001was able to find a seat cuz there's a lot of people here and uh I'm just grateful to see um so many people who are willing to come out and engage on important issues like education with some of our school board members. My name is Ben Horsesley. I'm the superintendent of Granite School District and I think I'm on my 267th day something like that. So I'm a little fresh and wet behind the ears. I worked for three different superintendents in graduate school district um before I was appointed by the board this last July. So, we have a couple of board members here. We have our board president, Nicole McDermott. We have Connie Burgess. We have Clark Nelson over here. And Julie, where'd you go? You're hiding over here. We're also recording this and I think
002we're posting this on social media and our website. So, if you have friends or family that just weren't able to enjoy the refreshments and the good company tonight, then feel free to point them to that resource. We're going to be respectful of your time. Um, there's just two real rules of engagement here um before I introduce some additional people and that is I have no presentation here. I've just brought some slides in case there were specific questions that I could be helpful in answering. So, um I'm going to turn the time over to you all here in a second. Um but uh we started doing these town halls uh back when Dr. Bates was our superintendent and I worked for him and we used to kind of go around uh the district and do a
003handful of these a year in respective networks and the idea was to engage our taxpayers who don't necessarily have kids in schools. We get to hear from our patrons a lot, right? But we don't always get to hear from those who are help funding the the tax bill. And so it's important especially this time of year we're adopting a budget. Um there's a number of issues going on in the community. We just finished the let session a few weeks ago um to be able to have an opportunity to come and and discuss those things and how they're impacting us and how they're going to impact you potentially. So I'm grateful for the opportunity. We uh we scheduled these out last fall um knowing that we wanted to to uh to redo this to do this
004again and bring these back. Um, and you'll be able to we'll have more of these opportunities in in in next fall as well and into subsequent years. This is an ideal opportunity for me to come in here from a key stakeholder group to be able to answer and address questions oneonone for our board members to be able to hear thoughts or concerns. There's a couple of other people I want to introduce you to. We have Luke Allen. He's from our communications department. He's recording right now for us, so we can put that on later. We have Todd Harber, our business administrator. He's essentially our CFO. and Mitch over here is our chief of staff and uh Jen Christensen is the principal of Olympus is running around here. I do see Matt Graham, the newly appointed
005principal up at Eastwood for next year. It's nice of him to come and and be with us tonight. Um and then we also have Representative Carol Moss from our uh esteemed colleague from the legislature who's here to join us as well too. So, I'll be referring the bulk of the meeting over to her now. And uh Oh, dang. Maybe maybe later. Maybe later. Um Yes. Right. We're going to be sensitive your time. I'm going to try to be prompt. When we did this uh the other night, um in our Westside community, uh I let one group of people kind of monopolize the meeting. So, the the first rule is we're going to try to be prompt. I'll try to answer your question. We're going to try to spread it out and make sure everybody has
006an opportunity to get the question answered. Right. And so, um, if you do have a really urgent matter or something that's going to take a little bit more time, then I I'm going to put my email address up here after the meeting's over and you can reach out to me anytime. Um, and I'll give you my phone number, too, and let's find some additional time one-on-one to be able to meet and visit and discuss that concern if it's going to be a bigger, longer concern. hopefully we can address matters that are a little more prevalent to the broader community that you might have um and always open to suggestions. So that's rule number one. Let's try not to monopolize the time and make sure we get everybody has an opportunity. The second question is if
007you are here and you want to talk about an individual student issue, I can address private student matters in front of a public body. So, I would need you to follow up with me and set up a time individually to discuss that issue so that we can make sure you get taken care of in those issues and concerns addressed at an appropriate time outside of the the public sphere. Um, because there are obviously privacy laws that prevent me from discussing individual student matters. So, with that, does anybody want to kick off our meeting with the first question? So, why are we here? Why are we here? Well, when I introduced earlier um when I worked for Dr. debates. Um, starting 17 years ago, um, we started doing these town halls on a regular basis as
008an opportunity to gain feedback on how we're doing, how we're providing support to your schools, matters of budget, other questions or concerns you might have. So many of the people here are footing the bill, whether they have kids in our schools or not. So, when I became superintendent any of the five schools in the in the area, this meeting was scheduled long before our pack study. Um, and this was just an opportunity for us to hold a regular town hall within each of our respective communities again. So, this is just one-on-one time with me, the superintendent, and some of our board members. So, what will we know about the five schools that you're thinking? We can talk about that if you'd like to ask about it. Who will here ask questions about the pack study,
009the population and uh boundary study questions? Okay. Well, let's go ahead and talk about that. I've got some slides prepared, but I'm not going to do the full presentation. And if you go to www.branetschools.org, there is a boundary study link on the homepage and there is a ton of information um there from uh t population tables uh from the last 20 years and into the future. Um what's projected uh there's videos from the previous meetings we've already held in the community and you can see schedules of other events and other activities that we'll be doing. So, in the process right now, we just opened up the study in February, right? We're say we're studying this area. We announced that to everybody, but to be fair and equitable and make sure that we're open-minded to any
010potential suggestion or concern, we study an area. We don't come in and say, "This is what we're going to do." We want to come in, tell people about the problem and the challenge that we're faced with, and then start to solicit feedback and comments. We've received over 400 comments thus far from our meetings that we've held and we have a few more meetings to to take care of in individual school community councils and we'll continue to meet as appropriate. Steve Hogan's our director over that process and he's the one who who runs those meetings and process for us. So the next step in that process is to con uh uh converge a parent and teacher committee that will then inform decision- making for the district because I don't live in your respective community. Um and
011a lot of the people a lot of our teachers and employees do live in this area, right? Uh but we need to make sure that we're getting meaningful feedback in terms of those decisions before that population analysis committee makes a formal recommendation to the board next fall. So you'll see in June um uh coming in the next coming weeks that that committee will be formed with parents, two parents from each community and a teacher from each community and they will get to have some say in decision- making and we'll be listening uh providing additional information uh providing information or questions they might have. That's kind of the next step in the process is to really dig into the weeds on the challenges that we're faces. One of the things that they're going to look at
012is this and I'll I'm happy to pass this around. This is also on our website. This is a 140page report given to us in March of this year from MGT. They're a company out of Florida that is an independent demographer. So, we paid them some money to come and do an independent analysis on population study um for our schools. Um they did this five years ago for us and uh and we utilize that data on where they anticipated our school populations would be for the last five years. and their data was pretty spot-on. So, we asked them to do another five-year look. They won't go further than that. They want to be able to guarantee their work and and be as accurate as possible. And really, there's so many factors in in how demographers do
013their work that really anything past 5 years is you're looking in a snow globe, right? You could shake it up. It's not it's kind of foggy, right? You can't really figure it out. So, this report details that Granite School District in its peak and heyday was at 78,000 students districtwide. Um, we kind of leveled out around the 68,000 range when I came to the school district and in that time period we're down another we're down to 50 we'll be 53,000 students next year. Okay. We're declining about 2 to 3% of students every year because of declining birth rates in this area. And not just this area, pretty much the whole of Granite School District. We're a mature school district, right? We're old. We've been around since 1904, right? And so, uh, this area, whether it's
014Holiday, Mil Creek, South Salt Lake, West Valley City, um, the main factor is declining birth rates. we just don't see as many young families in these areas anymore. And the other major factor is that frankly families can't young families can't afford homes in this area. So that's our enrollment trend. MGP, MGT, the independent demographer. And I'll pass this around. You guys can look at it. It has data sets for um every school in Granite School District. And again, that's available on the website. Anybody can look at that information. 140 page report. Um, you can see that they've been pretty true from our peak 78,000 back in the '9s. 2015 we were we've plateaued for the last since really 2005 we've been hanging around 68,000 kids and now we're at 53,000 kids starting next year. Okay.
015So, uh what's the other contributing factor? Young families cannot afford homes in this area. Even in uh some of our areas like West Valley City, people are selling homes 200 square foot ramblers for $500,000 and they're moving where? To North Davis, Weber County or Utah County. Don't ask me why anybody would want to go to Utah County, but they can get a 4,000 foot home there with a whole quarter acre lot uh for a whole lot cheaper than housing costs in this particular area. Mil Creek City and South Salt Lake City have put in over 10,000 new units of housing, apartments, two, threebedroom town homes, and our population continues to decline because our young families cannot afford a $2,000 a month uh two-bedroom apartment, right? And so that is actually the other primary factor that's
016causing population decline. So we see declining birth rates and high housing prices and charter schools having an impact on our student populations, right? And so the challenge is is that some of our schools in this area have not only they're attracting some students from outside of their boundary population, but open enrollment laws in the state of Utah allow parents and families to be able to go to any school they want as long as there's capacity, right? And so we have to honor those rules and laws. Skyline High School attracts over a thousand of its student population from outside of Granite School District boundaries or other boundaries within uh outside of Granite School District and outside of Skyline boundaries. Wasach Junior is about 40% open enrollment. So they're attracting a lot of students from outside of
017those areas yet those populations are still declining overall. and our boundary, the actual inboundary schools. There's one of our schools in this area that has 120 kids that live in the boundary in and of itself. Okay. So, the question then becomes um how small is a small school? And it used to be I think a lot of people equate small schools to smaller class sizes, but that's not how we allocate those resources. We take the total number of students, divide it by 27.25, and we allocate that many teachers. So, a school like uh uh let's see just directly east of us, Oakidge Elementary on the other side of the freeway, um it has was allocated for next year because of its projection 8 and a half teachers. What that means is they either have to
018subsidize with some of their own funding that comes directly to them for another half teacher, but they're still going to even with nine teachers in sixth grades K through five, you're going to have some split classrooms, right? That's not good for kids. It's not great for teachers to be able to have to supervise and it's not great use of our resources in terms of uh using the economies of scale to our benefit. So in Granite School District, we love for all of our schools to be between two to four teachers per grade level. That gives parents lots of options in case one teacher isn't really working out. There's another option to go to. Um so as we work through this process, there's a number of factors that go into small schools that we have challenges
019with and I'm happy to answer specific questions about that. We won't get to any final actual options until we've gone through the public input process and really listen to parent guidance and consideration. So, we'll take things off the table in June and really hone in narrow the scope of the search of the study and then in the fall and September, we'll actually have some proposals developed by our parent committee that the whole public can then make comment on. The board won't make a final decision until at least November and December. not after school. I live near the now closed uh Twin Peaks Elementary School. It of course is just one of several that are closed and I see there's a third party tenant there using the building for some duration perhaps 5 years. Yeah. Um
020which I think is a great way for the district to be in a wait and see mode which can happen in six years. So my question, does the district receive pressure from land developers to acquire the lands of current closed schools and to redefine that demographic of that area and what is the what's the uh what is the rune of the district when that occurs? This is a great question. A modification to that would be uh with existing schools is there pressure to shrink the sports field to give up a part of the land to a land developer that may want to put it in say. Yeah. Everybody hear his question or should I restate it? We're good. I got my teacher voice on or Yeah. You want me to restate here as well? Me
021either. I got hearing aids on. I got them cranked up all the way. So his question is he lives near Twin Peaks Elementary which closed a few years ago. I think that was our 2022 study. Um and funny thing that you bring that up. I'll I'll tell you that in a second. His question is, "What do we do with the land? We're renting that facility out to a third party was his question. What do we do with our land? What is the law uh applicable to that? What are our plans with these properties if and when schools are closed?" So, this is an excellent question. Um, everybody else can hear me? Okay. Right. Okay. Good. Good. Good. So, uh, with respect to that, um, as a school district, really since I've been here, which was
0222008, in 2009, Granite High closed, right? And we went through the process of following the law to surplus that property or sell that property to South Salt Lake City. They tried three different times to purchase that property. both of their bonds that they put on the ballot to purchase that property. They wanted to turn it into a city hall and their campus, their city campus, and maintain some of the historic features of the older building. Um, while most of it needed to be torn down, there were some cool features of that facility, right? Um, and maintain the open space, right? Um, so with respect to that, both of their bonds failed by singledigit votes, right? And so it was pretty split within their city whether to raise taxes to purchase that property. By state law,
023we can't just give it to the city because it wasn't just South Salt Lake residents who purchased that property. It was the taxpayer base of the whole district that purchased that property. But we have to convey it at a fair market value. And municipalities, if we choose to surplus or sell property, always get first right of refusal on those properties. So, if we were choosing to sell property, we always have to go first to the local city and we'd also include the county on that. So, we have sold uh we have not sold any property since that time. Um we've actually maintained all of our properties with the exception of Canyon Rim Academy, which was a closed school boy way back and we actually sold it to the the charter schools there. And I'm going
024to just call it out. I wasn't superintendent then. That was a mistake. We shouldn't have done that. Um and again there's a philosophy with our current board of education that the one thing they're not making more of is what? Land. Giddy up. So with respect to that um we feel like there's a stewardship responsibility for our communities that we work with our local community partners. Spring Lane was closed as well. We're going to be demoing that building here shortly and the city is turning that into a park. So, we're entering into a long-term lease with Holiday City. So, we have access to the property 30, 40 years from now if we needed another school down the road, but they're going to have this great asset in their community in terms of a park. We've looked
025at some other options with Mil Creek City on a couple of other properties that were no longer using as schools. Roosevelt Elementary got rebuilt in another location and there's they wanted to come in and potentially put in a dog park there. We've looked at some options there. We've looked at um some other housing options that we could partner with the municipality. Uh but I got to tell you that would be only in very certain circumstances with some of our smaller parcels. Most of these parcels we're looking at just maintaining and uh or working with the municipality to maintain the open space. Did that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you. Very good. When you said you mentioned Uhhuh. and Grand District should have done. What do you think you should have done? Uh we should have
026retained the property. And would you have let them have school still on it? Uh we could have entered into a longer term agreement with that charter school, but that is not our school. And so we basically just turned over our property to our competition and they continued to take kids from our schools. Well, yeah, I remember that. Yeah. So that was a little bit foolish and shortsighted on our part. They wanted to school. So yes, but you wouldn't have kept the school. No, the facility needed to be upgraded and we did not want to pay for it to be upgraded and this was in the midst of our 2009 bond. Um we were going to put air conditioning in all of our schools at that point in time. that was part of the bond as
027well as rebuilding this school and uh Granger High School that was on that bond and at that point in time we didn't need the property anymore. They wanted us to come and put air conditioning in their building and it's not our school. So we weren't going to use our taxpayers dollars to upgrade that facility. So at that point in time they said well can we buy it from you? And the decision was made to to sell the property at that time. people really appreciate. Yeah, I'm sure they're happy by all by any stretch of the imagination. I think they're very pleased. So, but if I'm Rose Elementary or uh Eastwood and families continue to go to Canyon Rim, even though Rosest and Eastwood are outperforming it, um me to me that was silly of us.
028That was a little shortsighted. So, I'm willing to admit that we might have made a mistake on that front. Okay, Carol, sorry. Representative Moss, esteemed legislator from the Utah House of Representatives. I [Music] taught House Bill 267 to discontin collective bargaining And now with you know they're counting signatures and so on. Um is that um and I know there was a slight teacher salary increase in the governor but is there going to be this year? Very good. Um, so HB267, if you didn't hear the question, was a legislative bill that banned collective bargaining by government entities. And so we're obviously a government entity and we would no longer be able to go and have a negotiation with our teachers union or our uh education support professionals, our bus drivers, some of those folks um in
029uh under that bill. So they went out uh the teachers union with a bunch of police unions, fire uh fire and volunteers volunteers went out and gathered over 300,000 signatures. You need 140 to put it on the ballot. um it cannot be put on the ballot in an odd year. So, it would have to wait until June uh fall of 2026. So, if the signatures get verified, I read this morning that they have certified signatures in five of the 15 um Senate districts that they need to certify signatures for. Um so, they have 10 Senate districts to go. Um we'll see if they get their signatures, but if they have 300,000, that's that's pretty good, right? Um, so if that were to happen, the idea is that this law would be put on pause for
030implementation until fall of 2026 when the broader uh public could vote on that legislation. So you can So we can collectively bargain this year. So we we proceeded this year as if the law was still in place. And frankly, the law doesn't go into effect until May 7th with or without signatures. So we have this is a member of our collective bargaining team over here. He spent the last few of his Mondays with the granite education association in full day negotiations and we uh had an executive session on Tuesday night to discuss what that looks like and we continue to work through that process. Given the nature of the the circumstances and the the political environment, I'd much rather continue to collaborate with our association at this point in time um in good faith and
031we'll see what happens with the law. But regardless of what happens with 267, whether it's defeated or not, it's in my best interest to make sure that we have happy, healthy, uh, and teachers that feel valued and appreciated and want to come to work in a great school district. Here's another reason why Granite School District shouldn't split. Um, because I know some people have presented that as an option. Granite School District is one of the few districts that's self-funded by virtue of our size. We are a self-funded um insurance program. We don't put that out to a private company even though it's managed that way. So our our employees have access to a variety of health plans, but it's all funded by within. So that our insurance premiums this year will go up what percent.
032Not even 310%. 310 of a percent. I want you to think about your own insurance program that you're on. Okay? So we we can control that really well. And if you look at other benefits programs in other school districts, Granite has the most advantageous benefits plan. So while we don't always get to pay as much as we would like to attract and retain high-quality educators, you can't beat our benefits plan. And it's that size of our school district and the economies of those scales that gives us that resource and ability to do that. So that's our plan moving forward. That's great. Can I just add this because some of the opposition of course they went UEA and it was retaliatory. We know that because they weren't because they filed a lawsuit to take a one
033thing I heard people say and on vouchers on vouchers is that UEA controls the curriculum and so on. UA is the umbrella organization. They don't do collective but granite education association which I joined when I was is the association with has nothing to do collective bargaining has nothing to do with how teachers teach or what they teach and that's what I hate seeing out there in social media it they they collectively bargain for salaries for insurance for retirement for health vacation all those kinds of things that are important they kind of make up a lower salary. So, I just wanted to I've been very happy with this. Very good. I see a hand over here. We'll come here and then we'll kind of move back around. So, yes. I'm sorry I walked away. I'm Ben.
034It's very nice to meet you. I'm Thanks for coming. Yes. Uh can you please maybe you've discussed this? I don't know. Vouchers and charter schools. Uhhuh. Has this been discussed? It has not. And besides what she just kind of pitched right there, what is your question? Uh, could you please give us your position on charter schools? So, charter schools are independent uh from Granite School District. Um, you usually get uh a group of parents or some other organization that a nonprofit that will create a school, get it approved by the charter school board at the state, and then create and open a facility. And then that usually draws in students from their neighborhood schools. We do see a larger amount. The higher your socioeconomics, the more inclined you are to special permit or open enroll
035to another school within Granite School District or to a charter school or a private school, right? So, uh, charter schools are in fact public schools. A lot of times people feel like they're private schools. Sometimes they have uniforms. They do some things. There's some regulations that don't apply to them. But by and whole, uh, in 1998 when charter schools were organized under the law, the idea is that they could do it better than a traditional public school and they could do it for cheaper. And they have continually lobbyed successfully since that time to gain access to the same amount of funding that our traditional neighborhood schools have. So that pot of money continues to get separated. Just this last budget cycle I had um there was a bill um one of the main budget bills
036actually took away funding uh that helped us pay higher level professionals or teachers who had been profered degrees or had been in service longer. We call it pro- staff money because they're professional staff. They've been in they've gotten a master's degree or a doctorate or they've been teaching for an extended period of time. It took that funding away to the tune of 2 and a.5 million and dumped it into a larger fund called the flexible allocation that charter schools would then have access to. So we continually see the legislature loves charter schools, right? But even that's what concerns. Yeah. Senator Howard Stevenson, who is a retired legislator, now lives in St. short. He's been on the hill lately and just his last legislative session four years ago, he said charter schools have not lived up
037to the promise that they were supposed to because the reality is 95% of them do not outperform their neighborhood counterparts. You have this 5% of them that are stellar. They're outperforming probably because they're drawing in a lot of um highquality students, right? Um parents who are engaged, right? But the rest of them are not. Skyline High School, the former principles right here, is the highest traditional public school in the state of Utah. And it's beating out a number of charter schools. There's only one other charter school in the whole state that outperforms Skyline High School. And Olympus was, I think, number nine. So, it's right up there, too. I would put any of our schools up against a charter school. If you go on to the state data gateway, you can do a compare schools
038analysis. And what that does is actually take an applesto apples comparison of a school population uh based on their socioeconomic free and reduced lunch numbers and then compares their proficiency rate and you will see that by and large 85 plus% of our schools are outperforming their counterparts based on those socioeconomic applesto apples comparisons. Now here's the deal. I have five children. My kids are all unique in their own circumstances. there. Sometimes charter schools are a good option for our families and I want to make sure that Granite School District is offering as many choices and offerings as possible to attract and retain our students in their neighborhood public schools so I don't have to close them for one because that's a really hard thing to do, right? But at the same time, I know we
039can give those kids what they need just as well as any charter school, if not better. That being said, there are some charter schools that are performing quite well. With respect to vouchers, vouchers were passed in the 2023 legislative session. It was HB215. Um they've increased that amount of funding uh by 25%. So now it's a hundred million and uh no accountability. Yes, the there's zero accountability on that. And I think that's the challenge here. I want to respect people's right to choose where they put their kids and educate them. But at the same time, I also want to compete on a level playing field. Okay? It's not fair for me with a hundred new regulations from the state of Utah in the last two years for traditional public ed to have to compete with
040an environment that just got an $8,000 voucher with no regulation. How do I compete with that? I have all these humph hills and hoops to jump through. Um I have reports to complete. And you know what you have to complete in order to get that voucher funding? an end ofear progress report. What do we call it? A portfolio. I can't remember what they called it. Portfolio. A portfolio. You have to turn in a portfolio saying this is what my kid learned. That's it. We're subjected to end of year testing, high stakes testing. Federal requirements. Federal requirements. Um, and here's $8,000 over here. How, and may I defer to you? Sure. How has this gotten so out of hand in the legislature? What's going on? How much time do you have? We have school choice. You
041can choose a charter school. You can choose open enrollment. But it is a national trend people in government pushing it and we say parents have parents are the best ones to decide for the kids you know what kind of setting but I predicted it be rifle fraud in two years and it only took one year because parents were using to buy ski passes trampolines pay for private lessons and I could go on and on all the things that we sacrifice to have our kids do on their own. My objection to it is well now they unconstitutional there's a lawsuit but but is the lack of accountability account from the time I've been in the legislature all I hear about is you must be accountable with taxpayers money that's why we have audits right Todd that's
042why we have to review our district is required by law to have an independent auditor that reports direct directly to the board continually auditing how we spend money. So, this has no oversight and that's it's run a uh by that same token though. What could we do to change that? Who you mentioned a state agency that's overseeing the charter school? There is a state charter school board, but that is uh with respect to changing charter school law and vouchers. That is only on the legislature. Is that appointed the legislature? Yes. No, those are your every two-year house member. She's your house rep here in this area. I promise she didn't vote for vouchers though. They elected by the house. Who? You elect them. Then the charter school board. Oh, the charter school board is not
043elected. They're appointed. Yes. Charter school. Yeah. That's what I'm They're they they are the ones who approve new charter schools. So, they're not over vouchers. that that program and how charter schools get authorized is all done through legislative vouchers are private schools like Catholic schools home school and I mean understandably a lot of parents a lot of people think charter schools are part of this but they're not there are a few private charter schools but most charter schools are public schools as he said they get and they have you know they have requirements testing and assessments This is different. This is private schools and it's always for me been problematic that I we have some good Catholic schools. There's one our district but the biggest thing is Don't say the name. I don't they don't
044have to take every child and our Utah constitution says every child is entitled to a free public education. They could be blind, deaf, have cerebral pausy, have all kinds of learning public school and it cost an enormous amount of money to have those interpreters or to have special ed programs. But a private school can say sorry or your kids have behavior problems, so he's gone or she you see what I mean? There's such a disparity between the two. for them to get taxpayer money is just fundamentally wrong and a misuse of public I want to make sure we have opportunity to hear lots of questions and we really could talk about this for hours so let's keep coming around the room and we'll just make our way is there any declining ensenar we have fewer
045students sizes rather excuse correct So his question in case you couldn't hear it is the ex with declining enrollment does that somehow justify larger class sizes or downsizing teachers altogether in the schools that we've closed. We've closed 10 schools already across Granite School District. We've never lost a teaching because what's happening is those teachers then follow the kids. not necessarily literally I'm your teacher now I'm going to go to your new school but now that new school is taking those kids in and they need more teachers right so that class size ratio remains the same in our proposed budget we're actually trying to reduce class size to the extent that we can but we're struggling because of that figure right there is there a figure for what that ratio is the goal for that ratio
046is it's 27.25 for elementary and it's 28.25 25 for secondary. So we we take our budget, you take a school, it's got 600 kids in it, you divide it by 27.25, that's how many teachers we give you. So I just used Oakidge as an example for their fall projection next year. They were only allocated 8 and a half teachers. It's a really small school, right? I think they got 230 kids or something like that. And so that means more split classes. Now, could I come and provide them more teachers? Yeah. I don't have the resource to be able to do that. And that wouldn't really be fair or equitable to other schools that do have larger populations. Right. Even within this area, Crest View is a little bit larger. It's got 450, I want to
047say. Um, is it fair that a smaller school gets smaller class sizes because there's less kids in that neighborhood? You see what I'm saying? So, it's a balancing of that that equity issue. And one of our board members has a thought. I just wanted to say that while while we haven't like fired any teachers because of that, your instinct is right that as we lose students, we have less teachers that we can hire, right? So, we haven't had to fire any because we've had teachers retire and just haven't hired as many. But you're right, it's still we get one teacher for every 27.25 students. So as our student population declines, that doesn't mean that our class size declines, it means we will get given less teachers. That that to that end, we're expecting to lose
048another 1,200 students. Again, birth rates, that's what the projection is for next year. And we will take care of that through regular attrition. That's another benefit of that economies of scale of our size is that we have a lot of teaching positions. We have 3,500 teachers districtwide. And chances are there's a bunch of those that want to retire on any given year or quit, get pregnant, need to take leave, and there are positions to to fill um with those spots. Yep. Yep. So, let's come here and then we'll I'm sorry, you go next because you were next. Okay. Um thank you. Uh two questions, one from wife my wife from my wife, one from me. Um, first off, in terms of prioritizing um, teaching positions um, when they're posted online, I know for one-year teachers
049have been on one year contracts, they've been put down to the very bottom. And for those with one-year contracts as well, do they have priority of somebody that may not even have a degree that's in the system? So if they went to like a a title one title one school and one year contract to help out all of a sudden they would drop out to the very to the very bottom in terms of you know being able to fund right so we did close a couple of schools this last cycle over along 3100 south corridor right so we had uh and we actually regenerate kind of turned over one of our schools alto together which just reconstituted the whole staff and so we put a bunch teachers in the surplus situation is what that's called.
050That doesn't sound very good and it doesn't sound like we value our teachers, right? But what it essentially means is we have we have all these teachers that we need to find a position for now that those students are going to different locations, right, for this process that we've just talked about. And so I really would like to come up with a better name. Uh soon to have a home but don't have one yet is a little bit too long. But I don't love surplus, right? That doesn't sound very warm and caring to our teachers who are doing a great job for us and we're going to get you into a spot. We just don't have one for you right now. We go through that process first per the negotiated agreement. So, um, when we
051talked about collective bargaining earlier, we have an agreement with our teachers association, how we go through that process to place those teachers and in what order we do that in. So, we absolutely have to get through that surplus list first. I'm sorry, the teachers that don't write have a position quite yet, but will have one soon. Um, we have to get through that list first and then we will look at those one-year positions. I feel very confident um looking at our looking at all the numbers right from my 30,000 foot. I can't guarantee it, but I feel very confident. We've been in this situation before with the amount of surplus and one-year teachers that we've had before, and we've been able to place every single one. So would somebody without their teaching certificate still have
052priority over? No, if you're at that point in time, if you've already been an employee of the district, you get prioritized on the interview is my understanding. Okay. And then the follow a different question for have they considered like they're being self-funded for insurance. have they considered doing an HSA because it seemed like that could be a a way to save money and also give a lot of So we do provide our employees access to um what's it called? FSA. Thank you. But an HSA is completely different. It is totally different. Um you want to speak to that? So that comes down to the employees and their desire to get into a high deductible plan. So, an HSA has to be tied to a high deductible health plan. And at this time, as we've had
053our committees working with the associations talking about options for health insurance, they've not been real interested in looking into an HSA because of that high deductible plan that's tied to it. It can save so much money. Yes. And and that maybe that we do have a a benefits committee that helps us guide and and work through some of those decision making. So our employees do have a lot of options to be able to to indicate that direction. Um that being said, savings on we're getting the bulk of our cost savings through running our own health clinics uh by providing uh cheaper prescription costs through that clinic. There's a number of other ways that we're able to save our employees money again because of the economies of scale and our size. You look at any other
054smaller school district in the state and they're paying two or three times. our employees are paying two or three times and the districts themselves are paying two or three times to a private company to provide those health benefits and we don't have to worry about that in Granite School District. Even the larger districts, it might be worth mentioning that when a when one of our employees visits our own health clinic, there is no out-of- pocket cost at all and there's no co-ay. It is 100% covered and for 90% of prescriptions are available there too at no cost as a dispensary. So that's that's part of what's driving the reluctance to to gravitate to an HSA is that when they visit the our own health clinic 100% of their services are covered understood which is similar
055to I mean you could do that under an HSA but reduce the premiums to almost nothing yeah I mean there's pros and cons right so we're going to listen to our employees and and kind of figure out the best way forward in terms of that thank you I I will say this our our health plan is is designed for you can tell our employees have a lot of say in it. Okay? Because I have too many kids under our health plan, right? It's not it. If I get cancer, our health plan is amazing, right? But uh there have been other health plans that are a little bit better for different types of family circumstances, right? And so we continue to model that and evolve that based on our employee input and need primarily through that
056uh that benefits committee. So good question. Yes, sir. Can we talk about taxes? So that's the reason why I came to talk about the whole tax education about these things. Yeah, taxes are awful, right? So, uh, we have a legislature, I'm going to exclude present company, um, where the majority feels like, um, we should be reducing income taxes or potentially eliminating them altogether. Yes. Okay. So income tax revenue is the primary source by which public education is funded uh per the state constitution. Income tax, property tax, income tax. We still got I'll get to property tax in a second. Um so income tax is our primary source for our maintenance and operations budget. So that 90% of that fund, the revenue we receive from the state uh comes in the form of a weighted pupil
057unit or we get this much money per kid, right? So again, we can use economies of scale using those resources to provide a number of programs, special education resources, do a number of things with that. But the problem is they keep reducing income tax revenue and funding things like vouchers to the tune of hund00 million and putting funds that should probably or have traditionally gone to I'm I'm sharing a little bit of my opinion here and I apologize for for giving my bias. um fun money that should go to public education and help reduce class sizes and and take care of some of these other things. So, this last year, the WPU received at the top, that green figure up there, an increase of 4%. That sounds really good, doesn't it? Well, that 4% equates
058to roughly $13.5 million. Okay, that out of an $850 million budget, it's not a ton of money, right? But it's going to help us. Our employees sometimes look at that 4% and say, "I'm going to get a 4% raise." But that's that number does not translate evenly. And where is inflation at right now? 2 something. Okay. It's it's dropped, right? But in over the last year, it's been as high as 6 and 8% the last few years, right? So 4% is intended to cover from the state um increases in inflation. There's uh under state law HB237 or something like that. We'll throw out numbers here. Uh we promise we're not making them up. Uh we can find the bill for you. They're required to fund us at a certain amount or above. All right. This
059last year they gave us a 4% this last legislative session that ended in early March, right? A 4% WPU increase. There are three bills up there, HB2, HB3, and SB2 that defunded other programs in Granite School District to the tune of 41% lost revenue. They cut another program altogether. Um HB2 uh in that that's the primary funding bill for the year, the big education budget bill. HB2 was another 41%. They mandated that we had to get rid of school fees, but they only gave us onetime money to be able to do that. So, we have to build that into our budget over time. So, that's another reduction in revenue of another half a percent. That pro staff change I already told you about, it's 74%. Changes to how we levy taxes is going to cost
060us a lot more money down the road, but 4.21%. And there's a school safety bill that requires us to have armed security in every school through Granite School District without any funding to go with that. So that 4% is now negative. Oh crap. Lake Pal. It's Lake Pal. So can you tell me what what were the defunded programs and what was programs? You want to rattle through those? Yep. So the defunded programs were our gang prevention program, siphons for highly impacted uh student So scholarships. Yes. Uh we also lost money for libraries for matching funds for nurses. So those are the primary funding. Okay. Prostat money goes to steps and lanes primarily. That's the $2.5 million. There's a property tax revenue down here as well that will have an impact. There's a portion of uh
061HB2 was it that is going to cost us $15 million over the next 3 years. So that's the board. Okay. Okay, that's the voted and board leeway change $7 million. More detail that voted and board change because I don't understand what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And we will actually have uh a budget hearing in June and you we will have we will send you more details. You can look at it on our homepage line by line on these budget numbers. We're having a budget lunchon with our legislators and other elected officials to go through these details on two weeks I want to say. Uh hopefully we'll have our budget kind of put together by then. We're still putting these numbers together. Now, this is just the WPU and the income tax revenue that comes
062to the school district. There's a whole property tax piece that's the other funding source. The pro the bulk of that funding is actually goes towards the uh capital facilities under state law. So, there is a portion of that uh that levy that does come into our general maintenance and operations fund, but the bulk of your property tax revenue, I'm looking at my finance guy to make sure I don't say anything wrong, is going towards our facilities. And so, we have had a pay as you go plan for a long time. We passed a bond in 2009 and we passed another one in 2017. When we went out and sold that bond in 2016, before we actually went out to the voters and had them vote on it in 2017, we held a bunch of meetings
063and we gave people a bunch of options on how do you want to go about rebuilding schools, right? Um because the money that we have is insufficient. It was a billion dollar problem at that point in time. We had the oldest schools in the state on average and we had a capital deficit problem and $20 million to repair those buildings on an annual basis. Well, at that point in time, an elementary school cost about that much to rebuild, and we have 80 uh 60 60 of them at that point in time, right? So, clearly, the funding that we were receiving through property tax was going to be insufficient. So, we put a 40-year strategic plan together to rebuild all or renovate all of our buildings and be able to retain revenue. What that included was
064a one-time bond that replaced Skyline and Cypress. Those projects are wrapping up here soon. a couple of other smaller projects and then kickstarted the pay as you go plan. So we raised taxes over here and then as we've paid those bonds down over the last eight years, we have been shifting the revenue. So we have to take it out of this pocket of that additional revenue that's no longer going to pay towards the bond and put it in that capital maintenance pay as you go plan pocket. And that looks like a tax increase, but the idea is to keep and maintain the rate and not increase taxes long term. The problem is when the rate does get held and your value of your home goes up, what happens? Your property taxes go up, right? Although
065you can adjust the rate. Say that again. Adjust the rate perhaps. Right. So the the goal has been to try to maintain that revenue so that we can actually speed up the process of I mean I've got uh we've done a bunch of security things on our schools per state law and and some other factors but we need to rebuild a number of schools not just in this area but throughout Granite School District. Most of our elementaryaries most of our high schools are in a good place but Evergreen's due to be rebuilt in a few years on that 40-year plan. Um Oakidge and Eastwood are on that plan. I will tell you as part of the um the the budget conversations at that time when we were holding these kind of community meetings to talk
066about the bond um we had a number of people saying are you going to rebuild schools you don't need and so when people talked to us about school closures we'd gone through that bond process before we actually started looking at school closures because if you look at our calendar there bond was passed in 2017 where did we see the vast majority of our declines it's It's really been since 2019, right? Um when interest rates got really low and people started buying larger homes in other places, right? And then housing prices started doing if you look at our decline, you can see conversely, housing prices are going up at the same time, which is a double whammy for for a district like ours with mature neighborhoods. So with respect to that, you've got a situation where
067we continue uh our biggest cost savings. There's not a huge cost savings in in school closures because we still need the teachers, right? We're still paying for the teachers. We might not need as as many principles or front desk secretaries or janitors to maintain the buildings. The costs for utilities are roughly a half a million to $600,000 a year. A larger building might be more like $800,000 a year. Um, so the the big cost savings in a school closure is frankly the need to not have to rebuild that building long term. And so as we close 10 schools west of us here in Granite School District, a lot of those are projects that can come off that 40-year strategic plan. It's $35 million I'm not going to have to spend to rebuild Orchard Elementary, which
068was closed this last cycle, right? And so there's a benefit to the taxpayers and that means those other projects that do need to be taken care of um can be moved up on that list as well. Did that answer your question on taxation? Look, I want to go back to the school safety enhancement issue. I talked with one of your board members before I came to the meeting and they're telling you that it's going to be rather costly to do everything the state legislature wants you to do. And some of the things that are are being asked by the state legislature I think are coming a little bit too far with regards to the windows that with bulletproof windows. Yeah. I mean I I've never you know I've never once heard school shootings where they
069they are shooting from exter you know exterior windows inside. They're always inside the school or they're um coming in from outside. And so why spend money? You know, they're also telling me that so many schools have such old windows, they have to replace the windows and then and then put the film on them. So, so what I told him is with like some people decided on the vouchers, why don't you sue the state legislature over this bill rather than just say we're going to do it? Uh so you're talking about a legal question of whether we have standing to sue the state for lack of funding for uh for the mandates that the So we have two we have actually three unfunded mandates this last legislative cycle. School fees is one of them, right? And
070I think we all I think we all agree that it would be great to get rid of curricular fees, right? We're not talking about football or things that we're talking about art supplies or things of that nature, right? I think we all agree that's a good thing to do, but we need that money to be put into the WPU because now it's going to force us. We have legislators telling us, "Well, we're cutting income tax. You need to go find the money yourself." What does that mean? I only have one funding source, and it's my property tax revenue. Right. So, in addition to that, you talked about the school safety bill. HB40 was the updated version of that. There's one other bill that uh inadvertently punishes a district like Branet more than um a district
071like Davis because we have a higher amount of free and reduced lunch. They've gotten rid of reduced lunch and we're now required to fund those kids at the full free amount, right? And so they've given us again one-time funding to be able to pay for that right out of the gate. And then we're going to have to find that WPU in that increased revenue that they do give us. find a way to fund that long term. So, you're right. They gave us $800 million in HB84, but that's statewide. Granite usually gets about 10% of those kind of funding, but it's all in one-time grants, and they're telling us how and what we can spend it on. Right now, they're telling us they're going to identify the panic button vendor, and we have to then use
072that panic button vendor, right? So, the vendors are having a field day. I get probably 20 emails a day from panic vendor buttons, people who make ballistics film for Windows, uh people who want me to purchase more cameras and other security software. And the biggest funding piece on this, again, that's onetime money and it's estimated to be over a billion dollars to implement all this statewide, right? um at we have looked at the legislature. Um after HB84 was passed, I went on the news and said, I these are all we appreciate the legislature taking school security seriously. We don't know how we're going to fund this, right? And uh the sponsor of the bill, his name's Ryan Wilcox. He's a nice guy. He's from Weber County. He called me that night and chewed me out
073and says, "What are you talking about? We gave you 18% more money." This is a year when WP was 4%. So in our legislators minds there's a disconnect on how much money they're giving us and telling us how we can spend it in unrestricted funds that we really don't have access to. So there is a huge disconnect there and the biggest thing we can do is talk to our legislators about that. But I got to tell you this isn't a granted school district problem. By and large our representatives are very supportive of us and are very supportive of helping us fund these things. Okay. So, why don't you talk to other school districts throughout the state and say, "Let's ban together and sue the state legislature over this." I you know, I'm not a lawyer.
074I play one on TV. But, uh, that was a joke. Sorry. I know it's after 7. We can't laugh anymore. But, the reality is is I don't know if we really actually have legal standing to do that. And I will tell you that the UEA is feeling the wrath of the legislature right now by challenging their legislation. And it's really hard for me to look at our board of education with the meager handout that we just got on the 4% with this other punishment and say let's go bite the hand that feeds us. Do you see what I'm saying? So it's a little bit of a dilemma that do we use precious resources that we don't really have to then instigate litigation which I don't know if we even have legal standing to do. So
075we have a school board member who wants to chime in on that. I'm of the opinion that it's not the school districts. um they are in the job of educating kids. We are a government entity. We're funded by the government. If somebody were to sue, it should be an outside entity, an an education association of some sort, a nonprofit that is separated from the government that's not we that doesn't receive their revenue from the government. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. So if if you wanted to help do something like that, get involved in one of these people like Education First or like some of these there are other entities who would be better positioned to do that. Does that make sense? But I I love your idea. Yeah. Like see the crap out of
076these people. I'm all for I'm frankly sick and tired of the Republican majority and I'm a Republican. I'm sick and tired of it. I just want to point out this school safety thing because I've got a big issue with the kind of money they've been putting into it and telling schools what we should do. That commission doesn't have one teacher on it. No school employees. They're all just legislators or other people. Now, if you were in a school, for example, when they start talking about single entry, how many entries are in this high school? You can't kids come and go all the time. You cannot have that kind of situation. And what kind of person I speak to a lot of school classes. I've even asked junior high. What would make you feel safest? Because
077you get into Monville Junior High now. Most schools you have to push a button. You got to ring a doorbell. You have to ring a doorbell. Elementary schools. But the kids say, "Well, the school cop in uniform with a gun, but some random person that you hire independent to come in and walk around with a gun all day. Does that make kids feel safer? No. Does it make parents feel safer? No. It takes some kind of a class. I I mean, I just think they're going the wrong direction. Talk about vendors. That's props. There are not enough police officers in the state to put them in. Oh, no. I get it because pretty much all the municipalities can't even hire enough to do the regular right now. Yeah. So we're looking at a negative 2%.
078School safety is actually what another percent I want to say about 2% what we estimate it will take to comply with the ongoing portion of that. So we're probably at negative four or 5% on our budget this year after getting a 4% increase in the WPU. So did our legislators here vote for that? Well, one or two of them did, but most of them were very supportive of of Granite School District. And believe you me, I've stood up in some of these meetings with superintendents and said, "Get on the phone with your legislator right now." They just passed SB37, which got vetoed by the governor. Now they're looking at an override. In that meeting, when it was passed, we were all meeting together and I got up in that meeting and said, "Call your senator
079right now and recall that bill. That's bad legislation. It's going to harm public schools." We are having those conversations with our other counterparts, but at the same time, we have great relationships with our legislators. And he will answer my text at 10. I [Music] would if I I can't bite the head that feeds me over here as the person who probably represents most of the people in this room about property taxes and the rate. Um, so now I look at this and I say, "Okay, Ben, Todd, go back and and cut again as much as you think you can without destroying the education of our children." And now, how much is left? Because that's how much the only place for me to get that money is property tax increase, right? So then we're put in
080that hard position. And we have a legislature right now who is saying to me, "Yeah, you should be raising property taxes. You're not raising them enough. So, we're going to decrease the income tax to force you to raise the property tax." So, you see how we're in this position because that's kind of the power struggle that's happening with legislators and school boards right now. And put it on top of that, there was a bill this last legislative session that if we proposed a tax increase, it would be referendumable, meaning that if community members didn't like that we proposed a tax increase, they could gather signatures and put it on the ballot. So now we would be forced to go to voters for every single tax increase. We don't have this idea of a republic anymore
081where we elect a school board to represent us. Um they're making it on on top of that they're telling our school board members you do the hard work of of raising taxes but we're also going to put one hand behind your back when you seek to do so. So it's not a great situation. Let's come here and then with regards to school closures so kids who are have a district um what happens to them? Do they travel? Do they move with the kids at that school? Do they have if their parents choose to do so? So when you're coming from out of district, you are actually filing a permit with the school. It's an open enrollment permit and you're supposed to fill that out every year. Most schools will just retain the one that you've
082had, right? So there's a a thousand kids, like I said, at Skyline who come from out of boundary or out of district altogether. So we're stealing kids from despite our declining enrollment here. We're actually doing a lot better than we would be if we weren't stealing a bunch of kids from Canyons and Salt Lake District because we're amazing over here, right? We got Olympus, we got Skyland, we got Cottonwood. We've got some amazing schools here. These are some of the highest performing schools literally in the state. So when people talk to me about like splitting the district, I'm like, wait, we're giving you the best educational opportunities right now. Why would we increase taxes to enhance what services? We're giving you the best we can right now given the circumstances. So yes, they would have
083to come back and reapply for enrollment in the school of their choice. Okay. So my child right now Grest wouldn't automatically go with the rest of those. Correct. You would get to choose and and frankly we do see that when we've seen school closures, we will see families kind of make a decision. Do I want to follow to my new foundry school or do I want to look at other opportunities? And we always want to make sure they feel very welcome. In fact, tonight a couple of our board members are at Copper Hills Elementary, which is in um West Valley Boundary at Magna. They're taking on some kids. They're having an open house for families who school was closed last year, this last cycle that will end this year, right? To welcome to their new
084school next year, right? So, we do a bunch of events to help our kids feel welcome and work through that transition process because closing a school's hard, right? We want those families to be able to go and go welcome in their neighborhood public school to the highest degree possible. Would that child be a priority to go with the kids to that school? By and large, most kids are are following their boundary path. Is that it's an open enroll? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So if Rose for instance closed and all those kids went to another school, would my child have a priority in that? when we start to narrow the scope of the study, we'll start to answer some of those questions a little bit better. So, for instance, when Mil Creek Elementary was proposed from
085closure um and we were looking to move their DLI, their language program over to William Penn Elementary, we created a new priorization that families that were currently in that program would have priority status. You'd have neighborhood families, right? They would get first pick and then anybody within the new boundary would get second. And then those who are currently part of that program will get and we got everybody in. And and to be honest, our populations have declined so much in these areas. We actually have a tremendous amount of capacity in these schools. Some of these schools were are holding 230 kids and they were meant to hold 600 kids. Right? So even with two school closures, three school closures, whatever the recommendation is, we will have a lot of capacity in these schools and families
086who want a special permit to whatever school they want will likely have that option still available to them. And and frankly, that's our intent, too. We're here to make sure we're providing quality educational opportunities to you as a family, right? So we'd be remiss to make a school so big we can't fit open enrollment permits into it. Does that make sense? We're going to leave a little bit of a gap there to make sure that we can continue to draw and support that school that way. Under current momentum, the federal department of education will dissolve. If that occurs, how will it affect you? 8% of our budget currently federal funding. Majority of that special education and title one, which is uh at risk funding for impoverished kids. There's some title six and some other monies
087for smaller populations as well. Um the the reality is that those funding mechanisms are not tied to the department themselves itself. They're over here in legislation itself. So through IDA or um the educational elementary secondary education act ESA that's how those things are funded. So even with the elimination of the department those funding streams are still there. So really, it's about how well Congress is going to fund those. And frankly, we've seen a decline in Title One funding and special education funding the last decade or so. And so even with the Department of Education, we've still seen a decrease in funding on that front. We've had people come to our budget hearing last year that said, "You guys need to get off federal funding altogether." And man, we wouldn't have to follow a bunch of
088federal regulations if we weren't receiving federal funds. Right? That's the whole notion of the the elimination of the Department of Education is make it a lo a local issue, right? But at the same time, how do I replace 8% of our budget without cutting off a bunch of teachers? Cuz 90% of our maintenance and operation budget is people. It's teachers, right? It's staff. So I I don't know how I would replace that funding without a significant tax increase additional funding from the state. the current condition is better with the federal department. Well, at least with the fun if if I had my brothers, I would say block grant the money to the states and let us decide how to spend it cuz right now it's coming to us in a in a restricted status meaning
089we have to spend it this way just like uh our school safety money has to be spent the way that it's earmarked. Yeah. Is earmarked or restricted is Yeah. is what our accountants would call [Music] that department of education. They also have a civil legal staff make sure that kids by law no matter what their disability is funded. Would you be able to monitor that? See, that's one of the Yeah, that is actually the primary function of the federal department of education is the Office of Civil Rights, which monitors compliance with things like privacy laws, special education resources. When a parent doesn't feel like we're doing a good job educating their special education child, they can go to the state, but then their next step is to go to the federal government. And then if
090they found a cause or a findings, they would then enter into an agreement with us. Remember that bullying case out of Davis? they entered into a civil rights um agreement with the Department of Justice and they monitored that Davis School District to make sure there was no more racism, right? And of course, if you implement an agreement like that, all the kids know that they can't be racist anymore, right? That's how that works, right? So, uh sorry if I'm being a little flippant. Um rarely does the federal government actually have I mean, the intent is good, don't get me wrong. Of course, we don't want racism in our schools. We don't want kids teasing kids or bullying kids. But did that agreement really do anything except put more stringent requirements on Davis School District at
091that time? That remains to be seen. I'm a coffee bar. Thank you. You're welcome. This lady puts her life on the line. Are you coming to our board meeting? We're going to thank you. You're going to get an invitation here. Well, thank you. You'll know more in June about what schools are closing. Are there more on the west side or are there some? So, we have been studying different areas. Um, and we have kind of moved all over the district. So, right now the study area, it's a year-long process February to to end of December. Okay. So, we start the process in February. We kind of say all options are on the table. tell us what's going on in your communities. We try to gather a lot of public feedback, see how uh what our
092challenges are with our facility, do go through that process. Now we're in the part where we engage parents, create that parent committee that then can make recommendations. The next step is to take schools off the plate for closure. Right? So narrow the scope of the study with the help of our parents in those communities. Right? So that the June July time frame will just narrow the scope of the study. It'll say, "We're not going to consider this school for closure. It still might have a boundary adjustment, but we're really looking at this area now, right? And that's based on all the 400 comments we've received thus far and any more comments that we get um and any additional meetings that we hold. Then we'll wait through the summer because it's not a great time to
093engage the public during the summer. You're all on vacation or on the lake, right? My picture of Lake Pair, right? So, uh we'll bring you back in the fall with some actual proposals and then it'll be like do this over here or this option over here and we'll let the community kind of fester and give us more feedback on those options. So, this really is a communitydriven process. There's a lot of feedback given to our board members and then they will make a decision in November or December. Either narrow the scope even further to one particular closure option or keep a couple of options open all the way through till November. But in June, we'll have a pretty good idea of where that looks like. The 25 26 year. Okay. Yeah. And then the then
094the closure would occur the following year. Correct. So we closed three schools in the west side along that 3100 corridor. We reopened one as a magnet. But all that's actually we're going through this transition process. Now we did that made the board made that decision in November December. Now we're going through the transition process. Like tonight Copper Hills is hosting that welcoming party for Orchard Elementary families. Right. So, they're going to finish their school year and then we'll have some special ceremonies, uh, open houses for the community, um, do some nice things to send those kids off on the right on the right way and get them settled in their new schools and those schools will close at the end of this current school year. And so, comparably, whatever happens on this study, if and
095when there's a closure, that decision would be made in November, December. We kind of do the same thing, transition through the year, and that decision would not be implemented until the fall of 2026. Thank you. And hopefully you're still crossing for us, right? Until a car didn't hit you. Hey, I'm going to answer one or two more questions and we'll kind of close the meeting at 7:30 formally, but I will hang out as long as you would like to talk. I'm going to get my email address and write it on the board here for you. And if you want to call me or come and visit with me, you are welcome to do so. Um, I can't promise that I will respond. I've got about 300 emails in my inbox right now. I can promise
096you I will respond to your email. But, uh, in a timely fashion, it might be a few days. So, with that, we'll come right back here. Thank you first of all for your question. Hey, that is that's our props to our board. That's that was a tough decision, right? And uh it's very important. Yes. And I've sat through career days three or four times at high schools uh and the kids are not paying attention. They're all playing with their phone. It's And why did it take so long? Well, I got to tell you, there are some parents um who are still pushing back and saying, "I want to be able to call." So, I teach a class. I teach a core government class out of one of our high schools. I was at Skyline last
097semester. And when I was teaching my class in the middle of my lecture, I had a kid who wasn't supposed to have their phone on them because they were supposed to be in these lockers over here and they left their ringer on, right? And so he pulls out his phone. He's like, "It's my mom." I'm like, "Why is your mom calling you at 8:30 in the morning? Doesn't she know you're at school?" He's like, "Yeah, but I got to answer." And I'm like, "No, you don't got to answer." I'm like, "Are you okay right now? Are you you in danger in any way, shape, or form?" And so sloppy parent. Yeah, we I have I have another parent and we've tried to make accommodations as appropriate for kids who have health or other circumstances that
098necessitate having access to that device. But frankly, the research is very clear and it's indicating that we're just creating an anxious generation uh and kids who are anxietyridden and uh creating uh and promulgating mental health challenges with kids by giving them access to so much screen time. And in fact, our board's actually even discussing how do we make sure that we're limiting Chromebook use, right? That it's only being used for legitimate instructional purposes and that kids aren't stuck glued to a screen all day. I just want to further where did you get the most support the legislature? Who was for? Who was against? Um, it was kind of a mixed bag. Well, I think the legislature was there. Yes, they were. Legislators. She said, "I have five kids. I'm in charge of their phones, not
099the government." You know, there's some of that, but anybody who's been in schools like disruptive is the teachers can tell you, but I'm more a proponent for the upper grades. Now, this is still in dispute is that from morning to when they get to school to the end of the day, I think that's okay for elementary schools. I like that for high school kids who many have classes other places and go to work and so on. I think it ought to be bell to bell because at my daughter's class at Scotland, they have a little cubby. They put it in it's got a number and if let's say emergency happened, you know, school shoot the kids can just run over and get their phone. You know, you hear about kids calling their parents. I mean,
100it's not out of their reach. But I that's how I view it is there's still people from the and the governor even said that. So we had looked at this in our district as a policy and we were one of the first districts to initiate a school phone cell phone ban in our schools. But I got to tell you a lot of that came from because there were pe our community members and some of our legislators. Um there was Amy Winder Newton who is a county commissioner who's also works for the governor's office uh doing family work and she was a big advocate. Um but frankly our board members kind of took the lead with that and said it's time to look at this and frankly we had universal support from our educators by and
101large and so even though we did have some parents we we felt very comfortable. We thought we were going to come back and modify that this spring because there was going to be some needed adjustments and we're really only hearing good things by and large. Julie, I just want to adjust that. I feel like what happened was our teachers came to the board and said we can't take it anymore and the board responded to teachers. That's how I perceive that. Oh, go ahead. I think the governor said you guys need to have a policy and the board said okay teachers what do you want? And the teachers said oh please take Yes. The governor did come out at one point and say you guys need to look at the passing of policy one first on
102very good will that have an extraation on use because when I was in the classroom YouTube was on half the time Yep. So we've restricted a number of things. Um we cut back even more. I was with a group of parents up at Church Hill uh a year or so ago. Um it was I wasn't superintendent at that point. I was just doing a digital safety presentation in another role and uh I we kept parents are like you need to turn this off or you need to do this off and then I have another parent like turn off the Wi-Fi at your home. It's a break, right? And so you have this disparity even between parents. Parents who don't know how to manage the the technology use don't want to spend the time to supervise
103it. If you come to my house, if you want to use your computer, it's sitting here in this very public place and they're all there and that's the only place you can do it. And you can only do it when a parent's there. But not every parent has the ability to provide that type of supervision or understands the technology. So, we actually went back and provided some additional options this last fall to parents to be able to further restrict their kids access to use to some of those types of sites. And frankly, just recently we even further restricted access to YouTube and some other things. It's there's kind of a funny dynamic there. Part of that was to we can still use YouTube and post things under Canvas, but you can't go to YouTube, just
104the site itself anymore. So basically, yeah. So now we're just really limiting that. There's a couple reasons for that. We feel like it's better for the instructional purposes and the use of the Chromebook itself. and we're trying to make sure that that Chromebook is actually being used just for educational purposes in the classroom and not to to play games or whatever. Um, but the other part of that is that uh Google came back um and and could not provide this the assurances that our students data privacy would be protected. So we said well we can't we can't let you have cart launch access to to YouTube anymore then because if if Google's collecting our students data that's a no no right is that showing that still useful to have home or having them. Our principal
105would like to say something back here. You know, I'll tell you, um, AP testing this year and ACT testing, it's all done digitally. And so, our students all have a school issue Chromebook for their use. And so, usually there's not, our teachers have worked really hard to get away from using Chromebooks in the classroom. So that that's not you know through co it was like this was a primary form of how you can teach but they've worked really hard to get away from that and when teachers utilize Chromebooks in their classroom they have their kids and we require our kids to be on a school issue Chromebook so that they can monitor what the kids are doing on land school and so they can see they can see every they've got all of their students
106and so when they're doing an assessment they can make sure that the kids only doing what only on screen that is allowed And so it monitors and it keeps it confined to that specific website which has been really helpful. And so to prepare the kids, you know, it was it was a big transition for our school to go from the paper ACT test to the work to the digital AP test because well, not AP, sorry, ACT and going AP this year. It's been a big transition for us because it's not been what we've been used to and so we're preparing kids in a different way than what we have in the past. I will say this, I'm in schools all the time. I probably spend half to twothirds of my time in schools and classroom
107spaces. So, I see good use of technology and I see really poor use of technology. When we're using technology, particularly in an elementary or junior high school, mostly in the high schools, I see pretty good use of technology. Right? It's in the junior highs or the elementaryaries where I see a little bit more of it being used as a an incentive fun time andor um a babysitting tool while they're providing a tier 2 intervention. So, I need to pull a small group of kids over to this table and work on reading with that individual group. If they're using LAN school, which allows them to monitor it teachers with excellent classroom management skills, those kids are using the Chromebooks. They know exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They're following through. I see very few deviations
108from that. That's what I would call good use of that technology in Chromebook use. What I would see poor is when we see that poor classroom management. And that's something we need to work on is making sure that we're providing good quality instruction to our kids and that their time and their management is is used well. Policy or is that really we're actually looking at a policy to to provide that philosophical guidance um on how Chromebooks should be used. And frankly, if it's not being used for um quality and instruction purposes, then we don't want kids on screens. I had students from Junior, a couple classes visit me session or told me things and you know what both classes said, we are tired of looking at [Music] screen too much. Y still interaction with teachers.
109So, in my class, I use a paper notes and they're uh they have to go through and fill out the different sections and we put the Chromebooks away. But then every once in a while, I'll have them pull out and do what's called a Padlet because some of my kids don't speak very good English, but they know they know English, they don't speak it very well. And so, they're not willing to engage me very much, like speak in class, because they're they're embarrassed they don't speak very good English, right? So they get on this Padlet and I will post a question and right here on the screen I can see all their responses and then I can say, "Hey, you put this answer here. Tell me what you think about this." And we have some
110engagement. That's what I I mean, I'm not just saying this cuz I did it, but I was taught I had an instructional coach come and help me develop that strategy to be able to engage the kids using the tool as opposed to letting the tool engage the kids. Yeah. Yeah. But I have been in situations where where we do see kids, you know, it would be my preference and we're working this through with the board because they are the ones who make the decision ultimately um that we no longer just give kids Chromebooks onetoone. We keep them in the class. We pull them out when necessary. At the high school level, it's a little bit different um because they do so much on the Chromebook itself. Um, but at junior high, if you need if
111you don't have access to that technology at home, let's check you out a Chromebook and you just take it when you go home at night, right? Um, as opposed to everybody just going one to one. Co kind of took us over here to the threshold of of one to one and now we're kind of that pendulum is swinging back a little bit. I think too like one of the things that's just shocking me is how fast it's all changing, right? So we're like, "Okay, this is our plan. This is what's best for kids." And then two years later, we're like, "Pull on the brakes." That was not what was best for kids because there's so much new. You have to guess in many ways. And so plan on it that this is going to be
112something that's going to evolve very quickly. In two years, it could be a completely different thing for us. And um so the I would say the main takeaway about te technology at this point is that um it's going to be different in a month and then different in another month and different in another month. Ben, a lot of my colleagues in elementary um view it as like we need to get back to using technology as salt on food and we need we want to bring back the artistry in teaching. Yeah. Because it is a craft. It is an art, right? Creating quality engagement, we use tools. We don't just say the computer doesn't do a teaching. It's a teacher who does the teaching. Right. Very good. Let's take one more question and then we'll break
113up the meeting formally, but I'll hang out and answer any other questions oneonone at that point in time. Does that work? Because it's 7:30. I know some of you were clamoring for some Chick-fil-A or something, right? Maybe it's just me. Just pointed at me. I I just have how how much uh uh capability do you have uh to uh create policy toward uh school safety? You were on that issue and it's very looks like it's very expensive. Very expensive. Um I have been listening around uh the country. There's been several school districts that have adopted and I don't know if you can't because you're tied to the state, but uh they're they're more locally controlled. We're talking about uh North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia. um where they have teachers that are armed in the classroom, not
114necessarily a gun, but you know, a burner gun or saber gun. And that there has not been one school shooting in any of those schools. And they're also uh classified as uh not gunfree zones where all of the school shooters in this country have gone to gunfree zones. Right. So this school safety bill from HB84 last year and HB40 this year did stipulate some requirements. One of those is armed security in every school. Um it does not permit teachers. Teachers can already carry if they would like to if they have a concealed carry permit. And we do have a number of employees who do carry. Now under that concealed carry permit, if you have a concealed carry permit, that whole uh secrecy is lost of that concealed carry when you tell me you have a
115gun. Right now I know who has a gun. Right? The whole purpose and intent is lost when you advertise that you're carrying a gun. So, we do have a number of teachers. I know this. Um, one of them shot a toilet in one of our schools a few years ago accidentally. Okay. So, we know that we do have teachers who carry guns and they are legally able to do so. There's a number of classes every year that are offered free to teachers to come. I just want to say and uh the toilet's fine. It's okay. It lived. Um, but yes, we do have teachers who are able to carry and conceal carry. That is separate from the school safety bill. What the school safety bill does require is that we do have armed security in
116our schools. What that could be is a police officer. It could be a renop like but it could could it be a teacher practicing their right to conceal and carry and uh nobody's going to walk into a school that they know. Correct. when when police when people see a police car sitting out in front of a school. Absolutely. So we have Yes. So the bottom layer of that is the guardian program. So what that does is allow janitors and uh secretaries, non-eing personnel to get a small stipen from the state, take a training course, get a mental health evaluation, and be be able to carry. We're actually trying to promote that program, but it it doesn't allow it's not allowed for teachers or administrators unless it's in a school with 350 students or less. So,
117most of our schools don't fall in that category. Only about 20 of our 87 schools fall in that category. So, while they can still conceal carry at their own discretion, they can't be part of this guardian program under HB40 um unless they're in a smaller school. So, we have actively promoted that. We um we're paying a $5,000 that TBD that we don't know. It's on this section. I apologize. The lighting on this is awful, but we don't know what this was going to cost us when we produced this slide, but it's about $2.5 million that we have to fund to be able to pay for these stipens for these people to carry um a concealed weapon on our campuses and provide that security. And I absolutely anticipate next fall you're going to see signage on
118our buildings that say if you will come into the school you could be approached by armed security. That's good. Yep. As a detractor. Right. This is also a reminder that one of the things that we have is a really we we're really concerned about making sure that we can attract quality educators. And the type of people who go into education are not the type of people who want to use a gun to protect their children. So, we have this other thing that we're balancing out where that issue is concerned that we got to make sure we aren't turning away people who are like, "Well, look, I'm not going to be I'm not going to be armed security." Yeah. From the profession, right? So, there's this there are so many pieces that go into it that
119are tricky. It's a little frustrating. The the the challenge is not in our secondary schools. We have agreements with most of our allied police agencies and we have our own police department to be able to provide coverage, police, actual police officers, school resource officer trained individuals to cover our our secondary schools. But the law requires us to provide that same type of coverage in elementaryaries. And there's there's 54 elementary schools that need to have armed security. And I don't want to just pay somebody to walk around with a gun in an elementary school, right? I want somebody that can actually provide and improve academic outcomes for our kids who might be carrying a concealed permit. Right. That's the option I'm bringing up. Yeah. Because there's no need to pay somebody or require all teachers to
120be uh holding a gun if they choose to. Right. But if if uh a um active shooter is aware that this this school district uh is not a gun-free zone, then they're not going to bother. They're going to go where it's a gun-free zone. Absolutely. And I have actively promoted in television interviews. If you come into a Granite School District School, we have the shortest response time in the state in terms of our police being able to get to any school in Granite School District. It's between two and two and a half minutes. The average allied response time, meaning your normal police department, can be anywhere between 4 to 7 minutes. So, we patrol and have officer resources within a minute to two and a half minutes of any school location in Granite School District
121because we know we want to be able to respond to those. We actually had a weapons violation on this campus. A kid brought a allegedly brought a gun into the parking lot area and so that created a situation where we had to do a a protocol and keep the kids in the classroom while we searched for that weapon. Right. and we had a very vigorous police response and I'm very grateful that we have those resources in place, but it is very expensive. Right? So, uh, we'll wrap up the meeting. I just want to say thank you first and foremost for coming and spending your evening with me. I know you probably have better things to do. Go on a date with a spouse, uh, go out to dinner, um, do some other you guys are
122on a date. I want to brag on one more thing here. I want to show what we're able to do because we're Granite School District and we do this really well. We are not Some of these places you're talking about that have two or three times the the per pupil expenditures that a place like Utah does. Granite School District has some of the lowest administrative costs in the the nation. All right. and it's less than 3/4 of 1% of our entire budget. Okay? So, when we look about trying to push resources to our classroom, I want to reassure you that the money that you're sending to us in your precious taxpayer dollars, the vast majority of that funding is getting down to the classroom level where it belongs. So, thank you for your tremendous support.
123We wanted to offer this support not just to our parents, but a chance for our actual taxpayers to come and have facetime. You can call me or email me anytime. I'll write my phone number up here. She wrote my email already, but I'll put my phone number up here as well. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have additional questions and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you so much for being here with us tonight. [Applause] I swear you get so much