J.O. Combs Special Board Meeting 03/30/2022

001okay congratulations i'm not sure is that that weird thing that we got i have no idea yes i'm going to start the meeting call this meeting to order at 601 um i need a motion to adopt the agenda a second all in favor hi hi aye well we got chad doing okay um motion carries five to zero okay so um [Music] i guess we just have an informational discussion on 5.1 oh we have the pledging public comments all right fine i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all do we have any public comments no we did not okay before we get started i want to know how did the job fair go

002the job fair went well i don't know if if mark got the exact number of people that came in but we ended up hiring six teachers and a couple more today we picked up we got four new subs we got four pair of pros uh we got a uh somebody for food service so i'd say we're in a neighborhood about 15 to 20 employees that are people that we we picked up and we probably had maybe 40 people come through 60 come through yeah so overall i think it was is real good we'll do another job fair in the spring or in the summer for classified i think you know with teachers it's a little bit different we'll keep working the teachers and and we have people i mean we're we're we're still getting apps

003and we're still interviewing so um we're approximately 50 positions teaching positions some of those were unfilled this year um about approximately 50 teaching positions at this point where they're trying to fill okay but i will tell you it'll be fluid and i will tell you that in the old days you didn't break a teaching contract now it's not so we'll have people that sign that could turn around and break it in june i mean not just us districts all over the state will have that same issue okay so um let me get started then and i will try not to wander because i know we need the mic for um the people that are online if anybody's online because we're streaming this and the peanut gallery here even though they're sitting at the back you

004are able to ask them questions i mean as part of this this is just a general study session and so therefore it it's a situation where please ask as many questions as possible i'll explain what we're trying to do with this uh with this particular uh presentation but if you're trying to get perspective of a principle or perspective from julie or someone else like that i mean this is an open an open process not not a closed process in terms of of the conversation so we will try to answer all the questions that are there depending on what the questions are that may change a little bit and we may not be able to answer something that we have to get more information but i think we're positioned with people in the room to answer

005all the questions so oops let's make sure okay so what we want to do tonight is a couple different things is is number one review aspects of this current year's budget from a couple different perspectives i want to provide you a high level view of of the upcoming budget and i'll talk about that things are shifting as we speak we received some numbers 15 minutes ago so we'll talk about that in a second so so i will tell you what this budget stuff is in terms of of of where it sits in the bigger picture we'll review current commitments from fund sources this is especially applicable to essers because we've already made some commitments based on stuff that you guys did last year and then more importantly look at initial budget proposals based on initial

006conversations with leadership as well as ccc uh we have presented this presentation slightly modified to cc ccc last week we anticipate there will be another meeting for ccc to talk more about some of these budget proposals in april uh just because of some things ultimately our goal will be to provide you with different aspects of a budget recommendations at april it's a slash may i think what you're going to get is some in april someone may maybe even some in june it's still contingent on state budget i can tell you as an example in april we'll talk about um [Music] health insurance premiums you will definitely get something in april because we got those numbers and we know what those numbers are and what i present to you tonight will be fixed while we start

007to talk about some of the other aspects those are contingent upon what does or doesn't happen with state budget okay so and as we talk about the state budget understand that whatever we present tonight is the most conservative of our budgets because it's built on the most conservative of the state budgets there are two different education proposals being worked on as we speak which would increase the amount of money into the district in one case potentially a little bit in the other case potentially significantly so i'll go on to senate uh strike everything senate bill 1269 what you heard in house of probes monday on the next slide that's the one that's getting the press and so you may have some questions on that so i'll kind of go over it and tell you about

008it the grand bargain of the grand plan i left an article on in front of you uh and it's a bob rob article out of the republic from back in january and it was an overview of saying hey here's how we can everybody can be a winner that concept is being pushed a little bit now by senator paul boyer we don't know a lot of the details so we don't know and the reason i say though when you just take a look at it if that plan were to gain steam the basic notion of that plan is it replaces 208 and so the idea of 208 was we're going to infuse at a minimum 700 million into the state budget so obviously the infusion of 700 million would be significantly more than any of the

009conversations we have today now whether that becomes a reality or not and what happens with that we're just going to have to see how it plays out over the next it could be weeks it could be months but but there are if you read what what rob says in his article and you see the the notion of what he's talking about it does make some political sense for why that could potentially be what comes down when the final budget's taking place um there were still the details will be are they going to go ahead and take care of we've been talking for several years about additional moneys to special education so even though we're going to give you this much money we're going to target that you must spend this percentage on special education are

010we going to talk about a poverty weight there's been conversations about a poverty rate if you're talking about a poverty weight obviously that means some districts ourselves included would not get as much as someone with a very high poverty rate and so even though the monies out there wouldn't necessarily be allocated everybody will be a winner but you will win to different degrees depending on what the details are that we have no idea um uh of what's being talked about right now it is is very quiet uh the the senate bill 1269 has been all over the place but this other grand bargain grand plan depending on what who you talk to that one's very very quiet so we'll just have to see please understand irrespective of what the final budget is that will not

011change the parameters for how we're building this budget it will just change the amount of money that's available for us okay so that's the key component and take just a few minutes to talk about uh six uh 1269 so that people understand in a nutshell they're looking at throwing about 270 million more let me back up 170 to 200 depending on how you compute the numbers in the it is a charter bill is being it was written by and driven by charter operators there was no public input from traditional public schools it was dropped on friday of the second week of fall break they couldn't find a place to put it last week so they put it in house of props this week or senator props one of the two approp house of probes they

012had all of 30 minutes of discussion they had three speakers four and three speakers against and then they moved it yeah two minutes each and then they moved it and it is structurally a significant change to the entire way we do things in a nutshell 50 percent of all traditional school districts lose money in the deal 94 of all charter schools get money in the deal you will see on average a 1.5 percent increase to traditional charters and a 2.3 percent on average increase to charters what they're going to do and i picked four of the components just so you have an idea there's a couple minor components to it you'll have to give up something with esa's and some of those things but that really doesn't impact us why again tei if you're not

013aware what tei is in the state they go ahead and figure out the average teacher experience across the entire state and then they find the midpoint if you're above the midpoint you get additional dollars on your budget because traditionally the the longer you're in the profession the more it costs for you to pay teachers the less you're in the in the system the less the cost so if you're above the midpoint the factor is going to be put into your budget if you're below the midpoint you're not going to get that factor they would eliminate the tai in additional teacher compensation for all public school traditional public schools there's where you get winners and losers charters since they don't have tei when they replace that tei with the 2.5 percent increase to the base support

014level every charter gets 2.5 percent increase so right out of the gate that's where your winners are in our case we're a winner in that we would be it's projected we would be at 300 328 500 and so where you get the losers because we tend to have younger staff we don't we get zero right now for tei so therefore any addition on the base support level is money we get i use payson only because i was there that a veteran staff they will lose about the same amount because they are above the threshold of the midpoint that's where you're starting to get winners and losers and we got a fiscal note from jlbc and you can go through and they'll tell you every single district and whether they're a winner loser in every single

015charter where they're a winner in this case they're all winners but but so you can take a look at it so in the numbers you're going to present to us today is that 328 000 included nope okay so that's what you meant by conservatives right we're conservative because we this just came out and and this is just uh it got out of committee on a party line boat uh it has not gotten out of the senate uh and uh there's no guarantee that it is gonna get out of the senate um and then if and if it does get to the senate what will the governor do um but i don't i don't know if it'll get that far so i share this because getting a lot of publicity and i just want to make

016sure you guys understand it again if it does get out and it does get voted i personally think it's it's bad for public education uh for traditional public education but in a micro sense it's we end up becoming winners there's all and and besides charters atra was real big writers of the bill and natura does not like tax increases uh does not like public school districts with taxes that they're big on the transportation piece they want to phase out the transportation support limit and that's because of the notion of what schools get to transport kids there's a belief that that school districts are getting more than they should to transport kids you'll see a term of ghost riders meaning best example and julie you can jump in if i butcher this but best example is

017if if my district is 100 square miles and i'm in a small district or my district 100 square miles and i'm in large district i still have to run buses to 100 square miles but if i'm in a small district i might have buses with not a lot of kids on them yet i'm going to get funded by the number of kids as well as the number of miles i i drive so therefore there could be some ghost ridership there if i'm in a large district i still run 100 square miles but obviously my buses are much fuller because we're in a big city let's just say and so they there they've figured out a gap what they believe is a gap and and what the funding level should be for school districts and what

018it is and therefore they would love to get rid of the transportation phase out the transportation support level for five years because they believe that um [Music] that gap is is a drain on the tax payer um and they've been trying to get rid of it for years and so this is their piece in exchange they will increase the route miles by 30 percent in our case um given where we're at and the amount of miles we drive we would see a 31 000 increase so we're basically trading out what we currently get for what they would give us if you're in a small district that's running big miles you could be seeing significant decreases in this one and you have to look at these independently of each other they want to go ahead and

019add the two together and tell you what your overall limit is but you need to understand you can't take transportation mileage and move it over into mno and just automatically spend it in in uh in salaries on top of that it costs you more to run your transportation than what you get from the state so there's some issues you could take daa and do it but then you don't have money to fix your buildings so they'll show you and the jlbc did in their fiscal note like it's all connected together but in fact it's very separate and so you have to look at them separate so there are little districts that will lose you might gain in tei and lose in transportation there's districts that will lose in both there's districts that will gain in

020both we're gaining in both but really the transportation's a trade-off because it's only 31 000 they have results based funding they dump it into the formula uh they tell everybody what the number amount is but this is going off a 2019 letter grade so obviously there's going to be no new letter grades next year and so the number is really to be determined depending on what your letter grades are depending on any number of factors there so i'm not even bothering with what the number is because we will have to wait and see what letter grades are in in uh in november uh and then we'll go from there so the results-based funding is this the concept that if you have better letter grades you get more money as opposed to if you yeah it's

021like lower grades and you need more money you don't get it yeah it's the concept that um uh really if you if you have a very good program then in the business world we should follow the very good programs and so if you're having good test results then that would imply that you should follow that with analogy i have that would be akin to saying since stanford and harvard have the best test scores we should go ahead and incentivize them and give them more money in hopes that western new mexico university will now change their funding model to get the same amount of money that stanford and harvard get and it's just two totally different issues uh the number one factor in in in uh test scores is social economic and so trying to do

022what the rich already get with the poor who don't get it it just doesn't it's never made sense to me the danger in this one is before it was a line out of budget that the governor had to put out so like last year he he backed off the amount of money because of covet and stuff this would put it into the base support and this would then in ensure that there's um increases based on inflation every single year and so this will result in the rich getting richer to be and and we may be beneficial to it especially as our demographic changes so uh in all honesty it it it's a benefit potentially to us as a district i think it's not good personally for public education but it is a benefit uh and

023then the real big one which i'm not going to get into all of it but it's they're going to change the way this this they're going to call it a state student funding option all charters would get funded this way they would see an increase school districts would have the option to go ahead and and move into the state uh funding formula this option the number one thing you have to do is right now the only schools that are eligible and i believe the numbers they had in the fiscal note were 26 school districts is you must not have an override or bond what this is is a move to get rid of overrides and bonds for school districts and so if you don't have an override or a bond they'll give you a new

024funding formula and all of a sudden you make depending on your situation you could see increases of one or two i know pima uh uh unified over in eastern arizona i don't know this because their superintendent is in favor of this because he makes like 1.8 million dollars on his district based on this he can't pass an override or a bond therefore why not take it what you do is you have to give up a variety of different funding sources to accept this so if you do this you can no longer go out for overrides and bonds oops atra loves that first step to get away from bonds and overrides you have to give up adjacent ways you can't fund for adjacent ways you have to give up you can no longer go to the

025sfb for building renewal to fix your buildings and so there's a number of things you would have to give up to get this extra dollars for us it's only 389 000 so it's not a lot you have some districts i can tell you there are some districts out there they ran 26 districts that that met the criteria and then they ran another i can't remember the exact number but i'm going to say probably 20 or 30 that they for some reason we were on that list that's why i know our number uh believe that we would have paid off our if anybody they believed paid off a bond within the next four years then this would be if you chose this option and everybody thinks you're going to jump all over this option we're not

026i wouldn't because of what you give up here's what it gets but to give you perspective in the first scenario those districts that do not have bonds and no rights the gap was somewhere between 2500 for a real tiny district to about 2.5 million for a medium-sized district of those that were eligible in the case of the second one the gap is somewhere between 25 000 and 11 million so if i'm a district that's scheduled to get 11 million by doing this and i'm in a place that has a hard time passing a bond and override i might do that i will tell you this is a classic um divide and conquer it's used all the time against public education we'll take the good deal and charters will take the great deal i think what

027you give up you have to go to your voters which creates its own set of issues and so in in understanding this is because of the additional dollars coming in you take off the the tax for the bond and the override but when you get the additional dollars and it's going to change your gtr and you're going to have additional tax and oh by the way it's going to show up on your tax rolls that go out to the public oh that's right charters aren't showing up on the tax rolls so they get to just not go to a boat to the public and they just get to do an increase so this is strictly i got accused of being too blunt in a meeting a couple meetings in friday this is just strangely uh

028straight charter bill it's not good for public education but i bring it up to you because we it may be the law of the land so to speak if it moves forward greg good question um with our bond i don't remember when do we finish paying it off uh i think we're scheduled 28 so we're in that four year payoff window there are other places that they looked at them but their their window is so far out but again you have to now basically say you're never going for a bond you have to understand that so therefore the two things that are real negative for us is number one you're now reliant on the smb to fund it you cannot build a full comprehensive school just on smb money and so you have to keep

029that in mind number two you're still bound by the formulas of when we're able to build a new school so we still have to go to the sfb we still have to give them all our numbers they have a complex formula and they say nope you have capacity so you cannot build a school oh by the way the charter even though we've been told no if they can find a piece of property and get the loan they would go ahead and plop a school in that area that would take kids away from us and next time we go out to the to the sfb we're further behind because they sold a bunch of kids because they have a right to build a school and so this is just the realities of what we have so

030that states student funding option from the people that drafted this they think it's just a slick deal that's all the school districts can go to it is not and most school districts won't go to it because they can't afford to survive without the bonds and overrides so so how did we build this budget a couple different things we built the budget on a projected zero percent growth for students compared to the hundredth day of 2122. so for perspective that is 4 200 a little over 4 200 adm during the um uh so that's this year's number last year if you took a look at our 100th day count for last year we're actually at 44 0015 something so we are seeing an increase over what we got last year um we're just saying we're not

031going to build on a projected increase in the number of kids beyond that number we may get it and it'll be bonus but given uh the demographic study we did and some other things that are happening we believe there's probably going to be about a one year lag on significant growth and then the southern uh southeastern quadrant of the the district will start to see uh combs ranch and wales ranch or wales farms come on board and and then the next quarter after that where farms come on board and probably the one up here uh on germain uh north side uh northside creek and but if you look at where they're at and even if you go up to a uh to aj the project's up there you're probably looking quarter two or quarter three

032um of 23 going into quarter one quarter two of 24 before you start to see wholesale numbers coming in we will still get kids from archer meadows but we're going to see about a one year lag time unlike in all honesty someone like queen creek which has seen 10 growth so you might build a different number if we were seeing that kind of growth but we're a couple years away from even starting to see significant growth so that's why we chose zero percent growth on against this year's hundredth day count we want to maintain a contingency of at least a million it may be higher last year was a little bit higher so we want to have the contingency in everything we do with this initial budget is built on the same fte as last

033year obviously when we get into the budgetary conversations we'll talk about that a little bit tonight we could end up increasing fte but for a starting point we're saying same fte as this year because by the way we didn't fill all our positions this year because we couldn't hire everybody and then we want to be creative using all the funds we can to maximize capacity i'm going to own the daa budget question bob i didn't say yeah i think our budget is around 30 million in that range am i remembering correctly so our contingency is about three to three and a half percent that's traditionally what it's been over the last few years that i've been on the board so i think we're looking that's about right for the million dollars right yeah so okay

034i'm going to wander because this is bothering me standing here and i'm gonna wander so what we're trying to do with the goals uh obviously balance the budget because that's what the state requires want to address staff ccc administrative concerns we want to remain competitive with our surrounding school districts continue to move the district hashtag forward recognize and thank staff for their hard work the pandemic create some bridges between 23 24 24 25 and 25 26 budgets and we'll talk about this with some of the new information that we just received right before the meeting so there is a way we want to look at how do we bridge uh some of the other budgets and then also we want to create an aggressive yet conservative budget that may be counterintuitive to most people but

035i think we can do that with some of the initial ideas and again these are initial ideas these numbers are going to change and i can explain right out of the gate where one of these changes could occur and we have not had a chance to talk either as a group collectively here or as a group with the ccc on some of these changes we did talk with ccc they gave us their priorities biggest thing to look at is generally the majority of those priorities involve more individuals i've talked to ccc to tell them if you want we'll project we're going to hire a million people if they ain't out there how are you going to get them so we have to keep in mind that even though these may be priorities for the entire

036district the reality is there may not be individuals out there to hire so we will get into that conversation in a little bit on number number four more elementary electives can you talk a little bit about that one yeah there's a conversation both with them with administration quite frankly as well as them do you look at either putting a 1.0 for technology at every site do you add art we don't have art so art would be true more in terms of a class or more in terms of i want a full-time pe at every single school so it's a combination of the two of those kind of things depending on who you're talking to and what you're looking at um but right now we have a qua we don't have choir so could you do

037choir at the elementary level you have band orchestra you got technology you got pe what about art what about choir what about some other things like that and at some point i think we'll get there not quite sure we're there based on our size but but that's a discussion point so why why number six why just fifth and six reduce their class sizes quite frankly because that was probably he was in the room within not everybody was in a room with ccc so it's a regular ccc meeting those people that were there we had to do something that day so you're seeing a focus on k and you're seeing a focus on fifth six and that may just been that the the amount of people in the room because what we did was a brainstorm

038to say what other things you guys want and then it became a case of rank ordering them and so based on the discussion those things came up and then it became a rank quarter well when i show you what we've done within the height within the leader i have an uproar well but but note that but note that we're trying to blend leadership and ccc so you'll see leadership has significantly more ideas than than uh ccc did and number seven what is alternative scheduling that's just looking at things how we do things how do i i'll give you the best example what you could do with an alternative schedule i think we discussed it you guys can help me out if we did or not but right now we take for our specials and you

039might have them go to each site you know in the morning this site in the afternoon at that site next day in the morning in the afternoon well what if you said they're gonna stay at all at one site on one day and i'll another side on another day you might be able to change the way you schedule and how you work with your the kids and then the teachers in their free time by doing a different way of scheduling you may based on who you don't hire do you take a look at how you group kids together and group them with teachers we're having that conversation so it could mean a lot of different things we haven't really fleshed that out because we got to get to that point to look to see i

040think that some of that's going to be driven quite frankly by how many positions we do or don't fill okay this is just the priorities for leadership in the areas they fall in same as last year i just put up these funding sources because i want people to understand that there's tons and tons of different areas that we can go to pull money from if we need to again this may change based on stuff that already happened today so in a nutshell rough numbers prior to today um we would see roughly a million dollars in growth by the number of kids we grew this year 200 kids roughly 5 000 a kid that's where you get your million dollars okay we know inflation we don't know the inflation number i won't know that until the

041budget's pushed out by the state but it's the lesser of two percent or the uh gdp and so we're going with 1.89 which gives us about 600 thousand dollars asrs is decrease is a decrease in the irs uh what we have to pay in the ars for every employee point two four really not a big deal for us but it does create a thirteen thousand dollar gain health premium increase is nine 9.4 percent i'll talk to you in more detail on on down but that's 400 000. so for very rough numbers before we start we're sitting at 1.2 mil now i'm going to tell you that that's depending on what you do with that money that that number could be greater than that if you get creative legally creative so we're all on the same

042page if you get creative with how you're going to spend some of the different funding sources that we had on the previous page so you could stretch the 1.2 out more than 1.2 and we'll talk a little bit about that not necessarily in great detail but we'll talk a little bit about that so when we started with the leadership team and said where do we prioritize things we're basing it on the fact that we believe we would have 1.2 million dollars to spend if you saw senate bill 1269 come through you would now have 1.5 million to spend if that grand plan or brand bargain came in you got a big number i don't know what that number would be because it would depend on what it is so that's why this becomes a conservative

043budget that we're building off of and so anything that we present tonight as a as a concert as a concept could potentially go up and i'm going to give you a very specific example in just a second i'm going to give you a specific example right now i can't remember my slides so 301 uh the new number must come out by law by march 31st i think last year it actually hit april 1st or 2nd but at quarter till six we got an email with the new number so that's how fast this changes if you remember last year the base support level was 541 and they had a 190 day addition or 192 addition to that which was one-time funding and it was related to what happened within uh 301 and the paying off of

044debt services so it was a one-time increase so the total increase last year or the total amount last year was 733 dollars you probably had some districts that said chi-ching 733 dollars how can we spend it all we took the the idea or the stance that it would be 541 which is what we would allocate the 192 would become a contingency okay depending on which one of those two ideas you adopted the number that came out a few minutes ago some might see it as a loss i see it as oh i can't believe it's that great so what we saw um and i've i have the jlbc uh article on this but i it happened at quarter to six and i can't process what it's in there the new number so the 541 is

045the way i'm looking at at it went up to 708. some people are saying we lost 25 dollars because it went from 733 to 708. i didn't i in my perspective and i've talked to several people that would do the same thing nobody planned on that 192. so everything we talk about here is based on 541. so you're going to sit here and talk about you have anticipated carryover of a little over a million dollars and you just popped 160 dollars increase to the base support level the first question is is it sustainable it is in the base support level so yes it is but that base support level is still subject to tax revenues so if we went into a recession that number could go down when are we going to go to the

046next recession well those you that can tell me then i'll be able to plan better but i don't really know and so there's a piece there that says how much of that do you add more to contingency if so how much and then what are you going to do with that which is left over it's such a significant number and remember it can only go to certified staff so we these guys are sitting here don't even know that the new number 708 until i just told you guys and so we haven't even had a pr time to process that we haven't had time to talk with ccc ccc is probably just or teachers are just finding that out today i'm sure it was released sometime this afternoon but we got the email that said the

047amount at quarter till six and so this fundamentally shifts some of the ideas we'll talk about here again if you talk about 160 plus dollar increase here and then you get into one of the other two state budgets they're talking about you may see substantially huge numbers and so that's why i keep talking about this is a process with what we're thinking but if you get those kinds of numbers coming in if you really replace 208 with 750 million dollars into the system plus 160 whatever it is one or two dollars on this that's big time dollars and so okay so a month ago i'm saying we're going to present some to you guys in april and maybe maybe dang if it's those kind of money we might be having a conversation that pushes out

048a little bit because you don't want to do something stupid and just spend money for the sake of spending money so just to understand that as we give you this perspective i want you to understand what we're thinking and where we're trying to go but we're starting to get some numbers in that may substantially change and we may have to come back to the table and have bigger conversations okay and it is literally happening this fast it's also important that you remember governor signed 1139 back in 21 that effectively changed the way 301 can be spent and i'll have a slide on that so i'll show and explain what that means bit it's significant impact on what we're trying to do not just us other districts too just so you're aware we get about 1.9

049million as of right now daa 450 000 goes over to mno automatically so we have about 1.5 in daa we have about 2.1 in bond remember you have to spend bond money within seven years of the sale and that's 22 is about seven years so there's some money that we're going to have to get done spending this year and we have essers of approximately five and a half million left but please understand that some of it's committed so we put that number out there some of it's dedicated to positions more m o less capital so we got to play around with that number questions any other just on that so that just frames it now we're going to go into what we're going to do and why i have a question on the daa how

050much of that is eligible to move to mno is there a certain percent or a dollar amount or 100 okay i will tell you i've been in districts that have had to move the majority of there to stay competitive with other districts in mno i'm aware of other districts that wouldn't touch a dime and move it over to mno so it just depends on the situation you're in we did the 450 i can't remember someone may be able to tell me why there was a specific reason based on the way we funded something that we had to move it over to cover the 450 but i'm drawing a blank on it right now i don't know if anybody remembers that and yeah and then but there was a reason we were funding something bonuses for

051the board members yes is that it okay we were funding something and so therefore the decision was made to make sure we could continue to fund that but i'm just it might have had to do with the when we lost the override and the override went out in 13 or 14 whenever it died out they still wanted to make a commitment to something that was funded as part of the override and so therefore they chose to take the 450 to keep that commitment i believe that's what it is but but i'd have to do some research on that so budget review priorities again staff increases so meaning the number of staff positions we have fte salary and benefit increases or position increases and by position increases takes someone from a part-time employee to a full-time

052employee is is an example we're talking about there we're not going to spend a lot of time on staff increases or position increases i'll show you what this group has initially talked about uh we're waiting to see what the final dollars are because when you get to the salary benefit increase that eats a good portion of what we're talking about you will see i'm not going to go through each one of these these are some of the ideas that leadership put out so obviously because of the nature of the jobs they're doing at their sites and etc you're going to see more ideas and a little bit more specificity what the mean is is basically we had them rank these and this became the mean for what they felt was most important okay and so

053once we got all of uh all the ideas through brainstorming same as we did with uh ccc we then went to a rank order you're seeing some uh bold faced um [Music] funds in there because some of these could come out of some of these different funds so it makes it you may actually have something we'll see down you may have something that's number 15 with the lowest mean and we may fund that and not fund number eight because there's funding in idea to do it so just because we rank them that way doesn't mean when everything plays out that they're automatically get funded there because there's different issues that are at play here additional training days for certified staff technically you guys have approved that last year when we talked about essers so yes

054number 10 create signing bonus stipend yep we'll talk about that in detail yeah yeah no we'll talk about that in detail is that good or bad though yeah well i don't mind doing that but then if they decide to break their contract well we'll talk about it yeah we'll take something back no we'll talk about that yeah we have that okay so in this conversation both with ccc and the leadership the discussion of compensation became the overriding most important thing we do so most of this conversation is about compensation because it's the only way we can remain competitive with our neighboring districts and so these other ones although important you have to see how much money is left over when you get done with the compensation discussion and therefore that's why we haven't done as

055much with some of the other ones because we had to deal with compensation first so some context for converse for compensation and some of these may be changing this was a report that somebody did so we pulled some numbers they may have modified a little bit but this is what we had when we talked about this this tells you what the 2122 base salary was and it tells you what based on what we're hearing is the projected base salary and the performance pay i'm going to get into that more detail but you can see that at 43 000 as a base salary we're in the bottom three or four of all of these districts mesa is not in here well that's just because we did the study chose not to use mesa but so you

056can see we're down below if we don't do something to remain competitive then if i'm going with we'll use qc if they're going to come in at about 50 000 and i'm we're at 43 then we're not competitive it's just that simple and so if you're a chandler um maricopa where they're 47 40 49 you're not competitive florence is moving up to 47. so that generated why we're having the discussion on compensation that we're having because we have to get more competitive aj's going to be at 49. so again these numbers may change a little bit but conceptually there's an idea that's being pushed and that we'll talk about that when we get to there so our first recommendation again this is conservative and based on the discussion with the 708 this is changing but

057if we were to go to a five percent increase for everybody why five percent number one that's what the classified raise was in january of 22. so it gives us a starting point to say we want to treat all employee groups the same way we said compensation and being competitive was a primary consideration so we'll start with five percent in this particular scenario there's two ways to take that increase do you take it to the base so you say five percent increase on 43 000 which is our current base is an increase of 21.50 so you're effectively going to go um up to 45 000 as your as your starting point okay 40 45 150. if you did that obviously a new teacher because you're given the same dollar amount to everybody 21.50 means entire

058certified staff gets 2150 raise obviously the younger you are percentage-wise the greater the increase to your salary the older you are the longer you've been in the system the less so the other way to do it is say we're going to take five percent and we're going to give five percent to every single individual in that scenario you still give five percent to the base so the base is still increased by 2150 but if i'm making 55 thousand and i do five percent on fifty five thousand it's a bigger number than if i just gave you twenty one hundred i'll give you some examples i have a question um i'm thinking about that forty three thousand so i went to our website and it shows our average teacher salaries forty thousand eight thirty nine so

059i'm trying to see how the numbers forty thousand forty thousand eight thirty nine now that's coming from from 2018 right from 2018. our average salary right now i believe is 50 or 51. okay because i was going to say that this seemed like it didn't jive with the 43 yeah so you can see obviously to go ahead and do that the difference between going 5 to the base is 750 000 for certified staff if you did the 5 to the individuals it's 900 000. so one costs more than the other again depending on what happens with the state budget and stuff that may be an issue that may not if you do it to ministration i just chose the ap base the system principle base that we could start that's where you get the 36.60

060and the same with the exam classifier we fixed the classified but there's a group of about i think it's 10 exam classified that did not get the increase so they would have to get an increase so you're seeing all toll if you were to do 5 it's 868. if you do it to the base it's over a million dollars if you do it to the individual okay we also talked about a student growth stipend this is a slide that struck strictly from last year that implies that if we get 200 kid growth we would pay it out in march we did that this year when they came back from spring break they got the increase if we don't get the 200 kid growth we don't pay it out so there's no impact to us uh

061in a negative sense because it's based on current year funding but it allows for a way to to reward staff if we have growth so it's a it's a good incentive but it's not or no it's not a commitment performance pay next part this will be important i know i'm giving you a lot of information but we'll start to connect these dots so previously prior to 2021 you had three funds there was a specific percentage amount so you're 708 dollars 40 percent had to go to i believe it's 12 and 13 and 20 percent had to go to 11. with the new program in 2021 they just lumped it into one one fund the big difference was all the funds says is you have to do performance pay it does not tell you how much

062you could theoretically give all of your staff one dollar all the certified staff one dollar and you would meet the law might fire people up but you would meet the law okay so that's the significant difference and that plays into what districts are doing and just so we're on the same page what districts are doing is say we will take most districts are probably given somewhere between three and four thousand or forty five hundred in performance paid depends on the district and what they're doing they're saying we will reduce that number down to maricopa said two hundred dollars i think chandler was five and queen creek was seven or vice versa aj was like a thousand because they didn't spend as much money and we will take the additional dollars and put it into the

063base salary therefore it's the way to bump you up and get you closer to 50 000. so those numbers that you were seeing on that slide that told you all the school districts had a reduction in the performance pay component at the concept of trying to raise the as close to 50 000 as you could make sense okay so what we would take a look at a couple things first of all we already have a commitment within 301 for some base salary you have to because that's what fund 11 was our performance pays at 4 000 and again state revenues and as i said we're not sure what the increase was and i can tell you today it was big okay so what we would look at is possibly two options with certified staff if

064you gave the five percent increase that we talked about before you see that the starting salary is 45 150 in either case because you're applying the same five percent to this starting salary if you were to take in one case and say instead of giving teachers four thousand dollars in june we will take three thousand and dump it into the base so everybody's gonna get the three thousand it's not costing us a dime more because we already have that money already spending that money if you did that you can see you can get the base up to 48 150. if you don't do that you would keep the base at 45 150. at the end of the day the total amount that you're going to get paid in either scenarios is still 49 150 because

065you would have in one case a thousand dollars of performance pay that's paid in june and the other case you would have four thousand so either way you're not changing the amount of money now i fully understand and there'll be people that have concerns that i love the bonus of four thousand dollars in june because we go to disneyland every june and it pays for the trip if you spread the 3 000 over 26 pays and you do the higher tax bracket and stuff i don't not going to really see it that will be the debate do you not go for the bonuses they don't get taxed on their bonus yeah they do but but i'm just saying you're going to get this debate over like you get 4 000 but really that's not what

066their check is right but but the debate's going to be do i want it here or do i want it spread out you can change the question was asked in ccc can you change the percentage of what you're getting pulled out in your deduction yeah you can do that just like you could before the big difference is in one scenario our starting base is 45 150 in the other scenario it's 48 150. when you look to be competitive with someone that's paying 50 before you even start with any other factors if there's a 5 000 difference you have a hard time being competitive okay so that's the way to do it now these numbers based on the 704 or 708 are now changing not only for us quite frankly for every district in in the

067state depending on how they have if they've been conservative they may have a boatload of money to spend if they've been aggressive they may have less money to spend but everybody got a pay increase today into their budgets through classroom site funds so all the stuff i presented up to this point just changed and so i could go back to that first slide and you may see a two thousand dollar or three thousand dollar increase for some of those school districts because they chose to take all the increase and dump it into the base it can only go to teachers so that's where it's going or certified staff but we're going to increase the teachers starting to 53 let's just say again we won't know that until every district has a chance to assess what

068this means to them and they talk about it we since we just got the numbers we're we're a little ways out to understand that um i'd like to ask mark a question um in terms of recruiting when you just when you're talking to candidates and the issue of money comes up from your experience which is more important to a new hire a higher base salary or a lower base and a bonus at the end because they're comparing their base salary if they have two places that they're looking at they're looking at the base salary and so that's the issue right now for us is we need to increase the base to be even more competitive than we already are because we're creative like dr wyman said but with the base we're not there right now

069and a lot of it quite frankly is every district to the west of us is on a fifteen percent override how they use that fifteen percent probably varies from district to district so it's a little bit harder to uh uh to discuss you know district x gave it this this fashion district why i gave it in that fashion um so so if we get to the base one way or the other we still may lose out on people because there's other dollars that are available that we don't have but at least when we're out marketing we're potentially there again as i told ccc show you where because we're still back to this debate all of this discussion whether i give if we go back to the previous option whether i gave it to the to

070the base or we give it to the individual well those that are new teachers would rather take the money in the one scenario versus the other but here well depends on how i want to spend it so you're not going to get a 90 10 on this and so we're going to have to make a decision administration will come with a recommendation after talking to people but obviously somebody's not going to be satisfied with whatever the decision is because they're not going to get potentially as much and i have a slide coming up that will tell you start to tell you what this means money dollar wise is there so when they when you do performance pay is there a chance that they don't get that money because they didn't reach something yes there's a

071chance this is the other difference is if you bury it into the base right you get it everybody gets it so right now we don't have 100 of our people getting it we don't get 100 of our people because some people don't meet their goals we don't get 100 of our people because some people choose fundamentally have a philosophical problem with performance pay and therefore they just don't want to do it so this will cost us a little bit more but again this and so this again are you trying to do the good for the whole or but it will cost us more as a teacher i think that if there's a chance that i have that i won't be able to get out i'd rather just go into my basement because then i'm going

072to get it either way yeah and we will be we will be having this conversation with uh 301 tomorrow and so because if you take the majority of the money the conversation with 301 with the 301 committee tomorrow oh okay i was like well that's good and so and part of that yeah that's going to be a necessary conversation be myself and a piece of paper i think i'll win it um the issue that's there though is if you take enough money out i'm going to use maricopa because our understanding is they went down to 200. what does the performance pay plan really look like in that scenario versus aj who didn't spend as much who look like they're still going to have about a thousand or 1200 i think in their performance pay so

073how much work am i gonna really do for two or three hundred dollars versus how much work am i willing to do for three or four thousand dollars and so so there's other conversations irrespective of any decision made that you have to be discussed with with our staff about what does that plan look like we've had some of those conversations and we'll have some more tomorrow we were looking at a different perspective when we started them last year about is this the best way to do the plan one of the teachers had gotten samples of other school districts and some of their plans and so we were starting to have that conversation but given covet and everything else and and all the stuff going on we we just decided to let it ride this is

074going to drive a different conversation because of what other school districts are doing so if let's just say the decision is made to put most or all of it into the base next year at the same time we have that decision to make again we could choose to put the new 301 money into the base or yeah the new 301 the new so if the 708 went to 840 you could talk about the the the difference there you couldn't talk about anything below the 708 depending on what you did with it i mean if you put it in this contingency you're okay but but once you bury it into the base it's in the basement then it's committed but if there's any incremental difference in future years you can then change and say we're not

075going to put that in the base we're going to use that as an end-of-year bonus okay yeah and that could be quite frankly a negotiating point ccc may come and say we would like to see more of it we think performance pays is more important and we like to build up performance pay this year so please take a look at any raises that come in and do that and we that would be part of the discussion process with him okay does ccc take it out to a vote for the rest of the the camp at like campuses or they just then they just take whatever they say like you know the fifth and sixth graders are only gonna get there's a presentation and they get the feeling they get the feeling of their of their

076of their sights and then they come back and discuss that they may take a boat within that the 20 22 members well it depends i mean you know there's some cases where when you take a look at what's out there and the money that's available there may not be a whole lot of voting to take place in other situations and i will tell you the more money that's available the more you want to vote because you get more provincial and there's a lot of money out there the less money you may not take a vote because there's very few options to move forward with i would suggest that with some of the stuff that's now coming on and this is again different than the conversation i had with ccc would have been different if i

077was presenting to them tomorrow instead of presenting to him last week just because 708 changes the ball game and we just have to think our way through it and see what we're going to do with ccc and the leadership to talk about the 708 the 708 on the classroom site fund from the 541. that's the sort of that you're talking about yeah no so senate bill i was like where did that one come from nope you need to keep me on target okay so the other thing that we talked as a concept so please understand this is a concept not everybody will agree with this concept the reason this came up if you recall we talked about ways to incentivize and to help administrators because we're losing administrators in a pay schedule so one of

078the ideas we talked about is could we come up with a performance pay plan for both administrators are classified obviously classified it's a little bit easier to swallow for some people than administrative but if we were to take a look at this and look at and there's a type one i apologize that should be a thousand not fifteen hundred i changed it on one but i forgot to change it on this one uh if we went to administration with a thousand why a thousand because and in the previous scenario we were saying teachers would get a thousand so we would keep them equal that cost would be uh 500 that could come out of mmo or rooftop fees if we take it out amino or if we take it out of rooftop fees back to

079making bridges in 23 24 25 26 etc we can play that out for the next five or six years and not really impact rooftop fees as we get more money in starting in about 24 it would obviously offset it because at 38 000 you can get enough homes built in a single year to basically cover that uh and so that's why we say rooftop doesn't have to come out of rooftop but that was an example to let people know we could look at any variety of funding sources to pay for that yeah because that but those rooftop fees are only one time they're one time but we have we have but eventually right but but again you're going to break anymore right but you're going to bridge it out how far and again you have

080to take a look and i will tell you this whole conversation is before the grand bargain if you throw 700 million into the mix why would you even go to rooftop pieces right so so at that point we're trying to be creative to be competitive if you change the way the dollars are coming in then you change your whole thought process but this was done before that time if you look to do one for classified you're looking at about 150 000 you do cannot find a fund that's out there other than mno that would make this sustainable and i'll talk about the classified because it gets a little bit more uh the administrative i would see very similar to teachers have the exact same plan classified goal-wise you have something similar but the problem you

081run into is you have too many you have at least three you have a half a dozen calendar work calendars and you have people working anywhere from one hour to eight hours so to try to provide a perspective for it this is not what we would necessarily do but it gives you an idea the reason i'll tell you why i selected these numbers but we first of all broke out by hours worked one to two three to four five six seven eight it was based on straight percentages the number at the top was trying to take a look at what teachers were getting what administration was getting and worked off of that then it just became in the case of the 800 75 percent 100 percent 75 percent 50 and 25 percent we then looked

082at those that work on 26261 calendars 190 to 223 and 170 to 189 those numbers are there because if you get below that bottom right corner at 75 dollars what's the point of doing uh too many goals if i'm gonna get two dollars and fifty cents by the time taxes are taken out so when you ran the numbers 75 is not great but for someone only working one or two hours 75's decent for that pay range and so this would be the type of thing that we would do i'm not saying this is what we're going to do but we have to bring something for context for our staff to understand what we're talking about that's why we bring the scale question on the um seven to eight hours worked hundred percent exempt classified 800

083why is it not a thousand as the same that we did for administrators and certified it could be exempt classified as a general rule coming in a little bit less on pay and based on the the jobs that they have again this is just i arbitrarily said it at 800. if the board said hey we want everybody treated a thousand would just change it to a thousand change numbers obviously the dollar amount because they're classified would go into the classified so that 150 would go up a little bit not a ton because you don't have a lot of employees in there but you just have to factor that in so again this is subject to any sort of change yep go ahead chad oh you can hear me okay um i just a couple of

084comments and maybe a question there too i uh for one uh you know when we talk about increasing the teachers by a thousand dollars for example and increasing the the administrators by a thousand dollars if if we increase them the same it's not just going to keep the same not very large gap between the two that we've talked about before yes it potentially could again that the issue that's always out there is what's palatable to the board what's valuable to the to the employees and so so the notion we that's why the 1500 was up there but then as we discussed it as a leadership team we thought an easier sell quote-unquote cell would be to stay administration same as as as teachers again the numbers are whatever you want the numbers to be we'll

085just have to have that conversation make sure we run some scenarios that we can afford that amount because if you go to it's not a ton but if you go to 1500 that 38 000 becomes 50 000. so wait a minute is it isn't this just a the the performance pay it's not going into their base salary right no this okay so then you won't have that compression then yeah you went on the salary schedule you would in terms of overall pay that someone would be eligible for but you're right you would have it on the salary schedule okay well but the the other the other question i have or the comment i guess for my fellow board members you know this whole concept of performance pay you know it comes from the business world

086where there's this idea that unless you incentivize somebody to say you're not going to make as much money if you don't do certain things or if you don't you know meet your quota like a salesman or something like that um i guess i just and and i and i i can guarantee that most of the staff and and teachers you know would feel something similar but the whole the whole concept of i'm only here's you know you we already don't pay you very much but here's a few extra dollars that you know will dangle out in front of you if you as long as you number one jump through any hoops that we want to create or number two um if somehow you know you're you're able to raise your student scores or whatever which

087there is a correlation between good teaching and and and the scores that they get raised but part of the problem for most educators through the years has been the frustration of saying that number one you know i'm not a good teacher if i don't raise my kids scores a certain level and yet we all know that in some cases some teachers have they don't have the same playing field when it comes to the students in their class you know one one classroom may have students who are much more capable of scoring higher than another class and so to constantly judge teachers by solely by you know what their students score is a little bit unfair at least in my opinion it's a little bit arbitrary but then on top of it it's almost like an

088insult in some ways in my opinion to to tell a teacher that you know i know i don't pay very much already but i have a little bit more money here that i could pay you i could just pay it to you because you really you know we tell them you really deserve more money than we pay you but i have this little bit of money that i'm only going to give you if you jump through these hoops and you you know whatever have your stup you know somehow try to get your students something that you cannot 100 control have your students increase their test scores um you can play a factor in it but you can't 100 make sure every kid's gonna do their best on the day they take the test even if

089you've done an amazing job teaching them and so this whole this whole concept of that teachers somehow need to be incentivized in order to to to do well or to perform is is a bit asinine in my my opinion i mean it's just you know it's like saying oh unless i have this money to throw out in front of you you're probably not going to do your best to help these kids um so it's just hard for me when we have discussions like this i mean obviously i guess what i'm saying is i go back to i know i was just sharing a bit of my opinion on this but but when we go back to the question of whether it should go on the base um i mean uh dr duplistus is exactly right

090i mean i think he's the one who said it but yeah we have i mean we if if the only way that we can raise the base salary is to take some of the 301 or a big chunk and put it into the base salary so that the base salary looks higher and more competitive to the other districts because that is number one i mean that is absolutely what a new teacher or somebody moving into the area they look to see what's the base salary um because there's an assumption that if it's a higher base salary then they that you know that that district pays better or that district has better compensation and so i guess just for my fellow board members that would be my recommendation is that you know we we strongly consider

091that option where you bury it into the into the base pay because really it's almost if you talk about the priorities it's more important that our base salary be a little higher than whether or not we have extra money to dangle out in front of teachers and tell them if you perform and jump for these hoops then maybe you get this money it's it's in my opinion it's better that we have less of that and more in the base salary so that base salary looks higher and and you know we can be more competitive and find teachers who want to come chad i think that that's what i was saying the other thing chad just i think that's what i was saying when i said wouldn't they rather have it all in the base salary

092but when i'm asking him when i asked dr dr wyman it sounds like the ccc would like to have well i think you're getting a split and so what we would have to do in those scenarios is as we have further conversations we may provide multiple options we may throw out another option again legally and i'll use maricopa because our understanding is eight they agreed to go down to two hundred dollars in into a into a um performance pay plan because legally you have to have something in it um and so you can have that conversation and so chad that could be i think we would try to gauge the the the feeling of the group as a whole because because you believe it's going to be a 50 50 or 60 40 but you

093need to ask and in some cases i can tell you based on my experience in some other areas sometimes they throw your curve on what they want and they may want the 4 000 the majority of them may want the 4 000 in june as opposed to bearing it into the base and so but we need to get more dialogue the dialogue in ccc showed that again not everybody was on the same page with this stuff and i even had a conversation with ccc to let them know that this is a problem you're not getting 90 tens you're going to get 50 50s 40 60s whatever the number is and so at some point what we can do for you guys is provide you with what we're hearing both from leadership ccc and other staff

094members but ultimately you're going to have to make a decision and so if you fundamentally disagree with the group meaning the the staff you might throw out of a motion that says we want to do this if you get a second and three votes then that wins if the board says no we want to listen to what the teacher said in this case so we're going to change the number back to this that becomes part of the discussion the process the purpose tonight is to give you an understanding of how we're thinking um at what we finally bring to you guys will not necessarily there may be additional stuff to this especially in lieu of the fact that you see a number that went from 541 in classroom site fund to 708. that that fundamentally

095changes this conversation and we just haven't had a chance to to have that conversation so you may see that chad i just gave this as an illustrative uh situation i will tell you if you move this thing down let's just say 200 this discussion of a of a performance pay plan for classified administrative is off the table because it's not worth the time and effort to take two hundred dollars and and give somebody 25 as a one to two hour employer ten dollars or whatever the number is um and so but those would be the choices not good or bad right or wrong just the choices and then everybody will make the decision that that they make so i understand where you're coming from when we can work on that piece and we'll ask the

096question of our staff about that to see what their feelings are and it may be such that very much like we're saying maricopa they may come back and say yeah let's take all all but 100 or 200 and dump it into um dump it into the base in which case the conversation with the 301 committee is radically different because you're now how many hoops are you going to jump through for 200 bucks so we'll have to have that so legally you have to have something for the law yes the new law says you must have a performance pay portion of it but it does not reference any dollar amount whereas before exactly what the hoops have to be no uh yes there is still there's still they didn't delete the rest of of of the

097of the the law that was in place before so there are some some requirements there's some latitude there and obviously you're going to have to look at it a little bit different in terms of what you do and i haven't had a chance to to process that piece and that'll be part of the discussion tomorrow with 301 so they they changed the way the money was distributed so they used to have language about this is bucket uh 11 this is what it's percentage-wise this is what it means this is bucket 12 this is bucket 13. um they just said from a funding standpoint it's now one bucket and you have to have a performance pay component they didn't turn around and change all the com all the components of the performance pay piece that's still

098in the statute right well and and you did i mean your exam i know you said it was just like a you know a hypothetical example but your hypothetical examples is right on i mean the example you're giving us is a great example and it's it really is telling the story so and that's good and and absolutely if the the teachers wanted something you know if they absolutely wanted more performance pay for whatever reason that's what the majority wanted then i i will support the teachers whatever they want i just i just you know we're all clear like some of this stuff it doesn't you know like the 301 committee right that's that's become an institutionalized thing just because 301 was created right you know several years back and so it's almost like i think

099for some teachers there's just kind of this acceptance that this is just this is just how it has to be because it's the only way we're going to get this extra money because that's how the state has held it out there for all these years i do so instead of just giving us more money to pay our teachers more right right i i do think though with this new the 704 uh the new base support level for 301 um we're going to have to look at that and then if there's additional dollars into into the state budget we may have to look at what percentage go to because it's not like the only place that we're underpaid is at the at the uh teacher level where we have underpayment issues at the classified level and

100and at the um at the administrative level if you do a five percent raise um uh it's one thing but with that 704 dollars if you start putting more money into the base we need to look in our m o budget to say can we do something with uh administrators in classified because at the end of the day what we're trying to do as much as anything is lift all boats so to speak at the same time we don't want to start separating out we may be forced to just by the nature of the money that comes in for for classroom site funding where it can go versus the money that comes into the state budget but but you might see a totally different perspective if they vote like chad was talking about but then

101depending on the dollars um again because we we have to remain competitive across the board for all of our employees not just one set of employees i mean i i don't disagree with chad whatsoever i i think chad's on the right direction but like i i i would want some hard evidence of exactly like if they said that they want a performance paid to be a thousand dollars i want like i want to know i want to know who voted for it and you know what i mean like i want to make sure that we're doing what they really want whether i think it's silly or not i mean well if we right if we need to i mean and i i look at the the team here because the very place i've been ccc

102or whatever you call it operates a little bit different in all districts um but but with our qualtrics and some of our other surveys we can go we can go ask whatever group of employees we need to ask a specific question of what they want and we can get back the response and and we've done that and again the intention is not for leadership to say this is it uh come heck our high water it's that we're trying to come up with proposals a foundation of why we came up with these proposals but ultimately if we need to get uh more specifics we can we can easily get more specifics um and also like not i would think that if when this when this budget comes down and we vote on it i i would

103assume that there would be a representative from ccc here we can get that i don't i mean i would assume that they would want us i mean in case we had questions that they would be there right we can i mean what i try to do so everybody the same same page is is if they can make it they're more than welcome and they can be more than happy to speak in many cases again different places different structures is is we would bring the data to say why we're making this this isn't just pulled out of thin air if it's a survey issue then this is what it is if it's a vote issue than what it is i've been in places where quite frankly there was a memo that was written up and everybody

104signed it for the negotiating group and then you just took the memo to the to the uh board you didn't necessarily have them at the board because they all signed the memo and they said this is what we agreed to our structure is a little bit different um and there's some structure in place that that we have to work with but but we can we can have that conversation again this is all changing so even as a group here um as they sit through this they need to be processing too because we may be having some significant conversations and it may be it may be a month from now if that's how long it takes to get a state budget in but you're gonna have a significant different conversation if you're talking about all we

105have left is three hundred thousand dollars to spend versus all we have left is two point three hundred two point three million dollars to spend and we haven't had that discussion because at this point we think we have less money not more that appears to be changing and may change significantly so all the work that was done up to this point potentially is going to have to change okay yeah that's true and i guess i if i could just add one last my last comment on compensation is um regardless of you know whatever we do for the teachers and the classified personnel um you know whatever it is we end up doing i you know hopefully we can do what's best for everybody and and to and to do something significant that's meaningful and helpful

106to our teachers um but regardless of that i i do think and this is my opinion too i i think we need to to take a a even more serious look at how we can help uh increase the compensation for administrators even if it's not exactly the same percentage as it is for teachers but somehow i think we need to we need to take more seriously how we're gonna what we can possibly do to compensate our administrators more um that's just my you can't see but we're not seeing that if we can you can't see but you're not seeing any frowns in the audience on that one so just know but the other thing you have to keep in mind the one thing that makes this a little confusing is uh classified by statute get

107a raise in january because of the 208 and last year the race was 5 that's why we landed on it so the raise for classified is calculated differently than the raise for the base support level for education so we we're seeing a l a two percent or less raise yeah classified got a five percent so if you put too much into here and then also legally we're bound to come back with a huge increase in january it's it's a piece that we're going to have to work on a little bit doesn't mean we we're trying to shortchange classified binding stretch and imagination but it is something that's a little bit different because the way 208 works just real quickly this kind of goes to what you were asking uh shelley when we talked about esser

108funds this year we used uh some funds that said we're going to give you a thank you stipend um that was done in june and then we did a retention stipend in uh we did in september so if somebody quit on us basically they have to get through the the first quarter uh they would get the money if they quit on us in october then they would have gotten the money and run but rather than giving a retention bonus or a signing bonus it would not be august first we would look at it to be sept end of september the reason for that is that way the check's going to go out to everybody right after fall break so if we had some classified staff that were not working they would get a paid they

109would get some money wouldn't be as big as their paycheck and so if we do do those we can mitigate it to a point but it's impossible to to guarantee a hundred percent so option number one was to say hey what would happen if we gave one percent thank you in in june of this year uh that would be uh probably on high end 270 because not everybody was here the whole year we didn't fill all the positions these are numbers from last year so you won't spend 270 on it but it gives you a ballpark again if you did a retention so some people said well what about signing because people are giving signing bonuses last year we just did retention so anybody knew got no money this one suggests do we look at

110retention and signing so this is one option but a second option that people look that the leadership team brought up was what would happen if you did a retention bonus you didn't do the thank you the thank you bonus you just did a retention bonus again september 22 but you gave everybody two percent and then for a signing bonus you gave everybody that was new to us one percent slightly less i believe it for my math is correct but i it's it's been a while since i looked at it but it's in the same ballpark and so it's just a different way to look at the numbers um and we're not married to it and again it's the idea to give people options so do we want to say thank you to our staff through

111retention those that came back to us this year and we're going to give you two percent in september instead of one-on-one at the end of the day they're getting two percent but it's a little bit different than the distribution of it if you did the signing bonus again you're given something uh it's not going to happen until you stay with us for a little bit of time but that's another option there might be three other iterations of this but this gives you an idea that when we look at esther's dollars there's money available to do some one-time stipends might go on for a couple years and we just have to decide what we think is best and those give you rough ideas of what the numbers are uh based on what we have okay so

112compensation summary just so people i'll go through this quickly but so everybody has an idea what this could mean for staff i think i use thank you summary or thank you um stipend it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day if you gave two percent it's two percent whatever you call it so just keep that in mind so if we just took a look at a staff making 52 000 which is roughly what our average uh teacher makes you can see that whether they go a five percent increase to the base they're only going to get 2150 bucks if you did it to an individual five percent of 52 gives you 2 600. the thank you stipend or the retention stipends or however you want to do it ends up being the

113same amount because in that case it's truly a percentage to the amount of money they're making so one percent is 520 bucks so you're going to see in this scenario there's about a 500 give or take difference uh 3100 versus 36. if we did the growth stipend if they got it they would get an additional 520 if we didn't grow that many kids then it's irrelevant they wouldn't be part of it so that gives you a perspective about five percent of what certified staff would make for clas or administrative staff i did the 82 000 so it's spread out the same way and so you can see uh the difference again is about 500 bucks 36 to 41. is that 1500 or a thousand um that would be a thousand i'd have to change that

114if we decided to go there again or if you guys decide to do 1500 or it could be you know so we can make that modification anything below the subtotal anything below the subtotal is dependent upon any number of factors okay if you talked about the exempt class we put 50 000 that's like classified so there's your numbers the difference there and i give you just perspective for an employee currently so 23 000 seven hours a day seven half hours a day for 192 days just so you can see that they're still and then for the classified employees they still would look at uh fourteen hundred dollars notwithstanding if we did a gross stipend or a performance stipend uh we're taking that increase from january to 2022 to january 23 so note that 1400 will

115actually be higher because we'll have to factor in whatever the increase is from january 23 to june of 23. we just don't know what it is and so therefore we can't tell you what that amount okay so that's just more perspective in terms of what's there okay i show you this because we have additional dollars before they told us what we were getting and so even though it's 868 000 in one scenario and a million 54 in the other there is some dollars that you can use with the excess money because we already spend some money of classroom site fund into the base salary for teachers so because we have excess money in we ran some budgets that said how much could we support and if we gave two percent out of our um contingency

116how far out could we go before we ran out of contingency that scenario put us out to 25-26 or we could do it well those numbers are blown out of the water with an increase of 704 so i don't know what that number does but this was a way that if you took 300 or 360 000 out of the total that means you're not spending as much in m o so you have money and m o left over in a different way to pick it up if you paid performance pay you got some dollars there that one might show 1500 so bob when you do the math to catch me i might be off a little bit on that because i don't know if i caught that slide just mia culpa right out right out

117of the gate but so you can see what was 868 and a million four we can reduce down to 756 and 882. that just frees up capacity if you don't do performance pay you have a little bit more money if you do performance pay you have a little less less money i only illustrate this to show you how we can how we can use the funds that we have to free up additional money it's the only way and this is why if we do not free up additional dollars that we currently have we cannot bridge the gap to people that have a 15 override if you want to bridge the gap to 15 override then we're going to have to be creative and how we use our funds otherwise we'll never make up that difference

118until we pass an override and so this is what this is trying to show you that we can start to get creative it's still all legal but it helps to free up a few more dollars that could go into base or go in hiring more positions or increasing positions or whatever we want to do okay then i'm not going to go through all of these but this is to show you some of the ideas in terms of a position increase um so we uh uh look to in some cases we'll have to do it uh based on our numbers so when we talk about talk about resources number two we're seeing an increase in kids so some of these we have to do depending on the funding source they come out of some could happen

119some could not we have not had a discussion we've ranked these because we wanted to see some of these other numbers come in to see how much money we had to play with and because one of the issues depending on the amount of money is are we gonna do position increases or we're gonna do um uh staff increases so more staff or take existing staff and give them more hours so i'm not gonna go through these but i just that way you can take a look at them and see what are some of the ideas that that leadership at least is talking about um to address question i see some of these you know you've kind of identified some areas where the funds could come from say the cte rights so if we were to

120add up all of those cte is there enough money in the cte budget in order for those for those ones yes so in this case we haven't talked about it but the cte ones actually john and i have had that conversation correctly from wrong john there is dollars available to us though so again we're back to like it did before you may see three four and five happen and not one and two i'm just making this up right just because those are different funding source and hundred dollars available and we will work on that but again we wanted to see how much money we're playing with then you get the staff increases again i'm not going to go through these unless there's a specific question but these were just starting to talk about additional individuals

121that we would have i will tell you number one the creation of site designated substitutes for the district i think i typed that one wrong is both a leadership and a ccc request please know though that that is we don't know what that would look like how much do you pay those people but understand if they're permanent and they're let's say you don't pay them like a full-time teacher but you pay them in between a long-term sub and a full-time teacher by the fact that they are now full-time you're going to have to pay bennies our bennie package we're gonna get to in a second but that's gonna run you over six grand a person so when you add up the salary plus the bennies this is not uh chump change if you're bringing uh

122seven or eight people on board for this you're running the two hundred thousand range if is that correct i think that's the number we we talked about about two hundred thousand okay so we're looking at that again depending on what the ml budget is this could be an easy conversation based on uh 208 numbers or could be a hard number based on what we're getting right now and so again these are just examples i'm not going to go through all these but it just you can take a look at if you have specific questions uh you know tomorrow or something based on this please just go ahead and give me a call boom health insurance this will come to you in in april so just know that these numbers won't change uh what we're gonna

123what we're anticipating is uh nine point four percent or not what we're anticipating what we know is a nine point four percent increase for all plans we would like to add a high deductible health savings account plan we currently do not have it it just gives another option for staff our staff is young enough which quite frankly this would be very palatable for lots of people we want to take a look at our fsa we're not satisfied with the current fsa provider based on what they're doing so we are looking to change and that will come to you we're working on what that looks like uh it's just how much they're charging us and the process they're using is is we've had a number of employee complaints about the way it's being done so we've

124already indicated that we'll be making that change you will come with an agreement with american fidelity part of that will be to provide one-on-one meetings and explanation of health benefit style staff and that will occur during open enrollment which end april early may the current program has not really done that and so especially if we do high deductible health savings we want to be able to get staff and sit down what they would provide is for a 20-minute consultation with all staff if all staff so desires they will do both virtual as well as uh in person they'll be at the sites principals don't even know this because we're working on a schedule and we'll get it to them in the next little bit that would say hey we would be available they're creative in

125what they're doing we don't know if this will work but the example is they said they would cover the cost of subs for for those days to allow someone to have a teacher walk out of class for 20 minutes go through that and then come back and then they would go into another classroom and do it our only problem is do we have enough subs to cover what we need for that day and so so we understand and they realize that but to us it was more the creativity to say we want to get out make sure that we talk to your staff and tell them what's available if someone wants to speak with their spouse and do it at night because if they don't make those decisions in their family structure then we would

126have some uh zoom type meetings uh at evening that we could set up for people to have conversations but that way there's just a conversation about what our bennies are and what they mean okay question on number two the high deductible health plan and the hsa the health savings account is that something that we would administer as a district or would we have that be administered by a third party and what would that cost to admit that that is part of the the concept or that is part of what uh smith which is the the insurance group were with they administered i'm not sure we have brooke blue cross blue shield would administer it and i believe the high deductible in that setting was 2800 is the deductible could be off on that a little

127bit but but they would be part of a normal it's being offered to smit there's other schools that have done it for whatever reason we have chosen not to do it i just think given the increase of nine point four percent this is just another option that some of our employees may may feel as fit fits their needs um just as a reminder we currently cover 100 of a health insurance plan for our employees would pay for uh dependent coverage if they so desire and they may buy up both for individual plans for themselves or buy up for plans with their dependent coverage we would look to cover the cost of each the high deductible at the same rate as the basic insurance coverage that we provide for those numbers just so people see because

128sometimes i think we forget what this really means currently on a per employee basis we spend 80 573.80 if we did the increase you're seeing a 543 dollar increase so it would be 6 300 to over 6 300 so that is a significant benefit to employees it is the same benefit that people get all over the education profession but sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle for cost so people understand cost that's currently over 2.1 million dollars and this increase would be 2.3 million dollars now i want to explain one last thing that increase is 203 thousand yeah but greg earlier in the slide you did the presentation and said it's 400 000. why 400 000 versus 200 000 and the big issue is this reflects the numbers with the current number of employees we

129have we know that we had 30 employees that we could not hire this year that would be eligible for benefits therefore if we were to be able to hire those 30 individual individuals it will cost us an additional additional 189 000 therefore you get to basically 400 000 okay and so that's the reason for the increase if we did not hire the 30 people again then obviously that ends up being a de facto contingency within our budget but we would rather have the money prepared for and not failed and not have the money and also we filled all 30 positions and now we're trying to find 200 000 to cover makes sense so that's the that's the health insurance could i yes you want to ask mark a question again is he oh there you

130are in the back uh when you're looking to hire and prospective candidates are talking to you and you said salary was a very important thing how much do they focus on benefits such as health insurance they normally will ask those questions after the fact they will look at our website and see what we have as plans but normally that's the second piece of a conversation that takes place base salary is always first and then the second piece is that all right thank you we have fairly in many cases young employees and i'll just you speak for myself not to speak for anybody else how much you paid attention to some of those stuff when you were younger compared as you get older is a little bit different so sometimes it doesn't become a driving force

131just because you don't pay attention i mean you're young and you're healthy and you're indestructible and those kind of things and so sometimes that's why you get what mark said is i mean what do you mean health insurance i don't worry about that kind of stuff so it is if i'm in a different district where we have a veteran staff then this becomes a whole lot more of a hot button issue okay just real quickly we're getting towards the end uh esther fund summary i just want to let you know like right now we have about 573 remaining in esther's two although that may get eaten up over the next couple months and we have about five million left in essers three so it's federal dollars so just like with title one title two title

132three title four you can amend whatever you're spending we had to do an application for this to tell you how we're going to spend but i'm an example of how we may end up have we will have to amend this so this is what we projected in 2122 for essers 2. the biggest piece is take a look at the top one we thought we'd be hiring 10 additional staff for online students well we only had a very small percentage three percent or so that showed up in terms of wanting to be online so actually we only have two staff that we hired for online school so you can see that some things have changed and we would just have to go ahead and make additions some of this stuff we show about a 500 000

133savings but some of these things uh we we still are are paying on some things and and so that number may go down a little bit with esther's three this year these are the things we did we don't know the uh it kind of messed up on me on the way it moves forward but we spent about a million six the science curriculum we're working on right now we don't know we we put seven hundred thousand dollars for that but that number may change but we also talked in future years about additional ideas so we talked last year about taking that pd development days for coaches in the three hashtag four days and summer school across multiple years you can back away from that but you'll see that those are starred and that's because the

134american rescue plan act requires that we did 20 percent set aside for specific things those ideas meet that and so if we go away from those ideas it creates a problem for us so we would recommend that we continue with those i will take a look at e we may look at making a change with social studies because math is creating an issue right now and so we may move to the math curriculum instead of social studies just given testing and some issues like that okay we even push out to 2324 you're continuing to see some of the same discussion that we've had and we can actually get all the way to because we must spend this money by september of 24. so in the 24-25 year you could get july and august stuff and

135still pay for it this can change because things could change but it kind of gives you an idea of what we're looking at in totality then you see that for funding amounts we have dollars available for us if you do your math bob it might not add up to you but understand that what i took was the 6.3 million then i had to take away the set-aside and so the 362 is what's left over after you take away the set-aside the good news with the set-aside is we're above what we should be spending for it it's 1.2 million is what we're acquired by law we're at over 2 million dollars so we have some flex on some of the set-aside if we wanted to make some changes i would anticipate that over the next three

136years three and a half years you will see some of the ideas that we put in here change but this gives a ballpark it's it's aligned with what we applied to ade in the in the state four and now we just have to have some discussions again the the number of teachers we needed modified so that changes i know everybody wants to do a lot of stuff with summer school i think most school districts are finding out right now that teachers are fried and the number that are raising their hand to come in and teach summer school is not as great so even though we say we want to spend money on summer school if we can't get people to do the job it creates its own set of problems and so some of these

137numbers will change and we may come to you at some other point in time in the fall to say we didn't spend all we said we're going to spend again because we have that 700 just short of 750 000 that we're over we're still going to meet the intent of the set-aside which legally we have to do but we may have to make adjustments okay so that just gives you a quick overview of what that is and capital projects all i will tell you with capital projects we looked at three or four different funding sources we're still working on some numbers um and so we haven't had a great discussion i will tell you with all the projects that are out there they tend to be talking about equipment upgrades technology infrastructure curb appeal what

138we look like for our street cred so to speak as people drive by curriculum future bond projects those will be pushed out not necessarily done on this budget maintenance cameras and bells we have some issues with cameras and bells and then food service and we could potentially take money out of food service to cover that so we will look to maximize our funding sources for all of these areas but we'll come back to you with a more detailed list of what they look like we have a fairly significant list of things that we need to fix now we're just trying to pencil it down and pare it down make sure everybody gets something but there's still some work that has to be done there okay um i'd like to talk about two of these one

139is curb appeal yeah when you think of our seven schools the one that's most visible is cta and i know we've done a lot all right with cta but if there's some way to beautify the front of that school even more than what's been done because people are going to drive by and compare cta to ala and ala just looks better when you drive by okay so i would recommend that we do some curb appeal work for cta as being the school that people see right that's not in the neighborhood the other thing on curriculum this is my eighth year on the board and it's and i know testing has changed over the years but i'm still want us to focus on student performance and increasing student performance because when we get our reports it's

140always a little bit less than we'd like it to be so i like some more emphasis on what whether it's curriculum or more training for our teachers whatever it is so we can increase student performance and the one things i would say that's why we're having the conversation of is math become a higher priority than social studies uh given that the emphasis on math within testing and that's why you're potentially going to see that that's why we're recommending the extra three days of pde for our staff not just this year but the next couple of years and that's why we purchased illuminate a year ago and this is our first year of implementation so all three of those things are designed to do exactly what you're talking about we would hope over the long haul

141as a result of those decisions and and moving forward with that that that in fact we would get exactly what you're describing so that's why even though we had social studies up there uh there's a chance when we come to you with recommendation for next year it's not gonna be social studies it's gonna be math and that would be the that would be the rationale for it uh so we're assessing uh and that's what we do with any of these things just to assess what's what's a priority what's the highest priority um when we present it to you someone may say i think number 10 should be number two or whatever but we'll bring to you our priority and then we can have more conversation but that's the intent behind some of those decisions okay

142so that's all i have so any final questions otherwise we're good to go it's not quite eight o'clock i know shelly that's important can't we stay another 15 minutes no look i'm wound up i can go for another 15 each good we're good any questions you guys have a question no chad are you still with us yes no questions thanks greg that was uh that was a lot to prepare for us appreciate it okay i'll make an emotion to adjourn at 7 43 second all in favor aye aye i motion carries five to zero thank you guys thank you chad have a good night