001all right Jason are we good to go all right good evening thanks for being here um we will go ahead and get started we're live streaming this presentation just to make sure that folks that couldn't be here could still access the information we've got several folks that are going to help do this presentation Dr Sullivan our assistant superintendent will play A Part carry all day and Dustin Lemay are directors of teaching and learning will play A Part as well and appreciate all their hard work I also want to thank Cindy Simmons our school board president for being here and Anne Engelhart one of our school board members for being here as well I appreciate them being here to to hear input from our community so we're going to jump in and get going on on
002this presentation about enrollment growth and future building needs I know if you're watching this online it might be hard to see the screens but all of this information is posted on our website in short videos so you would be able to see any of the information on the slides by accessing our website I'm Scott Windham superintendent of Avon schools and our goals for this presentation are we really want to provide some updated enrollment growth and demographic study projections about our growth in Avon schools and then we're going to review three models for you of how we could accommodate enrollment growth that none of which would take effect until the 25-26 school year so we're talking about two and a half school years from now that any of these models would be in place serving our
003kids and talk a little bit about our timeline we have three strategic goals that our school board has adopted for us as a school district centered around improving academic achievement of our students creating systemic and purposeful Innovation and then supporting the whole child those goals Drive everything that we do as a school district we share reports on them at every school board meeting and they're all really centered around our mission that all belong learn and grow and what I love about Avon is that our all just keeps getting bigger more families are choosing Avon for their children and to raise their families and we're honored to get to serve more kids every year that want to be a part of our school district so as we think about our journey as families we often equate
004what happens in a school to our personal experience as homeowners if you're like me my wife and I started in an apartment that was our first place that that we lived and and uh then we started our family and started having children and many times at that point that might be when a family decides it's time to buy a house in the beautiful community of Avon maybe more children come along and so space starts to get tight this is often the time when as parents as homeowners we start getting creative about space if more children keep coming so maybe we have to get bunk beds maybe we have to convert the office into another bedroom maybe we end up parking the car outside the garage because we want to use the garage for living space
005those are exactly the kind of conversations that we are having as a school district and that we are using every available space in our schools and we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail just imagine if the kids kept coming and kept coming many times our goal as homeowners is we want to pay off our house we want to be debt free and not have a mortgage I understand that that is certainly my goal as a homeowner as well but what we cannot do that as a growing School District because kids just keep coming it's not like we can eventually hit our uh stop our enrollment growth and no longer need to to accommodate more students we've continued to grow and grow and grow and are to the point where we just can't
006keep creating more flexible opportunities to serve kids the way that we have over the last few years what's been really impressive about our school district and is really a testament to the great leadership of our school board is our last new school was constructed in 2010. and that's River Birch Elementary so 12 years ago was when we opened our newest Elementary School River Birch since that time we've added over 2 100 students to our district so again our board has made really strategic decisions that have allowed us to grow such a significant number of students without opening a new school since 2010. so how have we done that well a few things one of our strategies has been to make our smaller schools larger so over the last few years we've enlarged Hickory we've enlarged
007Maple we've enlarged Sycamore we're getting ready to enlarge pine tree to maximize our SM our space and our smaller schools you'll also see some things on this list we're definitely using more Portables this year than we have in in the last few years we're redistricting subdivisions before a home is built to send to class to schools that have more space getting really creative with space in our district and then some longer term Solutions as well there's lots of information on our website about the Avon High School project that is underway now that will take us at the high school to accommodate 4 000 students but these other items on this list have really been our focus at K-8 to delay the need for a new school I also want to talk about White Oak we're
008in White Oak right now at the back that's what used to be the White Oak Gym White Oak is a building that was built in the 1960s and really when we analyzed it with Architects is not able to accommodate the kind of Elementary School environment that we want for kids today and so we made a very strategic decision again the the school board thought well into this that rather than get rid of white oak or try to make it into an elementary that was not going to be up to the standards that we have in Avon we converted White Oak To Be An Early Learning Center that allowed us to serve preschool here got preschool out of our elementaries to free up classroom space at the elementary schools so it might not seem like white
009oak becoming an Early Learning Center impacted our elementary enrollment but it did significantly help because we were able to get preschool out of our elementaries into a home that can serve preschool students for years to come all of these projects have been able to to be accomplished with no increase to the taxpayer and no referendum funds used for construction projects and so really pleased that we've been able to go this long without having conversations about a new elementary school but a new school build but certainly the time has come so Dr Sullivan is going to talk with you a little bit about some of our other enrollment information thank you Dr Windham as most people know we have become the third last our third fastest growing School District in Indiana only behind Franklin Township and
010Zionsville Community Schools from 2019 to 2021 with adding an additional 536 students this map shows you our redistricting you can see by color where each School lies and you can see some outliers that are circled because there are schools in these districts who are at maximum capacity and so we had to send students to other schools outside of their District so if you look at Maple you see the orange circle in the upper right hand corner that shows that there is a Housing Development that's been moved to Sycamore and if you look below that there are three circles in green two and Cedar one in Hickory all of which are going to Pine Tree because again both Hickory and Cedar are at capacity this very busy slide lets you see some of the upcoming developments
011you see three that are going to be in the river birch District two more that are going to be in the maple District another in the maple District in Brookstone and then three more one in Hickory and two in the Cedar District two more that are going to be added to the Hickory School District and then there's one the settlement West that'll be in Cedars District this forecast was done by the board to project where we will be as far as students from today which is 2022-23 through 2031 2032. you can see that it projects that we would have ten thousand five hundred and twenty students this year which is about 130 less than we actually have but this was a very rigorous or very aggressive forecast and you can see if we look in
012three years at 25 26 we're projected to be at 11 110 students and then by 3132 we're projected to be over 12 150 students yeah so we have less than that about 120 less than the 10 520. and if you've been in the district any amount of time you've been able to drive around and see that we have Portables at several of our schools including intermediate East West Maple Hickory pine tree and Cedar so if we did redistrict a couple of years ago at the elementary level uh when we expanded Maple when we expanded Sycamore and Hickory uh and converted White Oak to be a preschool Center we did redistrict at that time this slide shows you what we estimated in redistricting with what the current enrollment is in those schools redistricting is not an
013exact science it's hard we have a whole Committee of parents and administrators that helps us redistrict we are projecting into the future what cornfields we think will develop into new subdivisions and you can see on this slide uh in several schools we underestimated the growth that would happen there Cedar Hickory maple in Pine Tree we overestimated the growth that would happen in Pine Tree which is why on that slide Dr Sullivan showed you we are redirecting some new developments into the pine tree uh area River Birch we underestimated and Sycamore was remarkably close uh to the the numbers that we had estimated there but as you can see in general we have trended higher than what our redistricting estimate was for uh the the that was completed in 2020 and 2021. in some school districts
014as growth happens one of the strategies that is used to accommodate growth is to grow class sizes so rather than having 22 or 23 students in a class you'd have 26 27 students in a class that is certainly an approach that many school districts take when space when enrollment grows of course in Avon we don't want to do that that is not something that we want to do because our community supported a referendum an operating referendum in 2018 that one of the primary focuses was on reducing our class size on this slide you can see that we've been able to hit our class size Targets in all levels that we indicated in the referendum Elementary intermediate and middle school and we've been able to do that while decreasing the referendum tax rate so the voters
015approved a tax rate in 2018 of just over 35 cents our board has never taken the full amount of the referendum tax rate it has decreased Ever every year since and in 2022 the referendum tax rate was 25 cents which is a 29 decrease from what the voters approved so we've been able to hit our class size targets and drop our referendum tax rate every year and we're seeing the positive results from our focus on class sizes this slide shows you our academic performance our State ranking in terms of the percent of students who passed both portions of ISTEP and iLearn so in 2011 if you've been around Avon for a while we had a failed referendum in 2011. at that time we were 19th in the state in our uh ranking of percent of
016students that were passing ISTEP as our class sizes went up after that failed referendum our ranking in the state went down that was when class sizes were over 30 and many of our classrooms especially at the elementary Intermediate Middle School level then in 2018 you can see that's where we hit the bottom of 55 that was the year we passed the referendum and you can see the last three years since the referendum was in place we have seen a steady improvement in our academic achievement of you can see in 2022 where the 26th highest performing school district and if you look at the 25 that are ranked above us we are one of if not the most diverse school districts in this in the top 26 if you look at the percent of our students
017who are on free and reduced lunch or the percent of our students who are multilingual so again great progress that our teachers are making as a result of lower class size and we don't want to give up our focus on maintaining low class sizes so one of the exercises that we've been working on over the last few months is to really analyze how many classrooms do we need what spaces do we need and so on these next couple of slides you'll see a summary of Number One how many teachers are teaching right now in Portables so you can see right now we have 12 teachers teaching and Portables at the k-6 level then we've summarized repurposed spaces meaning that there are teachers teaching in classrooms that were not intended to be classrooms stem Labs that
018are now classrooms The Outdoor Learning Center has a classroom at Maple that has been converted into a classroom art rooms science labs that have been converted to classrooms we have 18 classrooms right now that are being repurposed for classroom spaces then in the fourth column classrooms needed by 2627 that's looking at the demographic study that Dr Sullivan shared and projecting out based off of the enrollment growth that we project that we will see by 2627 we can extrapolate how many additional classrooms we will need so you can see by 2627 we would expect to need about 50 additional classrooms uh based off this calculation if you go out to the last year of the demographic study 3132 we can expect to need about 66 additional classrooms to serve students based off of these numbers the
019only column that changes on this slide is the classrooms needed by 3132 because we've accounted for additional growth so the big questions really are it's not as simple as just saying we need to build a new Elementary because yes our elementaries are crowded but our intermediate schools are also crowded our middle schools are almost out of space so really at the K-8 level we need to have some conversations about how do we grow how big do we want our intermediate and middle schools to become is now the time to examine reconfiguring our schools to allow us greater capacity to grow over the long term so we're going to talk a little bit in a couple of slides here about school funding as we talk about construction of new buildings new schools that really is impacted
020in our debt service fund so that's essentially the fund where the school district pays their mortgage if you go back to the the first couple of slides that is where the school district uses property taxes to pay for buildings that that is the only fund that we would use when we're talking about building new schools or renovating our schools is The Debt Service fund we do not need to access a referendum for construction in some communities when they talk about building a new school they also start talking about a construction referendum that is not us we do not need a construction referendum and we won't use any of our existing referendum to pay for buildings the reason we're able to do that is that we have capacity in our debt service fund this is a
021slide that comes from our financial advisors and you can see the cliff that comes as building as we start to pay off some of our buildings our debt goes down and that gives us capacity to fund these projects so when we say that there's no impact to the taxpayer that's because that dotted line going across is our tax rate and we can accomplish these projects and keep a steady tax rate for our taxpayers so you'll see these visuals on every model that we talk about tonight we're going to show you three models the three models cost different amounts of money and you'll see that but the thing to remember is we can we can accomplish any of those three models with no impact to the taxpayer because of our debt service fund and the debt
022that we have falling off and we do not need a construction referendum so there would be no referendum impact as as we look at those three models so let's talk a little bit about the three models and then uh we will go into each of the models in a little bit more detail so I'll do a high level overview and then I'll hand it off to Mrs alday who will dig into model one so in in model one this is more of the status quo model it would maintain our current structure of our school district we would still need to build one new elementary school that would serve grades K through four we would need to significantly expand our intermediate schools grades five through six and we would need to expand the middle schools but
023it would keep our current structure then if you look at models two and three that's really where we get into two models that would change the structure of our district so in model two we would send fifth grade back to the elementary schools so all of our elementaries would become K5 we would need to build a new K-5 Elementary School to accommodate that we would also convert intermediate East to be a K-5 and convert West to be a middle school grade six through eight so we would have three middle schools that would all be grades six through eight the third model does the same thing sending fifth grade back to Elementary in sixth grade to the middle school but it does it in a slightly different way and that we would convert both of our
024existing intermediate schools to become two elementaries that are grades K5 and then we would need to build a new 6-8 Middle School so if you're here in the room before I hand it off to Mrs alday you should have grabbed a piece of paper when you came in that is a little note taker for you for each model there's a place for you to take notes and then at the end we'll break off into small groups and have a chance for you to give us some input but as we go through these models if you have questions or if you want to take any notes that's what those sheets are there for so Mrs alday if you want to talk a little bit more about model one thank you good evening so as Dr Windham
025said we're going to dig into each of the models and so the first one is model one and so with model one that's keeping our same structure um so we would stick with K4 elementary schools five six intermediate schools and seven eight middle schools with this model we would build one new elementary school and then with our existing six we have a total of seven elementary schools we would expand both of our intermediate schools and we would expand both of our middle schools so when you look at any of these models there's positives to each of the model and there's some challenges to each of the models when we think about positives the model one is there's it's kind of staying with our status quo so there's not much impact to the structure of our
026school district um with this model our intermediate intermediate teachers and staff they have worked so hard to build great positive learning experiences for our students and so we know that they would continue to do that and work really hard to have those great learning experiences um in this model we know the construction would be one new elementary school and when you look at construction costs the most cost-effective school to build and our models would be in elementary school so that's a strength to this model um there's also some challenges when we think about this model when we say with our same structure there's we like other like um which is different from other school districts with the intermediate model we have more transitions so our kids will start at K4 they transition to the fifth
027grade they're there for a year and then they transition the middle school there for two years and then they go to the high school and when you think about it we have you know approximately let's say 800 850 850 kids there each year there's 425 new families coming into that school and new students coming in there and 425 leaving that school and that's just a lot of relationships and we know the power of relationships um another area when we think about this model is with having five six at the Intermediate School our sixth graders just don't have as many opportunities with extracurricular so Sports and different clubs where other districts in our conference have sixth grade at the middle school so their students get to participate in those um another thing when you think about
028this model is the curricular piece a lot of curricular companies they will have K5 they make resources for K5 and then there's resources for six eight we're Le we're living this right now with math we use one math resource bridges in K5 and then we use a different one in sixth grade the sixth through eighth grade and with that it just inside the same school it just makes it challenging for teachers and for students and one other piece to think about in this one is um if you have dropped your kids off or picked your kids up up at East or West it can be congested we have a lot of kids a lot of families a lot of cars in that area and so it's just when we look at this model it'll even
029get even tighter so with this model this slide will just show you like what we're forecasting um how many students how many sections of students in each of the schools so again K4 would have seven elementary schools with the six existing and one new school and you can see what we're projecting for enrollment and 26 27 and really when we're looking at schools we would expect with this model that we would have four elementary schools that have six section schools when you think about a six section school that means we had we would have four elementaries that would have six classes of first grade six classes of second grade and then we would have three of those elementary schools that would have five section schools so five first grades and so on and you'll see
030well even 3132 the enrollment goes up some but we stay the same with the sections of schools at the 5 6 level when we're looking at those two intermediate schools expanding we're looking at just under 900 at the 26 27 and then at 31.32 each of the schools will be over 900 um would have over 900 students again at Middle School staying with the two schools we'd be looking at already at 26 27 already being over 900 and then within a five years we'd already be hitting the Thousand Mark so we'd have over a thousand students at each of our middle schools this is a drawing of a possible floor plan really to show that if this model we have the capacity on our current site to do these additions so this is the intermediate
031school you can see that school that is turquoise is intermediate East and the turquoise is the existing um building and then that darker blue is where we would need to expand so if you think about that's right up it's we're right up front where that portable is right now and it would go into some of the parking lot but we had the capacity and on the other side the yellow the school um the darker the the muted yellow is the existing building of West and that brighter yellow shows where we would expand to have additional classrooms and even you can see that orangish color where we would expand a second floor into that Media Center so again we have the capacity but we know this is already a tight footprint that we'd be making tighter
032this slide just demonstrates that when you look across our conference across our area we have districts have different ways that they structure their schools and a lot of the school districts around us have that sixth through eighth grade some do they have exactly like we do at seventh and 8th grade and there's even some that have fifth through eighth in the buildings and you'll even see on this slide there's a variety of sizes and again I think Dr Windham said like what side where do we want to be like what is that right amount of students and what feels like too much and you'll see there's schools that have middle schools that have close to 1700 students and I mean a lot of middle school students and one at one school so we're just thinking
033about what what do other schools have and what do we want for our students again um Dr Windham shared we're going to look at some costs any time that you're looking at school construction costs and when you're looking at over 100 million dollars we know this is an expensive project and that's part of school construction the one thing that's why our school board has been so diligent and been so thoughtful about what can we do to avoid building schools because they're expensive in this model you'll see there would be the cost for um building a new elementary school there would be some additional classrooms at our other elementary schools to expand you'll see that expansion at both of our intermediate schools and you'll see the expansion out west I mean at both middle schools for
034that grand total in this project um the one piece as we said too we're able to do this with zero impact to our taxpayers and zero impact to our current referendum so when you look at this model this is just another way to visually look at this model um and so if you look at where it starts at the Y we have one preschool and the Orange shows at elementary schools we would stick with our current six but we'd add a new school then again this one has the two intermediate schools the two middle schools moving up to one high school so in a nutshell that is model one and Dr Sullivan is going to give you an overview of model 2. so Mrs alday showed you model one which doesn't change very much about
035our structure model 2 begins a change in our structure so as you can see from the graphic up top there will be no intermediate schools in model 2. that means we'll build one Elementary School convert East into an elementary school convert West into a six through eight Middle School having a total of three middle schools remember that all elementary schools will now be K through five so the positives are there's one less transition which means our students won't go from elementary to intermediate they'll go from elementary to Middle then from middle to high there'll be more time for middle school students to build relationships with students and Families curricular alignment as Mrs alday spoke about most curriculums are K-5 most middle schools are six eight and then of course you go to the high school
036there'll be more extracurricular opportunities for our middle school students again our sixth grade students will have more opportunities at that point East and West utilization and traffic would be similar to the current way it is now challenges is there's an impact on the feeder system we will now have eight K through fives and three six through eights for middle schools East will still need a kindergarten classroom and a playground update West will need additional classrooms and flex spaces and there'll be some crossover between elementary and middle schools for example Elementary music classrooms and abandoned Orchestra spaces will be shared baseball and softball for South and the new Middle School would be at a separate location and west and south will have a shared football stadium and track so another way to look at model 2
037is by 25 20 or 26 27 we'll have a projected enrollment at our K-5 schools of which there'll be a a four thousand 595. what's that 6.95 and that means we'll have five five section schools and three four section schools by 2031 our K-5 schools will have a projected enrollment of 4 825 students which will be five five section schools and three four section schools our new three middle schools which will be grades six through eight will have a projected enrollment of 2730 students which will be an average of 910 per Middle School and by 2031-32 there'll be a projected enrollment of all three of those middle schools of 2965 students with an average of 906 or 988 students per School this graphic allows you to see where East and West will become a middle
038school and an elementary school and you can see in the green and in the yellow where there will be additions to both schools you can also see that in the lower part that there'll be additions as far as what will be a playground over to the right if it was actually over a little more do you see that we would take a look at what we would do with the tennis courts and so the grounds around both of these would be also updated here's another view who speaks about what I was talking about when you look a little bit more closely at the additions at the ground there's a new playground Avon Elementary to the right the tennis course would be updated and then there'll be a new practice field where um it would be
039outside the football stadium and those Aqua colors those would be where the new classrooms would also be one of the things that we already have as a district is our board has had the foresight to already buy land where on we could put a new elementary school and so this first site shows that it's north of Sycamore on Dan Jones Road and it was purchased in 05 and it's about a little under 39 Acres we'd also have a site for an elementary school at Whispering Pines which was purchased in 09 by the board and it's a little over 32 Acres cost considerations just like in Model 1 model 2 does have a considerable cost and a middle school expansion is quite costly you can see that both model 1 and model 2 have no impact
040to the taxpayer nor will it have an impact on the current referendum the last graphic shows another way for you to look at how this plays out for us would be that we'd have one high school that would be there in yellow which would be fed into by our three middle schools which will be north south and then of course West would be a middle school and then we have our eight K-5 elementary schools All in Orange which would all be fed into by our White Oak Elementary priesthood preschool at this point Dr Lemay will talk to you about model 3. thank you Dr Sullivan um as we look at model 3 one of the things it does is similar to model two um the first thing we do is as we look at our
041elementaries we convert intermediate schools East and West into elementary schools and they will serve grades K-5 and then our and then we actually build one new Middle School serving grades six through eight some positives we'll look at the positives and challenges of this model some positives would be that elementary students would be on a shared East-West campus and then this model would avoid needing to build a new Elementary School and there's also less new construction on the already tight East West Campus also similar to model two we'd have uh additional extracurricular opportunities for our middle school students especially for our sixth grade students who have uh very few opportunities to participate in school-based athletics and extracurriculars right now and then it does maintain property and this one's important maintains property on the north-south sides of
042our district for future elementary schools if needed some challenges for model 3 again similar to uh model 2 both East and West will need some additional work we need to add some Kindergarten space the playgrounds that we have now are not appropriate for our younger kids so those would need to be addressed as well the East Performing Art Space could be underutilized so we'll need to consider that baseball and softball for South would be off-site and then in this model we're building a new middle school and that does cost more than an elementary school as we look at model 3 again this is uh exactly the same as model 2 at K-5 we uh have eight schools six of those are already we already have their existing schools and then we add East and West
043as K five elementary schools and as we look at six eight we have our two existing schools middle schools north and south and then we would build an additional Middle School so as we look at the footprint of East uh our east west campus and some work that we would need to do there's less work to do as we said in this model if as you look at the yellow uh up up towards the top those are new uh kindergarten classrooms and then as you look uh just below that you have two new kindergarten classrooms for West and then below that they're outlined in red those are existing classrooms that would be converted to kindergarten classrooms and again so you can see in this model compared to model two there's less work to do construction
044on the outside especially so again with uh well thought out planning we do have space we do have land for a new Middle School we have almost 80 acres acquired in 2010 and that's just it's near the the Prestwick area parks and press Wick subdivision so again this would accommodate the new middle school and all the athletic facilities needed for a middle school again with the other uh just like the other two models there is a cost and as we mentioned uh it does cost more to build a new middle school so you'll see that and again the other we have additional classroom spaces at K5 at some of our elementaries transitioning uh intermediate uh to elementaries has a cost but then you can see the cost of a new middle school but again all
045this is done without impacted taxpayers and without using uh referendum dollars and finally for model 3 again we'll kind of look at that structure and how it flows we start with our uh with our preschool at White Oak and feeding into eight elementaries again uh six of those are already existing adding East and West as elementaries those all flow into uh three middle schools uh two existing north and south and and we build our third middle school and all three middle schools then flowing in uh to our high school so that's a look at model three so in these next couple of slides you might be wondering well why didn't they think about this option and chances are we probably did and so what we tried to summarize on these a couple of slides are
046other models that we tossed around and thought through but and then why we didn't feel like they were the right models for us moving forward so for example things like build a new Intermediate School and a new K4 different different scenarios what if sixth grade went to the elementary there are school districts that are k-6 so we tried to look through some of those models and wanted to make sure that we were transparent about why we didn't spend as much energy going in to develop these other models as we did the three that we have gone through with you so far this evening so all of this information is online if you're curious about these other six models you can certainly get more information and look at them in more detail online as has been
047said multiple times we can do these projects with no impact to our taxpayers and no referendum we know we have future conversations I've started or I have finished doing this presentation at all of our schools so some of these are questions that have come up from our staff as we've been talking through these different models but some will also come up from our parents as well but as I said at the outset we've got two and a half years to have further conversations once we determine what model that we want to move forward with so looking at our feeder system what elementaries will feed to what middle school we would certainly need to look at that and get that resolved need to look at the Staffing differences between the different models and the different levels
048the difference in Staffing between intermediates and middle schools as an example what would that look like for student and staff redistricting we would certainly work on that that year prior to this taking effect school start and end times we would have to explore what that looks like and any changes that would need to be made there and then some of our teachers have had questions about licensing specific to fifth grade and sixth grade there's some differences in how licenses are issued at those levels so we have time but we know that there are more conversations that will need to be had over the next two and a half years so our timeline as I shared I've been doing this presentation at all of our schools got those wrapped up prior to Thanksgiving we shared this
049presentation at our last school board meeting on November 14th we've got this presentation and then another one on December 1st a chance for our community uh to see this presentation and provide input then on December 5th and December or I'm sorry on December 5th we have a community presentation that will be more of a gallery walk where we'll have Architects here and we'll have these floor plans up around the room where people can come and actually see some more detail about what these floor plans would look like we've got a couple of those scheduled for staff but then one on December 5th that will be for community all with the goal of uh hitting a timeline of December 12th uh that the school board would vote on our future structure while we do have time
050building buildings takes time to plan and so our goal is if we can get direction uh from the school board at in our December meeting then we can head into 2023 starting to look at designs and finalizing plans and financing and all that goes in to school construction so that we can have these uh this new structure in place for the 25-26 school year all so that we can serve more kids that we started out talking about one of our parents that's here mentioned she moved here from another community that is declining in enrollment I've said that at every presentation to our staff that I have done over the last few weeks most school districts in the state of Indiana are declining in enrollment so I get it that change is hard and we anytime
051we start talking about chain possible changes to the structure of our district those are hard conversations but I would much rather be having growth conversations than the conversations that are happening in most school districts across the state where they're declining in enrollment they're talking about consolidating schools they're talking about cutting programs riffing teachers cutting teachers we get to have growth conversations because more families want to be a part of our great school district and so I I know these are can be challenging conversations and change can be hard but I'll take these conversations any day and and and I'm just honored to be serving in a school district that can continues to grow the way that Avon continues to grow we are going to break and do some small group small group input sessions if
052you're watching online we're going to stop uh the the live stream but there is a survey that you can take online you can access it through this QR code if it doesn't work through the live stream it is on our website but on the survey we'll ask you what do you think is the most important factor that we should be considering maybe it's cost maybe it's what gives us the most capacity to grow in the future so we'll ask you to identify what's the most important factor for you and then also give us some strengths and some challenges about each of the models we've listed off several but we know we haven't hit all of them and would certainly value additional input so if you're watching this on the live stream we're going to stop
053but please complete your survey and then we'll give some directions to those here thank you very much all right so what we will do is we can consolidate into one table um and get some