make a decision on the
125projected salary increases and part of my conversation with mr moore has been my concern of being able to sustain and for our future budget and we've been planning so my concern has can we sustain those increases and we've talked about our future budgets and everything and now we've seen a new salary schedule and and i i do understand the difference between our new salary schedules for new hires and um this is for our current employees um but i have to look at the future to determine current to make sure again that if we're making this decision we can sustain those and i know you've done a great job on the budget and i know you're not looking at just now we've had lots of conversations of looking at the future so have we have we
126talked about how the new salary scale plays into our budget going forward again just from my standpoint is to ensure we can sustain these types of increases because i would love to do them but the last thing i want is in two years going now we don't have it certainly president reese members of the board as mr moore mentioned you know we've had dialogue both in finance cabinet and in regular cabinet about this five percent and the confidence that we have in terms of our budget and being able to sustain it as we move forward um something that we mentioned i think quite a while ago in terms of our status report is that we had quite a bit of vacancy savings or what i term vacancy value um you know as mr moore finance
127department mr gad myself and others members of cabinet you know they've set aside a separate five hundred thousand dollars for new fte so any positions that we're having that are going to start in this new schedule is current fte that we already have in place and some of that as we talked about is going to be a repurposing of certain fte that we have not filled with in the district for a long period of time on positions that actually it was like oh i didn't know we had this position but for some reason or another with previous leadership and finance continued to roll over the budget of those dollars in the last three four years which created this large vacancy savings um and allowed us to reassess and kind of take an a bigger picture
128a bigger picture in how we move forward with this so it's not that we've created all this new positions and which then could be concerning to you guys as board members and or to our community but looking at what we have and as mr moore mentioned um looking at that at an increase at five percent but when it really came down to discussion and equity and value um as well as some extent being a little conservative we said 2.5 made the most sense to see where it goes and then we'll we'll move forward from there and the president reads the the formula that we're budgeting off of is a continuing formula from the state you know unless the state changes that formula that will you know our budget will not change um so we're budgeting
129to that formula which is our student our student population currently um the current budget that we have and then the increasing base rate which is a per student formula or pursuit number excuse me so unless that number changes which historically that has always gone up with inflation or adjustments by the state we are budgeted and budgeted for future to maintain this increase going forward i just wanted to be sure that we were also and i have no doubt you were because you guys have worked really well together having the conversation as we increase our new ones coming in um that that we're taking that into account as well and so um i mean we're not voting on the salary schedule until april but we're looking at some major changes to our budget some large increases
130both for the future of new employees coming in because that our salary schedule is changing and what we will be offering for our current employees so i just wanted to double check that my concern is i don't want to be sent spending the same pot of money when we're increasing different things and going oh well that was a soul in separate conversation this was our budget left after that and now we're increasing this and that was a soul in separate conversation but it's still impacting the same bottom line and so i know like i said you guys have been great on communication i just wanted to verify that that those conversations are happening as we're increasing our salary schedules for the future as well as our our increases because that has been my largest concern
131is just the sustainability of it so thank you president madam president if i could just add a couple of things to your concern about that sustainability you have to remember as mr moore said that's a continuing formula that's got a base amount of a little over four thousand dollars per student this state with it with a 200 plus million dollar rainy state fund it's not going to be anywhere uh close to wanting to alter that and even when we were in a recession they chose to alter capital outlay and not emmano so you know they will put a priority there the only thing down the road that could affect the district in a negative way is a massive loss of students because that's the key of what you multiply that base support level by we're
132benefited because we only had 117 laws you know we're we're talking districts in there for three and four thousand loss range so we're you know we're in good shape and the state will help i'm sure sustain m o uh especially driven by those districts that have been so heavily impacted they will want legislation to fix this 95 percent and all the rest of it plus we've got an added 12 million dollars of covert really helps reinforce the use of some of the balance because it's being replaced by covin so i mean i i think for the foreseeable future you know i i think it's really solid you might find down the road that the five has to become three or four in a given year assuming the five is already in the base just because
133you know the state's not allocating their inflation factors you know is 1.2 percent you know that's you know it's a lot smaller uh and and if the economy picks up which i think it will uh you know it's going to get larger if you look at the sales tax revenue which i thought for sure was going to be down it's up dramatically and it's up because people stayed home and bought things off of amazon and ebay literally i mean it's it's enormous i mean you would think with the pandemic and all of that people staying home not buying anything well you're wrong they use their computer to buy a whole lot and and so you know even the sales tax subject which was gloomy to start with because of anticipation has turned out to be
134a lot more than they ever anticipated uh so that helps with their rainy day fund and all the rest of it so i have every confidence that you're fine and you know you now have the advantage of because of your demographics you have an advantage of giving the staff more than others do and take advantage of that thank you and again mr moore thank you for spending quite a bit of time with me and going through some some different things i have to say it's definitely um made me more comfortable with this request for sure president reece mrs wilson i just want to thank our teachers staff and the cabinet even on the adm number of 117. i think we gloss over that sometimes but it is a big deal 117 where people have lost
135thousands and i think our teachers staff and cabinet all the district together has made that number and just give yourselves a pat on the back because i appreciate you and i appreciate all the work that you've put in to only lose 117. that's a big deal so thank you president reese vice president wilson we are so proud of our employees i think one of the things higley can be very proud of is that through a pandemic of un un uh unknown unprecedented all the words we've used what's been one of the most important foundations of this is how our team in this district has come together from every corner from every department from as a collective group of employees to do what we can for our students and for our community and i think that's
136something we are super proud of um and again um has really made us stand out in something we're real proud of so our our employees are truly a reflection of the quality and caliber what we're doing one of the things we're only continuing to do is is celebrate that success but also grow from what we've learned in this process so i appreciate that any other questions all right thank you mr moore president reese members of the board the other thing i wanted to to kind of piggyback on one of the things you heard and you've read in your status reports is when we're looking at uh tight position control instead of we really know now what do we have how are we staffing what are our what is our standard so that we always at
137any given time know where we are with what that staffing need is which is a nice another nice thing that we have worked through through this process so again working collaboratively to truly give you what we know and we'll maintain that moving forward will online teachers be paid differently or will they be on a different scale than the right the in-class teachers if that's the right time to ask i'm sorry okay president reece board member anderson so at this time you know we're still identifying and discussing the components of the higley virtual academy and what that looks like um later this week there'll be information sent out to families about next year and what higley virtual academy is and um clarifying and hopefully answering questions that they might have as a result we have actually
138done some communication to some employees that are currently teaching online and what we anticipate as we issue contracts out tomorrow what that would look like and that is that right now any position in which they are teaching online their continuing teacher they will receive a contract that's anticipated for in person at the site that they are at prior to moving online or prior to moving to remote work as we continue to assess we have to really look at what our enrollment numbers are you know we anticipate that there's going to be some level that's going to be different next year for hva because of the fact that kovit is still in existence although listening to the radio the other day i heard the cdc is now saying you could have um functions at your home
139where you don't have to wear a mask and you don't have to social distance so that's a positive and the bigger picture especially if you've been vaccinated somebody outside of your household so who knows what next year is going to look like so we'll have to see what those enrollment numbers are but we anticipate at the elementary level that we will need full-time positions whether it be a full-time for each grade level or a full-time position that might share grade levels is going to be based on that enrollment and then at the secondary level we anticipate the model in which prior to covid all of this occurring in the secondary level that it really is going to be asynchronous learning and as a result of that and our curriculum that we have with florida virtual
140academy looking at a per student basis in terms of compensation um again not knowing what our numbers are going to look like we'll have to see what that is going to be in the larger capacity but it's unlikely that we'll have full-time positions at the secondary level because of that i would be surprised i've not heard anything new coming from other districts that have had long time virtual academies if they're looking to do some things different i do know that there were some districts that when we looked to move to creating our online virtual academy they talked about the fact that they would look to they would want to look to do some things differently but financially in so many ways it probably wouldn't make sense and we already as mr moore mentioned and mr
141gad receive less funding for students that are online so we know that traditionally virtual academies are not financially successful but yet it's an important need that our community is interested in and a need that we need to look to offer as a result but how do we do it in the best way we can president reece board member wilson to piggyback on that so today actually i think at 2 30 correct the communication as we shared today at 2 30 communication went out to those families who are currently online the website is now updated the same communication that says we need to let you need to let us know what it is you want us what you want if you're wanting to learn more if you're wanting to be online that way as we know
142numbers numbers will drive what those staffing needs are so whether or not and again elementary looks a little different than secondary but again depending upon what those numbers are it helps us identify how many online teachers do we need all of our current continuing teachers as miss martin said will receive a contract but it will be for in person so if they want to do online they can apply for online but they will receive a contract and our numbers will continue to drive how many full-time elementary do we need and how many per student secondary placements will be providing for compensation so again the good news is today that communication went out at 2 30 i got an email it's out it's live for those who are currently online and our website is up so
143that we can begin to gauge that interest so that we can also then begin to determine how many teachers we need i know that would a great explanation but i think um and maybe we're not there yet assuming the um hba a teacher's going to be a teacher going to be a teacher whether they're hba or in person so their contracts or offer if you will would look very similar to a regular teacher contract like you said everyone's going to receive a contract or anyone who is receiving a contract would receive a contract with the expectation it be in person but we won't have a different job description for hba teacher will we president reece no we don't anticipate there'll be a different job description there just could be potentially different compensation as we said
144at that secondary level because again based on enrollment looking at what models other places have done it's unlikely that we could look at a it's unlikely that we'll need a full-time secondary instructor because of the the course offerings as well as the type of courses somebody needs because then you'll have somebody who's teaching potentially they could be teaching four different levels of english as a result and does that make sense um to where maybe instead of a teacher taking on a six-fifth static site they might decide or doing something else at a site they might decide hey i want to take an online class and i'm willing to teach you know 10 students that i'm just throwing a number out there 60 per student right along those lines so in general taking secondary out of
145it because that's going to look different but in general an hba teacher is going to receive the same type of contract as a regular teacher so they'll fall in the same salary scales everything it for a full-time teacher correct secondary like like you said that's gonna have to be looked at differently um because we're not anticipating it being a full-time full day it's a there's a few in this class there's a few in that class somebody a different compensation strategy correct okay does that help i wanted to make sure that we're not going to be getting a different teacher job description for hva it's going to be a teacher job description that we currently have okay uh president reece is this going to be a board h are we gonna have like an hba presentation
146coming up sometime maybe summer or before it fully launches because these these discussions i think are probably more important or more appropriate then because we have so many unknowns so i'm just wondering if that was in the plan president president race board member taylor i don't see us having any problem coming back to you with all with our staffing looks like what are we offering what do those numbers look like we just literally today sent out the so who you tell us you want to do online so we can begin to get a sense of who truly wants to go online for next year so we can staff appropriately and then once we have those numbers we'll have a better idea of what our staffing looks like and what we can offer or not off
147what we can and can't do and what it will or won't look like and those numbers will drive that substantially as you know on our last meeting you approved the the hiring of the administration for that and we're working on helping to begin that transition and getting that all set up so i would envision that and very near future we will have more details to be able to bring to you and present uh the state of the state of our hva um and where we're at and what we're offering and and the number of students we have who are interested in pursuing the full online experience this will be the true unique year though because remember this year we paralleled we didn't really unenroll you from this school you were still kind of uh connected
148with your home school this is the year the hva goes truly live and we actually enroll you in the virtual academy and we support you uh as a full-time virtual student in our in our new online academy so this will be a first for higley because we prior to this year did not have that and we now do that's an important addition for us because what we do know is is that we do have families who want this we've had families who wanted this prior to covet and i can envision that we will have more families who may want it next year then then maybe hitting regularly inquired about this but in any case we'll be able to keep our higley students which is important dr foley if i may add to that um so
149president reese like you said if it's a full-time teacher and they're doing it it's on that scale we have not decided and discussed um you know we will we've discussed but we've not decided on what kind of scale that secondary number would be so we would certainly bring that back to you if it doesn't model anything that we currently have and have that discussion but going back to board member taylor's comments that there is just so many unknowns so we kind of have to see how this plays out with information that we get uh miss kayla thank you for asking that question to make sure it comes forward and to answer your question uh yeah i was just asking for budgetary purposes if we're rolling an administrator over to a new position i just curious
150how that would affect our budget if there was going to be a change that's all so looks like we're soon soon to know not yet we don't know for sure yet and and as as discussed too one of the things that we included in that allocation is when we reprioritize those funds we already had the money for that so we brought that in as those positions that had been ruled over so we know we could fund it and continue to fund it and that that role is versatile so you may be picking up multiple parts and pieces and facilitation of that so truly um we we have there are some unknowns but then there are some knowns that we are putting into place to finalize the the the launching of our new school um and
151sustainable sustainability for for the future perfect thank you all right then we'll go on to our action items 8.1 i move that the governing board tentatively approved the 2021-2022 mno providing a five percent salary increase for all staff second any other comments i think questions we've heard a lot about our budget and i just again appreciate that this was not the first time we've seen it you've brought it to us over and over again which i don't think there can be too much and giving us the chance to ask questions and understand so i appreciate that and again mr moore thank you for working with me and reassuring me we are good on this increase president reece this is kaler um i was just thinking sr4 could be monies from canceling state assessments and i'm
152pleased as punch for this five percent and i am really grateful to our staff who since september 8th has stepped up and done a fabulous job with our students i truly believe that our intentions back opening our schools was putting our students first and still trying to keep everyone safe as possible and were their cases yes but now we're seeing a huge drop and we know that having our kids in class was so so crucial and i'm just thankful to our teachers that and all the staff i mean it took the whole village to step up and step in and they did a great job but um i just want my my statement to be known i would love to see state assessment cancelled in the 1.6 billion dollars that the feds are spending could
153be used for s or iv but that's just my personal opinion any other questions or comments all right well i would just like to add and um forgive me for sounding brash but very appreciative of the um recommendation for the five percent it will matter and people will be very excited but i just want to also make it clear that um there there still needs to be value given in other ways there still needs to be acknowledgement of their value in other ways this raise won't keep some teachers here unfortunately and and that's i'm not saying that's okay but we tried and it was our intention to it's our intention to show that we truly are grateful that they showed up some reluctantly with schools open i'm so grateful the schools are open and i
154i wish i could just hug and hold everybody that stayed despite their feelings for being open and this is a great way to to say thank you but i just want to stress again let's not stop there let's do let's go above and beyond this to show that we value them let's let's have some changes in our attitude towards some to some staff um let's just make sure that um we keep them for the right reasons and that they truly want to stay and that um i'm sorry i'm rambling but um i just i just want to put that on the table as well thank you mrs anderson that's a great point we value them but our increase is not the only way we value them so thank you all right any other questions or
155comments all right all those in favor aye aye that motion carries five zero all right now we will go on to 8.2 and i move that we approve the issuance of certificated educational professionals and administrative contracts with the increase listed below to the base salary for the 2021-2022 school year second any questions comments all right all those in favor aye aye that motion carries five zero all right i know we talked about um mrs kaler had asked that we have um a presentation on hva so there is a lot of unknowns um talking about um and just throwing this out there from an hva standpoint talking with some people about like no this is going to be a completely different new school like you were saying a few minutes ago it's not staying with your
156school and just doing online classes it will be that is your school and um it was recommended by a staff member that potentially we hold some town halls if we can and give the community the opportunity to come and ask questions and safely hold them with space or virtually something but to get some town halls out there and and that we hold some town halls to give them the opportunity i know as board members that would be great for us too um but for our community to really understand the difference between this year and what hba is because it's different remote learning is not higley virtual academy even though we've heard some of the same terms and everything so potentially with our presentation that we can look at doing some town halls i think that
157was an excellent idea do we have any other future agenda items that we want covered president reece assistant do we know when the demographic study is going to be complete did i miss that in an update somewhere uh president reese vice president wilson actually it's going to be we're going to include some of that information into our updates with you when we talk in april about what we've learned and what have we learned in the background information we also will be able to probably provide those in status for you updates and if so desired we could invite um rick bremer to come back and do it although i think we spent there was we spent an awful lot of time in a work study and i think what we can do is provide the highlight
158updates and if more information is desired we can provide it but it's coming it's coming as part of our so what now what where are we and what do we need to consider when we think about next decisions for those budget conversations thank you i just didn't know if i missed it somewhere along the way and if we needed to put it on but thank you for knowing we literally received just a draft of it just today actually a green ass cabinet with updates so we're we're compiling all of these things as part of background information to help us answer questions and provide you information thank you anything else all right with that then i move that we adjourn second all those in favor aye aye meeting is adjourned have a great spring break you