001good evening i'm going to call this meeting to order dr thomason roll call please evening president later please let the record show that we have all five board members present tonight thank you very much uh we are going to have a moment of silence followed by the pledge of allegiance this is also um as part of our moment of silence i think it's appropriate over 200 000 people have lost their lives as of yesterday i think we need to remember that you know lots and prayers thank you president kaler could you repeat that i i i must i did not hear that i'm sorry go ahead mr um mr witovich asked that we keep the 200 lives that have been lost to covet in our thoughts and prayers thank you mr petovich all right i
002moved that we approved the agenda second any questions or concerns all those in favor aye aye motion carries 5-0 superintendents report dr foley president kaler members of the board we'd like to share that this next coming week we begin our our fall break we have two week fall break and following we have two governing board meetings in the month of october thank you so much lord comments i have a couple uh first of all i just want to again congratulate our mrs bradley at centennial yesterday uh several of us many of us from the um district were able to go and celebrate her maricopa of the year principal award and i guess that was last year just took us a while to celebrate but it was truly so spirited in that gym i'm thankful to
003all her staff that makes her shine so bright so um congratulations again to her um also i am going to have a little rant i am very upset over some of the things i've heard about our students this last week and i just want to remind anybody listening our parents our students our staff our coaches if you don't feel well please stay home if you're being tested for covid please stay home until you get that test result and if you've been exposed to anybody that is tested positive please stay home and we just need to work together on this i'm very very i'm moved that we are going to all work together moving forward and i want to keep this momentum of us working forward together but we must do it together and so i'm
004asking the community to please help us in this area of staying home when you need to so that's my rant for 2020 i'm sure there'll be more but that's for tonight and darlene mrs reach no requests to speak all right we're going to move on to consent i move that we approve consent agenda item 6.1 to 6.7 any questions or concerns all right all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries five zero we are booking tonight we're already to 7.1 and mr gatt i'm going to call on you for a presentation of the f the year 2020 annual financial report president kaler members of the board we're delighted to have mr gad here tonight this is his day four of working with us so he's relatively new to our team but he will be
005providing the annual efr update tonight thank you for four days of hard hard work putting this together for us thank you dr foley madam president members of the board you have in front of you an approval request for an annualized report required by statute called the annual financial report it is a it is a chore sometimes to try to decipher and read what this is trying to tell you again it's in a state format that we're obligated to use but we've attempted to give you a little background at the same time that we are discussing the report the powerpoint that you see hopefully helps some of that along and if i can make sure i know how to change the slide i may have to they have to have my friend back here help me
006with that i thought you just said next slide and it went to next that wasn't magic there you go there you go thanks okay we've taken the financial report that as it appears uh and will be uploaded to the department of ed and upload it to the district website and we've chosen to for purposes of this presentation we've chosen to number the columns as you can see from the powerpoint there are six columns on this particular report the listing of those items down the left hand side are different funds the district is involved with some 30 to 40 different funds that it administers all of which are governed by statute in terms of what their purpose is for use etc etc so they're they're fairly technical in nature but our intention is to try to
007get you oriented to this it it begins with a cash balance and that is number one it then proceeds to record the amount of revenue that you've collected during the year that's column two column three would be any transfers in or out of that fund column four is the budget amount that was set by the board when they approved the adopted budget for last year and the amount expended against that budget as indicated the last column is a cash balance column yeah the the confusing part of the subject is there are some of these funds that are budget control funds and there's some of these funds that are cash control funds the budget control funds especially mno being the largest functions off of a budgeted figure that is controlled by a formula the formula requires
008the use of average daily membership primarily in calculating how much money the district would have and and the next slide uh that you'll see is there are two types of funds one are a grouping of funds called budget control those are not set by the amount of revenue you receive those are set by a formula of how much you can spend it's really important to understand that difference most of us all are used to a cash control fund because we have a balance in our checkbook and we know that we can write checks as long as the balance is sufficient in this particular case you can have lots of money in your bank account but that kind of is irrelevant you can only spend up to how much i told you on the beginning that
009you could spend so if you have excess revenue through property tax or whatever it becomes unspendable if if it's if it's cash versus the budget approval here the the budget controlled funds are these they're some of the largest funds in this report the largest was is mno that fuels basically on the day-to-day operation of the district with its salaries and benefits and utilities and i'm sure you're somewhat familiar with that because it drives so many decisions a capital outlay again you you probably have familiarity with that it's sometimes referred to as the da the district additional assistance that purchases things and typically does not include salaries or benefits but items that will be lasting longer than a year desk chairs computers etc adjacent waze is a specialized budget that allows the district to spend money
010on adjacent ways to public right-of-ways so it would be half half roads sidewalks curbs gutters anything that both benefits the school district and benefits the public and that is a hundred percent tax tax fund that is there and used by districts especially who are growing building schools and that infrastructure around the school needs to be paid from some source and if you're not going to use bond then this is the budget that you would use that service is the annual retirement of previously issued bonds so every year the district budgets an amount to retire principal and a re and an amount to pay interest to bondholders very similar to what you would do with your own home mortgage custom site fund i think you all probably know this one it's additional teacher compensation it consists
011of three different buckets one is a is a guaranteed base increase the other one is can use it's got a menu that includes compensation class size and other things and then it also has a a fund that deals with performance pay and it's sometimes referred to as proposition 301 the technical term is classroom site and then the myriad of state and federal projects title 1 special education all of those type grants would be lumped into that last one and those are obviously given to us with a with an approved application or approved formula that provides the district a set dollar amount okay if you take this report then and you would look at i i chose mno it's on the front page of your afr and it appears in about line seven or so it's
012large i took the budget amount which appears in the fourth column and i took the actual expenditures which are in the fifth column and subtracted the two and the budget balance carry forward from last year is eight million dollars so that monies then are carried over to the new fiscal year and provided for as an additional budget authority nothing to do with cash so far we're strictly comparing how much was budgeted with how much we spent and what we didn't spend this year we're carrying it forward so that we have the opportunity to expand it the following year people sometimes uh gauge that amount of balance relative to what percent of the budget remained in this particular case 9.4 percent was a care forward and and and so there's other discussions we'll have about how
013small or how large maybe that number should be targeted too but that's a probably for another time the um the next slide is a cash control fund so most of you most of what's on this list are cash control funds after you pass those six or so that we will appointed earlier i chose uh in this particular case uh well before we get there i took that same mno budget and there and in the far right hand column on your afr there is a number that's six million dollars that's the amount of cash that that fund has in it for i had in it when it began the year a little over a year ago it took in 85 million it spent 77 million in column five and wound up with a cash balance of
01414. so what we have is we have a budget balance of eight we have a cash balance of 14. so we collected more monies we started the year with six in excess of what we actually would have levied for so there's a positive balance in that fund and that's where you should be so that you have a positive cash flow and you don't have to worry about paying the county treasurer money interest on checks that you've written but there's not a sufficient balance so that's that's that's a good thing and the bad thing is you can't spend it it's there to honor expenditures but it's not there to offer to you additional money to spend and it's hard concept to understand i remember i'm working off of a budget control fund i just simply have
015cash that either exceeds that amount or is less than that amount and what controls how much i spend is the budget so because these columns when it says ending fund balance in that far right hand column that's not budget balance that's cash balance and this this this last column is especially applicable to the majority of the funds because there's only six of them that are budget controlled everything else operates off of cash so that column then becomes important after you pass those six budget control funds because that determines then i've switched from budget to cash now it determines how much i can spend so uh if you took an example i took one of community education community schools it's down about eight or ten from the top a fairly large one it provides tuition for
016preschool full-day kindergarten those kinds of programs where they're fee based this particular program started the year with 1.6 million dollars in cash it received revenues of 4.1 it spent 4.4 so it spent slightly more than it collected and so therefore the balance declined from 1.6 to 1.3 so this is a fun like most of them on this page it's controlled by that far right handle that says fund balance that's the that's going to be the beginning number for the new year for the year that we're in now and uh and these are stand-alone funds food service would be a big one these are stand-alone funds that collect fees from participants and whatever your expenses are are projected to be covered by the revenue that you receive through that tuition amount if that doesn't happen and
017this fund goes negative on on fund balance then there's an issue the issue is how do you correct that kind of put deficit we don't have it here fortunately we don't have any here with any of these funds but that's what you kind of look for is that you're operating at break even or better and you don't have a financial issue with not having cash in which to support the expenditure so um i think that's uh yeah where we're at with questions i know that this can be a fairly confusing subject it's a start on making sure that you have some idea of how that whole subject of school finance functions it's very complicated one of the most complicated in the country that a district would have 50 or 60 different funds to administer individually
018with different purposes is probably more than you would have in any state other states i'm aware of maybe five to ten and all of the things are grouped together in one of those five to ten funds here they're very segregated and and that again then applies rules as to how you can spend the money so that's just adds to the complexity of the subject but i hopefully as we as we progress during the year we'll be talking with you about next year's budget and some of this year's budget and i hope to make those sessions informative for you educational for you i want you to ask questions because that's how you know everybody learns and and hopefully at the end of the year you'll get some understanding of what this whole subject's all about and
019you can make decisions in a better um enlightened way so with that any questions that you or the board might have i'm hoping to answer thank you mr gatt i do have a question you said on the for on the ending fund cash balance column six 14 million you can't spend it for this year correct but that is our carryover and we have always used those funds then for our middle school lease you correct no doctor thomas is that no no you can you carry over the 14 million in your bank account that helps you with paying bills that you have cash then you don't go deficit you don't go to insufficient funds okay just like your checkbook okay so this is different than our end of year carryover that we carry over the difficulty
020with this particular fund is up until a couple years ago whatever amounts you didn't think you needed could be applied to reduce the tax rate okay that got changed legislatively so that those monies cannot be used any longer and they should be but they can't be used so that amount may continue to grow until people realize that instead of just counting money we should have a plan to do something with it and at least benefit most of the revenue which came from property tax benefit those type of property taxpayers by reducing their tax bill but unfortunately that's not in our control at this point but it carries over for 14 it collects another 70 or 80 million it winds up this year with some dollar amount but it's not spendable it's there just to be
021able to cover our bills what is controlling is that original budget amount that was based upon adm that controls you throughout the year and that's where the eight million came from the difference between how much you budgeted how much you spent so that really is the important subject to understand because that governs your salary schedules your class size all of those things that typically would be paid from them thank you for that clarification i appreciate that any other questions for mr gad tonight okay so we are going to move the thank you again thank you um we have a motion on the floor then can you slide that up thank you mr curtis i move that the governing board still not there there it is i move that the governing board accepts the annual financial
022report and authorizes its publication any other questions or concerns uh mr gad do you do you foresee any changes coming to this between now and it's i know you've had like four days with this documents and all these finances i just want to make sure that there's not going to be something that you foresee [Music] changing or we don't see anything at this point okay we've been over it enough that i think we've taken care of whatever minor kinds of things might occur very good thank you sir we will need to be talking with you routinely about the status of this year's budget and even more importantly next year's budget because it's so affected by the economy right so that's something that and we'll have a revised budget coming as well yeah mid year yes
023okay very good all those in favor aye aye did i hear everybody motion passes five zero thank you all right next we are going to have a gifted and talented and h pal update kaler members of the board i am excited tonight to have to have dr dodds do a beautiful presentation we could not be more proud of the work that dr dodds mrs richards the administrators our amazing gifted teachers and specialists have done there's been a lot of work that happened this past year and dr dodds is going to do a nice presentation tonight to show showcase the work and to highlight our programs that we're real proud of dr dodds and thank you everybody for their patience on this coming to us i'm sure that dr dodds has had this um you know
024planned for months and because of covid it kept getting pushed back so we're happy to have you tonight good evening president kaler members of the board dr thomason dr foley and cabinet i am so um proud to share with you tonight um just the really exceptional work that our teachers our site-based gifted coaches and administrators have done for the past several years their commitment to our gifted and talented students is exceptional and i think you'll see that tonight i do want you to know that each of the slides for the most part has pictures in it and i want you to know that the pictures i've included have been the gifted program over time to kind of show you the theory in practice so these pictures were mainly taken pre-covered so when you see our
025cute students and our happy teachers they likely won't have a mask on you'll see a few selfies but other than that just know that these pictures were all taken pre-coded so with that maybe mr gad we both have problems with the clicker there we go all right um i want to show you this picture of a virtual small group classroom instruction believe it or not our gifted coach is sitting in the middle of that small group she looks like one of our students and i show you this not to just show you a microsoft teams lecture style room but instead to help you think about what we think about all the time and that is who is sitting in our classrooms so when you go visit classrooms you know do you wonder who's in the
026room because we wonder do we have the next screenwriter sitting in our classroom do we have the next scientific innovator or astronaut sitting in our classroom perhaps that avid reader that you can't stop from reading all day long or that writer who is so creative maybe they're the next children's literature classic author or maybe they're entrepreneurs who are going to be household names that are going to inspire all of us through hgtv maybe it's the next architect perhaps it's the leader in our classroom who's going to become a motivational speaker and an expert on leadership thinking about who our kids might be is really what drives our passion and fuels our decisions for curriculum and instruction we want to honor who our kids are what they love right now and foster that so that being
027said from what i've studied in higley gifted education has been important in our community and from the records that i can access i can see that in the past decade gifted programming has been important and when i look to when centennial first opened about a decade ago an important part of our community was to create a self-contained gifted program at centennial and that flourished for many many years at the time that centennial opened as well as our other schools were also serving children we had pull-out programs so from what i understand families had a choice to apply to the self-contained gifted program at centennial or keep their children at home at their home school in a pull-out model over time i've learned that the schools began to realize this pedagogy is important for all of
028our kids and they started working more carefully at the school sites so as people began keeping their children at their neighborhood school the self-contained gifted program waned at centennial ironically at that same time that it was closing a new school opened when bridges opened as a cornerstone in our community again recognizing just this boutique niche philosophy h-pal was created when bridges opened as a program not just for gifted kids but those kids who wanted to work hard wanted to maybe be participating in an accelerated curriculum so that they could be on a more advanced pathway for academic rigor at the same time the site-based programs changed and from what i understand with some staffing reductions the pull-out program became two teachers serving the other schools in the district well that lasted for a short period
029of time because then we hit the gas pedal and we realized we need more people on our campuses so i know when i arrived here in the 2017 school year we were fortunate enough to have seven site-based gifted specialists who did a pull-out model on the campus h-pal was still thriving in its second year at bridges but we also started something different we started a program that was the third grade accelerated model so we began identifying kids for a gifted and talented program using an initial cohort of third graders and we targeted certain classrooms where we've placed children into classrooms that i'll elaborate on in a little bit so at this time in our district we have pull-out programs we have an accelerated model we have the hpalp program and we realized our little list
030of learners are missing out so we opened a highly gifted academy for our kinder prep students so a lot happened in that 2017 school year for our gifted and talented students the following year our programs continued we expanded that third grade accelerated model to be third and fourth grade h paul continued in grades three through six and as this was happening the pull out model on the campuses wasn't as necessary because third and fourth grade was being serviced in the classroom all day every day with the support of gifted coaches so fifth grade was the only class really having pull out so third and fourth grade was daily in the classroom fifth grade was having pull out sixth grade has always been a consult for us at the same time our think academy that started
031the previous year in kinder prep those students now rolled up into kindergarten so we added a kindergarten class so the gifted academy expanded to have kinder prep and kindergarten then in 2019 we had h pal at bridges for grades three through six we had third grade fourth grade and fifth grade now for our accelerated model for gifted and talented and we began to shift that role of that gifted specialist from doing any type of pull-out to solely being push in co-teach model curriculum support for the third fourth and fifth grade teachers at the same time the think academy expanded so we now have kinder prep kindergarten and first grade then last year um as we added a new cohort to our third fourth and fifth grade accelerated model we realized that our accelerated model and
032h-pal were running parallel to each other and it was causing a lot of confusion in the community because the programs had different names but were very very very similar in terms of curriculum pacing expectations for professional development for teachers in terms of gifted endorsements and continued training and the pacing for curriculum was very similar so mr bickle mrs richards and i started having conversations about what what could we do to help alleviate the confusion in our community and we realized it would be important for us to kind of rebrand kind of close down the store and reopen with the new name and we brought the teams together and we decided to call it gate gifted and talented education and that's what we now have so um we have for third fourth fifth and now sixth
033grade on all of our campuses a gate program and we also have expanded our think academy to include kinder prep kindergarten first grade and second grade so these initial cohorts have really been a driving force for us to expand the program within our district so now any school that you visit will all have the same opportunity for children identified as gifted or talented i'll elaborate in a minute on how we identify and why these models look the way they do but in k2 we cluster group our kids in grades 3 6 we cluster group and or have a self-contained or a walk to math program and then we have our highly gifted academy of think that is kinder prep through second grade something that was a blessing in disguise as we merged h powell with
034our accelerated program is it allowed us to put stakeholders around the table and really talk about what do we believe about gifted and talented education and what do we want for our students so as you see on this slide we were able to create two belief statements that we believe every child that is gifted talented or academically high achieving should have the same opportunities to learn at their appropriate level at any of our higley schools and we also want to make sure that there is the opportunity for rigorous learning in a continuum right now we have it in our elementary we want to support it and build it in our middle schools and think about our high school services too so in order to have programs we have to identify kids so here in the
035state of arizona we have a mandate to offer gifted and talented education and we are fortunate that we now have a funded mandate although it's on the floor right now it hasn't been funded for this year yet but i do hope it will be funded again this year uh so our mandate includes a few things that we must offer services for gifted kids and we must utilize some form of assessment to identify kids as gifted or talented so very common in the valley is an assessment called the kogat it's a cognitive abilities test it is group administered in k1 we give the kogat we also give the kogat in grades 2-6 but in grades 2-6 we also utilize a sea bass and a renzoli scale for gifted characteristics and then in our highly gifted academy
036we use intelligence testing iq test called the whip c it's the preschool version of a whisk we also use the kogat with renzoli scales as well as an alternative assessment that was the um was birthed out of the pandemic and school being closed and so when we administered the tests our site-gifted coaches are the ones who administer this we collaborate with our student assessment department for all of our uploads with riverside publishing but this is an online test children are in a computer lab and it's completely organized through our gifted coaches on campuses so in order to be eligible for our gifted program there's a few different ways that we are identifying kids we recognize that some kids are going to do really well when it comes time for that cogat this test looks very
037different than a typical academic achievement test so when children see it they'll say maybe to the teacher i've never seen this before my teacher didn't teach me this because it's measuring problem solving it's measuring critical thinking deductive reasoning so children are identified as gifted if they score 95th percentile or higher on the cogat either the verbal the quantitative or the nonverbal battery we also identify kids as talented if they score between the 84th and 94th percentile on the verbal and the quantitative batteries and then we also look at kids based on their academic achievement the kids who are our high flyers in our classroom who just miss it on the kogat you know they're that 82nd percentile student and they just missed the cut but maybe they're our most highly proficient ati galileo benchmark kids
038so with the wonderful support of our gifted coaches again because of the pandemic we were able to add another layer where we used our seabass testing but then our coaches conferenced with every second grade teacher who had a child who was highly proficient and used a renzuli characteristic scale about mathematical giftedness and verbal giftedness and they talked with the teacher to understand how does this child demonstrate critical thinking and problem solving how do they find alternative solutions in mathematics and so that was a really neat opportunity the second grade teachers felt like they had a say as well as to who could go into our program as a talented student so k2 is a cluster model and this picture illustrates what we often see in our k2 classrooms curriculum differentiation more than likely is going
039to happen in small groups through learning centers or choice menus the best that we can we group our kids together so for our k1 and 2 students these are kids who are identified early in the year in their years of school i should say so there might be a few of them we might have one or two kindergartners on one campus or two or three second graders somewhere until we do a blanket test so our principles are wonderful in working with our gifted coaches to try to target those kids together in a teacher's classroom who is passionate about differentiation or maybe already has or is willing to work toward their gifted endorsement in grades three through six this is where if you will our formal services begin our kids are going to be cluster grouped
040in a mixed stability classroom for their homeroom depending on if they are quantitatively gifted or not they may walk to math with a designated teacher who is gifted endorsed or is working toward their gifted endorsement and this becomes more of a self-contained homogeneous grouping of gifted and talented kids who are mathematically identified based on the kogat or that sea bass regardless if it is the cluster or the self-contained there are some important components to our curriculum we believe greatly in curriculum compacting we recognize that our gifted kids and our talented kids are going to learn at a more rapid rate so they don't need maybe the five to seven repetitions that a typical child needs they need one to two so as a teacher the pace for instruction can go quicker so we can compact
041and teach more standards we also are very fortunate to have created curriculum maps for our gate teachers to use for math and english language arts and i'll highlight those in a minute as i mentioned we have teachers teaching in our classrooms who are either gifted endorsed or they are working toward their gifted endorsement and then daily they have their gifted coach support i do want to draw your attention to the picture so when i look at this picture it's an example to me of how a teacher has thought about her curriculum a little bit differently so on the whiteboard i see that she has some icons you see a flower and you see a mouth and you see a circle a triangle and a square these are parts of differentiation known as the prompts of
042depth and complexity so we can use these iconic prompts as a way to extend the thinking of children with critical reasoning so in this classroom the teacher wants the students to be thinking about the topic noting details they want them to look at specific vocabulary for the discipline and then they want to look across disciplines on the very bottom there's three pictures of little people so this teacher is going to ask the students to be thinking about the skeletal system not just from the point of view of a biologist but from an astronomer and also an archaeologist so instead of just looking at bones for the sake of knowing the skeletal system they're going to maybe pretend to be someone else and how would that expert view the skeletal system okay so while we work
043really hard to group our children we recognize that the grouping alone isn't the answer it's what we do for our kids so for us we want to be sure that we work real hard every single day to foster that love for learning that our gifted kids have believe it or not gifted kids don't always love school but they really love to learn so it's our job to figure out what makes them tick and how can we make our curriculum relevant to them so we want to make sure that everything we do is based on their readiness as well as their interest to the best that we can and to do this we utilize a variety of resources i was mentioning to dr foley that it would be so perfect if we just had a textbook
044that we could just open up and it would be perfect for all of our children especially for our gifted kids we can't just open up our textbook and teach from page 1 to page 50. so we need to utilize a variety of curricular resources to ensure we are maximizing the learning for our kids we work real hard in our program to develop who we call scholars we want our students to recognize that they are scholars but we also want them to recognize these behaviors in other people so we want them to realize that when they come to the classroom they might know a lot but we try to teach them academic humility so we have an icon that is a glass that's half full to help them realize there's still more to learn or maybe
045that perfectionistic gifted child is really afraid to take a risk we work to help the child learn how to take an academic risk so these are some of our scholarly behaviors um utilizing those prompts of depth and complexity that i brought to your attention a minute ago um these do help us with critical thinking and creative thinking uh they allow us to differentiate our content really easily in the classroom so it's not always evident to the parent volunteer who might be in the room it might not be evident to you when you walk in a room but a teacher is able to very purposefully assign different prompts to children to push their thinking in ways that are just right for them so this picture here is a first grade math class and they're learning about
046money and i know when i learned about money i learned about a nickel and a quarter and i got to make different combinations of money this teacher is saying yep mathematicians learn about money but so do his story and how would a historian look at money so again we're adding that critical thinking while teaching math something else that is a lot of fun for our students is this concept of thinking like a disciplinarian and that's not like i'm going to get you in trouble as a disciplinarian but instead a disciplinarian as an expert in a field of study so i love the picture of this little boy on the right hand side christopher he's a one of he was a kinder prepper he's now a kindergartner and he was pretending to be an archaeologist and
047he's on a dig and he's in his classroom with his field journal so that he can begin conducting his research as a kinder prepper he's learning the tools and the methods and the work of an expert you can also see on these other pictures the different ways that teachers integrate the idea of thinking like a physicist in one of our elementary school classrooms so linking our science integrating the academic vocabulary the tools that would be used by an expert the methods so we layer this into our grade level curriculum and it allows us to bring multiple standards together something else that is important in our gifted and talented program is this idea of independent study the process of non-fiction research that can be either standards driven or interest based by based on a student's interest
048of course all somehow connected to reading writing and technology standards but here you see that there are children who have completed the independent study process which includes creating a driving question or a set of driving questions gathering a variety of resources learning how to synthesize their information and then present what they've learned to answer their questions something that i love about independent study when i get to go to schools and they have showcases is the pride that the kids have so they sometimes dress up you see this little girl who studied galaxies in her nasa t-shirt or you see queen elizabeth on the bottom right and that was a hoot to see her and her high heels stumbling around the classroom and so she was so proud though to be queen elizabeth and teach all
049about queen elizabeth we utilize technology and high interest like bruno mars through a computer presentation and on the top you can certainly see that guy was excited about tesla what i do want to highlight the bottom left and the bottom right pictures were the same grade level and the concept was space but because it's so broad with independent study it didn't just have to be planets this student studied innovation within space and connected it with elon musk so all of this happens because of our incredible team of gifted coaches i cannot begin to tell you how proud i am of this team this bitmoji illustration is us on our bitmoji craze as every teacher in america i think has hopped on every year we have a theme last year we were team all-star because we
050were going to hit it out of the park and somehow this year we became team awesome which the team is and two of them are in the room tonight so i want you to know i'm forever grateful for their expertise their passion their patience their flexibility they serve our children they serve our teachers they do whatever their principal asks of them they bring vision that i have to life and you know i'm very grateful for them so that being said they work tirelessly every day to bring goals that we have for teachers to life uh they provide classroom support for this differentiated instruction differentiated instruction is not easy it requires a lot of time and a lot of thought and our coaches are right by their side to help a teacher feel successful with differentiated
051curriculum and instruction they work to develop curricular resources that a teacher might need to use in her classroom or his classroom they also engage in ongoing professional development for our teachers it's really important for our teachers there's a lot of collaboration now that our program has expanded so much we're able to bring our groups together so they realize they aren't the only one on a campus anymore so we work to support our teachers and then we also want to provide mentorship for our teachers we want them to become mentors within their different teams but we also want our coaches to be mentors to them so i want to show you just really briefly some faces of the gifted team to think that we've gone from you know seven of them to two of them back
052to seven of them to nine gifted coaches to now grade three through six a lot of teachers they aren't all pictured i asked for selfies and some snapshots but we have teachers at bridges we have teachers at centennial more at centennial gateway point chaparral more at chaparral coronado portina power ranch higley traditional academy all of these people are the boots on the ground for our third fourth fifth and sixth grade classrooms um santan and a bridges teacher so all of these teachers get support from our gifted coaches one thing we realized was missing in our program was consistent curriculum mapping so with the expertise of our gifted coaches and with our teachers and our literacy coaches last spring we brought people together via microsoft teams and we pow-wowed we analyzed standards and the teams created
053curriculum maps something that i'm proud of is that the teams were so thoughtful in looking at third grade standards for example fourth grade standards that complement the third grade standards but because of school closure they also thought about the previous year standards so because we were closed what might we have missed and how do we need to align that so using some gifted grant money gifted coaches grade level gate teachers and our literacy coaches all came together and they brought different points of view the classroom teachers brought the point of view of the teacher doing the teaching the lit coach is our literacy expert and our gifted coach understands what can we do for gifted kids so working together they've created unit maps for our hoot mifflin heart court based on standards as well as
054pulling in additional resources every single map also integrates tenants of our gifted programs such as those prompts of depth and complexity thinking like a disciplinarian etc so that a teacher can choose do they want to use the hmh story do they want to use a paired newsela resource a novel it's all right there with the click of a button or a download we've done the same for math we've had math maps in place now for um three years now will be our fourth but we have revised them and the gifted coaches reached out to our teachers to find out what do you think you taught the kids well what do you think we didn't quite get to and we need to revisit so in these maps every unit there's a reminder they should have learned
055this but we might need to re revisit whatever the concept might i want you to know that when we opened up school virtually our model did not stop so i have a couple screenshots here just to show you when we were online mrs mcbride a teacher over at gateway point she's our third grade accelerated math teacher let's say i'm not in mrs mcbride's homeroom i'm in jutil's homeroom but i need to go to mcbride for my advanced math class my teacher would have a button on the canvas page that would pop me right into mcbride's room when it came time for that walk to math it became a virtual walk to math so our our teachers were so receptive to changing things up and making it happen even in the virtual setting so um again
056to support all part of me to support all of this we need a lot of professional development we have a gifted endorsement program we have early release wednesdays daily site-based coaching we take advantage of every free webinar or podcast that we can get our hands on and we participate in conferences either in person or virtually so gifted endorsement in the state of arizona you can earn it a few different ways but the way that we support our teachers in earning it for zero financial cost it's just a lot of man hour time cost is 135 hours of verified in-service training and three years of teaching where you have gifted kids in your classroom in our district we do this as a two-year cohort commitment so our teachers meet with me every other month from 3
05730 to 5 30 or 3 30 to 6 30 depending on the class and then they implement what they learn in theory into practice into their classroom over the past three years we've had 85 participants the teachers who have completed their coursework have earned a provisional and then they earn their full by doing their extra hours through a myriad of ways and so this illustration in the background is jessica d'ambrosio she's a teacher over at hickley traditional academy who came through gifted endorsement and it kind of set her on fire again with teaching and i chose this picture because jessica's actually teaching our principles about differentiation and we visited her classroom to highlight what jessica was doing to differentiate in her mixed ability classroom early release wednesdays this was actually the brainchild of dr t
058we were trying to offer training after school and we weren't getting the participation that we really wanted so he said why are you offering it after school let's integrate it into our early release wednesday so two years ago we started offering the third wednesday of the month where our gifted coaches meet with the grade level teachers and we based on what their needs are offer professional development it's designed to support all of our goals we have but it also provides an opportunity for that collaboration i mentioned so they aren't that only person teaching third grade gifted kids math or reading a certain novel in an english language arts class as i also mentioned before site-based coaching happens daily so carla and cindy who are here today or any of the other coaches who are streaming
059online they are in classrooms every day they are either co-teaching or modeling something for a teacher they might be running a small group that they've planned out with the teacher or maybe they are hunkered down working on creating resources for a teacher to use on their own in the classroom they offer enrichment for kids especially now that we've gone online they're adding buttons onto the online teachers classrooms for enrichment so if a child is gifted but has stayed home for whatever reason may be they can have online resources for enrichment just as they would if they were on ground we have a dare to differentiate newsletter that we push out for our teachers and again that daily coaching provides mentorship i added a screenshot of a classroom um tanya waddell over at cortina this the
060white circle you see has a star and those little bit emojis are marissa modio and daniel waddell and that is a button that the gate kids can click on for small group instruction 9 30 to 10 that is a co-teach online between mrs samodio and mrs waddell for gate math so again i just want to highlight that children can be online and we're still doing our best to differentiate and provide that appropriate instruction for them conferences i am so so honored to have a team that wants to learn wants to attend conferences is willing to give up weekends to learn out of state in-state so two years ago i was asked to present at a state conference about our early childhood program because it's kind of rare to have a k2 program and i said
061i'm happy to present but i need my teacher to be with me can i do a film presentation so they said absolutely so the bottom left picture shows me with heather brown when we presented about the think academy well what was super neat was the next year heather brown said i want to present on my own so she wrote her own proposal and she got accepted and she presented at the california association for the gifted conference to talk about how do we balance differentiation with the social emotional needs of young children so i'm very proud of heather for doing that on the top left shows a team that we were able to take to a conference and then we've done some virtual conferences where we've hunkered down in a conference room here at the district
062office we've masked up and we've learned together taking advantage of that and an a wonderful consequence of these opportunities is a lot of team building you know the relationships are so important in our classrooms as they are among our team and by trusting each other we're all willing to really kind of put ourselves out there and take those risks to try new things for our classrooms so the last thing i want to tell you a little bit about is our think academy we opened this in 2017 it was um the idea to begin a kinder prep program to capture those really bright kids at the very beginning of their school career and patti gleason susie markosi and i started in with a book study we analyzed quality first expectations patty's early childhood goals and gifted
063program goals and we read a book about early childhood gifted education and every chapter we used a graphic organizer to see how do these things all align does it align with the regio emilio philosophy you know what are the mixes and that led to a wonderful first year as we knew that first year would roll up to kindergarten we went over to bridges we met with mr bickle and we identified heather brown as our new kindergarten teacher and we sat down in a room with our gifted coach as well and we created that belief statement and figured out what could we put on paper that we could put in a classroom so as a consequence we wanted to really provide that personalized learning for these exceptionally bright kids iq 130 or higher i think we
064have um kids ranging from a 130 to a 145 in our highly gifted academy with that we knew we needed to do a lot of conceptual exploration that these kids would be really interested in unusual things that might not just be aligned to the grade level standards and we felt that a steam focus would be appropriate for um very much a project-based learning for these kids so as i mentioned we use the an iq test the whipsi to identify kids iq 130 or higher we also utilize the cogat 97th percentile across the board or higher we've added that so that when we now have kids coming in to us for second grade they don't have to have an iq test we can use something for art from our district and then this this school year
065when we were closed we created an alternative assessment to try to identify kids based on their creativity their unusual ways of thinking and learning and communicating as we created our highly gifted academy that first year we realized a lot of really bright kids together in a classroom means there's going to be some social challenges and so we responded to that very quickly we were fortunate enough to use some gifted grant money and we purchased a social emotional curriculum we thinkers over time we've added to our social emotional curriculum as we are doing on all of our schools and we use gifted grant money to buy all sorts of children's literature so that we can help teach the behaviors we'd like to see help a child develop the behaviors but not by pointing out in them
066but instead relating it maybe to characters we have puppets we have all sorts of fun tools that are age-appropriate for kids we also have created individualized learning plans so this continued from preschool where they have portfolios but these are a little bit more specific we write them for an english language arts goal a math goal and a social emotional goal we align them with the renzuli scales and we conference with families in the think academy four times per year and we are constantly in communication as well but the four targeted ilp conferences have been really helpful in a partnership between the parent and the teacher so our think team starting on the right is a picture of anna stoll i was sad when the computer cut out the picture but she's there with a puppet
067cosmo who visits her kinder prep classroom often in the middle we have alyssa turner and heather brown who are our kinder and first grade teachers and then we have emily buzzard who cheri and i had an opportunity to meet last fall and she was going to be moving here and she mentioned that she had experience with gifted kids so we kept her name and we contacted her again in the spring when we knew we were expanding think we interviewed her and she's amazing so she's relocated from indiana and we are so grateful to have her on our team as well so that's our kinder prep kinder first and second grade think team incredible incredible teachers uh all of this also happens because of parent support we realize that raising a gifted child can be difficult
068and that parents need a network as well so we do a few things here in our district parent nights are held here in our board room every time we do an identification process we welcome our families and we teach them about what's available now that their children are identified as gifted or talented we bring guest speakers in we brought in psychologists to come talk about different things related to gifted kids i host something called coffee with kim i know board member wilson has attended one before they're just informal sit around a table in a conference room typically with dunkin donuts coffee and some donuts this year we'll do them virtually but it's just a time to talk about what are you hearing about our gifted program what questions do you have you know truth rumor
069and a lot of celebration on our website we have a library of resources books podcasts links to websites that can be helpful to families and then the arizona association for gifted and talented the parent institute that's where this picture comes from we joke that we always have a small budget maybe mr gad can help me with that um but we make our own things and so there we were just highlighting our program and letting our community know what we offer for gifted and talented kids here in our district lastly i want you to know collaboration is the key to what i really believe is the success of our gifted program we've grown very quickly but we've done it well i think that our students are thriving our families are happy but you can see here
070some virtual images of our teachers working together they never stop working when we went online we realized real quickly that things that we normally do needed to change and so a typical learning center or a typical extension menu couldn't just happen on a piece of paper and make a poster things had to go digital and so carla who's in the room she became our canvas guru and she uploads everything for us but we have created a canvas resource page that is available to all of our gate teachers that stores all of the resources that they would just need to click a button and download and these resources oh thank you curtis this is an example of that canvas page these resources are real time this is a a working page for us so just the
071other day we had a sixth grade science teacher say i need things for my gifted kids so a gifted coach started creating things for sixth grade science uh we have a first grade kiddo who needs some enrichment and online we're gathering some resources and preparing them so these are all downloadable so this is a storehouse for our teachers they can contact our gifted coaches if you scroll a little more curtis a teacher can download resources by clicking on any of those gate resource pages pdfs of a variety of things a list of social emotional picture books that we have in our district are available so they can check them out they also can download content specific resources if they didn't for some reason get a curriculum map they can download that if they want to
072download a marcy cook tile they can download a marcy cook tile for math whatever it might be it's available here for them and our teachers are just constantly adding to it to try to make the process of curriculum differentiation less daunting for our teachers thank you curtis and now our last um slide for you whoopsie is going to be what we hope to do in the future our next steps will be expansion into middle school right now we have the elast program that's over at soseman and that has been a wonderful pipeline from this kids from bridges who have been in h pal to go into that accelerated program but now we have nine schools with sixth grade kids who have been in a cohort since third grade with curriculum compacting who are going to
073be ready for rigorous middle school sections so we're really excited to begin working with mr dolan and mr varner of course mr l um to begin thinking about what are our courses going to be and how do we continue the momentum that we have created in our elementary schools so with that what questions do you have i don't know if it's questions per se so our our think for sure is kindergarten or kindergarten pre-k kinder prep kinder first second and second so and then they just go right into they're tested in second grade all across the board that's a great question so think academy is a little bit different they won't need to retest because we already know they have iq 130. our plan is to add third grade add fourth grade as that self-contained
074highly gifted academy so our families will end up with a choice let's say um you have a second grade student who is identified as gifted during our blanket testing maybe you want to apply to the think academy you could apply to the think academy or you could keep your child at their home school and they would have the clustered english language arts science social studies and then they would have that walk to math and so by the time they catch up to sixth grade and on to seven they would be those gate kids yeah basically correct so they're kind of running on the same freeway yes just called different yes and no so so within think we don't actually have set next grade level standards so in our gate program starting in third grade for
075math for example they learn all of the third grade math standards and 14 of the fourth grade standards so as they're learning multiplication in third grade and there's fourth grade multiplication standards that are a good match they're going to integrate those in think it's more thematic interdisciplinary where they're learning about a topic and the teachers really respond to the kids for example last year they were learning about the human body the next thing you know the kids are obsessed with blood they're learning about blood and they planned a blood drive because they learned that there was a blood shortage and they wanted to help the community so kindergartners and first graders learned that they couldn't give blood they didn't weigh enough and they weren't old enough but they worked they had experts come in they
076had a hematologist come in the classroom they could tell you if you were o positive and somebody was a negative and you had children what their blood type would be they could tell you all about it they were obsessed and then the community came and gave blood and they made the signs it was all them at five and six years old so that's a little bit different the flexibility they have in that self-contained setting is a little bit different than in our gait program where we're not necessarily self-contained we're more of a homogeneous heterogeneous grouping of mixed ability unless it's that walk-to-math so it's a little bit different in terms of faster and above grade level standards versus really authentic interdisciplinary grade level standards and yet they meet they will meet okay um and then
077the other thing i was going to say is that there's a difference between um equal and and equitable and i find that now this is equitable in higley unified school district we are not going to have just this group that is getting these services but this is across the board and giving all of our students no matter where they live the opportunity for these more challenging classes i am so thankful for that so thank you for the hard work and making sure that our whole district has this opportunity i agree with you wholeheartedly i have a gifted kiddo she was in the centennial self-contained back in the day and she was very difficult to raise to be very honest because it doesn't just mean smarter it doesn't mean that it means so much more a
078gifted child they have so many idiosyncrasies about them and things and they process differently so i'm thankful that we have a support system for our parents i think that's huge i'm grateful for that um i think those are my comments so thank you president kaler members of the board i wanted to add on to what you said one of the things that we really are proud of is the work that kim and dr dodds and her team did this year to expand access and equity to these programs across all of our elementary schools we have a continuum of programs here you heard a little bit about the thing but now you're looking at the ability for more students to have access to these programs i think the other thing that you also heard and that
079we're really proud of and we need to highlight the work that dr dodds has done with her gifted coaches in professional development for our teachers and inspiring those to continue their gifted endorsement and learn about differentiation is so powerful and impacts all of our students and so that work there when you you heard about also that another highlight is the work that happened that evolved even in the middle of covid you saw that canvas became a hub a resource for us to communicate and collaborate and create resources with that we hadn't had before and her and and under her leadership and work and her amazing team huge strides were made with tools and resources to look at it a little bit differently so again lots to celebrate here in the continuum of great work here
080so something we're real proud of and i'm excited to see this head more north and see our coulee friends and our go on to our williams williams field friends so i'm really excited to see how this program is just going to be so much better across the board so anybody have any questions for mrs dr dodd sorry see i don't i give doctor names to those that don't and i take away those that have it so uh shame on me thank you so much dr daz we appreciate you so much thank you all right we are going to move on to our next agenda item i move that the governing board approves the purchase of technology for the media centers at williamsfield high school and higley high school this is part of our finishing up
081hopefully the rest of our media centers as far as getting all the technology the gaming part of the room and things like that so you can read about that any questions concerns comments i'll second that thank you for that mr witovech um i just have some questions in reference to this um say the gaming room i'm disability concerned as far as the educational uh this is the the esports dr fowler's here so maybe he can address the esports for us because i know that's brand new to us and in addition to that um the program is only as good as the leadership and who is going to be the gatekeeper that's going to be overseeing all of this technology in this one room i mean is this somebody that's going to be there all the
082time and those type of things so if you could answer some questions as well then president keller board member with i i know that we have very extensive esport teams that have flourished just this past year on both campuses the numbers that um i have been given of 100 students at each campus that participated in the esports and uh we were proud this year higley high school actually made the championship round with one of the competitions and and i know that the technology that's in there is going to service those facilities really well in terms of specifics related to the technology i know mr shope's able to answer that and i'll pass the mic because the other one's not working president taylor the technology in there it's gaming computers that they're using as esports and
083so from the aia they're playing clash of clans and league of legends against other high schools at other districts sorry rocket league what did i say oh sorry i take it you're a really gamer right i wish i had time for that right um so yeah they play against other high schools at uh other districts president kaler members of the board one of the purposes of this room is really to legitimize a place for this team okay and i think it's a stretch for us we have a basketball team who competes in a gym right we have the football team that's on a field we now have this esports team led by the esports clubs that are on our campuses uh there's high very high interest in this the the teams are already set or
084excuse me the clubs are already formed right now when you talk about who's going to be watching this room who's going to be taking care of this room when talking in the discussion with the principals about how we're going to maintain because that was exactly my question too we got to make sure that these rooms are going to have the ability to be locked they're not an open free-for-all room it's going to be a space where kids and teams can go in and compete and so there will be the management of flow within and out of it but i think it was brought to that this legitimizes the space for these teams just like the other teams on our campus have a legitimate space where they practice and compete so the answer to my question
085who's going to be the gatekeeper so in in terms of safety and security within the media centers is coming from the security team that's going to be in the media centers including our media specialists as well as then the coaches and the sponsors when we're having the practices after school these are the specific for the gaming room looking at it so the gatekeeper and that uh security piece is already built in place uh staffing it with the members that are already on campus so the media specialist is going to be overseeing this as well because it's in the media room i'm naturally the media specialist be a part of it and talking with both principals there will also be security in there for instance if it's open at lunch just to make sure kids aren't
086in there posting security guards in there but then when we come in after school it's going to be the responsibility of that coach working with their kids while they're in there president taylor um dr fowler i got to go back to my question now we have more for our new media centers do we have a total cost on the whole revision of our media centers yes and and i can put that in the superintendent's report and bring that but this was the the price just on the technology the other numbers were ones that we had previously added i can total those up for you because i believe this is the third cost if i'm not mistaking the first one was the construction we were asked to approve an additional cost a month or two ago
087here's another additional cost so we still we still don't have a total cost of a project that was approved through multiple so if we can make sure we get that total cost president keller board member reese yes i will have that for you include the construction the furniture and then now the technology those three together would be the total and do we have a date that this will actually be open to our students yeah so we we were delayed with with coveted with some of our furniture i'm gonna bring a report back on in october i believe the 21st board meeting and so we're looking at that date we have some of the furniture installed but we're waiting for the remainder which we should have mid-october as well as the technology that if approved tonight
088would order tomorrow that takes about six weeks to arrive okay thank you any other questions all those in favor aye those opposed name motion carries 4-1 so this is going to wrap up our uh our board meeting this evening any other future items we still have a athletic handbook coming media center update from dr fowler in october and yes end of october then we start our textbook adoption process we're going to have a course guide coming up in november you can see a couple more things still headed our way some of those might be into the spring anything else you'd like to bring forward tonight mr mitovic i mentioned before we talked about be kind and things like that and i was really disturbed by your discussion under board comments my concern was that how
089important it is that we need to have a be kind program in this school district because from what i'm hearing from you um mrs kaler is is um i'm quite appalled about the self-centered behavior that some people are sick and it's it's like it's i'm looking at this and it's just like common sense as an adult maybe it's my generation common sense um but i'm seeing people that that like if a child has a peanut allergy classroom these people are sending their children to school with peanut butter sandwich okay so so our school district has to take the leadership parent role here and i see this so much more important i'm i'm ashamed of these people for their behavior and i hope our district is is addressing these people and stepping up the plate and
090showing that there are consequences for this type of behavior but it just shows me the need for i know the community it's 99.9 it's wonderful people here but it's just that one percent that we need to really take it addressing and really encourage this be kind to each other and respect each other and be thoughtful of each other don't just had to continue my rant with that thank you mister president kayla before you yes mr glover um if i i know i'm probably out of order so you all can stop me but i i uh board comments you kind of moved on i just wanted to piggyback on something you said if that's okay and it is uh you mentioned about testing and people going to get tested that feel like they were exposed or
091are showing symptoms but i would just like to say to the community you don't have to wait you know sometimes by the time you're showing symptoms it's too late and not too late but i mean it would have been better if you've done it before so um i think i said it at the last the last meeting you know that they're still open 24 hours a day you know i think your teachers their employees would feel a lot better if they knew that x number of percent of people in this community got tested so it's free it's easy i don't think i mentioned that i didn't even have to get out of my car it didn't hurt at all and so i would encourage that as well and i don't know if it's a future
092thing but it seems like these coveted data dashboards are starting to spread beyond chandler so perhaps that's something we talk about or it comes up or we can talk later but uh the community i think is interested in that as as am i yes mr glover and belt mr witovich reach out to me this week with um our gilbert and chandler friends making a dashboard for each so i guess that would be something that cabinet can definitely um chat about and that was brought to her attention as well this week mr glover on the testing didn't you say you went to uh gilbert community college just down the street i did they're open 24 hours a day and it's free and if you have insurance they'll bill your insurance but if you have a co-pay
093or anything you'll you won't see anything if you don't have it they'll take you so it's easy is that on our website this can we add it to our kobit website that link would be wonderful i think okay so with that we are going to move into i move that we move into our executive session for discussion and or consultation for legal advice with the governor board's attorney pursuant to ars 38-431 and a4 second all those in favor aye aye aye motion carries and we will return hopefully in just a few minutes thank you we are going to reconvene now in regular session and i'm going to make a motion on 11.1 i that that's the only thing that's written here right i move oh i see okay i move that the governing board approves
094the decision to participate in litigation decision to approve legal counsel to represent higley unified school district an electronic cigarette vaping litigation with legal and with i think i need to use the name wagstaff and cartmel i'm so sorry um and to approve engagement agreement of legal counsel to represent hillary unified school district and electric electronic cigarette vaping litigation and i should have written that out sooner and better than i just read it second any questions or comments mrs reach did you get that do i need to repeat this please tell me no thank you so much because that was terrible that was the worst motion i've ever made all those in favor aye all those in favor say aye motion carries 5-0 i move that we adjourn second all those in favor aye aye aye
095thank you good evening and have a great safe fall break you