001I 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 we'll have a moment of silence please thanks all right thank you is there any board member statements that they wish to announce yes ma'am um I was able to attend the district science fair here held here in the boardroom and I was really just in love with all the science that's happening as a science teacher I love to get to see all the different science ideas coming around um I also attended the band concert at Fine Arts and then just this past Friday I went to the asba bolts training and just kind of refreshed my skills and knowledge of how boards operate thank you
002anyone else yes ma'am I was able to attend the District spelling bee I was in all of the students their determination it was so evident that they had put forth so much effort these kids can spill words that some college students cannot so I was just completely enthralled by them they did such a great job who attended the bolts training on Friday with with um with Amy and Marcus and Rachel and it was just nice to be there together and I'm a good refresher as well my first bolts training was virtual because it was right after covid so it was it was good to do it and personal yes definitely not the same so it was good to do it in person and as a group so anyone else if not thank you very much
003Dr Freeman we're going to turn it over to you for the superintendence report thank you madam president members aboard good evening everyone Buenas Tardes and Happy Valentine's Day we want to thank you our board members Administration staff of everybody here who chose to spend their time with us this evening on this special day it's not easy to give up holiday time we appreciate everybody loving Littleton we also want to express our condolences to the families in our community that lost loved ones the last few days um the uh this month's Civics values and personal responsibility are common threads running through all our signature choice schools at our last meeting we were just approaching civil rights holiday so tonight I'm able to report on some of the way schools celebrated and honored the life and work
004of Martin Luther King as we discuss the importance of advocacy and civil rights our goals for students to become informed critical thinkers who are engaged community members at Estrella Vista STEM Academy students learned about prominent African-American leaders like Rosa Parks Thurgood Marshall and others and had discussions about tolerance and respect for diversity at the Fine Arts Academy one of Miss Valdez star readers brought in a book titled the life of Martin Luther King Jr from her own home library and read it to her fellow students then they all wrote a passage with the prompt my dream is and those passages are displayed on the hallway bulletin board outside their classroom if anybody wants to see those Littleton STEM Academy third graders wrote dreams and goals they have for growing their own learning in fifth grade
005dove into an analysis of quotes and their meanings students created a collaborative poster to celebrate Dr King's work and showcase collaborative research quilts and Studio boards that they created at Quinton STEM Academy Middle School classes engaged in conversation around Jim Crow laws Civil Rights Act the NAACP and the 14th Amendment at Trace rail service Academy fifth grade students read informational text highlighting some of the pivotal moments in black history including the Underground Railroad and the Montgomery Bus Boycott students also learned about their contributions to the fields of Science and Engineering as we shift to the great presidential leaders of our nation our lessons shifts their focus to Civics and at Estrella Vista Pre-K to first grade students are learning about President Lincoln and Washington and the impact of their presidencies while up in eighth grade
006they're reviewing the election process and importance of being an informed voter Fine Arts students are working in small groups to research all aspects of famous presidents quotes and learn about historical significance and implications of the speech from which they quote their quote originated at the Littleton STEM Academy Middle School school middle schoolers learned about the origins of the White House and progression through various presidencies students are making connections to leadership at school community and at the state level these lessons also help students set goals for their future so they can plan fulfilling engaging lives which is a key component of the kids at Hope philosophy Mustangs are using the College and Career exploration program Naviance to investigate possible future careers Firebirds are continuing to show how they are epic by showing effort perseverance integrity and
007compassion and 8th graders also got to explore their potential in future career options with a trip to West Mech our Littleton Online Academy students are working on selecting an ace which is a caring adult to help them plan for their future and support them in meeting their goals and sharks recently participated in their healthy habits night which brought in many of the Hobbies recreational activities students enjoy they also had Miss Natalie from my kids dentist and Mr Avalos with students from Tolleson high schools HOSA Club join in to share about future careers in the health industry adolescent stress anxiety and well-being are growing problem before the pandemic but after what everyone went through in the pandemic helping our students develop skills to manage stressors and challenges in our daily modern lives is more important than
008ever through a combination of Grants and District funds we've been able to add social workers to our schools and at Fine Arts Academy the social worker meets with three different volunteer groups of Lunch Bunch students each week those groups are learning coping strategies to manage feelings of sadness in collaboration with the ubu project Fifth and seventh grade Falcons will learn how to express their feelings through music the ubu is performed is a Performing Arts education Outreach organization specializing in arts integration students create lyrical poems that are then set to music to become their own unique songs it seems School violence has been in the news a lot lately so we are always reviewing safety measures working with law enforcement and attending trainings like the safety Summit going on today and again in April as part
009of their service Focus Pumas had an opportunity to learn about protecting and serving with Sheriff Daniel from Maricopa County Sheriff's Office who stopped in into a few classrooms to share what a day of service looks like and then Franklin fire and law enforcement High School principal Cabrera spoke to middle schoolers about their school's programs um you may have already seen reports from our recent district and Regional spelling bees um uh thank you um to the board members who came I think I'm trying to remember Mr Nielsen was there he's not on the board anymore but he's a big spelling fan evidently um the winner of The District spelling bee was Candace milanus the seventh grader from Collier Business Academy and they're running at runner-up uh was Muriel rasko an 8th grader from Estrella Vista STEM
010Academy who won the year before the District spelling bee went 12 rounds the winning word was vesuvian anybody want to take a shot at spelling it I didn't think so uh v-e-s-u-v-i-a-n not a word you hear often but it's a reference to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius so if you're losing your top you're being vesuvian both students represented our district well in the regional five spelling bee this past Saturday but they didn't get all the way to the final round our communication team was recognized for their efforts in promoting and providing communication to the community they received two Awards of excellence and three Awards of Merit at it's the State Association for um a school um aspra whatever that stands for [Music] um and so um we're really proud of the daily work they
011do to keep our community informed and engaged through attractive and well-crafted messages our latest addition to the billboard was from Saturday when one of our community members who works for vitalant helped draw some life-saving blood for people who are injured or seriously ill and recognized a staff member of ours from the billboard so she is now on the billboard as another example that weighs the Littleton Community cares in closing I'd like to express our appreciation to Marquita Porter and Elliot Friedrich for their generous thousand dollar denotion donation to our schools again this year and Madam president that's all I have this evening um Amy if she would please read the reading of Career and Technical education Proclamation whereas all Littleton children have access to the highest quality education possible that includes career exploration opportunities early
012in their educational experience whereas leaders from businesses and industries Nationwide report increasing challenges related to connecting qualified professionals with available careers whereas students in a Career and Technical education programs participate in authentic meaningful experiences that improve the quality of their education and increase their engagement and Achieve achievement whereas the voters of Littleton support a partnership to afford our students access to opportunities to explore and develop skills that translate into future interests now therefore be it resolved that the governing board of Littleton Elementary School District proclaims February Career and Technical Education Month and they're just others to support and participate in these programs to strengthen our community thank you Amy Miss vandwater it's your turn for the program showcase president Reyes members of the governing board Dr Freeman I am excited to present to you our
013program showcase for this evening tonight Mrs Amy Rendon the principal of Trace Rio service Academy will showcase their signature school focus through highlighting the school's Mission Vision community and future Partnerships project-based learning initiative and several exciting being their experiences for our students including career exploration additionally Trace Rios will showcase their kids at Hope student of the month 8th grader Evelyn navares and recognize a dedicated volunteer Laurie Estep we are pleased to welcome Mrs Amy Rendon good evening thank you good evening president Reyes members of governing of the governing board Dr Freeman executive team and the members of Littleton Community my name is Amy Rendon and I am the proud principal of terrestrial service Academy thank you for providing us with the opportunity to showcase Rio's signature school focus being given the time to learn about
014our signature Focus past Ventures and where we go from there we meaning our slat team has helped identify opportunities to develop our service learning focus with emphasis on Service careers in law enforcement fire science Emergency Medical Response and the Armed Forces to name a few our vision is to empower our students to lead Advocate and serve through their service learning experiences it is through intention on purposeful instruction and strong Partnerships that we will provide students opportunities to explore their interests and expand their understanding of service to become career ready for the fields and public service as we seek to provide all students with opportunities to explore their interests and expand their understanding of service learning or service learning action team has begun to identify opportunities within our HSS and science standards and core programs to
015integrate Service Learning in the Janet setting in parallel to our Service Learning Classroom with Partners we will develop a service learning Continuum and curriculum aligned to Career and Technical education provide professional development and project-based learning and offer Capstone experiences for our students in service learning with Miss Garcia students learn about professions in public service K2 students explored what it is to be a firefighter their role and how they serve their Community our K1 students received a special visit from Captain Reyes from the Phoenix Fire Department third through fifth grade students explored the armed forces the branches and how they respond to crisis Marine veteran Sergeant Garcia made a special visit also to share his profession experiences and War artifacts our sixth grade students began to explore the profession of emergency medical technician through the use
016of our Z Space Program students engage in investigation of human anatomy through virtual reality our 7th and 8th graders also participated in the learning and they will also engage in Naviance our Career College resource focused on Career Exploration with Pathways to success through Partnerships with westmec Grand Canyon University Maricopa County Sheriff's Office Phoenix fire department Luke Air Force Base and Franklin Police and Fire high school and others students are empowered to solve authentic real world problems and become career ready in public service to positively impact their communities to share more about our partnership with westmec we have a few words directly from Mr Hassan parte good evening president Reyes board members superintendent Freeman and guest I am rasan bartette the elementary and Community lies after westmec before I talk about the wonderful partnership between westmec
017and Tres Rios surface Academy I want to say congratulations to the board superintendent Freeman and the Littleton community on becoming a westmec member district even though he became a member district this school year the partnership and build up to it has been there for a number of years some of the wonderful things that are happening with Tres Rios and West Smith include Trace Rio staff coming to multiple westmed campuses and learning from our instructors who are in the service Fields just last week our law and Public Safety instructor took time out of our day to explain the program's scope and sequence and what are some age-appropriate activities including forensic crime scenes fingerprinting and obstacle courses a few of the partners westmec has introduced treas Rios or Luke Air Force Base and the Glendale Regional Training
018Facility Glendale Regional training facility is really a gym into itself it is where all the police fire and specialized emergency units in the West Valley train sure you know the Super Bowl is right in our backyard and the training facility holds the command center that is keeping everyone safe before during and after the Super Bowl we have planned a service related career fair in A Day in the Life visit to West met campuses where your students can really get immersed into what are the different service Fields what are the different career Pathways and how do they get there there's lots of amazing opportunities being generated for your students and I can't wait to update the board at another time again thank you we also have a partnership with GCU and they also provided an experience
019of Thunder vision for our students a day in the life of a college student what a great opportunity for our 7th and 8th grade students they received a tour highlighting Public Service colleges the students engaged in activities to help them develop the understanding of college conceptualize a GPA importance of setting goals now and how their actions or choices impact their future success one of our most exciting GCU initiatives is the professional development of project-based learning for our Educators through project-based learning students will solve authentic real-world problems through 21st century skills of collaboration communication critical thinking and creativity as students engage in this learning they will develop empathy and become compassionate individuals this is critical as they prepare to be career ready for professions in the public service we have established a key partnership also with
020the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in effort to develop positive relationships and Pathways of success for our students interested in law enforcement One goal is to initiate a scout program to prepare for law enforcement careers and MCSO Cadet program will be the first Elementary School in which MCSO will partner to initiate this program detective Ron Gomez Community liaison has extended his full support as we develop this program together now looking ahead we have many possibilities and as you can see we have partnered up with Luke Air Force Base our Phoenix fire department partnership and also Franklin Police and Fire High School we have a collaboration with Luke Air Force Base in order to continue to collaborate with our flag program in educational program led by students and Miss Guzman to instill pride and respect for our
021U.S flag we will continue to partner with Captain Clyde Reyes on opportunities related to fire science and we will also continue to partner with Franklin Police and Fire Science High School to ensure that we become the first in its kind just like Franklin High School that is focused on fire science police and EMC EMT now what's the comfort terrestrials preserve and strengthen Partnerships pbl professionaldevelopment at GCU focused on 21st scales and all those events that are listed there too at this time we would like to present a video highlighting our signature Focus you will observe opportunities with Community Partners intention on purposeful instruction highlights in alignment to 21st century skills and a team who is fully committed to serve their students families and community [Music] thank you foreign [Music] I wanted to be a police
022officer when I grow up I want to be in The Encore I want to be why do you want to be a firefighter because they get the same people from fire I want to be when you grow up why do you want to be a police officer but I can save people [Music] Theodore really meant it and I would just like to say that that is very inclusive of every representation of students in our campus so in conclusion we would like to thank you Dr Freeman littleton's governing board and members of our our executive team we are truly Paving a pathway to the first K eighth AZ Elementary School focused on public service we will Empower our students to lead Advocate and serve through their service learning experiences to be successful and compassionate professionals at
023this time I would love to answer any questions you may have we any questions hearing none thank you very much we look forward to our continued long partnership with westmec and uh we're excited to be one of the first pioneers of this that makes it even more special so thank you and thank you all to stop that helps put this all together I know it's a lot of work so thank you okay next we're going to do the kids at Hope yes we have a kid at hope to recognize the student is not here this evening but our volunteer is I am a kid at Hope because of the way I respect others and treat them with kindness an ace in my life is my mom because of the way she works hard for what
024she wants and what she needs thank you for choosing me for kid at Hope [Music] good evening everyone my name is principal Rendon from service Academy our volunteer of the month is Lori Estep anyone that knows this volunteer knows that she is a true treasure hunter since retirement she has missed kids so much that she decided to come volunteer atres Rios she works with many of our students in Kinder through third grade in Reading while pulling small group she is using her 30 years of experience in education to teach foundational phonics skills to grow our students as readers she makes learning fun for the students by engaging them in a variety of activities like singing songs and playing games all while practicing essential reading skills on the day she is not scheduled to come in
025students always ask for her her willingness to share both her time and talent by volunteering demonstrates her commitment to learning she truly makes a difference in our students education and life we are so grateful for Lori Estep good evening everyone my name is principal foreign thank you Miss Rendon thank you so at this time we do have a call to the public so is it time for the call to the public thank you so at this time we do have a call to the public Cassie Lockard oh my God so at this point I'm just going to read a quick disclaimer if I may and in order to allow time for everyone to participate comments should be limited to three minutes no name calling personal attacks upon board members staff Personnel or other persons in
026attendance or absent will be permitted by individuals who address the board in addition questions or comments on matters that are currently under legal review will not be accepted citizens are directed to other governing board policies for deposition of legitimate complaints including those involving personnel and thank you for being here good evening board president Reyes governing board members it is on do you have anyone who's my teacher voice actor I've been at it for eight hours let's go I know and executive leadership team my name is Cassandra Lockard I am a seventh and 8th grade history teacher 7th grade science and coding at Littleton stem and with me this evening is also Mrs Marissa short I'm the Lea secretary I'm also a cross CAD self-contained teacher at Choice real service Academy we're here this evening first
027to congratulate our two newly elected board members we're very excited for you congratulations we're also here to say thank you for those of you who have returned and were re-elected we are just here to extend a hand and discussion sorry all the seventh and 8th graders that I teach this freaks me out this is the one so I'll start I'm going to restart first I want to say thank you to all our parents and students in the district today was Valentine's Day and if my classroom looked anything like Mrs Short's classroom today was a delightful sugar rest day full of learning the second thing we want to say is and to remind all of you that we are Educators first my job is students first my site first to us the Lea comes next I
028am the Littleton Education Association board president and as Mr said she is my secretary to us we want to be advocates for our students and the teachers as stakeholders and so we want to just take this opportunity to extend a hand to you governing board members for future events and which we can meet and talk and learn and be partners in our great District we choose Littleton for a reason I'm about to finish my seventh contract and I will be turning next year because this district is a wonderful fantastic district with so many delightful things going on so at some point I'll be working with Miss Ada Silas to offer opportunities for you to meet with our members so that we can become a partner in this great movement that we are working on so
029that's it we're short and sweet just want to introduce yourself ourselves to you I'm clearly nervous this is wild handle this better in other places well that's it teachers first Lea next stakeholders and we would like to have a partnership with you [Laughter] [Music] we just wanted to introduce ourselves to you particularly our new governing board members I know that we are here for you we want to work in partnership with you so we'll be working with Miss Ada took have opportunities for us to meet and talk thank you for your time well thank you very much we appreciate you coming yeah that actually I was going to jump up and exit the building um yeah well so no no I'm good without that um at this time this is an action item regarding the
030consent agenda is there anything on the consent agenda that the governing board wishes to be pulled hearing none I will ask for a motion um to approve the consent agenda as is I move that we approve the consent agenda I'll second that or do you have a first and second uh all in favor any disapprovals hearing none emotional pass thank you we'll move on to item 10. and this is a discussion item and Dr Freeman it looks like you're going to give an overview of it thank you madam president and members of the board we also have quite a bit to cover on this item tonight um you can see that we have start times and transportation corridors added Choice criteria for school opening school calendar reconfiguration and school grade level reconfiguration um these all
031have origins in trying to address some organizational concerns or some Community concerns so um I'll go through in order and we I don't think we have a grid map or signs for the transportation quarters but one of the challenges we've had with two 40-minute intervals between start times is 80 minutes difference between first and last school either starting or getting out that creates some problem because you have to start pretty early or start pretty late to accommodate that and for all of our after school activities and sports that means if you're in early or late school early schools are waiting 80 minutes before anything begins after school and it creates additional supervisory responsibilities for the staff at early schools so we have been doing Transportation corridors in the past which is looking at some of
032the longest and least efficient routes and limiting usually just a couple schools um and with the addition of one more school on the southern end of the school district we were exploring the idea of having two start times only and what we would need to do to do that so one of the things we determined was the need for buses and drivers if we were going to go from three routes down to two be able to cover the same space we would need more seats on the bus assuming ridership was similar we did have school buses line itemed in the capital override so we Consolidated those into a three bus purchase it takes a while to get one so we're positioned to be able to do this vehicle wise then we need three more drivers
033which can be a challenge in today's labor market and we had the transportation department run model route times around 50 55 and 60 Minute intervals and we settled on the middle interval um that we believed that we could get from 80 minute gap down to 55 minute Gap and I think Transportation left a little cushion there because they're concerned about all the construction going on around the district so if some of the people who are building homes are improving roads do the thing where you stick cones out in the middle and people can't get around or it's one-way traffic that always slows everybody down including our school buses so we asked we did do a survey item to staff to see if they thought that was something that would be helpful and we got a
034positive response on that and so there's no there's no action on this tonight but we wanted to make we want to make sure the board was aware of the discussion what it would mean is going through the process of selecting early and late schools but for transportation corridors what we wanted to do essentially is take a street that's on the North End of the district as a northern boundary for families from the south and a street on the southern end of the district that became a southern boundary for families going the other direction so essentially if um if your address was south of the sr-30 alignment we wouldn't Transport North of Buckeye Road because of the distance and if your um if your address was north of Van Buren we wouldn't transfer all the way
035South of Broadway Road and it doesn't mean that people couldn't go to those schools it just means that we don't either have enough ridership or we couldn't efficiently run that route to provide that transportation if um if people toss that idea around a little bit we found a lot of agreement and staff that it would be helpful we could bring that back for Action at the next meeting or certainly it can be an item for discussion here so based on um based on what we hear from the board discussion tonight will help form our recommendation for the next meeting we think it adds a lot to the program especially the after school and extended programs but also for teachers who are having to wait around for professional development meetings or sporting things that it creates
036a little more Equity it's not perfectly Equitable but you can't have staggered start times and and have complete Equity when it comes to after school programs again we're just trying to make an incremental Improvement and want to know what your thoughts are on that so are we starting with start times and transportation quarters as feedback yeah everything's feedback tonight so what we imagined was a possible start time of 7 30 and 8 25 right both of those numbers are within the start times and end times that exist today so today the early schools at 7 20 and the late ones at 8 40. so we didn't pick anything outside of what people were used to essentially what we think is the 730 schools would start at 7 30. that would require teachers to be on
037campus around seven o'clock to be prepared for the day right now at early Schools they're getting there before seven to be ready for the day and um and then 8 25 is 15 minutes earlier than the 840 school and again uh 10 minutes on one side 15 on the other shortens 25 minutes the difference and this requires purchasing a bus right we we had buses in the capital plan and we had kind of staggered them out over time we hadn't done a bus purchase lately so um and there there is actually like everything else back ordering of buses so I think we found um three 78 seat versus 88 seat buses that are front engine and that's why they have less chairs so um all of those units and numbers have been put into the
038transportation routing software to make sure that that would work so what we were going to buy buses anyway just partly because as you put so many miles on and they age out you can't repair them forever you're going to need to um recycle some of your vehicle inventory red white and green so so let's open that up for discussion is there concern or feedback from the board regarding the proposed start times and transportation corridors yes regarding the transportation corridors are these very similar to the ones we currently have like are we having students who currently are able to go to or be students currently riding the bus are we still saying they're currently riding the bus or are we telling some kids this year we can bus you but next year we can't um Madam
039president uh member Sussex so part of the analysis that um transportation department did was look at the number of people impacted by doing address locators by School site the students enrolled in so as you might imagine the majority of those cluster close to the school and then there's some that are more and more outliers so going south was a little bit tricky because we had started with Broadway Road and that would have impacted I think 155 families so we kept going south until we got that down to a a very small number so even with that sr-30 alignment it was only like a half a dozen kids who were traveling north of there that would be impacted and as you can imagine we're now running you know a big yellow 88 seat bus south of
040the sr-30 alignment to pick up five kids which is fairly expensive and and um you know it's a nice thing for us to do but you add extra miles and Route stops on that and then you can't turn the bus around and get it back they actually now they only have a 40-minute turnaround this gives them a 55 minute turnaround so they can actually do a little more route time um but what we did is a process of elimination by drawing down those boundaries to minimize the impact on families and to improve the efficiency of the route okay um thank you and I am I'm in agreement with the start times I know my kids attend a late start and it just seems like a really late time to be starting school and then they
041get out so much later so if we could let them in a little bit earlier so they get out earlier I would be in agreement with that and part of our discussion was you know the interest in um getting uh literacy activities to early Learners earlier in the morning when they do a little better so maybe not the middle school kids so much but um you know we'd like to get the little ones in working on you know Big Five reading skills and stuff in the morning when it has when we think we can have the best impact other feedback feedback the new start trying you're saying 720 No 7 30 and 8 25 that is very similar to our high school district that's close to us because the early start school so for example
042La Jolla they're an early start school they start school at 7 20. and then you have late start schools so like West Point and wall copper Canyons a little bit farther out but they start school at 8 20. so it does take them a little it's pretty closer pretty closer yeah other feedback concerns questions hearing none so then Dr will Friedman will move for you to discuss item two adding criteria so the school choice criteria came about through multiple rounds of discussion as we were looking at developing a partnership a school partnership um with an instructional service provider that could do individualized and accelerated program instruction and then the idea that or the question as to whether students who weren't in the Alamar development would be able to go to Lincoln prep and what we
043had imagined is they would be able to in through school choice and that the current census of students in the Alamar Community was fairly low and then we found out there's more students down there who are living there whose families you know would like to bring them to Lake and prep but they're not currently enrolled in a Littleton District so as part of our demographic study we looked at where we get kids from and we do have I can't remember I think it was almost 100 kids who live outside of our district attending inside our schools but we don't have good data on who lives in here who's never attended here they're in some other school district or Charter's data not in our data so if they had attended and left we might be able
044to follow them tracking out sw4 codes um so we've met with Brookfield and the Alamar people and have kind of opened up a new series of communication and Outreach with them we had planned to do that but we thought that we were going to be on track to say what the school program was sooner and so we had scheduled our communication with the community based on the new school program and then when the new school program got delayed so did our communication and then in the lack of communication we had a lot of miscommunication so we're ramping that back up again and so I think the idea that was mentioned in the board was by some members was can we assure that kids who would really benefit from that program will get there our idea
045still is which is coming up on the agenda to have three teachers in grades K5 as the beginning um grade level opening offerings at Lake and prep and so that's a that is at 27 kids times 18 rooms 486 kids I think that's more than um the estimate for everybody at the Alamar community and then as it grows the school has capacity to grow 18 home rooms is half capacity for the school so there's there's as we build it out Room to Grow 18 more classes in different configurations so I think even if there's 300 kids down there there's still room for almost 200 kids from other schools who might select to go there um and so the question was when that came up do we want to do anything as an added criteria for
046school choice right now the school choice criteria that are first are previously attended and live with in walking distance a mile so nobody's previously attended so that takes us to walking distance and if we wanted to add anything to that what our thinking was that we would have a school opening rule that no matter when or where we open to school the first time since there's no previous attendance there would be some additional rule I don't from the discussion I heard last time I don't know that that's still a concern as people have worked through this but we've kind of held up running the school choice um process to give the board time to talk about this and make sure that we're going the direction that our elected representatives want us to go so it's
047an opportunity to discuss that and if we need to put a recommendation in the form of board action it would come back at the next meeting thank you so I'll open it up for discussion comments questions just a comment so um as you stated sir there was a lot of anxiety as it related to the children of Alamar and being able to attend the school there was a poll done most recently it looks to be about 214 so that would definitely be within that guideline no longer a concern there's a great deal of relief that has been um you know a lot of you know pain or anxiety has been alleviated because now that they are understanding that that is in fact going to happen um so I think this is very good information thank
048you do we know which um schools will start late or early yet Madam president member Cisneros I think um the the way we were leaning was the the ones that are early early now will be early and the ones that are late late now will be later because that minimizes change to families then there's two in the middle and so and you're adding Lakin which is new so we were going to try to do it four and four some of it would depend on configuration discussions that are going to follow next so configuration could impact first um uh first spell second Bell School identification so that would um that would have to follow at a future meeting so essentially the our our first straw construction is four schools early four schools late and to think
049of one keeping times close for families that we could the two in the middle need to move theoretically what you do is move one up and one down to be fair but you're also adding Laken so if we did that that would balance out the four and four but if we change School configurations at all we might want to reconsider that that changes the number of kids being transported and potentially where they're being transported from so it's a good question but it's a Next Step yes Amy um I I really like our current um policy or procedure of if you live within walking distance of the school you should have First Choice into going to that school so I would not want to see that leave um and that's that's all I really had I
050just wanted to make sure that that stayed because I really think that for our community if you bought a home near a school you're thinking your kid's going to that school so being giving them the ability to attend that school and maybe build that community their school being near their home and maybe the kids around them if the parent chooses that is a priority for me and I just had a few questions so um if if I did the math and there's 214 identified give or cheat and we had a 486 it loses about 272 open seats right which which could be a variable of parents making different decisions not a problem that's good my concern is next year so so you're after that or the year after that yes so looking forward right so
051now now I am assuming are we going to K-8 then and in two years is it going to be K-8 when's the goal to have it due in eighth grade um Madam president members of the board so in discussing configurate grade level configuration of schools um uh next steps as the student enrollment grows is a critical factor in um in our thinking and reasoning and planning so we had um we had a long series of years where there was not additional Charter intrusion so Legacy until the two new Charters came in um uh two and a half years ago Legacy was the only the other three Chargers around us were outside the district Legacy was the only in District penetration it impacted Collier's enrollment a little bit they draw kids from across the river as
052well we competed pretty well for achievement they made a lot of promises and they have over the years kind of sorted out you know who they were going to keep and who they weren't going to keep and so that became pretty stable then we had two schools open in the same year Math and Science Academy has way more enrollment than the one north of the freeway but that impacted all of our growth trajectories so when we opened Fine Arts we did the same thing with limited grade levels but we had consistent growth so we grew that into sixth grade the next year seventh grade the next year in eighth grade the next year and used it to help facilitate classroom space for student growth in the district but now we've had this Interruption and so
053we're a little more cautious about assuming that we can grow a grade level a year for so many teachers in so many places the demographic information that Mr French is going to share later does show um as the charters are kind of reaching capacity that we're going to be looking at 400 kids a year again for the next 10 years on average so if we could get predictable growth Behavior without these unplanned intrusions we could do a lot better at planning I don't want to promise that um any uh grade law any school that's K5 automatically goes to sixth grade next year and um I'll I can tell you a little more about that when we talk about grade level configuration but what happens is if we're doing pure choice and you end up with
054only one teacher in a grade level because that's how many parents chose that grade level let's say Lakin was three teachers K5 and then one sixth grade teacher is kind of isolated and on an island if they're sick and they're out there's a problem so managing um the logistics of Staffing has um implications for what happens for teachers and their working conditions and the support they have so it's one of the reasons that we're bringing School configuration is to try to better support teachers um in their work life and working conditions and so we have a couple places where um we're concerned that especially in the Middle School the number is too small to provide adequate program or teacher support so even if people even if people wanted you to you might compromise program to
055appease that need and then I'm not sure that you've really gained anything and I I think what we're going to need to do is year to year look at growth in numbers and potential impact and then I think the goal is still to fill out the school but it's to do it in a smart way and I wouldn't I wouldn't want in in Fine Arts we did it we promised it and we did it I'm just really reluctant to prognosticate you know year to year what that would be I think it's going to be a continuous work at looking at demographics enrollment and how much capacity we need to add not because we have a space issue but because getting good teachers in front of kids really is right now our determining factor for how
056many classrooms we have right and I understand that and that'll make sense my only thought process was if I have three children and one's in seventh and one's in fifth they'll go this year but they really need to understand they're not going to go next year I mean the potential for them not to go so now I'm taken as a parent I'm driving over here I'm coming back grabbing this kid going back over here and then maybe have a kindergarten to shuffle off too so I'm just again communication as long as it's clear I don't disagree with anything you said but as a as a neighbor there I would just think my kids are going to go there next year I'm going to do six maybe and but me going as a fifth grader and
057then having to leave that school I think that would kind of be traumatic because you're leaving your friends your your hoe everything you got so I'm not they're all leaving with you but there's no but normally when they leave they go to the same place which they could but the chances of them are much Slimmer than normal right so as long as it's communicated that because I can tell you people think that's opening you know different and we're discussing which I understand why but again if we could communicate that when we go to our flyers and our distribution then parents can even make a wiser choice you know what what they think is best maybe they want all their kids to go somewhere where it's K through 8th I can see that just because of
058Transportation so my comment was not to say I under I I definitely understand it's a challenge just think about again new school coming up you're across the street you're thinking no okay my seventh grader's going there my eighth grader's going there I got everybody walking across the street life is good but they won't know that if we don't tell them so that my comment is merely that so now so I'm sorry madam president members of the board so theoretically what happens is if there's uh let's say 75 kids in fifth grade that's three classes of 25 kids so we could go from 70 to really you wouldn't want to go to 90 but I mean that's the idea right 30 kids in three rooms would be 90. um those kids are there to matriculate to
059sixth grade so then um what you're looking at is are the are the grade levels below filling in and filling out around the district so it's not really like LMR people need to go out and recruit 11 year olds um we need you know we're going to need to take the students we have and assign them in uh you know School uh classrooms where we have teachers and um so we haven't even made the enrollment of uh 75 kids in a grade level for sixth grade levels yet if we only have 50 kids in a grade level that show up there instead it's going to be 12 rooms of two teachers in a grade level and then they'll have to grow up and out for it to come to capacity so we we still because
060we do school choice we still don't know um what schools everyone's going to choose and we're hoping if there's 214 kids in Alamar they're not on the same grade level hmm well that would be interesting demographics because I don't know I mean I know the ones we have I don't know the ones we don't know all right thank you thank you all right so we're moving on to school was there any other questions Comics yes ma'am um so I know that we have Rachel who's a member of the Alamar community what is our current way of communicating with the residents of Alamar as a district like I feel like we cut we're coming to these meetings and there's the Alamar residents are thinking this and we need to communicate with them and I Dr Freeman
061I've heard that you've talked to Brooksfield but I'm kind of in the back of my head and this has not been fleshed out or thought about and I always tell myself don't say something until you've thought it out and now I'm saying something but do we need to have like a meeting or a town hall with the people of Alamar to like talk to them about what the school is going to look like or do we rely on Brookfield that's my concern are we relaxed I feel like that would be ideal um I think that there is a lot of discrepancy as it relates to um just even mistrust with Brookfield because the Alamar residents were told one thing specifically and then um we you know learned that was not in fact um a guarantee
062so there's a lot of distrust as it relates to Alamar now monk Alamar um Amy there are three residential Facebook groups and they communicate we're able to get like demographic information we're able to get you know the polls done those constantly are happening so I think that um if there was an opportunity to have a town hall or just to meet and understand I think that would be ideal because um there's a a huge divide and lack of miscommunication and I think that um that of course yields and you know leads to a lot of mistrust so if that weren't option that would be absolutely ideal and just as Madam president stated um I think that they're even myself I was under the impression because I have a child who's going into fifth grade next
063year that the school will grow with him and so um the idea that that might not be a guarantee though it makes perfect sense you know as you stated it very eloquently I think my idea was okay I'm going to keep these cluster of children together and they'll be able to matriculate sixth grade seventh grade and eighth grade then he'll go out and then the others so the idea of possibly the following year and a lot of other parents feel the same way who have children in the same situation but their children will potentially have to part ways they'll have three children in this school next year then the following the following year they might have kids in this school in this school I think that um you know just that being communicated effectively will
064be wonderful what we have ask for a community meeting no oh no there's um so once again you know we're communicating with um their um corporate communication people they have a community life newsletter and a Communications person we're not communicating with three Facebook groups so is that our method are we instructed that's our method of conversation and communication well what the um what the you know as I stated when we started out we thought we would have more information forthcoming about the school and the program by now and we are really behind in this schedule for figuring out what program we're going to deliver um and so our communication plan had been kind of calibrated around being able to inform the community about um Lake and prep its opening and its program so um we're
065we're busy trying to figure out program and bring that information to the board we delayed all of our candle calendars including the communication one which was a mistake but this it happens commonly in communication because people hesitant to hesitate to communicate until they think they have an answer or something to say instead of saying we're working on it here's where we're at here's why we don't have that answer yet which we know we just had a lapse of performance so we met with the Brookfield people and their communication people and came up with a joint communication plan we've developed FAQs put them together sent them to the Alamar people and the reason is because we um unknowingly assumed if people were moving in there and we had buses going in and we knew we had
066kids enrolled that the kids in Alamar were enrolled in our schools I mean we didn't know about the kids we didn't know about once we found out about that we thought we need to change our communication strategy from just internal you know in our system to reach out to the community so the Brookfield people have been helping us with that why do they help us with that it's an unusual strategy they already have so in their you know and I don't know if I'm saying this right if one of them was here they could they could correct me but they already have in their Community Life Plan communication and so as they uh develop out the master plan Community they continue to Shepherd the integration of community members into the community until they're ready to
067assume their own homeowners associations and their own leadership and that kind of thing so the the master plan Community with all of the you know Community amenities and park there and I don't know if they if you guys pay association fees I'm assuming you do um you know they continue with the homeowner communication the meetings all of that they already have that in place so we're not going in and trying to duplicate their work we're trying to piggyback on the communication system they have in place at some point we do want to go down and have um you know a town hall q a kind of thing but we've put together q a sheets that answer a lot of these questions that we're Distributing to Brookfield and we've seen them and it's up on our
068website well it's what you know so far I mean it only answers the questions that we've answered so um and we certainly can attach it to your board update this week because Miss Garrison and Miss buds or Mr Buds and have put you know jumped on it right away and I I think it's is it more in a page Dan we usually try to fit them on a piece it's good if we had a copy just in case we're leaving we'll get it to you [Music] we were kind of in um I you know I'd say crisis communication mode once we figured out we'd come up short you know we got everybody jumping on it in the same week and putting it together and so we had um one of the vice presidents and two
069of the communication people with our communication people um and they've all got each other's contact information and are working together so um as soon as we know an idea what the school program is um we wanted to have a big meeting there and then set a date for when they can tour the school and all of those kind of things that are like we know we want to open up the school to the community prior to opening we just don't know yet when that'll be so um so some there's some things that are known and some things that are unknown and you know we're working through all of them but that was the that was the strategy for kind of reconnecting and getting communication up to speed with the progress the district is at so
070far and there is a tendency you know when we have still unknown things for people to fill in the blanks like you know we can tell them that this is how far we are and then people will get mad that we're not going to do sixth grade a year from now well I don't know that yet but since I didn't tell them we were then they then they'll start to think that we aren't and I don't even know the capacity of the school next year yet let alone two years from now so those are those are challenges that always come with change change is hard yeah no I don't think any suggestions communication clear communication words liked or not [Music] I know I don't know the protocol if we have to rely on Brookfield but
071at the end of the day Brookfield will be over there and they'll be looking at us like why wasn't this school like that why didn't it go like that and we won't you know you can't control what someone says I'm not saying they I don't know them well enough I can't speak to them I've talked to them a couple of times but really at the end of the day that's our school and we are responsible at least in the seats we set in to um make sure we're doing whatever it is to communicate but you're right no one's disagreeing with you yeah one I mean one of the things we are doing now is encouraging people to enroll for next year just like we do kindergartners and so they can come in and get an
072enrollment packet and get registered houses with numbers well now we know like I can't mail the things to people I don't have their address for and they're not their own ZIP code so um lots of stuff there yeah so I mean you'd have to actually maybe go do door hangers or something yeah obviously there's a lot to do I think the point of this is just communication is clear and we need to make sure those that Community member knows exactly you know if it's going to be okay through fifth okay it's going to be a k through fifth and the sooner we let them know then families can decide what their strategy is right and actually kind of getting the school configuration is yeah one of the things that's holding us up from launching the
073choice calendar okay and there's just one more thing um I know that there are some parents who are enrolling their kids for kindergarten they have been given that option for liking but um that's not an option that's afforded them if their children are not in kindergarten next year so when they come to the district they are being told that they can only register kindergarten students for for the new school not anybody from first grade upward I don't know if there's a communication difference but in the conversations I've had with Miss Garrison again handles enrollment and she's not here tonight I apologize for that but um The Way We Run The Welcome Center and enrollment is um in right now they're taking enrollment packets but I don't think um and I could be wrong any kindergarten
074we call it Kindergarten Roundup so we're taking in all of that enrollment um I don't think we're promising schools to people because let's just say the teacher capacity at a school is either is either 100 or 75. so um those Staffing configurations um aren't set yet they would know how many people to take or when to cut it off generally speaking this time of year the early enrollment for kids in kindergarten you know is less than half of what the total enrollment is going to be so they could be thinking it's safe to tell people if you're within walking distance that you can go there but I don't think there's supposed to be committing they're supposed to be taking enrollment packets and not committing the school because the school choice calendar hasn't been initiated yet
075but you can see the point that's exactly the conversation we're having Dr Haye did you have a conversation with Miss Garrison I mean even we're confused so Dr Freeman Madam President we are taking enrollment packets for all schools for new enroll enrollment and we have them put their first and second choice so that's regardless of grade level and that has been the practice over at the Welcome Center so they can put Lake in or they could put straight visitors it shouldn't be processing it might be implied if it was your first choice and we didn't tell you you didn't get it you're thinking you did um but I I think we just if nothing else we've we've concurred that there's still some communication things we need to work out and work on um we know
076that yeah okay any other things to beat on that Madam president members of the board right now I'm not hearing you want to add or change any rules because nobody's proposed uh it doesn't sound like it I didn't hear any of that so at this point we're moving to school calendar configuration is that Dr Hayden who is that no that um I'm yeah continuing on the hot seat okay so the um uh this is um this is a really kind of a pressure coming from staff and for Teacher retention and the competition for um the teaching Market but what's happened is evidently a lot of conversation in a neighboring School District so Liberty Elementary shares a boundary with us on the southwestern part of the school district it's much bigger it's 500 square miles and
077we're 30. um but there they were making a move to go to a four-day instructional week um there's a few other districts that have not at all a majority but I think more and more looking at it because as I said in your weekly update it's actually becoming you know more and more of a national Trend related to the teacher shortage so um the best example we have close to us which is not an identical but a more similar demographic is the Cartwright School District which did this a couple years ago and they had been in declining enrollment they still are and they've had a big increase in Charter intrusion which is again contributing to their declining enrollment but their teacher retention is good they're also a deseg district which gives them additional money for
078compensation that other districts don't have so um we're we're looking at right now um anybody and everybody we can find who's made that calendar change and what the impacts to the district have been but generally speaking the one of the impacts is an increase in teacher satisfaction and teacher retention there was a Apache Junction who did this on the far East Side and only did it for one year and then reverted back to five um usually it's been a strategy for very rural districts with long transportation to and from school in the reservations there's even some cases where the kids are in dormitories Monday through Thursday um because otherwise you're just half you know what a third of your life in school and the other third on the bus so um in that case it
079makes sense I don't know in the kind of Blended Community we have that it does I know the last time we raised it when we were considering transitioning back from 200 to 180 days doing a four day week on a 200-day calendar would have been 162 days and we pretty much filled the auditorium with people who who were opposed to that now we did a survey of family members and of staff and I think those slides are attached um yeah you're already peeking at those you so um yeah Jim get a little bit okay then that was only 18 of families right that's that's the that's the issue we wanted to make you aware of that um 18 of families responded in favor we really anticipated an overwhelming no response and we got 81 percent
080but a small sample size 18 of families who responded so I I think one of the things that tells us is there's not automatic opposition in the community um but then again if 81 percent of 18 percent right is positive that means you could end up with 15 positive and 85 percent against so um if if the board was interested in entertaining this further what I'd suggest is the um you know we do some kind of uh forced survey where kids have to take it home and bring it back and they get a dress down day or something if they deliver it that we try to do a more comprehensive survey with a little more reach I don't think that answering this question will really hold us up in school choice as much as school
081configuration will um and I think there's another slide where we ask teachers if we shifted to a four-day week would that um would that change your um Jim what was the side below there was that the staff wanting the 40 week so that's community and then below that is the staff so um these are a little out of order but if we go back to the first one we cross tabulated that data from teachers so um of that 85.9 planning to return so 80 86 percent return rate 56 were certified in 20 or 59 basically 60 were certified and 26 um and a half percent were classified add those two together they make up with rounding they make up your 85.9 right now 14 said no so we asked people if they said no would
082changing to a four day week possibly change your mind about staying so that 14 is 12.4 percent teachers who responded 1.7 percent classified so the ratio of no DS is a little higher no for teachers than it was for yes we broke that 12.4 percent down into people who said going to a four-day week would matter they would reconsider and going to a four-day week wouldn't matter they wouldn't reconsider so we're assuming some of those people are retiring or moving to Michigan or that kind of thing so that um is six and a half percent who said it would so roughly a little more than half of the certified said it would impact their decision in a sample size like this which is 68 percent of the staff if you extrapolated that out that comes
083out to a little over 30 some teachers essentially the complement of homeroom teachers in a school so it doesn't seem like a big number except that if we have a fully staffed school with 36 home rooms you're approaching that number and um uh but you know then again that's 30 out of 330. so um we have all of the special area special ed uh reading and special resource teachers so our staff is bigger than just our home realm count as far as services that we provide anyway it's just an interesting bit of information about um what the what the scope of retention might be um considering the responses that we had from staff and then um uh what are the other slides Jim so that's Community that's staff and then and then we had we
084asked a question to staff into families about reconfiguring to um uh K2 schools primary schools and Madam president if it's okay to move on from the calendar thing we can start talking about configuration I don't know if um if the board I guess here's my question for the board do you want us to further explore um you know what the calendar might look like on a four day week or do some more surveying or anything else like that I would say it's one strategy to help improve teacher retention I don't think any of the other four at k-8s that feed into Tolleson are considering it at this time and I don't think Talis and Union's considering it at this time up I don't think Tolleson Union is considering it right now so I remember when
085Littleton considered the four-day school week is it nine years ago um around there yeah it was around there because I remember that was when my son was in kindergarten and I remember coming to the meeting and it was a packed house and um so I'd like to see some more data from the community because I know that there was a lot of families with opposition to the four day work week or this four-day school week um I know having kids in the district and having now having kids that are going to be at the high school level as well I know that it's a I know it's a big factor for families to have them on the same calendar because you have siblings that take care of younger siblings and you know that that has
086a plays a big factor for our families so I would like to see some more data you know surveys out there from the community and from families as far as the four day school week goes I think Madam president um member Contreras I think if it was a regional effort within our whole system that it would make more sense I I um I don't know if like we want to be um bold and go first to see what happens um but but here's the bottom line and of course you know with two teachers on the board to be sensitive to this is you know I think what's happening around the country is uh people are grappling with what they can do to help attract and retain people in the profession with the changing of generations
087with the political climate that we're in with the struggle for compensation and even in states that pay teachers way better than we do they're having this conversation so I think the other conversation we need to have is um you know if we want to try to do some work to build consensus in the community like one would be to find out for more people one would be to build consensus in the community but I think one of the dangers is there would be a lot of people who would you know leave and go to a five-day option because there's so much to place in Arizona which didn't used to be the case and isn't the case in other states in other places so um so that's different but the other thing is the big question
088is what can we do to improve working conditions for teachers to attract and retain them that's the big question and so this is just one answer to that question because our neighbors are doing it in some places and other people around the country are doing it so staff have asked and and we can we can see about if we can do a more extensive Community survey that's probably a good Next Step um and then we can continue to do which is what we started to do is try to do more research on other districts that have done it and what the implications were like did they all have declining enrollment after they tried it or did some not and of course um other states handle Charter Schools completely different so our problem is there's absolutely
089no regulation of where they pop up and what they want to do in other states that's not true there is a collaboration between Charters and districts where there is some dialogue and strategizing Arizona doesn't run that way which makes everything planning-wise more challenging so right now we're going to continue to work to try to get feedback from the community but not bring back action does that make sense and yeah I appreciate that I want to just make it clear like I um definitely want to take what the teachers are providing as far as their input because I agree you know we need to find ways to retain teachers I mean I think that's it obviously it's an issue everywhere so definitely taking that um and considering that obviously but also just we want to get
090the community community in our family's input and make sure we have a wide range of that input from our families all right so um thank you I have a couple more things yeah I'm sorry um so I think just to keep something in mind is um you know what kind of effect would this have on our families as we are a majority working class District what having a four day week put a financial burden on our families however they're having Monday or Fridays off because they some parents would have to pay for child care because they have to work five typically five days a week another thing is if you know I think the school districts if school districts do shift to this does that mean that the legislature would give this a reasoning as
091to Tipple more money away from the existing budget that we have right now Madam president member Cisneros it's hard to say what the legislature would do um but the way the law stands today is they've converted a lot from seat time but they have given us this magic number of 890 hours and so when you change from a five day to a four day week the number of hours required for your um uh you know to meet all the obligations of your state formula Aid don't go down so you don't get to do 80 percent of the hours you still have to have the instructional contact time that's already established in statute and I think you know I think that was kind of agreed probably between liberal and conservative members I don't know that that's
092contentious so I think it'd be challenging to if everybody's doing the same a number of hours to say now you now you get less resources um I mean I think I think you may be right in some way that there's probably some always looking for ways to give us less resources um but I I you know I don't know that it's one of them I think it's just um you know for instance if you're a mostly rural community people aren't driving on the I-10 to the center of town to work an hourly job their you know working on a ranch or working on a store or someplace where um the commute shot is not like it would be for employment here so the impact on what people are doing to earn a living is also
093Less in those areas so there's um I I think for different communities there's different implications and we're keenly aware I think from the time we did three years of half day kindergarten what the impact on the community was from the time that we brought up the four day week before how the community turned out so um well I think the biggest issue is always daycare you know what where are we going to put daycare and the other thing is energy costs when I worked when we went to a four-day work week no one anticipated energy costs because you're shutting a building down in you don't work as much summer but you're still in May right you're still some and maybe shutting the building down and you're shutting it down for Friday Saturday and Sunday if
094someone wants to come in and work on a Friday it's hot and you can't stay in the building very long so there's all these other things you have to look at once you decide if it's something you want there's there's Energy Efficiency and it's a long depending on what your days look like now people don't want it anymore they want to go back to a normal schedule because they just live there and so there's just different components of it so just keep gathering information is what I'm hearing and then we can continue to discuss it we're we're seeing more and more places um cities and other Industries like other people because of the operating cost pressures people going to four day weeks I mean I I think it's happening in different sectors in different regions
095of the country um and I don't know you know if we're you know going to end up like France with a 32-hour work week and they were protesting they had to go to 34 or something and um but but I do see a shift in trend from what was assumed to be always like a five-day 40-hour week around the country I just don't know I I think in some cases like if a lot of people had a four-day work place calendar having a four-day School Place calendar wouldn't be as challenging all right so the K2 configuration was broached and so one of the things that we have noticed is because the preschool and head starts mostly housed at Littleton getting back to our families because people are taking their kids to school there they tend
096to default to matriculate from preschool to kindergarten at the same same place they went to preschool so so we're seeing this shift and and in the early childhood enrollment at the Littleton STEM Academy and in some cases we have in preschool model preschool students and preschool students with special needs so the other thing we're seeing is a disproportionate number of special needs kids entering primary grades at Littleton STEM Academy and typically what we see in the enrollment Trend in the district is our primary numbers start out a little lower but then our class size numbers grow as the schools as the kids get older so essentially like r678 classes class size district-wide so let's just say that's 660. are bigger than our K2 class sizes district-wide let's say they're 560. of course they vary every
097year so somehow across primary to Middle grades we attract more kids as they get older and I don't know if people are homeschooling or they're trying out Charters and deciding by Middle School they want to come back to the district obviously you know Sports and then getting ready to move into your Public High School um making new friends and acclimating to the public school system maybe parents are a little more protective in early grades and see their kids developing Independence and agency and they think they're ready um you know we don't really have data on that but we do have the trend which is the total class size in 678 is bigger than the total class size in K12 so um so we're looking at then the number of teachers in each grade level where
098they're allocated and what the class size ratio in other words the fill rate so the closer we get to matching 27 kids to each teacher FTE the more efficient our budget is if it gets over it's hard on teachers and if it gets under it becomes more expensive and um and actually reduces some options for kids and staff so we floated the idea if we had a K2 campus and that was going to be Littleton what were the implications for grade level enrollment and enrollment configuration be for the rest of the district the numbers don't really work unless you do it at two schools so if you think of our homeroom enrollment in three bands three grades K2 three grades three four five and three grade six seven eight we call primary intermediate and Middle
099grades um that's three grades in each band if we put K2 schools then we would have one of the three Bands then the other two bands would be in the other schools essentially you would say you had two K2 schools highly focused on early literacy and Child Development and then you'd have six three eight schools where kids matriculate up through the grades but that means once again everybody's changing schools between second and third grade um that reconfiguration is probably the biggest change and most logistically problematic of the other changes but it might be great for kids especially in early learning the other change that we looked at was um because we have actually we're trying to staff more Middle School sections at more schools to allow for convenient matriculation and grade is that we actually
100really need to have a good middle school program besides Lake and be a K-5 another school be a K-5 so that we can consolidate staff in six eight so they can actually run a middle school program so right now if we just allow everybody to move up it works fine when the teacher is the teacher of record for all the subjects but as soon as you start to be certified secondary end have the T the kids move on a bell schedule from subject to subject to get them ready for high school then we start hiring teachers that are subject certified and then they rotate kids and if you don't have enough teachers and enough rotation that doesn't work very well teachers end up doing double prep or triple prep and then if anybody's absent and
101there's only two teachers in sixth grade seventh grade and eighth grade you're having to and you can't get a sub you end up having to collapse and cover down to one teacher in the grade level that doesn't work very well so um so we looked at well what if we put instead of fours if we put three teachers at every grade level the math doesn't work um uh there there isn't enough enrollment to put four teachers at every grade level so this is the primary reason why um we wanted to leave the lake and configuration at K5 is because we have a middle school configure program configuration problem right now we have littleton's enrollment is smaller in the upper grades and they can't get a complement of four teachers with the enrollment we have we're
102trying we're trying to keep everybody's enrollment K-8 and when the numbers are low and they get to middle school we can't run the middle school program we need everybody's concerned about Middle School achievement seventh grade State scores dropping and those things so we're looking for a way to help those teachers and of course to retain attract and retain with a viable middle school program so the other configuration idea we have is that one of the K another K-8 school besides Lake and prep becomes a K-5 those kids and those parents who were planning to have their kids moved up are going to have their cheese moved a lot of change and um and probably not be happy about that but it's a positive impact on teachers and student achievement now conceptually that may not um
103meet with that much objection as I explain it and people understand the need logistically for Staffing and being strategic about the numbers at each school until you find out it's your school and you know and your family so then this is the you know which of your children do you love the most question you know and which one are you giving away so um we would have to do a lot of work to um uh you know go through uh decision making process business rules that determined uh what would be the school that would convert from K8 to K5 and then through school choice those families would have to pick a second school and then now we're looking at two schools where everybody wants to grow fifth grade into sixth grade without having to change
104schools so this once again you know if we can get the word out to Alamar is we had a plan for building schools Staffing and growing staff and then somebody came in and dropped you know a big expensive flashy building with race lights at night and took a thousand kids so um I mean that's really our challenge is configurating configuring Staffing to make it optimal for teaching um and and the challenge of course is it makes it less optimal less optimal for families you know having their kids matriculate and stay together through grades now um because the board president and I did talk a lot about putting in this on the agenda and how to present it the real question I have is you know how can we help our Middle School teachers be more
105supported be more effective and to help them retrain this is the school configuration idea doesn't cost any money but it costs a lot of pain and change and so the other idea is we have you know all costs more money and part of the reason for having this discussion is if we want to do something about that and we're going to allocate budget resources differently next year we need to have that conversation now and in the spring so as Mr French is putting together budget and budget recommendations it's based on you know the conversation and Direction the board wants to have um so this is one option to help improve Middle School teacher retention in middle school student achievement but it's not the only option it's being presented tonight for consideration if it's um if
106it's too much change too fast then we still need to do something to provide support to staff and try to retain them our Middle School teacher retention is our most challenging area they the middle school kids are challenging Middle School teachers have a lot of responsibility and some of them think they're not really a grown-up teacher until they get to high school either so they have some high school Envy sometimes um so I mean those are all real considerations and we think you know in a lot of ways they're suffering so are we and maybe our kids are a little too if our teachers are so let's let's have a conversation about just thoughts and I'll go down the line okay so I guess my first question is and maybe I was under the wrong
107assumption does the state fund schools that have Kinder and that don't have Kinder an eighth on the same campus the same because I was told many many moons ago that that's why some districts got rid of middle schools was because they got more money if they had K-8 schools and not a middle school it's funny because that's exactly what I remember being told and maybe they've changed it in three years you know if you look carefully I mean we it's a couple years Mr French did a little you know overview of budget and that kind of thing so if you looked at the beginning budget forms where student counts go so there is a preschool area a kindergarten area because they we only get half funding for kindergarten they're at 0.5 for a full day
108and then grades one through eight you know count as one and nine through twelve count as one but you have to meet a certain amount of registration criteria because they actually can go 0.75 and and 0.5s then what happens is there's a weight added that was developed to cover what um was interpreted at the time to be shared average costs so the high school weight is bigger than the one eight weight and then kindergarten which is already weighted at 0.5's weight and then preschool is funded at its own level so the brackets are Pre-K 1 8 and 912. after that then you get the other added weights which are for special programs special ed and those kind of things so the one place it is different where you get more money for junior high is
109with sfb because the kids are considered to need more square foot per kid and higher gymnasium roofs so that ends up costing more money but otherwise the budget form is the budget form finding a way to keep and retain Middle School teachers I mean you're speaking to someone who's taught middle school for 10 years like I would love to support them in any way that I can but I don't have the solution for you so but I'm open to any ideas um if I'm I don't know if I'm wrong but one of our neighboring school districts currently does this if it's um if I remember correctly Fowler so I'm assuming what we would do instead of doing K5 would be K2 and then have a separate middle school or do K2 and then do three
110eight Madam president member Cisneros the only models we did were K2 and 3 8 I mean you could explore other things but you know since we went to k-8s you know it was funny because at first people were worried about big kids and little kids being together and then when we broached breaking them up again everybody's like well who's going to want who's there won't be any big brothers to watch little sisters anymore so there always is when you have change that kind of um you know anticipated things that will go wrong most of them don't really come true um but the idea that here's here's the big idea really that goes with that configuration is we want to be schools of choice that zero in on areas of interest that kids have that lead
111to careers with the idea being that their school work becomes more meaningful and their Middle grades achievement is higher so they're prepared for high school instead of struggling and going into Credit Recovery in ninth grade so um K2 students who are telling you they want to be marine biologists are probably going to change that somewhere along the way right but as the kids get older this image of what their future is going to look like becomes more and more developed um and we think that actually um you know career exploration in seventh and eighth grade is probably too late because they've already disengaged with their core reading and math work they're all if if you're waiting till 8th grade to figure out what you want to do with your life ninth grade could be really
112hard um what's happened in America is the expectations for students and and core standards and Workforce I've changed dramatically I mean even for some of the you know the most basic trades the reading level of the material people need to be able to understand has gone up dramatically for almost every profession so we've raised the expectations of Workforce we've raised the expectations of core standards but we haven't necessarily raised the aspiration of kids to persevere through content through Middle grades when they're going through adolescence their brains are rewiring they're highly prone to risk taking and that I think is our big Challenge and the reason we would want to have that separation maybe between primary intermediate and middle is to really try to get kids engaged in some of the special programs like we saw
113tonight that are happening at every school we don't think yet I mean if everybody's going to the school because it's close to their house they're not going to it for the signature program and what we'd like to see is but we do have some that are going for Signature program and from surrounding districts we'd like to see that be a more meaningful number and if you're changing schools all the time you know it's not going to be so I mean we could run other models if people were interested but one of the problems you have if you consolidate all of the six eight kids in one school is you get a lot of um interaction of adolescent behavior um uh you know kind of like a Junior High dance so the the idea the idea
114if you put a bunch of middle grade kids together in a big Middle School you have curriculum opportunities more elective options and things like that but you're also putting a whole bunch of adolescents in a small space is risky like like most of you wouldn't want to have more than eight at your house at any one time so I'm just trying to wrap my head around this so we're looking at two schools that are K2 and the rest like so the reigning six is third through eighth grade correct um that's one option Madam president and Miss Contreras so the the we tried to summarize options on here so one is don't change anything and just figure out how we can retain Middle School teachers so that's option one is no Change option two was 2K
115twos and six three eights now balances the numbers the other is um moving one K8 to a K5 to strengthen the Middle School model it's the least amount of change it's three grade levels at one school versus everybody's K2 but then it's whatever schools impacted um uh people thinking their kids were going to go to sixth seventh or eighth grade and having that change on them so um uh any kind of change that way is going to be challenging well I just I my comment is just I would have to agree with Amy this is the tough one and um I don't have a solution to this one I can attest I have two middle schoolers so I know that they are tough um so I'm open to any solutions that you have to offer
116us so and I think that um as everyone else stated there's gonna we're really looking at the lesser of all evils and this because um when you think about the K-2 students um there's definitely value in that modality for them to be able to be enriched but I think what becomes problematic especially with the students who are currently in school um they're used to going to school with their older siblings so that becomes um you know almost traumatic where you're you know kindergarten and first grade you're with the older sibling and the anticipation is almost this um punitive that now this year you're in a school where you're not and then my other concern as it relates to um you know that K to five is I think what could become problematic if there are
117sibling sets parents might you might see a reduction in enrollment at those schools because they'll say oh well if this school is not going to you know matriculate with my students I'll take all four or five out and I'll put them somewhere else and then I don't want that to become then it becomes you know Pekin Valley where there's a whole nother set of issues because now that those particular schools their enrollment drops tremendously because the parents were you know being able to have that and then even as you say earlier with the um change in time you know people coordinate that based on if I have um students at the school and they are early school and then I have my younger students at a later school then you know who's going to be
118able to be there so I think there's just a multifaceted issue um and one that really needs to be discussed because there's so many variants to it and you know the most important thing of course is students but we also want to be able to um you know really take care of our teachers so that they can then take care of our students and it will just kind of you know pour down on them so I just had a very small comment um one thing that I speaking in my middle school teacher hat right now having other teachers who teach middle school science or middle school social studies and having them on campus would be I believe a support to your other teachers to have someone else I can go bounce ideas off of that
119is something I've always struggled because I've always been the seventh eighth grade science teacher and there's no other science teacher in middle school because sixth grade doesn't have a science teacher because they just can't um and so I do think I do see a benefit in that way if there's a way I know making a school that's a six eight or a combination there may give some additional support maybe looking at as a district we've always talked about professional development being of value to our teachers is there a way that we can incorporate more all the science teachers talking together all the social studies and getting more support in that way so I just have a few comments I I agree with all of them I I there's different ways I look at it one
120to me this is too soon we just barely recovered from covid I mean I hate to say it again but we had online learning and those middle kids are exactly the ones who got crunched not all of them but a majority of them and you can see that in our test scores can't deny our test scores so we're talking about all this change moving wire our test scores are still struggling and a lot of that and not all of it but you know you're talking about middle school middle school is exactly the ones that survived covid right they were online trying to adapt to what that means and how to learn so you've got all that Dynamic so I am concerned for Middle grades I'm absolutely concerned for them and I think our numbers would
121bear that that is something we should be looking at in terms of how to enrich their programs I definitely agree with that survey if we are wanting if the whole goal of this is it to attract and retain Middle School teachers have we just asked them I mean if we had a meeting and said hey you know listen we have options and really get good feedback from all of them you know have a good you know 90 survey or something I bet you they could tell you what they want now that doesn't mean we could give it to them but it would be nice to know what's what's your thought what do you think you want to if you could stay in this District what would it look like and you know really the the
122pie is the sky and and I don't know if we've done that so I know it doesn't it's late and so that's that as far as Fowler uh if you look at Fowler I know people have worked there really well they're declining enrollments their test scores are really struggling um ours look pretty good compared to them so that's that's concerning if they have that Dynamic does that work I I don't know I mean we'd have to survey other schools and say does your test scores go up did you find this to do exactly what you wanted it to do I don't know that and then um adolescent Behavior if you remember we used to be a seventh eight we did have K through fifth we had all that you're talking about there was so much
123preaching and conversation about That's not healthy they're not psychologically learning we need to have little kids with the big kids and then everybody can grow together we need to have partners and now it's exactly uh maybe it's the trend I don't know but it's 180 degrees from where we came from we converted under down from a seventh and eighth and then we went sixth seventh and eight and that didn't come too successful I mean so I'm struggling with it right I mean there was a lab set on fire and all kinds of things that was crazy that's the way I was here no not while you were here I survived that though so I I just struggle with there was a lot of um hormones moving in the in the sixth seventh and eighth right
124and they weren't focused on learning they were you know all that goes on with it so I don't have the answers I absolutely don't but I think the first step is we got to ask how do we keep you what does it look like if pay is the issue then I don't know maybe we come back and we have more conversation but I'm thinking this is too much too fast when our middle students right now are the ones that we really should be focused uh hard and heavy are they ready and honestly I I don't think they're ready and that that that makes me I failed that right I've got to do whatever I can to help them get ready to transition to sixth seventh and eighth and on to high school and if they're
125not I think you've said it fifth grade is a transitional year I've heard you say that or four between fourth and fifth and if they're not there that's really scares me and so I'm worried about them so enough that that's my comments thank you well Madam president thank you I mean we live in a in an under-resourced state where you have all of these other unpredictable things happening uh which which does make that challenging and you know the soapbox I'm on all the time is you know we've gone from uh we to me community and everybody's getting theirs and not worrying about the impact on other people you all are worrying about the impact on other people in your conversation tonight but I don't I don't think that seems to be as prevalent in today's
126politics or in a lot of the thinking that people in the community do you know they're you know they're concerned about my kid not our kids and that's a challenge especially if you're serving on a public board that's responsible for all of our kids um the uh we we have looked a little bit if we could do something with compensation for Middle School teachers and our concerns are it wouldn't be a lot of money would be more would it be appreciated or would it be insulting and if it was a lot of money how would the K2 teachers feel about now they're not getting competition all they have to do is quit and leave a lot and then they'll be hard to fill and actually the trend around the country is primary teachers are harder
127to fill the lower end of K8 now is more hard to fill than High School Across the Nation so um you know be careful where you put all your acorns you know when winter comes so the um I mean we could um we could toy with that in what are hard to fill and hard to retain positions with data and try to do a little bit in the way of compensation I'm just worried if we do that you know in the the little bit of discretionary money that might be left over in the budget isn't really enough to change Behavior if it's not money what is this I don't know other people at the lunch line I don't I mean I don't know maybe it's different different the the other things that come out are
128autonomy and support okay our teachers would probably tell you yeah see I've been making those things so all right we'll leave that with yeah got it Madam President right on it but thank you all for the discussion and your help I think that as that management team meets that'll help inform our dialogue appreciate it a lot next is foreign yes Madam president members of the board I have the easy two items because this is not change so for this evening we have uh two years of instructional calendars the first one up for review is 23.24 which for new members of the board what we do each year is bring the next year and then the future year and sometimes it has to be changed and modified as we try to work with the talson Union
129calendar which is exactly why 2324 is coming back so there's one change in March we moved spring break from the calendar that was adopted last year one week forward and it's the March it says March 24th so our start day and end day is the same it's just the week of spring break is different so that's the proposed change for that one the next calendar for 24.25 currently aligns with talson Union High School District you might notice that um well next year is Leap Year so that throws everything off a little bit so the 24-25 year will shift because of that and about every seven years we need to shift the start day from a Wednesday to a Monday to get out by Memorial Day at the end and still honor our breaks and things
130that teachers have become accustomed to so the big thing to look at here is in July of 24 the first day for students is the 29th of July which is a Monday it does give us a little bit more time a few days after that Fourth of July break which is later in the week for staff to come back and get situated and ready for new staff to come but everything else is in alignment with talson Union and there are no other significant changes so this is information only I'd be happy to take any questions from the board or comments the leap committee has reviewed this but we also took it to the principals group the hrbr group um let's see we took it to the director's team and so there have been about six
131different groups that have looked and at these as well as the next items calendars questions on on it's a discussion item anyway so is there yes ma'am hearing none we will looks like it goes to Mr French no who does it go to I have the next time thank you you have the staff work calendars my apologies but they'll come back they'll come back so again Madam president members of the board this would be item 12 staff work calendars and discussion only coming back for Action at the next meeting in two weeks we have a 10-month certified calendar a 10-month support staff or classified work calendar an 11 month work calendar and a 12-month work calendar there are no significant changes as the board put additional holidays in for groups last year we rearranged some
132of the floating holidays you might ask why there are solid boxes or heavy black boxes around some of the dates those are the observed holidays and then our discretionary holidays that the board gave us to extend breaks in different places are not boxed and bold and then they have um shaded days and so that is the discussion item for this evening and we'll bring it back in two weeks concerns comments yes I just had a a couple of comments it's related to the the staff calendar but also just to uh a couple other things that I just wanted to just discuss while I had superintendent Freeman and Dr Haida here I had the um as I've been to first month on the board there's just a couple of things that I wanted to to bring
133to your attention um that I've had many interactions with staff members at Fine Arts Academy and um some things have been said to me that I just wanted to you know bring to light that um I know there's you know a lot of things that's happening behind the scenes that you know does concern me and um you know I just um I don't know how to say this without so is it dealing calendar um yeah it's related to to just snap things so there's several um conversations that I've had with staff members over at Fine Arts and um it's just several situations that have happened that um that I wanted to just bring to the tension well I had the entire board here um I've had the interaction with several yeah just just with place
134we discuss it so if if your conversation with them is regarding the staff work calendar we can certainly address it here if you want something on a future agenda item to discuss other things we can certainly get it on the calendar but we are held to our agenda items and what's on our calendar and so I don't know you know what your thinking is and I appreciate it but this vote in this conversation is regarding staff work calendar so if it has to do with that by all means let's bring it to the board and let's discuss it if it is other concerns outside of that I will let you bring those to Dr Freeman or myself and if you know if you want them on the agenda we can put them on there for
135discussion of course following the protocols that we would follow okay yeah yeah so is your do you want to advise the board on the staff work calendar oh okay so at this point is there any discussion on the staff work calendars hearing none so okay uh thank you we'll look for that to come back thank you madam president at this point um Mr French this looks like it's yours thank you madam president members of the governing board Dr Freeman Littleton Community uh this evening we're looking at a draft of next year's employee benefit rates the management team has consulted with Valley Schools over the last couple weeks to determine the best course of action for Littleton and the rates for major medical as well as the ancillary benefits the K-12 education sector has seen a
1367.1 percent increase in major medical and a 10.3 percent increase in Pharmacy over the last year so management is working to mitigate that increase as much as possible in next year's rates if we look at the attached rate sheet the district is showing a contribution to the high deductible High Premium plan of six thousand three hundred and sixty dollars while maintaining the 300 contribution to the health savings account this plan would remain a free option for employees that are only insuring themselves this would be an increase of just under 500 for the annual contribution by the district the administration also moved the traditional planned employer contribution to six thousand six hundred and sixty dollars to match the high deductible High Premium plan the plan would also see some slight adjustments to the high deductible High
137premium deductible from 2800 this current year to three thousand uh next year for an individual and 5600 this year to six thousand next year for family both plans would see a slight out of pocket maximum increase from five thousand to six thousand for individual and ten thousand to twelve thousand per family this change allows for Littleton to align better with the average out of pocket maximum for Valley School other Valley School Districts um other Valley Schools districts that have in their plan for ancillary benefits the district will not see an increase in either dental plans offered we are projecting a small increase to the vision plan which is voluntary for employees as well as a half a penny increase per thousand dollars in Voluntary Life Insurance paid for by the district which equals one times
138a staff member's salary this item is for discussion only um this evening I'd be happy to answer any questions that the board has is there discussions or questions regarding the employee benefits for 23-24 hearing none thank you for the presentation and then next of Mr French you're going to do a demographic study correct yes thank you madam president the district has recently received a draft of a demographic study completed by applied economics as part of a larger study conducted for the Tulsa Union High School District this evening will be like we would like to share some of the information the management team is analyzing we will be touching on a couple of topics which include a look at District enrollment Trends since 2000 2001 a long time ago District demographic Trends including the race and
139ethnicity and age of our community as well as the housing Trend seen in the district since the 2010 census we're then going to look at Charter enrollment and Trend since 2 2011 and the projected growth of the school district through fiscal year 33. this slide if we yeah so this slide is a little difficult to read but the blue line is the total enrollment of the district from fy01 so 2001 to fiscal year 23 with the red line indicating the percent change from year to year you can see from fy01 to fy05 there was a rapid growth with the district adding almost 2 000 in students in between those years with about a thousand of those coming between fiscal year 04 and fiscal year 05. rapid growthing continued through fiscal Euro nine and then the
140recession and changes in Immigration policy combined to negatively impact enrollment since then enrollment has seen an upward Trend with a couple of exceptions until kovid happened in fy20 you can see a significant decline in enrollment that year which the district contributes to moving to a remote learning environment and the opening like Dr Freeman said of two charter schools within District boundaries Academy of math and science as well as the other charter school that's just north of the I-10 since then we have not fully regained enrollment but have continued an upward trend that we saw before this slide shows the race and ethnicity of the community during the last two censuses as well as an estimated an estimate applied that applied economics did for FY or 2022. what the management team did here um was in
141blue we added District demographics for the same time frames this allowed management team to determine if there is a correlation between the data provided by the demographer in the district the district's thought is our demographic data may serve as an indication of where the community is as a will go as a whole in the future so we see that if we scoot back we are slightly higher in certain race and ethnicity groups we are seeing the Hispanic population grow at the the most as far as population between 2020 and 2022 individuals which was the second highest percent growth behind the other um Group which would be mixed race um okay Jim this table is a representation of the age groups presented in the community and how those age groups have increased or decreased since the
1422010 census you can see the under five group and the 5 to 13 group have both declined as a percentage of of the whole but have both increased in number at the same time the 45 to 64 and 65 and up group grew significantly combine the account for just over 20 26 percent of the population which is up from 20.8 percent in 2010. at 32.3 percent the 25 to 44 population which represents most of the Littleton parents is the single largest group represented this table is showing the housing units in the district during the same time period you can see that the total housing units increased from fifteen thousand three ten in 2020 to 17 922 in 2022 which is an 8.2 percent increase in that time frame this is a good representation of the
143rapid growth we're seeing in the community with the change from agricultural to residential land single-family housing makes up 86.1 percent of all residential units within the district today although multi-family units have developed rapidly over the past two years resulting in a 2.1 percent share increase since 2020. there are currently three charter schools located within District boundaries those being Legacy Academy of mathis science and Sun Valley Academy that is north of the I-10 and three other Charters located near District boundaries imagine elementary and middle school and the Arts Academy at Estrella Vista this table shows the most current K-8 enrollment of those six schools based on this year's 40th Day enrollment currently the three districts in District boundary schools have a total enrollment of 2941 and the three out of school districts have a total enrollment
144of 1535 resulting in a total enrollment of 4476 students we believe this point most of the schools are at or approaching capacity foreign this slide shows Charter enrollment Trends since 2010 20 fiscal year 2011. the management team has boxed a couple of dates here on this table to show Charter enrollment growth which corresponds with the top one is District adopting a 200-day calendar and remote learning and covid is in the second box lastly I wanted to show the board the projections for the district for the foreseeable future based on the information we know today about Housing and Development starts over the next five to ten years the district is projecting to projected to grow from 5746 in students this year to over 9 300 in fiscal year 23 20 22 23. what the management team
145has done on this table is underline in blue the fiscal years we would need to be planning for new facilities based on projected enrollment with that I'd be happy to answer any questions the board has any questions feedback comments yes ma'am not a question but um I really really like this I love the way that this is set up I think this is the clearest that I've since I've been on the board that it's been given to me so thank you good job yes agree all right next Dr Freeman I think this is yours legislative update thank you madam president members of the board so um the legislature's more interesting this year in years past their uh their is I think just under 1700 bills introduced which has kind of become the new Norm probably
146400 that impact the school district um so um we are in the in the political and culture wars a prime target for a lot of people who have strong feelings about that and our legislature is um uh key in keeping with that Trend the national Trend I think most everybody is aware last week um there was a bipartisan super majority vote to waive the aggregate expenditure limit and we do owe some thanks to David Cook who helped move the HCR 2001 along so the vote in the Senate was 23 to seven you only needed 20. so there were some extra yes votes there and in the house was 46 to 14 and I updated the board a little bit on what the votes were there the the cut anticipated to public schools which wasn't anticipated
147for Charters or vouchers was 17 for the whole year but if you have to do all that in the fourth quarter it's a 68 percent cut in April and May so it would have been catastrophic ins and um were truly relieved but I think the fact that they put it off for so long does send a signal to Public School Employees and teachers that um their employment's not really secure in their computations compensation is not really secure and part of the problem is going to be that this comes up again next year so the relief is for the current fiscal year the same problem happens next year um right now jlbc has estimated inflation at about seven percent the um the legal agreement in the court settlement on inflation says they have to fund at
148least two percent there's probably going to be a battle over that that was the number in the skinny budget and they didn't get enough people um to support the skinny budget to run it through it hasn't gone through yet but it does tell a little bit of uh the thinking about uh Conservative Republican majority even if they funded us at two percent but inflated the AEL at seven percent we'd still be almost a billion dollars over Statewide so um so this is reoccurring until it gets addressed the last week to hear bills in the house of origin should be this week they there is a procedure for the legislature to extend that and that means that um there there could be a little rush to hear bills there were a lot of bills on the
149agenda today um in the house House Education meets Tuesday Senate education meets Wednesday so um uh what happens after that is if they don't get into a committee for a hearing and then they don't move um essentially they can't move on the process would be they have to come out of the Committees with due pass vote to go to the floor and then finish third read to get to the next chamber the next chamber can work with them to amend them in which case it has to come back to the Chamber of origin to see if they agree with the Amendments they can also not hear it so there's a lot of things that can happen so far but what people who are watching the process are hoping is the number of things you're following
150gets smaller instead of bigger there is a thing called strike everything amendments and there's one of them that I had on my list today to bring to your attention but um I'm not sure it's going to impact us so um one of the some of the bill feels that um I'd like to highlight were a striker on House Bill 2060 which is um allowing a homepage link for statutory required postings it seems to have been a trend in the legislature that anything they want everybody to know they put in statute has to be on our home page the home page is getting really crowded so um a nice legislative legislator Grantham has actually put a bill up for consideration that says we can have a link on our homepage for all the stuff the legislature
151requires one click and you can see all their stuff which would be a big help um uh that's a that's a good bill the next one's a problem 2533 on classroom instruction and so um uh what one of the trends you're seeing is this idea that everything that happens in the classroom has to be it's really raining isn't it what somebody just texted me and said I need to go home there's a really bad storm you need to go home well then wait for it to be over so um so this one is [Music] um it directs districts and Charters to post a free electronic copy of the classroom instruction materials on its website for each course of study offered of course we have teachers who are differentiating instruction giving different activities and different things
152to different kids based on their need and um and you're supposed to include the source of your supplementary materials and each lesson plan being used so our two School teachers you know you know what that does it's in it's impossible it's almost kind of like doxing teachers so that's a problem and but that appetite hasn't gone away this has come up in a couple other sessions um and then pinkarelli who's House Education chair wants to create a school choice division within the state board with different duties and Staffing to do public notification requirements for dnf schools and school choice and those kind of things so um that you know I don't know is creating a whole another set of administration and they have this idea I think that if you just keep pounding into people's
153heads where dnf schools are that people are going to move their kids and I think most people are aware if they have a dnf school but they're committed to their community and their school and the people they go to school with much like we were talking about configuration changes but this comes back um a lot 2705 schools and safety training creates a school active threat response pilot program and appropriate some money this is something we spend a lot of time and effort on with no support just comes out of our regular budget um we've we've been really grateful this year that we've been able to kind of hire Beyond normal work hours one of the Avondale police officers who's doing a lot of their training in emergency response has come to all of our schools
154we reviewed all of our plans and is working with all of our staff so constantly keeping people up to date and informed on school safety stuff but that's um that's been really no additional funding for that that just has to be a management priority for us to pull that off 2786 teacher training potential notification um this is a problem it mandates the governing board develop a parental notification and access procedure if we're training teachers or administrators that they are notified if the training notified of the training and give parents access to any printed or digital materials used in the training so the story behind this bill is they're concerned about diversity and inclusion and social emotional learning and they want to know if you're talking about it in your professional development so if they require
155all of it to be printed and released they can sift through and see if you're talking about non-conservative things so that's a problem because that would mean everything we do in professional development now has not I mean things we have to write down we normally wouldn't even write down and create documents so we don't create and then post them subject to scrutiny on the Senate side for tomorrow Senate Bill 1040 starts out sounding like it's not a bad idea this is called Public Schools restrooms and reasonable accommodations so John Kavanaugh out of Fountain Hills that's Fountain um it wants to provide access single occupancy or employee restrooms or changing facilities to any person who's unwilling or unable to use multi-occupancy restroom or changing facilities designated for a person's sex or multi-occupancy sleeping quarters because it
156grants this is the part like that doesn't sound bad like you can use another bathroom by law now um but it grants a private cause of action which means a lawsuit against the public school if a person encounters somebody of the opposite sex in a bathroom so if you encounter somebody you don't think should be in there now you can sue the school district so it starts out like have a place for people to go to the bathroom then it says if you run into somebody of a different gender in the bathroom you can sue the school district so I don't know that we need that much liability I don't know how often that happens um but you can kind of see where yeah it's um it's once again it's this I think this is
157my opinioning it's this trend you're seeing around the country to um basically um attack you know a small minority group as Citizens across the U.S in our state you know is included and Senate Bill 1343 digital media it requires Ade to develop best practice for instruction in digital citizenship and make a list of resources doesn't sound like a bad thing there's a striker today or tomorrow on Senate Bill 1400 it was first titled CTE but what we understand is it's going to come back for community colleges and mostly for Pima Community College and so that's one of those strike everything the problem of course is finding out on short notice the bill isn't what it used to be and what's going to be in it and we were watching that just because you don't know
158what's going to be in it um Senate Bill 1410 violations of state law this is a problem that extends the scope of member legislature requiring the Attorney General to investigate any official there already is a law if there's an allegation of wrongdoing they can request an infra an investigation this requires the Attorney General to investigate and the idea is it's any official action taken by the governing board of the district or Charter and then violating state law or Constitution then the attorney general has to notify the school district of the violation and it goes on to say by certified mail and then the school district Charter fails to resolve it within 30 days the Attorney General is required to withhold 10 percent of your money and then that's classroom site fund money but you can't
159reduce the teacher compensation that's paid out of the site fund money even though that's a cash fund that's a problem um Senate Bill 1425 High School graduation requirements this is interesting um not that we do high school but the legislature this this uh Senator is trying to prescribe what elements should be in the curriculum instead of letting the state board of education do that um Senate Bill 1621 incentives and dual enrollment this is to again fund incentives for kids to do dual enrollment there's a high correlation between dual enrollment and being college going and before it was just the um uh what's the other test the kids can take AP tests those were incentivized under the last Administration more kids do do enrollment so it would have a broader reach um uh Ken Bennett who's
160returned to the Senate wants us to return to a Statewide um assessment for graduation and then there's one on online instruction from Mitzi Epstein uh she's a school person and wants the auditor general to complete a cost study on online instruction um to see what it really costs when different people are doing that so the legislature can be more informed I think you know our costs are different than people who are strictly online obviously if they're giving out cash to parents there's a there's a difference Senate Bill 1070 that's the same person who um was wanting to do these other restrictions and this is library books again so right now we make our library circulation titles accessible to the public through our view only Destiny system anybody can look for any book they want um
161but this is um that a parent who objects to a book can have that removed from the library if they find it to be lewd promote gender fluidity or even use gender pronouns called out specifically in the statute grooming children or pedophilia that actually now that complaint goes to the Department of Ed the department of Ed has to establish rules for maintaining a list of bad books and then people are prohibited from making them available to kids with procedures for parents to submit those lists and 80 is required to review submissions by any parent public schools have to make a list of books and materials purchased in the library 120 days before making them available to kids like we release purchase orders in June so they can become effective July 1st and then we start
162school at the end of July this essentially would mean we would be buying books in the current fiscal year and waiting for the whole first quarter and part of second quarter be over before we could put them on a shelf I don't think it's really very realistic and in the current law there's a limit on what schools are required to do if you don't have full-time medium Specialists which most of us don't because you can't afford them that you're exempt from some of the public reporting and disclosure this takes that out so nobody can be exempt for any reason you have to follow all the library books censorship rules that's Senate Bill 1700 it's awfully prescriptive and once again targeting a small subgroup empowerment scholarships with a quarter of the port that's Senator Marsh she's
163out in ld4 and was teacher of the year and she wants the ad to start reporting quarterly on um how much empowerment scholarship account money is being um uh sent I saw a recent report I think in the newspaper where the number of people using them is going up astronomically and then finally dual enrollment Senate Bill 1717 Kaiser that's being heard tomorrow it's one of Hobbs initiatives and aligns with one of the other bills that I told you about so I think there's some momentum to help support kids and families uh getting some dual enrollment I had a friend whose daughter started college like in her junior year because she'd earned enough credits I think and they went to Dysart so that could be a huge help to families to be able to have concurrent
164credit and I think I mean there's really not any reason not to support that um so that's the update kind of on where things stand there is a deadline for when um bills need to hurt be heard from the opposite chamber that'll come up at the end of this month early next month and that'll be another time when we're kind of sorting down to what's going to be moving and not the budget negotiation is going to be the big deal and we're expecting that to be really difficult there is a revenue drop-off happening in the next couple years because of all the tax cuts and everything that have been done so unless the state economy grows dramatically um there will be you know challenges for the state for continuing funding and jlbc's made some Productions
165um that essentially the the Surplus Revenue we have is gone in a couple years and and anticipating some belt tightening so um um you know we're watching a lot of that stuff a lot of the you know what we would characterize as culture War bills um as they relate to schools and and then the punitive thing which is adding more civil penalties for doing things they don't like so um we're paying a lot of attention to that there's a there's a bill that takes away superintendent's due process for termination um so a lot of things to pay attention to Madam president that's all I have thank you thank you the move that we adjourn at 8 35. I'll second that Journey