001you good evening i'm going to call this meeting to order dr foley roll call president kaler members of the board please let the record show that all board members are present tonight thank you very much we are going to have a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance and i just want to keep in mind the colin karchner family this gentleman was instrumental in speaking to kids across the united states when it comes to social media and he passed away last night so please keep his family in your thoughts and prayers president kaler yes i also like to keep in our thoughts and prayers the 221 941 people who have died as of today from survivors 2.1 i move that we approve the agenda second any questions all those in favor aye aye
002motion carries 5-0 dr foley superintendents report president kaler members of the board we have some upcoming events um for this month in the near future we've got several meetings that are our regularly scheduled meetings i'd like to draw attention to our november 20th will be our superintendent's visit i'm happy to share with you that we have just received confirmation that mayor anderson and vice mayor koprowski will be joining us on this visit so we're excited to have them come see the wonderful things that we have happening at our superintendent's visit at williamsfield high school which will be our first one this year that is very good news thank you all right board comments 4.1 any comments from the board i was like i just understand we had our first homecoming football games would administration likes
003to give us an update and share how things went that would be wonderful board member watovic yes we we are happy to share a few updates from this week i'm going to ask mr latzenhauser to come up to the mic so that he can share with you as the athletic director some of the athletic events he and i had the privilege of being able to attend both football games on friday evening and so we'd like to provide an update for you great thank you president president board member betovic yes we did host two football games on friday night as well as we hosted volleyball we had the williams field on wednesday night was the williamsfield versus higley volleyball game at higley high as well so we were able to host all three events and i
004want to give a shout out to our community because we're taking the masks very seriously what i was very very pleased about because i wonder just the same as you when we go who are they going to be following along and are they going to be respectful and yes for the most part they are we've had a few that we've had to go up and remind and ask to put on their masks and we haven't had had to remove anyone yet but that will be a possibility if they're not following along and complying um i i think when you and for those of you who were there on the friday nights the general feeling from our community was they were very very happy and thankful that they were able to attend an event on our
005campus and there was some sense of normalcy about how it was made any changes from the arizona athletic association or anything in the future as things as we start doing these events i mean so we we just had a meeting today david hines the director of the aia had a meeting with all the of the athletic directors and basically outlined that we're going to continue with the status quo and what we're doing through the football season they reminded us that for the winter sports they still the districts still need to meet the metrics in order to be able to start the winter sports and so that decision day is going to be november 5th with the idea that practice would start on november 9th we went through the different tournaments that are going to go
006on at the end of the season and how aia is going to do that for football they're going to use the same program we're using go fan for ticketing so it's going to be paperless ticketing limiting of events the number of people who are at the events and those are outlined by basically the capacity of the sites that are going to be hosting them because of the condition of our stadiums the ai is asked that william both williamsfield and higley high be host for smaller level uh 1a2a or 3a football games if the need arises and so we're preparing to do those as well i think this is a really tenuous time um because as you guys read in the paper and we read that there are programs whether they have had multiple kids that
007have had covet on the teams where they've had to shut down teams for weeks in quarantine we're continuing for to monitor ours very closely and are prepared if the need be out of caution that we will close our our teams and quarantine them and do at the direction of the county health and what we feel is good for caution that is an ongoing honestly daily conversation we're having with uh jillian fulton the district nurse our athletic directors the coaches are heavily involved and i think the hard part is there these kids are so invested in what they're doing and we don't want the acts of just a few to ruin the many and so if there's anything that i could publicly say is please be cognizant aware of what we do on the weekends when
008you're not in a supervised event from us because those actions have direct implications on all of the hard work that our athletes have put forward to have these seasons right now is you know we don't want to go into a situation where everything gets close completely but just to reiterate i'm very pleased with how our our management team took very seriously the requirement of masks and the ticketing and the management and at the same time providing an experience where parents didn't feel like they were completely removed from the atmosphere of the event okay thank you thank you mr lotzenheiser appreciate that president taylor yes this is rhys um i too was able to attend both football games friday night and i agree i i mean everyone um seemed to be following the rules and everyone
009seemed to be glad to be there so um thank you for continuously making sure that everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing i also want to give a shout out to dr foley so on saturday we had our um board evaluation which we do annually and um the commitment that dr foley has shown to our district just this quick we met on saturday had our evaluation had a lot of great discussion and it was at that meeting we talked about the superintendent visits and seeing who else in the community may want to be invited to these events to see and showcase our district schools we just talked about it on saturday dr foley just announced today it's wednesday that we do have town of gilbert officials coming to this visit so i i appreciate
010your commitment and diligence to not just our district and our schools our town to invite our our town representatives to see what we have sometimes giggly is kind of the forgotten child within gilbert and a lot of times people don't understand there's gilbert public schools and higley unified and we're all in the same town so i i mean just that quick thank you i i appreciate taking that feedback and those suggestions and turning it around so um i i really appreciate that and then just a quick reminder as we we've just we've come back from fall break and we're trying to make sure everyone's safe and we know a lot of people were traveling i just want a reminder that the maricopa county community or public public health defines an outbreak of two or more
011cases so if someone is hearing there's an outbreak somewhere whether it's within our district whether it's in another district that literally could mean two cases and they call it an outbreak so i just want to put some perspective on that that if the news is reporting that there's some outbreak um haven't heard anything about our district but we're going to go over it a little bit later we have our dashboard but please i'm just asking people keep that in mind that they do define that as two or more cases but it could be as little as two cases on that campus that they could classify as an outbreak so um but everyone's doing a fabulous job so i just wanted to put that out there thank you thank you mrs reese and on that same
012note i know that um dr foley and i are going to a queen creek chamber of commerce event that we already signed up for as well so we're going to do what we do what we said right we're going to do what we said and also on that same note november 5th is the veterans the gilbert veterans day celebration and they're doing it at the new park this year and they're doing it an evening so that's also coming up if anybody can um attend so okay president kayla yes mr clever we mentioned a lot of dates in november but there's one really important one it's november 3rd is coming up so i think we're all scared i mean if anybody hasn't voted yet please please vote and all the way down the ticket no no
013um no offices are too small or too unimportant to vote for so get your ballots in if you live in maricopa county and you have a paper ballot you can sign up on the county recorder and they will email you or text you when they have received your ballot and then they will also do the same when they have counted your ballot and so you can feel comfortable and confident in our democracy great reminder thank you okay we're going to move on to 6.0 consent agenda items i move that we approve consent agenda item 6.1 to 6.10. questions or comments yes mr glover just one uh i just wanted to uh give some praise and thanks uh in item 6.2 there's some uh elementary teacher additional duties there's a stipend in there and i appreciate
014the cabinet and the superintendent for working on that for our on behalf of our elementary teachers oftentimes i have found in my experience that elementary teachers will very often do something without complaint and without compensation they just do it um but this is the case you know just out of the goodness of their heart but this is a case where they were doing extra work and uh higley saw fit to compensate them for that i think that is uh that follows along with our plan of honoring our teachers and especially uh in a year where people are very stressed out to know that their work is honored and their time is honored by the district is really good and i thank you for doing that yes thank you mr glover and thank you for always
015advocating for our teachers in that area okay all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries 5-0 7.1 any questions or comments for mr gad tonight on our financial report well that was easy mr gad gotta like that okay 7.2 we are going to review our um proceed fiscal year proceeds of capital improvement bonds maintenance operations override data and a presentation and is that going to be dr fowler is it dr fowler members of the board sorry we're going to pull up we're going to pull up this attachment and mr gatt is going to give some details and additional information will also be provided by dr fowler as well if questions arise and president members of the board this report is required annually by law to reflect what the district spent last year on its
016m o and bond budgets the mno listing as you can see has the five bullet points that was provided to the voters in the in the pamphlet the teacher compensation increase is in the neighborhood of seven to eight percent for teachers that has been added to the salvage schedule and would not have been added had the override not been available the elementary specials would be art music and pe the maintenance of those programs at the elementary level reduce average class size our calculations show basically this offers two per classroom as a reduction so instead of having 28 you would have 26. so that's that's basically how you quantify that the all-day kindergarten is of course roughly half of the teachers that we have providing all day k and that's fundable those full those halves turning
017into a full-time kindergarten class are about 20 of them at 1.4 million and then just general resources to the classroom including supplies miscellaneous kinds of things copiers all of that sort of thing that that would be usable by the teacher probably supplemental to what they may have been used to in the past so that is the summary of our m o override uh totaling 11.6 million dollars for last year i can stop there or i can move on to the lower part i'm just going to save mr gatt i love that you said there was 78 for our teachers that's amazing i love that thank you the proposed capital improvements are listed there just as they were listed in the pamphlet initially the bond election was for 70 million dollars and you can see the
018dollar amounts that were set aside for each of those categories where the estimated costs the big emphasis would be on new school construction and on maintenance those are the two that were would occupy much of the total expenditures in most cases to date new 630 2020 are below the estimated cost a couple of them exceed the estimated cost but not by a whole lot and they are more than offset by those where um we have under expended some categories significantly so so at this point in time of the 70.5 million dollar bond we have spent 60.6 million and we have 9.9 million left in in the treasurer's office in cash so the plan now will be for this year probably most of the 9 million will be committed through your approval in some way because
019we're getting toward the end of this program so we'll have more detail for you about that when we move ahead with our budget preparation that will be coming your way in november so you'll get to see some of what the plan is at this point and it's also important to note that this particular budget has the ability to spend 10 percent more than was authorized in the bond on anything that was not on the list as long as you've accomplished the list so in this particular case the way you would apply that is 70 million would be 7 million that you could spend of the nine and it would be not necessarily anything that's on this list as long as you were comfortable that you had completed the original list as as is portrayed in
020the pamphlet for any questions the board may have happy to try to answer them president keeler i wanted to add just in terms of the number the the 9.941 that shows us a balance that's reflecting bond money that had been expended up to the end of last year it doesn't reflect bond items that were encumbered for this current fiscal year and so as the board is well aware we spent a million dollars on the media centers in bond and we've also encumbered 3.7 million dollars in bond for the athletic center at williamsfield and so that 9.9 number is a little deceiving because that those big encumbered items aren't taken off on there and there's a couple other littler ones too and so we can have that detail specifically so we know exactly what that amount
021is but i wanted to make sure the board was aware of that thank you any questions for mr gad or dr fowler okay thank you so much appreciate that now we are going to have a little chat about our kobe dashboard dr foley president taylor members of the board i'm going to ask that we pull we're going to follow that link on the agenda there so that we can pull up our beautiful dashboard so at our last board meeting on september 23rd we had talked and had heard from our community and from our board members about we wanted to explore a dashboard for our for our community in addition to our communication protocols and if you'll scroll down thank you one of the things i wanted to highlight about our dashboard that i'm real proud
022of first of all i really want to thank jillian fulton our district nurse brian campbell our student information manager and cassie robles and spencer schmidt from our pr department spent hours over fall break with sherry david and i in our other home away from home the ed services conference room brainstorming how do we create a dashboard that will be something that is transparent that will give information one of the things i want to highlight is we have a lot of information on our dashboard but one of the things i think i really appreciate about ours that you will see different than others is is that we are updating our dashboard daily every morning by 10 a.m it is being updated anything any student increase as far as numbers of people who are on site students
023or staff are updated right from our student information system as well as any confirmed active cases you'll also notice we do something on our dashboard that others are not doing which is showing the resolved cases so that because one of the things we know is that in any given day based upon the status of where that is at it either could be an active case or a resolved case but the number today could look different tomorrow and we wouldn't want to confuse people if we said a number was seven today and it was four tomorrow it would look like where did those numbers go so all the numbers are being shared up there when they are moved and jillian is working closely with tracking each and every one of these scenarios with the health department
024on what days what day it goes active to when it goes resolved so that it moves board member reese i want to build on something you said earlier going with the idea of an outbreak one of the things we're finding as we navigate this with arizona department of health services here is that every scenario is just a little bit different and when they are defining numbers alone uh numbers alone the number two is whether it's epidemiologically linked or not so you could have two or three and you're going why haven't they deemed it yet an outbreak and it all comes down to that contract tracing and being linked and so we are we are becoming friends with our and have worked very hard with the health department on certain scenarios and situations one of the
025things that we will share with you is that we are erring on the side of over communication then under communication so that when we hear a confirmed case we're communicating with our protocols and updating it here and then if they come back and and and um demon and outbreak status you'll receive additional communication so again it can feel we're gonna we're gonna err on the side of over communicate than not and we're gonna take precautions as they come forward the other thing i wouldn't want to do a shout out to jillian is that she is working really hard with administration and site to follow up on supposed cases as a foes just confirmed cases and trying to maintain the health and wellness of what we know when we know it what's important to know about
026our dashboard is that these are going to be for cases that are in person on campus that would have been in our building with exposure to others not those who again if we get a confirmed while we track them if we had a person who was an online student only who we had a positive case because we'll confirm every positive case we track that but it won't go in the number because they had no exposure there's nobody in this to communicate with as far as our communication structure so this is in addition to not in place of we have gotten good feedback and we're going to continue to use this but wanted to show and share with for our community our dashboard you'll also notice on our website that you can't miss it now it's
027front and center we have our covid resources that we're updating so that you can find it easily so we appreciate everyone's feedback and i really appreciate the work of our amazing team trying to respond and provide resources up front so again you will continue to see this be updated thank you dr foley go ahead mr glover you sure okay yeah no that's a thank you dr paul it's a good update i think it looks really nice i think it has good info it seems really weird to complement a web page of infectious diseases but here we are i love that it has the resolved cases i really appreciate that it's updated daily because the thing about um you know what maricopa county requires it's so unsatisfying um because there are teachers who are literacy coaches
028and math coaches and there's office staff and there's people that just i don't want to say wander that's the wrong word but but are in our building and amongst our kids and they're not really required to be notified but they can now look on this and feel a little bit comfortable about knowing where they're going and what they're getting into and it's too bad that at our level we have to be the ones to do that do this but you know what it's just it's so typical of teachers when the job's not getting done teachers will do it so anyway i thank everybody for all the work and thought that went into this and uh it's a far cry from where we were and i think it's i think it's good and we're all learning
029and getting better thanks we are we are we're we are learning uh president kaler uh board member glover i appreciate the feedback again we're learning and we're responding you'll notice one of the other things we added up there was also frequently asked questions because we're also noticing there's some patterns and trends and we're trying to be we're updating information to help answer questions so we encourage again if in doubt don't delay just reach out to us and we'll help answer the question as fast as we can with that information as accurately as we can we do need to the caution i do say though is that we are responding as quickly as we can as we know information but we also have to work really closely with the health department that sometimes can take a
030little longer than what all of us would want and yet that is an official part and piece of this too so again we're going to continue to over communicate what we know when we know it and we appreciate everybody's communication with us along the way dr i just like to tell you i've heard a lot of positive responses out in the community and for all the hard work and i really do like the tabs on the side too as well so thank you once again echo these sentiments um dr foley so if a student comes in though with a positive case that they have it like or they submit it to the nurse does that go on here directly or does it still have to wait to go through maricopa county they will confirm president
031kayla good question they will confirm that case but we will start the process of tracing communication and getting into the queue ready to go so that we can communicate and formalize it because again jillian spends a majority of her of her day at this point on the phone and in following up so that we get the information as quickly as we can and the thing is at least now i know testing is coming back quicker so at least we can say that it's much faster than it was even when school started it was still a week or so for test results and now people are i'm hearing within 24 to 48 hours or getting test results and one of the things that you'll hear jillian will ask the person to do is to send her
032a copy of that so that she has an official documentation so we can start our process while we're finalizing it but then we're not we don't start it after we've gotten a confirmation we're ready to go and know who needs to be communicated with and to what extent well it was beautifully done i too really appreciate the resolved cases so that the numbers are very clear and just a little reminder if you're not feeling well stay home if you're being tested stay home we can't say that enough right now because we're headed into a very you know again as mr lotzenheiser says these are tenuous times and now we're going to add the flu and so um just a good reminder stay home if you're not feeling well and if i could also you know
033right on on this page there is a place that shows you where you can go to get tested we are starting to see at some of some not not at some other schools outside of higley that i know about um some kids who are walking around asymptomatic that have that do test positive so um you know if you're feeling symptoms and you get tested yes of course stay home but if you just feel like you want to go tested to have peace of mind this is we should have been doing this way ahead of time for like massive amounts of people and we still should so go get tested um you know you can do it for free and you know i i also want to complain about contact tracing we're we've we're terrible about
034this so far and uh we should be way far ahead so contract tracing i think is one of the things that could have helped to get us out ahead but also massive amounts of testing for people just to know so they're not carrying something around without knowing it and spreading it so those two things can really help and we can only get better thank you any other questions or comments okay moving on to 7.4 this is the first read only i i move that the governing board approves the first read of policy ijoa and is optional student travel second questions comments or concerns with this policy i'm glad it's just a first read good to soak in it's good to read it and then read it again so i'm glad that this is just our
035first read tonight so mrs reese thank you um miss martens has this been talked about at all in meet and confer president kayla vice president members of the board in regards to the specifics of this travel policy no because when we initiated it last spring we never came back from school start so our first meet confirmed meeting as of right now is scheduled for october 27th so it's next tuesday afternoon certainly something that i could talk with dr foley as well as mr watsonheimer and we can talk about the topics of that and have a discussion from there and i know there was a lot of time a lot of effort a lot of people involved in trying to come up with a good solid policy where people could know exactly what they need to
036do for student travel if it was moved on to administration there was essentially check marks yes they meet this no they don't um to remove some of the confusion that occurred with our policy as it is so i just didn't know and yep we worked on it and then we weren't here so um i would like that there at least be some discussion and some review and to get some feedback i get a lot of this policy too is from an operational standpoint and coverage but if we can if we can look at that i would be interested in some of that feedback president kaler vice president reece we appreciate that truly this was work that started last year there was committee that was brought forth you as a governing board had a work study
037on this at the end of february and then then we went into covet crisis management and school closures so truly this is bringing back the work that was discussed there in a more formal process that we had had conversation of that we're going to oper operationalize we will happily take this to our group back for additional feedback as we look at the operationalizing of the forms and process here and to the extent too that obviously this was going to be in place for when when all normal travel can resume because these are filters and processes that will be in place when when we're not sometimes modifying what the event or experience looks like because again some of the travel that we would have historically approved aren't aren't travelable at this particular point in time however
038the processes and systems we're working on putting in place thank you all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries and we will look forward to that coming back in november 7.5 i move that the governing board approves future payments not to exceed 128 520 to hacienda los ninos for the remainder of the 2020-2021 school year second questions or comments mr glover okay all those in favor aye aye did i hear mr glover okay motion carries 5-0 moving on i move this is going to be 7.6 i move that the governing board approves a second disbursement of results-based funding dollars and mrs martens this was again i know you covered we had a lot of information in our update of we send in questions um for the board packet but just for the sake of
039the community we did forget a few people maybe not forgot but they were in a different list and so we're just making that right certainly um vice president kayla are members of the board essentially we did disburse our first amount of dollars back in june for all of our employees and traditionally we had what we call our educational professionals so our psychologists our speech language pathologists our occupational therapist as well as our cte and event liaison fall underneath those categories and historically they've been labeled as district level employees and when we had dispersed the dollars in the previous two years they were disbursed with district level employees so when district level employees did not meet the criteria after additional guidance from attorneys that the district sought out we discovered that they were included in that
040list and then when we went back to get some additional clarification they said that we could include them so we are going to change our practices and so these educational professionals are no longer listed as district employees and that they're assigned to a home site and traditionally they are and just like teachers they can get moved depending on the year and the need for our various areas so we're also going to look at some process changes unfortunately because we distribute most of the money a significant amount of the money back in june we only have a limited budget left and based on the number of employees as well as the budget remaining we're looking at distributing 375 dollars per employee so after the board's approval tonight then we will look to start the process to
041get it paid out within i have to verify our payroll processing period i can't think of what payroll we're in right now at the top of my head but we'll make sure to communicate with the employees when they can anticipate those dollars thank you very much mr glover well i just again thank you uh you know when you get i don't think i think well i don't want to say but i would i would speculate that most people uh are not fans of results-based funding we're always happy to get the money um but what i like that higley does differently than many other places is it's really not just one class it's it can never only be one classroom teacher that that when a school has significant gains or or good results it's it's the
042collective effort of everyone that's on the campus so acknowledging that as higley does i'm very proud to be a part of that i'm proud that higley is taking the lead on that you know there's there's speech pathologists ell teachers math coaches literacy coaches even school psychologists all contribute to the uh to the to the welfare and and and helping to upbring these these students and the schools so i appreciate it i'm with you mr glover i'm not a huge fan but i do like the way that higley's worked really hard on results-based funding to make it somewhat equitable across the whole district so i'm i'm with you on that one mr glover all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero i move we're on to 7.7 that the governing board ratifies the 20
04320 2021 memorandum of understanding between the higley unified school district and the higley education association questions comments okay all those in favor aye aye motion carries five zero wow that was quick we are moving on to 8.1 here are some items that we still have coming up in november on the calendar we have course guides coming and textbook adoption process update on our media centers and then we still have our athletics coming anything else that anybody would like to add to this list mr glover so sorry i feel like it's you know like the very first year when i was just talking better you better still be here when um when this comes to us then whatever you're gonna say i'm gonna be a hypocrite for a second on one hand i wanted to say
044um in regards to one of one of the earlier things we passed is um [Music] that we should be cognizant always of of the amount of of work that we're adding to teachers and this year of all years we really should be asking the question a lot what can what can we take away to simplify things for teachers so that's that's a separate item that i wanted to say and i'm going to do the complete opposite and it's october now i know we did talk about that list of approved curriculum on our district website i know we're all super busy but i really would before i leave here i have three more meetings that that gets done i know that that was your your main request was to have that on our website up and
045running before mr glover retires so is that in the plans dr foley yes president kaler board member glover i am so looking forward to bringing to you several things on this upcoming agenda on the fourth you're going to see one a handbook for the textbook adoption process you're going to see an example of what it looks like and you're going to see what our when we're talking about our our list of a supplementals we're going to talk a little about the distinction between our supplementals and our adoptions and our lists and how we're tracking them and it's all part of this presentation that we're going to do for you coming up so i am delighted to have that ready for you and we've been working really hard and i would like to do a big
046shout out to felicia molloy who has been working on this with our content coaches and myself we have been meeting weekly multiple times so that we have a comprehensive piece to bring to you with our policies our practice and a template so it will come mr glover loves the word supplemental we we're gonna miss you we're gonna miss you okay well with that my friends i move that we adjourn second all those in favor aye motion carries have a great evening i