SUSD Governing Board Special Meeting 4/29/25

001We reculture study sessions so that we are leaning in office-l like style digging in as learners and students that we are going to try to narrow our topics to really one deep discussion uh where the expertise of many and the interdependence of many comes to the table. Um I want to thank Dr. for Matt for uh encouraging this uh and at our last um uh retreat our first retreat uh second study session in ish we uh we we've dubbed enrollment and the surrounding topics of enrollment as a as a priority among all of us. So this will be our first time doing that. However, uh our agenda is squeezing in one other topic and I say squeezing in belittlingly but because I want to honor the intention of reculturating and see if we like it

002and how this works for us. So uh we will also be hearing uh a first read and we can ask our questions later. Uh we can ask our questions now if we want to take some of the time to do that now. That's fine. Uh but we want to really aim for the bulk of our time to be about enrollment. So my apologies to those who have worked so hard on the social science curriculum. Um and uh about 13 slides to share with us this evening and uh and then we stand ready for a deeper conversation when we put it on the agenda for second read and the reason it's timesensitive is because May 13th is the procurement date for materials whatever the decision is. Yes. Okay. So, uh I will ask to have approval

003of the agenda as presented. I need a I'll motion to approve the agenda as presented. I'll second the motion. All those in favor? I All right. Well, we we will go to superintendent comments. Just a few quick celebratory notes. Uh tomorrow morning, Cherokee Elementary will be holding its 50th uh birthday party. Uh that'll begin at 9:00 and I am sure that the uh program will be an exciting and uplifting one. And if your schedule permits, I'd encourage you to uh to pop in and enjoy that. Secondly, the week of May 5th through May 9th is teacher appreciation week. And since our next meeting is on May 13th, I want to make sure that it's on everybody's radar. Uh we know that there are a lot of events scheduled for next week to uh make sure

004that our teachers know just how much we value them, but I wanted to also make sure the governing board was aware that that's happening. Uh we'll have many uh year-end celebrations at our meeting on May 13th because it's the last meeting while school's still in session and we have a lot of things that kind of come together at the same time. But this week I uh received information on the number of students who received the seal of biiteracy. And just to kind of share with you the progression we've had over the last four years. In 2022 students earned the seal. In 23 150 in 24 175 and this year 229 students have received the seal of biiteracy. So we have close to doubled the number of students earning that designation on their diploma. We have

005other students that have received other seals. We'll celebrate those as well. That's new information that came in today and I wanted to to share that with all of you. Two other things that are coming up both tomorrow night, the Arcadia beach volleyball team will be playing for a state championship at Castile High School tomorrow night. And at the same time, we will be celebrating the newest class of Coronado Promise scholarship recipients at 6 PM. So, we look forward to both of those being really great opportunities to acknowledge the success of our students and we wish the Arcadia Titans well as they compete for a state championship. That concludes my report. Thank you, Dr. Menzel. All right, we're ready to begin now with the first read of the 13 slides that are going to be presented

006to us on social science curriculum adoption. Leah, great. Thank you so much. I would like to welcome um Dr. Dods Karen and Mr. who are going to share an overview of the work of the committee as well as the recommendations for the first read for social science courses. I'm gonna check my handy dandy clicker. I'm just gonna check my clicker to see how it works. Okay, perfect. It works greatly here. All right. Well, good evening, board president Lewis, Vice President Shy, members of our board, those sitting around this table, and all in the audience with us this evening. I am proud to be joined this evening with Dylan Bullard, our social studies curriculum coach, to present to you the work of the social science curriculum adoption committee. We are presenting to you the recommendations that

007have emerged from the evaluation process specifically for world history, world geography, American and Arizona history, AP world history modern, AP human geography and AP United States history. The work of this committee was grounded in our strategic plan. The goal of the committee was to review and to evaluate curriculum instructional materials to bring forward a recommendation to you, the governing board. During our first committee meeting, we reviewed our strategic plan and what is brought before you this evening aligns with our strategic plan specifically with goals for academic excellence and optimized resources. It's very important to us that we challenge our students, we inspire our students to achieve high academic levels of success and we want to ensure that opportunities afforded in our system prepare them for their post-secary education and careers. Additionally, we are committed to

008providing resources to our schools and our teachers and our students so that they have all the tools they need for success. SUSD is grateful for the steadfast support of our community through capital override um initiatives. We recognize the responsibility for this fiscal stewardship and we take it very seriously. The curriculum adoption process is influenced by several key factors including budget, educational needs, alignment with state standards, requirements of college board exams. Recently we initiated this curriculum adoption to secure as well um advanced placement curriculum materials for um to ensure alignment with adjustments to assessments. So the college board often will adjust their assessments and we also want to make sure that we are preparing our teachers with the resources they need for a new course that the governing board approved during our high school planning guide

009process for AP human geography. It's worth noting that our last comprehensive high school social studies curriculum adoption was held in 2007. Since then, we have relied on supplemental materials to maintain standards aligned curriculum. The Arizona standards for social science also changed in 2018. This is um a pivotal time for us in our school district to procure these resources and we wanted to ensure through a very thorough and um a thorough selection process that this committee would review and recommend um curriculum for the five courses that you see before you here today. Um I see in the audience one committee member who is present with us this evening. So uh one of our teachers Ashley Kros who as a governing board you are familiar with Ashley. He's often at the podium podium receiving an accolade for

010his expertise and his passion for teaching. Uh but thank you Ashley for serving on our our committee. Uh as you can see here there were seven members on this committee. Collectively the teachers represented 55 years of teaching experience. We had two nationally board certified teachers and administrator and a community member. um if we weren't sitting right here at this table um and I would encourage you or members of the public to click on the link that is found here on this slide and the reason we included this link was to acquaint folks with the um platforms where we provide all materials related to our curriculum adoptions. It's important to us as a committee that we honor not only state statutes related to curriculum and procurement but also open meeting law. So by clicking on that

011website, this will take you to our committee site for under district committees for an active committee in progress specifically for social science. Also present in the um audience this evening is Steven Paloo. Stephen works in our communications department and he is a partner to our team to ensure that all of our materials are posted to our website. There are two websites. There is the committee website but then there is a mirror for everything that Stephen posts on our committee site. It mirrors to a textbook adoption site as well. But on that site, what you can find is committee information for the application. That application launched December 6th. You also will see um the members that were selected for our committee, the seven that I presented on the last slide. As well as every on the

012right hand side when you're there, there are dates. You click on the yellow plus sign and that unfolds our agendas, our powerpoints, any resources that were passed out to the members during their review processes as well as our meeting minutes. Those can be found there. We also include all of the materials that are on display for public review. And um board members Carney and Warner have um experienced a lot of curriculum adoptions with me over the last few years. And we know that when we get a lot of m the entire room gets filled and a community member walks in and is like where do I begin and that's how our committee feels too but they have months to review it all. So when a member of the public comes they might come for an

013hour or two or three or four so it can seem overwhelming. So based on feedback we've received, we have also added to our website when we eliminate product. And there are different reasons that we eliminate product. If you're on our website, you'll see a strike through immediately. There was curriculum submitted that didn't align to the Arizona standards. So we knew there was no point in spending time with that. But then throughout the process, we update that and we just want to communicate that so that everybody is aware that while we we recognize there's a lot there, we greatly value the opportunity for that public display for for that 60-day um review. I'm now going to pass the clicker on over to Dylan who is going to share more of the details of the work of

014the committee specific to the rubrics, the consensus process, and the ultimate recommendations for the five courses. President, uh why was I don't see a parent on the committee years of teaching. All grateful. Why was there no parent on that? Board member Carney, we had seven applicants for this committee. We accepted all seven applicants. The community member that applied and was selected represents the Desert Mountain Learning Community. Um we work hard at trying to recruit folks to serve on our committees. And so we had teacher and administrator representation from four three of our high schools. We did not have any representation from the Arcadia High School and for that community member with students who metriculated through SUSD with background in social science um they were selected as our Desert Mountain representative. Did you email out the

015link letting everybody know that the committee was going to be posted so it went to everyone? So, uh, our recruitment processes always are hosted on our committee site. All of our teachers and staff received an email and our all employees in our newsletters received it. Uh, during the December 10th governing board meeting, Dr. Mensel was kind enough to include in his superintendent comments the recruitment had begun for our curriculum adoption committee. Um, but other than that, um, I have received feedback from a community member one evening. Dylan will tell you a little bit about public review. A committee member, a community member was requesting that perhaps we use Peach Jar. I connected with Christine to see if I could use Peach Jar um or Parent Square, but that limits just to again to um people

016who have signed up for notifications. So, we're always trying to figure out ways to promote our adoption committees. Um most recently because we don't get a lot of applicants, we utilize Scottsdale Parent Council for our math curriculum adoption committee where we were able to um we've had consistently four parents participate in our math adoption committee this year. Okay. So unless you're you're going on the page and looking at the committee page, you will not know if you're just a parent, you would not know that this was up other than a superintendent comment or perhaps Board meetings. Board meetings. We post flyers at schools as well. So we have curriculum adoption flyers. We've created a series of templates that we just consistently use, but we change out the meat for the curriculum adoption. So flyers at

017schools and um in this case the superintendent comments. I'd just like to add because I had asked you this because I've been along the journey with the curriculum adoption committees. Um, and as a board member, like we're not even told when a when a committee begins. So, I think that somehow the board member should at least know that that's starting because I know to just go randomly on the site and look and then I say, "Oh, there's a math curriculum committee starting." I mean, that's how I find it. Like, we've got to do better and getting it out to people and at least the board members knowing. So, then I can promote it to people at least. Um, I think that's easy enough to do. Okay. One of the first tasks of the committee involved

018the development of a rubric to be used when analyzing and evaluating curricular material. Creating rubrics as a committee allowed the group to consider characteristics of the materials that are important for students and teachers in our district. The rubric created by the committee includes four sections. accuracy and alignment standards, ease of use and support, engagement and ability to meet student needs, and assessment tools. For every for every adoption, public viewing is set up and feedback is collected. Public viewing of course materials is held at Oak Campus. In alignment with state statute, public display is available for a 60-day review. Public review opened on February 19th and will remain open until May 13th. As the committee evaluated and eliminated resources, curriculum products were removed from our public display. This is a process our teaching and learning team

019has improved to ensure vis visitors utilize their time efficiently as it can be daunting to see so many products. It's very important for the board and the community to understand that the committee valued and took public feedback into consideration. The first pieces of feedback were received and reviewed by the committee during the March 5th meeting. New and existing feedback was shared at every meeting thereafter. This helped the committee members gain insight into what others were noticing about the curriculum and allowed for further discussion and evaluation of the products. To date, 25 people have signed into public view the public viewing space since it opened. 65 entries have been collected on the public viewing feedback form. Specifically, 29 comments were provided by people who visited public display at Oak. Public display is open during school hours,

020but we also host people by appointment. Dr. Dod's Karen worked with a community member to coordinate a group review on the evening of March 17th. And we want to thank the public, our teachers, and members of our board for taking the time to contribute to this process, visit the public display, and provide feedback. After evaluating curriculum and learning more about our top products, the committee used consensus decision-making to arrive at our final recommendation. This is a process that the teaching and learning team committed to developing for consistent use across district committees. It was critical to have this process in place so that all voices were heard and that the committee would accomplish its goal of submitting recommended materials to the governing board for approval. This slide illustrates the curriculum we are recommending for five of

021our high school courses. And these include for our world history, world geography, world history, voyages of exploration published by Syngage. For American and Arizona history, US history interactive published by Savis. For AP World History Modern, the Earth and its peoples, a global history published by Syngage. for AP human geography, human geography, a spatial perspective, also published by Syngage. And for AP United States History, a fabric of a nation, published by Bedford, Freeman, and Worth. This slide illustrates common themes and criteria considered during the committee's consensus making process. Always central to the work of this committee was alignment with AP course descriptions and college board approved material, state standards, a comprehensive suite of resources to meet the needs of all learners, digital integration with our learning management system, and professional development to support teachers. To support

022this recommendation, we are requesting $674,542.13 to purchase teacher and student materials inclusive of professional development and AP course exam preparation materials. We realize we're requesting a lot of product. However, these resources have the potential to impact over 20,000 students over the next seven years. This slide illustrates the implementation and support steps that will begin pending board approval. This pattern for implementation is a common process for the work of teach the teaching and learning team. Similar to the elementary ELA adoption, we'd like to finish the school year with scheduled visits to each high school to meet with social studies teachers and APS of ed services in order to introduce the new curriculum. This will not be formal professional development, but rather round roundt discussions to share the newly adopted materials and plans for implementation, including what

023you see on the slide. formal professional development through AP summer institute available for teachers to attend locally in Gilbert Paradise Valley or online as the Tucson Summer Institute is only offering virtual sessions this year. Professional development opportunities will also be available during pre-week when all teachers are back on contract. Throughout the year, I will have the opportunity to collaborate with our social studies teachers through coaching and classroom walkthroughs with building leaders. As we become familiar with the curriculum, we will adjust program pacing and design curriculum maps to best serve our teachers and our students. Additionally, we will receive the product by June 30th, which is when the cataloging and barcoding process will begin. This is important not only for our budget, but also for ensuring materials are in our high school bookstores and ready for

024teachers and students when they return to school in July and August. And this concludes our first read. Thank you very much. Great presentation. Uh other questions from the board. Mike, do the uh rubric scores get published or posted? Rubric scores are not published. We could happily provide them to you. um teachers on the committee, members of the committee complete a paper rubric score and then we enter them into a Google form so that we can run the pivot tables. What we do not do in our consensus decision-making process is we don't like rank them. So we'll see where points fall. So we identify, you know, maybe somebody thought this was an awesome resource, but perhaps the assessment tools were lacking. So then we dive back into that and we we discuss can we can we

025do it with this? Do we have other things that we could or does that eliminate the resource? We're h we could happily provide I don't need I'm just curious methodology. Other questions by the board say mine's not going to be quick. No, you're good. Okay. Um, I just want to say thank you to the teachers and everybody that is involved in the work in this committee because I know this is quite quite the lift. Um, I've taken a lot of time to read through the public feedback and there's several concerns about the Sabbath uh, US history selection that people noted and I also personally was able to go and review this curriculum. I think I was the first person um, to actually go and I it's true it was very overwhelming in there with all

026of those options. Um but uh Savis was one of the ones that I had reviewed uh myself and reading the feedback from people um I'm a bit surprised that we chose Savis as they're known to be a publisher publisher with uh political bias and uh very focused on uh activism and um we had issues with their ELA curriculum that was adopted several years ago and that proves to be true in this curriculum as well. So I want to know about the online version of this curriculum. Um I saw much concerning bias content uh and hook and inspire and listen wise. So for instance for an example hook and inspires connections today to today's support take action to inform people about modern protest movements says to share the video march march by the chicks and to

027discuss what they are confronting. Is this something that the committee reviewed? Do they review all the videos that are included in this? Similar to our curriculum adoption processes for any of our resources when there are things such as hook and inspire listen wise if there are recommended supplemental materials novels. We always go through a review process to embed those into our curriculum maps. So with our ELA curriculum adoption for secondary, we did um tap into the listen wise and you can inspire to identify if there were anything um of concern. We also learned in that process too with the listen wise they might take you to an outside platform and so when going to say YouTube we want to make sure that teachers are teeing up the lesson just as it is intended for that

028clip because the hook and inspire is truly intended to do that hook and inspire for the discussion. Um so we have not reviewed every single um podcast or video that is part of the curriculum mapping process. Okay. So we would approve this curriculum and then then they would go through another approval process for the supplementals that come with this. Our practice has been that when we add them in, we do bring forward we we listen to the the listen wise and the hook and inspire for our SAVIS ELA and we built those into the curriculum. Um we did not bring those to the governing board as additions into because the board had adopted the curriculum and we utilized our teachers, our coaches and the alignment to standards to build those into our maps. Okay. So,

029um, another concerning section is take action by learning about civil rights actions today. There's several things that, uh, are featured in there, but one, uh, social media helps Black Lives Matter, fight the power, campaign zero, which states we can live in a world beyond policing, shrink the reliance and power of the police. Another one on there is the movement for black lives, ending systemic racism and disproportionate police violence against communities of color. Invite your students to explore these websites and the vision and policy solutions they put forward. We believe that prisons, police, and all the other institutions inflict that inflict violence on black people must be abolished. We are anti- capitalist. I could go on and on, but I'm highly concerned about the negative rhetoric against police um in this in this curriculum and the

030idolatry with protesting is uh throughout this as well. So, when you look at the public review comments, uh I don't know, a couple times in here, I see somebody writes, "This is exactly what parents do not want for their children and is why they're moving out of the public school. If you care about maintaining or increasing enrollment, this will not help." So, I don't know if the other board members read this, but that's exactly what we said our goal is, right? Is and this to me doesn't um meet those standards. So, I'm I'm a little concerned that did the committee look at the feedback and and these I mean kind of biased curriculum and how how did we not how are we still saying this is what's best for our students? I'm happy to provide

031to the governing board a memo that can show the point counterpoint the balance of perspective within the units aligned to standards and the instructional goals of the different units. Happy to do that um to show the different perspectives that are shared so that students can have opportunities for critical thinking discussion to draw conclusions. So happy to provide that if the board would like to see the the comparison information within a unit to build student understanding. We appreciate that concern and that I I will echo um your question of did the committee consider it? Absolutely. Every govern um every board meeting every board meeting, excuse me, every committee meeting and you can see this reflected in our meeting minutes. The committee reviewed the feedback. The committee then would look at the curriculum. They would look for

032the evidence. I specifically remember at one point there was a concern for too many pictures in the book and one of our teachers said we teach 15 year olds they're learning about things that they've never experienced. They need the pictures to understand what's going on. And so we we do a very thorough review to understand comprehensively the best we can of what the curriculum entails. Okay. Um, lastly, I'm not sure exactly uh what this is, but someone shared that the teachers edition includes problem problematic standard categories on culturally relevant learning, my story and current current event videos and listen wise, uh, integrating social and emotional learning and creating a trauma-informed classroom. So, there just seems like a lot here that is concerning. And I'm just wanting to I'm just concerned that this is not going

033to be something that everyone is looking for. And like I said, if that was our goal, if that's our goal, I don't know how this meets the goal. Happy to provide. Thank you. Some response in a memo. Karen. Okay. Matt, were you moving your mic to talk? Mic? No. Okay. I uh I have some questions I may send your way for the second read, but uh related to adoption cycles in general um and the the budget based support for that within our budget. Uh the asking in general did the AD change standards since our last adoption. I'm sure they're aligned. I just was curious what the changes and modifications might be. Um and uh in what way you mentioned literature or novels. I was curious in what other way integration of resources was occurring. I

034don't need an answer tonight. Great. Thanks for your transparency. Good job. Actually, I just want to make sure I understand what you're offering to prepare. So, I think there's two concerns. One is in an internet age, something links to something links to something links to something. And so, how many degrees deep into any curriculum are you able to reasonably go? Recognizing that there still could be links embedded in links embedded in links. And your answer there was you try to you look at the main text and then you look at kind of the second order of resources things like podcasts or what have you and then there's always the possibility that that then may reference something else and there's only so far you can go. I'm trying to try to put words in your mouth

035but and then I have a want to make sure I understand the second answer but on the review scope is that the way you think about it that there's of distance from the core text beyond the core text and um curriculum recommended to support the lessons. If it were something that you know Sam I'm listening to something and they make reference to the lady in the yellow floral shirt that would require the student to go pursue the lady in the yellow floral shirt as a topic. That is not part of the learning objective that the teacher is engaging the students in the learning experience. So we have some tech tools that we use within our classrooms like a classroom relay system where teachers can monitor where kids are going on their computers but our work

036is aligned with what is the learning outcome that we are working toward. So you're reviewing the primary materials associated with the learning objectives. Correct. And if there's other things that are meant to enrich it that's where you have to draw some boundaries and how how how far you go with your review. And then on the second in offering the board the balanced perspectives memo, am I understanding you correctly that what you're saying is our goal isn't necessarily to um avoid our students being exposed to things that we might disagree with or any member of our community. The measure is whether there are other perspectives too. And so if you came from a politically progressive, you may read things that would upset you if you just singled those out. And if you came from a politically

037conservative household, you might. And so what you're guiding us to look at is not whether there's any one of these, but whether on balance there's a diverse set of perspectives that students are challenged and can think it through. Correct. Okay. And that's what the memo will do is show us, you know. Thank you. I would find that valable. looking forward to the memo. And um in terms of subscriptionbased renewals, is that embedded in the budget? And then you can answer that next meeting. But as opposed to fixed single assets, but consumables just for my clarity. Thank you. All right, we'll move on to our next agenda item. Thank you. You guys may home your boss let you go. Okay. Okay. Thank you for your hard work. All right, that brings us to our enrollment study

038and um I I want to remind us that we had a good conversation at our retreat that this was something we we all see as important. I know it's in our strategic planning goals. Um this is not an implications phase discussion. This is a a grounding foundational conversation so we can all get on the same page with the data that helps keep us curious and wondering. And as we ask questions rather than anything that would be blame or shame oriented, we want to study what might be the patterns and what are the variables maybe within our control, what are the variables that may be outside of our control and and take a look at what we have. If what we have is not enough or there's something else we want to do, we might want

039to pursue followup. I think there's the second conversation coming up about this topic. But I'm going to actually turn it over uh to um Dr. Menzel for an introduction and then uh Matt, I'd like you to introduce since this really is a conversation starter that I think initiated with you with the board. So if you're comfortable with that, let's have Dr. Menzel start and then you chime in comfortably. Well, thank you Dr. Lewis and members of the board and members of my team, as you know, one of our wildly important goals this year related to enrollment. We know that our financial engines driven by the number of students that we have and their implications when ADM is declining every year and our overall enrollment has been declining. So the opportunity to do a deep dive

040into uh what the trends have been not just over the last three or four years but over the last few decades and thinking about what are the factors that are within our control. What are the outside factors that have impacted what's going on that may be outside of our control uh so that we have a a level playing field with respect to what the implications are for future decision making. So as President Lewis said tonight's not to talk about those implications. to make sure that we're clear on the data and Dr. Bachna has done an amazing job in taking all of the data and putting it into visually accessible formats and all the members of the of the team around the table here have spent a lot of time reviewing the data talking about what

041else do we need to have and there are other um correlary conversations that that can happen. So from a marketing perspective we have a lot of data that's not in the slideshow we have information facilities that we can go deeper in. So, as we go through the conversation, if there are things that you as a as a board want to know more about, some of the data we may have already available, others we can pull together. But we're really hoping uh to to do tonight is to present the information, create opportunities for what we've called notice and wonder. When you're looking at the data, what what do you notice about the trends? What do you wonder? uh and then ask other questions that uh we may have answers here or we can find the answers

042but really it's to to honor the intent of a true study session. We wanted this to be more conversational there there is some overview that I think is important to kind of set the context and then we can um engage in the conversation but really this is your discussion. Um I didn't know you were going to call on me. Well, you can pass. I I don't feel any special um ownership over this. I think it's something that I've heard from former board members, current board members, just a desire to see us use study session time to break out of the rigidity of a typical board meeting where we're being asked to constantly opine on things and we don't really get to ask difficult questions and kind of explore. And I think coming out of the

043retreat where every one of us said our goal was to be the district of choice um that is different from enrollment because that's more capture rate as we get into this. If we're a shrinking district we could be the district of choice and still be declining in enrollment just because the number of kids are declining. Um but they're very related. Uh they're very related. So, I just want to say thank you for all the hard work that went into this. And I think, you know, to Dr. Mensel's point, if we have more questions coming out of this, that's a feature, not a bug. It doesn't mean, you know, that things weren't well prepared. It means they were really wellprepared that it kind of sparked it. Also, my computer constantly is rebooting with security updates. So,

044if you see me going on my phone or doing things, it is only for that reason. Um, but yeah. No, we just really appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation um and to hear the questions and um to your point, the information provided and shared is really just for true discussion and we're happy to take back anything that you would like for us to look deeper into uh collect more data on orum anything from there. And so we're just really pleased with the opportunity to connect and and to dive deep and study study these efforts and this work. We want to make sure that the mics are close because the audio is fading for some. Okay. Um so looking at our enrollment wildly important goal was based on um looking at our 100th day enrollment

045in comparison to our uh enrollment on the last day of school. We were looking at if we could increase the num the grades 1 through 12 uh enrollment by a minimum of 1% and not including our early graduates that graduated in December. And we did meet this goal um with a percentage of 1.76. And and just a reminder about why the the wig was framed that way. And remember that the structure of the wildly important goals is from X to Y by a certain date. a very measurable outcome. But uh we excluded kindergarten um and looked at first through 12th grade because historically, you'll see in a later data slide, the number of graduating seniors is significantly higher than the number of incoming kindergarteners. And so the wildly important goal this year was structured to

046look at what is our ability to retain students once they've enrolled with us. So looking at first through 12th allowed us to be able to track that growth over time. Uh and not penalized for this um cohort differential between graduating seniors and incoming kindergarten students. And so then when you um just to frame up and kind of tee up the way that the slides are organized, they really are kind of grouped in common data sets. And so what you'll see is the visualization, the data table overviews, opportunity to have some trends and themes, um and then really opportunity to dig in, have conversations, and ask questions. um but they are kind of organized within common topics. Um and so we just wanted to make sure you guys were aware of how and why we put

047those different groupings together. And of course at any time um as we give an orientation to each slide just to say this is how it reads. Stop for any questions, any conversation at any point. Oh yes. And um for those of you who are avid notetakers like myself, um we did print out the slides in color for you with some note questions um just so that you have the opportunity if uh as I find myself getting a little bit older in age, I find I have a question and if I don't write it down or think about it two slides later, what was I even saying, thinking, or talking about? And so just wanted to offer that to all of you. um feel free to use or not use, but um a note catcher is

048coming around as we dive really into the enrollment journey. Let you speak to this one. So, so I I want to give an overview, but then I'm gonna let Dr. What? I don't think so. I think someone brushed their paper on this. So, So um when I first saw this chart, I was I was blown away. Dr. Bachnner has been doing so much work in in taking volumes of data and trying to create a singular slide that sort of painted the picture. Um the one part of this slide that I want to make a cautionary note is that the where it looks at the charter projected enrollment that shows it going up to the 26,000 that's not an accurate number. Uh we couldn't get that uh re-calibrated in time to update the for this. So,

049I just want to point that out. There's not 26,000 charter school students in the boundaries of Scottsdale Unified. We don't have that universe of possible students for them to capture even if we did. So, the the um use of generative AI to help with the the tool uh gives us an 80% or 90% really good outcome and then you have something like this that's an outlier that we're still working to fix. the the rest of the slide really does break down when did we have policy changes at the state level? When did choice and charters get introduced? When did we have other experiences or events that impacted it? The great recession of 0809. Uh we know that that the expansion of ESAs happened at a certain time. We know when the pandemic happened. So this

050really gives I think a nice overview of where we hit our high water mark and then where things started to decline. And so Dr. Bachmann if you want to talk about some of the specifics on the slide, but I I just take one one thing that I notice here and that is the rate of decline since about uh 2010 or so looks to be pretty constant. I mean there's a there's a little variation in different years. Sometimes it accelerates, sometimes it flattens out, but over overall it's it's pretty consistent. But the birth rate decline is actually faster than our rate of enrollment decline. And so to me, that's one of the things I think we still have to watch. And and it gets to Dr. Patinsky's point of of capture rate versus enrollment because if

051we have a shrinking universe over time, that does is going to impact the kinds of decisions we make. But Dr. Bachnner, would you like to talk more about the the details of this slide? Um, the only thing I'd rather ra also like to point out is that the enrollment is our actual enrollment over time from our systems, but our systems changed. We ended up with our our current student information system where everything's housed electronically in about 2007208. So, our data going back historically was just whatever we could find in files that were left behind. So, we really feel more confident in our data from the 2007208 enrollment data from that point on. Um, we do have previous information, but I think some of the dip that we're seeing in 2006, 2007 might have been when

052we were transitioning systems from more of a paper pencil, keeping track of things into our student information system that we have today. Okay. Um, so looking at our projected Scottsdale population share by age band, using generative AI, we asked that the Scottsdale census data regarding resident ages for 1990 through be plotted on mine graphs. The census takes place every decade, so the most recent results are from 2020. We then asked Chat DPT to project what the age ranges would be through 2040. As you can see, the number of school age children residing in Scottsdale has been dropping consistently and is projected to be even lo by 2040. So just to clarify, this is not a demographers's projection. This is just if we took the current rate and just rolled it forward, where would we end

053up? You do. That's what Shannon does. I mean, I don't project out census data, but but from a projected staffing and budget that you use this type of information. We use what what has our enrollment been? What is the change? What has historically been the change? So, it's been about 2%. That's what we use to project that out. Same type of idea is what has that change been and projecting that forward. And and we've had a cadence of maybe every three years having a demographic study done. We we uh are probably overdue on that one. And and the real question is to what extent is that information really helping drive future decisions? And how accurate have been prior demographic studies? Because in some ways they they uh have been on the mark and other ways

054they've missed the mark. Then understanding why and and how the the information that was projected didn't materialize will be important for us to understand for future consideration. Yeah. As a straight linear extrapolation like I'm okay with it three four years out but not 20 years out. Um but it's the best information we have and I think you know we could look at actions three four years out because we're in that world. Um the demographers will take into account larger macro issues and might have things curving up, curving down. So, you know, I'm looking more at the near-term than long term on this thing. And to that end, and I meant to say this up front, I think another real valuable use of this is for the community. It hopefully gives us a common fact basis

055to have these kinds of conversations. So, I think the community is as much, if not more, the audience for this than us per se. So, I think you said it. I apologize for missing it. What is the time period that is actually uh real data as opposed to the linear kind of extrapolation. It's up until 2020. Correct. Because every 10 years when the data was right. So in 1990 um school age children I want to make sure I'm saying this sentence correctly. Schoolaged children in Scottsdale represented call it 24% of the population. Correct. And as of 2020 it's now 17% or so. Right. So that's that's pretty remarkable. Um yeah, that's pretty remarkable. I want to pause just for a minute. Anybody else want to add out of here's what I'm learning or my takeaway

056so far? We'll do that at the very end for everybody, but be thinking what is it we're learning on the um on the previous one with you know all the different factors. You know, for that I like to look at it not as causality. It's really hard to apply cause to those, but they're headwinds. I think it's it'd be ignorant not to say those are headwinds. How much and you know how much a certain gust of wind impacts our sale is not to be determined, but we do have the headwinds and so I think it's good to show them on there. So I like the in that way. I had made the comment that the the y axes are all over the place. So, you know, there's a lot of weird causality that's shown like,

057oh, look, those two are moving together, so they're related. Not really true, but still it's good to know they are all headwinds for us. Can you help me understand? Is it just for uh information context? Why would we have older adults 55 to 74? Not that I want to be put in a category, but in this chart at all, is it just for interest in in context or aging, selling of homes, whatever we can deduce from it? trying to figure out how to use it in my mind. Um awareness of the age ranges that of people that live in this area. So it's the total of the total is the point. Okay. Doesn't have to be just about schools, right? Could be about other needs of our community. I'm not sure I should proceed. Good

058question. Okay. Wait a second. You're like, what are you doing? I'm looking at I know it's fine, but I cheated. I looked at I grabbed your computer because I'm still trying to get my It's a little hard to see the detail. They're all on that blue sheet. All right. If I could anecdotally, uh, when we were getting ready to rebuild Hoocom, we took a 3/4 mile radius of that campus and delivered flyers throughout. And what we found was that that senior living, the empty nesters is what fills that community. Yeah. Around Hok. So that yeah, that data is important to know because those h houses aren't being filled by families. They're filled by empty nesters. Boy, this really shows it, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, to say the obvious, if our capture rate stayed the

059same, we'd still have a declining enrollment district and it wouldn't be an indictment anything other than we have a declining enrollment community that we're serving. Now, obviously, both are happening, which we'll get into in a moment. Yeah. All right, I think we're ready. Great. Okay. Looking at this one, um, this slide represents the in K12 enrollment over time overlaid with the median house prices in Scottsdale. The blue line represents our enrollment while the red line displays the housing costs. And then looking at this next slide, this slide takes I'm sorry. Can I pause for a second? I just want to kind of make a sentence about what this how what this means. I don't want to assume. Oh, that's interesting. Next. I'm just What's the meaning? Maybe I don't know. Maybe there isn't any meaning

060to a sign. Basically, there's just depicting the fact that as our in this area, the median housing costs have gone up consistently since the 2011 2012 2009, right? So, it's harder for young families to afford an absence. Affordability is the assumption. Another headwind. Another headwind. But I we are assuming that because of this chart. Just checking. Okay. Thank you. If you were to look at the same information looking at year-over-year change on this next slide, um this is showing the information in a numerical format. So Y stands for year-over-year change. YOI stands for year-over-year. So for example, in 2009, the median house price was $500,000, a decrease of just over 9% from 2008. And then looking at the chart on the ne on the right hand side at the same time K12 enrollment in 2009

061was approximately 26,200 and increase of 1.63% over 2008. Pause. Let's say what this means. Go ahead. No, I was bing asking a question that will show you how little well how much I still have to learn. I'll say it in a positive growth mindset. Um, to the extent housing prices are going up and some amount of our budget comes through property values and the override, can I read this to say that our kind of revenue yield per house is going up or the crazy way in which we do school financing that isn't that doesn't compute? Yeah. So, um, that's a great point that you're making. We have very low tax rate, which is good, but is low because it's based off of your assessed value. Your assessed value goes up, which ours has been going

062up considerably every year. That's assessed value is a little bit different than what your actual housing price is, right? Um but as that goes up, it means it's easier for us to generate a larger amount of money with a smaller tax rate. But you're still Yeah. But you're still I mean you're it's based off of what your assessed value is. Your house rate goes up and price the tax goes up too. Yeah. But that's why we're able to have one of the lowest tax rates in the valley is because our our values are so high. When you project is that direct is that directly come to like do you project oh there's been a increase in assessed value. Therefore our revenue will be up by 2%. Do you well our revenue is based off of

063what you know we're it's we're formula driven by the state. So what ends up happening is we look at that and go and we can project out what we think tax rates will be in the future going okay. We know generally our enrollment goes down some. Um the amount per student goes up some. So kind of evens it out. Um project that out based off of knowing what the assess valuation goes up every single year. So we can kind of project out what that tax rate could be in the future. So sorry. So with the housing prices go up that benefits the state. the state gets more pie. We may or may not based on the formula. We're Yeah. I mean, we're formula driven. We don't get And that formula doesn't include the revenue control

064limit. It caps, you know, in part what what we can assess, you know, and and so that's there's a rate limiting factor there and and so that's why the the rates continue to stay low. We are not um state funded. So our our taxpayers pay locally they fun locally they fund the everything needed for our district whereas in a lot of districts um they get aid from the state because their taxpayers aren't going to be able to I mean their tax rate would be so astronomical to raise what they would need it wouldn't h it can't happen um they get aid from the state general budget to do that our tax rate is low enough our our property value is high enough that we generate enough money to cover that liability so the state have

065to subsidize in Scottsdale. Is that answering? Still not. If if the Maricopa County assessor came in tomorrow and said everyone's assessed value doubled. Yeah. It was crazy and everyone's house worth twice as much. Will we see a giant increase in our revenue? It No, you would see a decrease in our tax rate, right? because we're still adjust the revenue control limit is that rate limiting factor and then tax into rate. Yes. Based on a fixed so it doesn't benefit us. Yeah. Okay. It it would it would benefit so it would benefit say potentially in a bond issue where you're you've got a different debt load that you're carrying and and then you could see a benefit there. But the maintenance and operating override and the capital override have have caps as well. Right. So the

066M is tied to the RCL and and the capital override has a a top dollar amount that that we can collect. So all of it has a rate limiter. So on the bond side the bond was whatever the number is 2% for you know every year for seven years as housing assessed value goes up the 2% becomes more and more. So you could you could pay down that debt more quickly lower the rate. Those are the things that you have. You can see the benefit there in our budget unlike anywhere else in the budget. Thank you. All right. Any other questions at this point? And Dr. Ba, go ahead. Using the state uh public data files on enrollment in combination with the enrollment of charter schools where Scottsdale students tend to attend, specifically those of

067basis and great hearts. That's what's showed on this slide. So when you see the name basis, it's combining all the basises in our area. And same thing for the great heart schools. And this is looking at specifically schools in this in this area as opposed to all of the state charter schools. Um you can see that our enrollment has steadily decreased over time while charter school enrollment in our area has increased. I will say that also the charter schools have increased their number of schools and the grades served over the time periods in the in this chart. Say that last sentence again. I will say um the charter schools have increased the number of schools in this area during this time period as well as the grade level served. Okay. So for instance when some

068of the charter schools opened like high school they only served 9th and 10th grade the first year. They added 11th grade the next year they added 12th grade the following year. So that's where we see some of the greater grades in the in charter enrollment is during those periods where they were adding more grade levels each year. Do you have a sense of whether 2020 is roughly when that build out is sort of apples to apples because there is a very marked difference right uh you know these percentage changes I assume are from the beginning of the series to 10 there is a pretty marked difference if you look more at 2020 to 2024 how our trend compares to their trend I would agree yes when I'm looking when I was looking at the schools

069going back in time the earliest I could go was 2015 before that um there weren't just the charters weren't actually there that are taking as much that encompass this area as much so I think they kind of leveled out in 2020 and now they're starting to recede a tiny bit at least at the basis. Do we have a feeling anecdotally that they're the basis great hearts are fairly saturated that they're probably not going to continue to expand in our boundaries? Is there any sort of feel for that based on experience? I'm not sure on my own. Then basis is Phoenix and Scottsdale. The two on either side. Yeah. I think it was approximately six or seven schools that are included there. I don't have them listed out in front of me, but I can show

070you later. And I Oh, sorry. This may be coming ahead. I forget. Um, do we know whether these are the top schools that we're losing students to? So, so if we do like a from two from a charter perspective, yes, those are the top two. Bases and great hearts are the top two. So, there's a whole list, I don't know if we have that from Kurt, a whole list of of the other charters, but but they're in the hundreds or dozens, not in the thousands. So, great hearts and basis are the top two that pull from our SUSD boundaries for the charter schools. Yeah. And that kind of aligns later when we talk about why families are leaving with academic rigor as their number one reason. You know, that sort of aligns a little bit

071in terms of how these schools position themselves or at least bases. I know a little less about radars. So, looking again at the year-over-year change on the numbers from the previous slide, um changes in K12 enrollment in numerical format. Basically, the number of charter schools expanded during the time period, which I already mentioned, um Scottsdale has had fairly steady decreases in enrollment each year, ranging from a high of negative4% in 2021 to a low of negative.3% in 2022. Interestingly enough, basis enrollment has also retracted over the past few years, while Great Hearts enrollment has mostly increased was in 2021 and then in 2022. Okay, so interesting peak. I went back to the previous slide to see that. Have we looked at why if you keep pull your microphone out why the what is the the

072cause for students and families leaving Scottdale Unifi for great heart figured out what that causes. What is this product is? What is it? I'm not sure I could have I do not have a clear answer other than what's been reported on the exit surveys and looking what some people are reporting as why they're choosing certain schools and we still need to do a little bit further analysis of that data to to get more into the detail of we have the exit survey data where it says these are the schools that we're choosing but we haven't analyzed it to say let's just look at the student the people that are reporting they want to choose charter schools and all the reasons they're leaving that's the next analysis and you' kind of pointed that out too that

073that's the next analysis we need to do and some of those never start in Scottsdale. So like my I have a neighbor who chose um a different charter school. They were on a wait list. They had a friend group. They she told me this this was um not a knock on the local neighborhood school, but it was because of the friend group and they were they were looking. And so that's how they made their decision. So they were never in our system. So we wouldn't have had the ability to to pull the data to figure out, okay, why'd you make that choice? Except for she happened to be selling Girl Scout cookies at my house and explaining why she made the decision. Yeah, I was specifically referring to the the students that are leaving that

074that were here. Yes. Yes. That that's something that we need to explore further. I agree. Uhhuh. So, we'll get into it later. In general, we don't have it on a school by school basis. Not tonight. Yeah. Which I do think matters. I agree. Um, also uh for the board members, I mean, even employees, it's very easy to ask your neighbors, you know. I mean, got two neighbor friends that started out in SUSD and they've both left and we're constantly comparing curriculum. We're constantly comparing book lists and they show me exactly why they've left. And it's very easy for me to see that as well. I mean, when we stopped giving uh summer reading, right, when you stop mandating summer reading, think they're doing that. No, they're not. You know, so like we've lowered standards and

075they have not from what I see. And it's and it's good because you can do that with your neighbors. Look back and forth at what what the curriculum is and what what's being offered. They'll be glad to show you why they left. Yeah, we're going to move into some more um the next phase of data or the next kind of section really talks about cohorts and cohort progressions. And so we just wanted to offer any um additional discussions related to the enrollment journey and the trends that we um have shared so far before we jump into cohort uh information. So what are you wonder are you wondering about things right now? What are you wondering about? Uh I'm wondering a little bit of what Dr. Menzel teed up which is are they leaving us or

076are they not trying us in the first place? Um I mean I have the same experiences. I know when the bond didn't pass and every Wednesday was half day and all the clubs were cancelled I lost a number of you know family friends who took their kids out. I know during COVID we lost uh family friends based on what other schools were doing in terms of either online education if they that's the hard thing about neighbors is I mean we could have one neighbor who left because we were returning to school too fast and we could have another neighbor who was concerned that we weren't the opposite we weren't going fast enough. um you know so uh but what I'm wondering is are they not trying us or are they trying us and leaving and

077I you know um but the thing that jumps out at me which I honestly had no sense of coming in is just how market the decline in school age kids in Scottsdale is the overall the overall so I mean again even if we had the exact same capture rate if we were as successful as our wildest dreams to be the first choice. We would still be a shrinking district because we're serving a shrinking community of school age families. And so enrollment is not in and of itself an indictment of the performance of the district. Uh it is also the case though that we are declining as a in our market share too. Um but but that stood out to me also. Yeah. and and I think there's there there's anecdotal data on parents who have

078left basis or greatarts and come to Scottsdale and we have information on that as well. I think that the challenge is how do we go from the anecdotal data to something that's more quantifiable so that we can make decisions based on it because you'll hear the stories uh related to why they leave. You'll hear the stories because I met with a family. We were celebrating a scholarship that their senior from Desert Mountain received a year ago and and they said, "We're really happy to talk about why we left Great Hearts to come back to Scottsdale." So that's an ane anecdote, not a not a systems level decision, and it can be unique to the needs of the family, the needs of the student. It could be they leave basis because they really want the full

079high school experience with respect to what we offer for performing arts. that's going to be a different reason than what somebody else chooses to to leave or stay. And so how we tease that out is going to be really important in order to make um good inferences rather than just taking the anecdotes and and uh extrapolating to an entire population. One thing I like think about doing a not here but like business-wise strategic analysis you do a SWAT analysis strengths weaknesses opportunities threats and what you look at is internal external what are the things that we have going for us that we can control what are the things that are happening externally that are happening to us that we can't control and you know I I think back to at the retreat we kind of

080talked about the goal but we talked about what are the things we can do to impact that positively actionables and barriers. I think you identified them. Yeah. And I think going through this whole deck will be good because it's bring up a lot of things that like it or not are beyond our control, right? Scottsdale, great. Awesome. Houses are worth a lot of money, but that's got a negative impact on our schools. But let's not lose focus on what we can control on those things. And if it is rigor, we absolutely can control rigor, right? we can we can impact out academic outcomes, we can impact attendance, all of those come into play. And so, you know, kind of my takeaway whether it's here or continued is, you know, yes, those things are happening to

081us, but what can we do because we absolutely have control over those. I think we can wonder and notice possibilities for what is within our control and what isn't. I think that might be a good use of some time tonight if we don't exhaust ourselves. Uh, but I I really like the pace that we have. Thank you, Dr. and and further comment so far. Anything else to add? Well, that's why I had brought up um in the first agenda item that politically charged curriculum is something we have control over. So, we're going to talk later on and reasons why people leave and let's go back there and see if that shows up as why people are leaving because the data tells us really good information in that. So, I'm glad you brought that up. So,

082we have Cherokee, Cheyenne, and with weight lists for kindergarten and I had brought this up a couple years ago is what are they doing that's making them successful that families want and why wouldn't we replicate that at some of our other schools that are struggling to get enrollment because while there's a decrease in population I also know families and I have neighbors just like you do and they will drive their children to their school of choice and um with a weight list here of nearly 100 Why are we not duplicating what we're doing in the schools that have weight lists? I think a big part of that is identifying what is that secret sauce. Is it a person? Is it the principal is just awesome? People love him or her. Is it the geography? Is

083it a reputation? Um that's really good to look into. Um during the um election process last year, someone at one point said we should look schools are doing and and and replicate that like basis. I'm like, yeah, if you look into why basis is doing well, there's a lot of details there that we would never repeat. And so, I'm with you. And I think looking into what it is that's there, like getting down to school by school, like you all know better than I do. It could very well be there is a beloved principal and everyone goes to that school because of him or her. That's great. How can we replicate that? You know, is it training? Is it hiring? But again, what can we control? So, typically it's about best practices and doing academically

084with their math and and they have seasoned staff and it is the school my my neighbors go there and too many neighbors have kids there and you know all did a great job and I know that they have a good principal there now too but things always fall under leadership if you have a good strong leader you typically have a good school but when you have a weak leader then um that also reflects and what is the product that they're putting out at each of the different schools And I think that um it's just something to take a look at. You know, we have four really successful elementary schools. And what was your fourth one, Karen? I got Cherokee Cheyenne Hop. Do you remember? Uh I have Cherokee Cheyenne Coochis. Thank you. And I would

085love to have that because I don't have that understanding in the same way we were talking about the data here to have a shared understanding of what's impacting. I would love to get down to the school level that we could all be on consensus that these schools are doing well and look you know it better than I do. You've been involved more than I have. I would love to kind of level set so we can all say look do we agree that Cherokee is doing great and identify here is the one or two or three factors because of it. So I like that you bring it up. I would love to have us all at consensus that yes, those are the reasons why they're doing well because I think that would help for us best

086practices to put forward and you may know them off the top of your head. That's great. I don't and I would love that to be shared amongst us. There there's not one one factor though. So if you look at where the schools are located, that's it's a variable. So for a Cherokee, they have a large open enrollment population and and where they're boundaried up against PV. They are pulling from out of the district. So some's in district, some is out. Hopi has the lowest amount of external open enrollment of any school in our district because their inboundary population chooses Hopi and so there's not a lot of extra space on that campus uh which then creates demand and because of their proximity to Phoenix you have some of those uh families that want to get

087in but there's no space for them to get in whereas other schools you might have that. Can we jump uh who's controlling the slides? Cindy, can we jump ahead to slide 17 because I think it speaks to what you raised just so we have it out behind us. Is that okay? That's good idea. Um, well, one way to think about answering that question, and I agree it's a great uh question, Karen, is what are things that are common to schools and what are things that are vary across schools. um you know if if schools that are seeing a big a huge weight list and schools that have a lot of extra capacity are running the same curriculum then it would suggest maybe it's not the curriculum. Um on the other hand you know thinking about

088Cheyenne you know if schools that generally have more traditional curriculum are attracting students at a higher rate than those that don't then maybe that begins to point towards curriculum. So I think it would be interesting to think about about four or five and I I think a few were mentioned characteristics that and asked the question are these consistent across schools or do they vary and to the extent they vary are they varying in a consistent way to those to the demand that we're seeing we have a case study on I think I think that's that those are the right questions I absolutely agree they're the right questions the district made a decision because Cheyenne had a wait list and was was a popular model to take and create a traditional school at Puma and and

089the Puma traditional school never ever reach the kind of demand weight list and and community support that Cheyenne has. So it it also has to take into account what the neighborhood wants as well. Uh, and then I think about the other that's really interesting is that Copper Ridge, another K8 just around the corner from Cheyenne, has uniforms like Cheyenne does, but a different curriculum. And and so you have two K8s in relatively close proximity, one with a traditional curriculum in structure, one without it, both with uniforms. The universe of of students that you can capture in that geographic circle may be a rate limiting factor as well. And so part of it is, you know, a wonder is maybe uh a different location for another traditional not in South Scottsdale. It didn't work with Puma,

090but maybe it works in the Arcadia learning community somewhere. I don't know the answer to that, but that those are the kinds of questions that we need to explore because what's what's driving parent decision related to the schools they're choosing and and it may be that it's the curriculum, it may be it's the principal, it may be the culture and climate, it could be location. So yeah, we need to explore all of those these uniforms that that might be a good like macro micro for another study session. So if this is the macro looking across at the high level, a next study session is micro and gets to the school level um to get that information out. I think that's a really good use of our time to to level set on that. I want

091to there's much more meat in this presentation I want to continue to go through. Right. I just think one last thing um those those four schools that you named and we talked about they all have very high parent involvement right so that is something to factor in too right not everyone has that uh ability but um I think that's one of the factors that make those so successful that's great then ask ourselves is that something we can impact or not it's a I think it's a great topic to talk about right is it just innately that those parents are awesome and get involved or can we and areas to help. I think it's a wonderful conversation to have. Thanks for bringing that. Glattus, are you able to bullet these different ideas that are being brought

092up uh as you take notes after you listen to the tape again? Uh because I'd like it captured in the minutes. Okay. Thank you. I think we have a lot of of great topic ideas to dig into. Okay. I think there might be some more comments here. Anything for now? And I didn't mean to get us out of order. I just thought this Oh, slide 17. Here it comes. We're going to come back to that one though. Sorry if we want to go back to spoke to. So that was a yes to 17. Yes. Or we're just going forward. We're going to come back to 17. We need to talk about Okay. Okay. Thank you. Cohorts. Y. All right. So the data reflected um here on is the reflects the past five completed cohorts. So

093each of the rows on this slide uh depict 13 years of enrollment for a single cohort. The top line starts with uh 2007208 which represents the class of 2020. When the kindergarten cohort started that year in 2007208 there were 1584 students and at the end of 2020 there were just over 2,00 273 students. You can see the same progression up until the most recent class of graduates in 2024. For the most part, enrollment has tended to increase throughout elementary school and then drop off in the middle grade levels before rising again in high school. That's why there's different shades of blue. So, the darker shades of blue are higher numbers and the lighter shades of blue or green, I guess you could say, are lower numbers. Um Cindy, can you walk me through a body

094of change over the years? So, just say look at the first two blocks that are aqua, you know. Okay. So, let's look at the very top line. 2007 2008 they were kindergarteners. That was the 1584. Okay. In 2829 I'm sorry 2008 2009 there was 19 1,938 which are the next flock over. Right? And then the next school year would have been 2009 2010 and there were 1917 second graders. So the same cohort over time. The following year they're third graders. That was 1868. The following year there were fourth graders 1869 and then the following year there were 1813 as fifth graders. Then they headed into sixth grade as 1749. Uh seventh grade was 1796. 8th grade was 1847. And then we saw an increase in that cohort from 8th to 9th grade. And their freshman

095year class the class of 2020 had 2135 students in it. Um the sophomore class had 20 just 290 students. The junior class had 255 students and ultimately we ended up with a senior class of 2073. So it's 13 years worth of the same class. Well, that's a pretty powerful standing increase as kids become ninth graders. So they come to us after what I remember and I may be off on this a demise mostly through sixth through 8th grade. Is that true for us too? Am I reading it right? Yes. A demise in sixth through eighth grade, which is a funny phenomenon. So between we switch schools between fifth and sixth grade. So it seems that maybe people are choosing just to try a different environment for middle school years, but then we're coming back typically

096for the ninth grade year. Boy, that says a lot. Change from K6 to K5s because there was a shift somewhere in there. We were just talking about that. I want to It was in the Dave Peterson era. So that would be 2011 to 2015 period. So yeah. Yeah. I mean that's a little bit of a we didn't talk about that in our internal review in terms of what impact that had having our elementaryaries go from K6 to K5 and creating true 68 middle schools versus junior highs. But that could be a factor in here that we hadn't contemplated in terms of parents related. Okay. And then overall again going back to Matt's point as the of 2024 emerges, it is fundamentally a lower number. But that's just enrollment. That's not capture. No, it mirrors capture,

097but it's purely enrollment numbers. And do we have that proportionately? So, we've always had 80% or we've always had do we have a proportionate sense of capture? That's another slide. Okay, I'll be quiet. Uh, okay, I'm done. Uh, Mr. Do you mind sharing about some of the historical? I think you're the only one that's been here for a long time. Um, I became principal in 1999 2000 and my class was K K5. You were K5. So, we didn't even when I started, we didn't have sixth grade. What year was that? That was I started in 99. Getting old. I started in 99 and it was K5 and it I don't know how long it had already gone to Engleside 6, seven and eight. So it was long before 201450. I feel like I think different

098schools had different patterns of um some were six, seven, eight at at the junior high level or middle school level where some were just seventh and it became a more standardized all schools all middle schools will be sixth seventh eth um in the somewhere in the DP in the Dave Peterson era. Does that sound right, Mark? I don't recall. I just remember attending meetings and we were we were K5, then some went to K8 and uh but I don't remember seeing a K6. So, I'm not sure. I'm sure we can dig the history, but Well, the bumps are here in the I mean, we're only looking really at five six years of data, so we can we can go back if we want to, but trendish. We have a document that we just recently were

099working on um that has a history of every school, its name change, what grade levels it served, when that was changed, and we're just putting the final touches on it today. Um and so we'll share that as soon as we we are finished. Perfect. We'd love to see that. Thank you. Thank you for sending that. So, um, with love and respect, this is one of those slides that only a data scientist. I apologize. So, um, so I stared at this one for a long time. So, I want to think about what it does address and what it leaves unressed. Um, so let me start with the what it doesn't address. So this is not for lack of a better term is a survival analysis. This is not taking the 1584 and say obviously because it

100wouldn't increase. What percentage of them are still here two years later, three years later, five years later this is a different population of kids each time the aggregate. Um, so in our kind of wish list, I think it would be really interesting to understand how that survival rate has changed. Yes. You know, over the last couple of years if we're able to kind of fix off of that original kindergarten population. Um, what it is is a way of understanding when do we tend to lose people and when do we tend to gain them. Is that fair to say? Yes. And the answer to when we tend to lose them, not surprisingly, and gain them is when there's building changes. Would that be an oversimplification? That was our that was our assumption guess when we we

101we're just looking at might be a takeaway. When things decline, they're declining around fifth or sixth grade. So that's when you might start thinking about I love my elementary school, you know, but that middle school seems scary and I hear all sorts of terrible things are happening in the bathrooms or the bathrooms are locked. Um uh because of the terrible things that I hear are happening in the bathrooms. Sorry to, you know, go after bathrooms always. So he left. He knew that was coming. Um but it's amazing how often people talk about bathrooms in their choice of schools. It's true. Um so true. And then is that the main point we're losing them between fifth and sixth grade? And then what happens is either there are fewer options. That's where the lightest colors are. Either

102there are fewer options for high school. So families will come back to us or the sky and turns out the grass isn't greener and they decide at the end of the day they'd rather just go back to their community high school. Um maybe could you just do a little bit more of a narrative? What do we know about when do we lose kids and when do we gain kids? So historically, yes, we've somewhat tended to lose them more in middle school and gain them back in high school. This is an assumption on my part. I believe basis is six through 12. So I could see if you were to want to try that model, you might go for the middle school. And right around this class of 2022 is when those basises were becoming more

103prevalent in this area. But then I think might what we might be happening is some families are choosing that environment and then going wait a second I want a more comprehensive high school and then choosing to return back to our to our school district. Um but we have typically seen higher en enrollment in our nth grade classes historically uh in the data back a few years which has shifted recently. So our most the last two years that trend has shifted. So that's a a point of concern because it had been really consistent that we had the big bump in the freshman year and you might have a little bit of attrition by the time you got to your graduating class, but last year I think was the first year where we noticed a pretty significant

104dip, right? I'm sorry. Could you say that again? What is So in the ninth grade cohort, uh the the cohorts had been averaging, 1900 roughly since I got here. And last year the freshman cohort was just under 1,800 maybe. And so that was the first time we didn't maintain that that kind of threshold. So the 1900 dropped to by the time they graduated to 1,800. But that incoming freshman cohort had historically been higher. Last year was the first time it was significantly lower than the prior, you know, decade or so. So I was sorry. No. um the where we gain and where we drop. You know, you look at this where it goes from light to dark, there's two big spots, K to one and 8 to nine. Um if you look at each of

105those years though, the amount that we go up has been getting lower and lower. Now for the K to one, that's 15 years ago. So it's really hard to kind of put your stock in that. But the 8 to9 um the o the 708 cohort went up by 16% the 1112 cohort went up by 12%. So while we are going up the light to dark from 8 to nine it's been going up by less and less. Um and likewise on the flip side the um five to six sees an increase and that's actually been getting better. Um but again five to six now that's 10 years ago. So you know having these more recent granted you wouldn't completed cohorts, but you would still have partial lines for each. You can kind of see the trends

106of those changes. Yes, it's going up from 8 to nine, but it's going up by less and less each year. And so that's nice nuance in there to kind of see what's going on. I know there's a difference between graduation rate and dropout rate. They're two very different metrics. I'm just curious if we where that lives in this and I don't need the information right now, but it might be another followup is is there a pattern of dropout? And I say that trick knowing they're very different. So, does this slide at all address my wonder around the question, is it families don't give us a try? Um, or is it they give us a try and they decide that it's not a good match for them. I think that has shifted. So what you don't

107see in these cohorts you have higher kindergarten cohorts and when you if you look at the last five to seven years those numbers go down from 1700 to smaller numbers 15400 1300 so I think the answer in the more recent period is that we have some that are not even giving us a shot combined with the uh declining birth rate which means you have a smaller universe of of potential enrollies. So those two combined I think would explain you know the lower kindergarten enrollments but then I think it's a mixed bag with respect to the others in the and we offer full day kindergarten across all we do. Yes because in some places that was a feature not in Scottsdale. All right. Okay. This slide depicts the cohort retention rates of students in Scottsdale basis

108and great hearts. Thank you. For the Scottsdale UN uh SUSD class of 2020 who started ninth grade during the 2016 2017 school year. So those are the first three dots on the left hand side. um 94% of the nth grade population metriculated to 12th grade. For basis that number was 87% and for great hearts that number was 66%. In other words, the senior classes of basis and great hearts were smaller than their freshman classes by a significant amount. For the latest group of seniors who were freshman in 2020 2021, which is the final dots on the right hand side, um the senior classes at basis and great hearts were only 70% of the size of the freshman cohort. All this is to say that basis and great hearts have substantially smaller senior class sizes than

109enter their schools as freshman four years earlier. Say that again, that last sentence. All this bases and great hearts have substantially smaller senior class sizes than enter their schools as freshmen four years earlier. Okay, so this is the survival rate that I was talking about earlier, but just only looking at high school, right? Okay, I wish this were published everywhere. Like I I support, you know, choice. I want parents to do what's best for the kids. We do best for our kids. Like we are never going to be in great hearts, right? We are never going to have a third of our kids not a third of our ninth graders not be 12th graders in our school. And that's a huge difference in how we operate. Like this to me is a story that I

110don't think is obvious. Um, and you know, nothing no action about it, but like I just love this picture because it tells that story of who we are. I think we're okay. Okay. So, capture rate. This slide depicts the capture rate of SUSD over time. Internal capture rate refers to the percentage of students residing in SUSD boundaries and attending SUSD schools. You can see that the first drop in this capture rate occurred in the 90s before rebounding in the early 2010s. By the 2019 2020 school year, the capture rate was 58% and currently sits at 59% of students residing in Scottsdale. The net capture rate refers to the percentage of residents attending Scottsdale schools plus students from outside of Scottsdale. You can see that our net capture rate is higher at 73% in 2022 2023,

111the most recent data we have available. This is an indication that families outside of Scottsdale are choosing to enroll their students in Scottsdale schools. We'll get into a more detailed breakout of where our students live later in the presentation. So So one of the the factors u when you look at the great recession component there and and I I'm going to speculate here, but but what we saw in Michigan at that same time was that families who had been paying for parochial education didn't have the money to do it. So they came back to our schools and then when the economy shifted they went back to the parochial option. So I don't know whether or not that happened here but I know it happened there just because people were so pinched for money that they

112could no longer afford the tuition for the private school. Do we know anything about 20 um 32 24 to have a sense of that's one data point it's a good one that's moving up but do we have any sense of whether we're going to find what are you asking the capture rate the 54 to 59 I see do we have any sense of whether that's going to be better than 59 par or the 59 is the blip I'm not sure yet I could I'd have to look into it further what Shannon, the crystal ball lady. I don't have a No, she thinks an aggregate enrollment. Yeah, I have I have no crystal ball on this other than to say I think part of it would be we haven't done a demographic study in a little

113bit and so we get a lot of that data from that. So I think part of it would be looking at another another study to capture. What do those typically cost? About 15,000 1520. That's what I was going to guess. Yeah. And then there was the previous slide with and great hearts which showed a flattening and dip in their enrollment. So there's a hypothesis that you know their flattening and going down would add to our increase of capture rate just from a throwing it from one bucket to the other hypothesis but you know those two trends were happening around the same time. Well, theirs could just be indexing the declining population. Could be coralate, not could be. Yeah, it's hard to make. But are you saying that the capture rate is a metric we get

114from demographic studies or it's just an operational metric that we get from the state or from some other source? We're getting this one from the demograph demographer based on our data enrollment. Yeah. What's your pause? So, oh, I just thought it was an operational metric like the state told us our capture rate every year or something. So, we have to spend money to constantly capture this this metric and we do every year. Well, we don't spend the money every year because it's $15,000. We we look to do the formal demographic study about every three years or so. Is this the demographer? Is this the rounds that we did in 22? No, it's Rick Bremer. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. So, we hired someone in the 2022 23 and then they looked back a couple years to

115the last study and they did studies they did a study for us in 1920 2021 and 2223. So, going back to our retreat, is it fair to say if our number one objective is to be the school of choice and we had wildly I don't know how to say the phrase if we had a big goal this would be the metric or is that too simplistic no I I think whether it's we want to increase it by two points four points one point this lends itself to from X to Y by when this is a metric that would work yes do we all feel that way do we all think this is like a really important metric or I'd like to look at the methodology ology um just to kind of understand how much is

116actual data, how much is kind of sampling just to get a feel conceptually yes I think that's kind of the the wig to look at but because it's not a you know state gen generated number a census generated number I think there's a little bit of wiggly room there to understand but definitely to Amy's point earlier about why I mean I think the the gap is still to be studied and I don't think a demographer will do that uh that's a survey that's also I'm I'm leaning forward too fast, but I think that's might be something else to add. I mean, I've thought of a high grounds or a noble predictive insight kind of survey to to get at what are the variables that parents use to make their choices related to that. So, the

117data is important and it tells part of the story, but it doesn't tell the whole story. So, we probably need a supplemental data set as well. move on. All right. Thank you, Dr. Y. Keep going. We kind of talking. Okay, perfect. Thank you for asking. We're noticing and wondering all along. Yeah, this is good. So, where are we now? So, let's look at some of our information about the current enrollment. And this gets back to slide 17. Okay. So, here you are seeing the K12 enrollment change over time by learning community. Each learning community is represented a different color. Some schools have been seeing positive changes in enrollment over time in each learning community except for Desert Mountain. Um that learning community has shown declines across all their schools since the this is going back

118to 2014. Um I wanted to point out that Tonalia was converted to a middle school during the 22 23 school year. So their drop includes the loss in enrollment from no longer Sue seren elementary school population. Um I will say I just looked at this number right before I came in. If you take into account just the middle grade levels at Tonalia their decrease is still there but it's only about 42%. So it looks similar to Cornado High School. It does. Yeah. Do we have capture rate at this level? Do we know are some of our schools better or worse at I know they're not all neighborhood schools, but for those that are tied to an enrollment zone, do we know whether Cherokee gets 80% of the kids who live in the Cherokee enrollment zone,

119but Sequoia Sequoia probably also, but Sequoia only gets 60%. Uh I'm not sure that captures capture rate though. just yeah the the challenge is and and I'm trying to go back to the last study Rick Bremer did knowing how many um school age children and the grade level in particular in each elementary school is what I don't know if we have at that level of granularity so you can do it within our boundaries a little bit more easily. I I have to check and see if he's done it at the building level. He does have some pretty detailed building level information. The question is, do we have enough to be able to c to do the capture rate analysis? And would it be helpful to send out I mean, it's was a few years ago,

120but would it be helpful to send that out? I think I think we've sent it out. Have we? Okay. Good. What we I mean, we have it in a PDF form. Yeah. So, so the issue is we need to figure out how do we take the data and put it into something where we can actually Yeah. Some of what you're seeing tonight in these slides is me copying the numbers from his presentation in order to make up something for us, right? So, rudimentary question. What is the actual raw number of Tonalia Middle School? Oh, 42% decline since 2014. So, basically, this is a percentage change over time. So, what this is saying is their enrollment has gone down by 42% from 2014 to 2025. I was just curious what that raw number was. The end

121what's the count? The end count. I'd have to look it up. Thank you. Oh, yeah. That's on there today. Thank you. Turn your mic on. Thanks. Hiding behind my computer. So on uh February 25th, 2025, our student enrollment including uh kindergarten was 19,874. And then today what you was 20,686. I'm curious where those 800 students came from. Are you is one a K12 and one a preK12? Out of curiosity? No, they're the same. They're exactly the same. I'll have to look. I'm not I'm not sure. Say your question again. So on February 25th, the enrollment update that was sent to us showed 198 19,874 students. The one that was sent to us today shows 20,686. I'll have to get back to you. Yeah, I I subtracted I subtracted the the toddlers, the prek, and the

122kindergarten. And that puts 18,677 on the February 25th and 18,696 on the for today. Okay. Oh, you added score, but score is not score is now at score should have been this year. It was it's been in there all all this current school year. So, I'll just have to take a look at that with you maybe after Well, hold on. So, with score and then when we looked at was this included when we were doing the enrollment goals back in more. We were having these discussions last fall and it was actually related to the um performance goals for Dr. Menzel. So we added score in score students last year were incorporated into the school count totals for each of the high schools that they were associated with. This year because we've established them as a

123separate school with the state they now are reflected in their own school name. What's I'm so sorry I don't know what score is. Score is the special needs students that 21 and they now go over to Scottdale Community College. Yeah. Okay. This the students were still counted last year. They just weren't called out as score until now. So they were incorporated into the student counts for the five brickandmortar high schools previously. We get adm. So it wouldn't affect aggregate counts. It would just affect where they were. Right. Exactly. Yeah. They they were counted last year. They just weren't called out as a separate entity. Okay. That's interesting. So yeah, so we're still 800 students. February compared to here's one you just sent today. This one says 256. So one of them's the future year and

124one of them's current year. Is does one say 2526 and one say 2425? Expecting a So one's 800. You're expecting 800 student loss for for 256. I'm not expecting a student loss per se. I'm that's what I'm reporting is literally enrolled in our system right now for next year. So that will continue to change until we get to the school year because we're taking open enrollment. I appreciate it. No, that's okay. It was when he pulled it up, I could see the color. Thank you. Appreciate that. I knew we hadn't changed that dramatically in the school year. So I'm looking Exactly. Okay. Thank you. Clarification. Thank you. So I understand the challenge of the capture rate by school. We presumably can do the survival rate by school. We can ask and answer the question of

125kids who start at Cherokee. What percent are here? and we can have some sense of how different sites are doing in retaining. We c we can do that. We'll want to do a little bit further analysis. So depending on the school, there's there's a level of permanence in some parts of our community and there's a level of transience in other parts of our community. Yeah, I understand that. And I understand if I was a side leader, I would be listening to this and thinking, "Oh my gosh, is someone going to judge my performance as a principal because, you know, I have a 5% higher, you know, or 5% lower retention rate than a different school and I'm serving a totally different apples to orange." So there yeah there needs to be trust that we can

126right understand that but at the same time to have to purposely choose not to know whether some schools are doing a better job than other schools I think it's not I I think I think it's a fair question we we will also ask the question how did the students who've been with us for their entire educational career perform on our state assessments compared to those who were not with us the whole time so so we do a different dive on the data. So, not to judge in terms of because we know transiency sometimes is not within the purview of the principal, but if you're with us the whole time, then we own the the educational assessment from start to finish and not that someone brought came in deficient and we're trying to catch them up.

127So, I I think there's a way to look at the data that's non-threatening, but still helps tell a story. Yeah, I don't want to back away. I understand the non-threatening. I don't want to back away. on that made a good point before our deltas happen when they change buildings and if someone's changing buildings because I don't like this school another that's a change point and a potential loss point. Um so going back to the what can we control right if if families are going from you know three to four from you know third grade at this SUSD elementary to fourth in this one that's still a change that's still a potential loss point and that's still something we could potentially control. So I don't when we were talking at their retreat I mentioned accountability like

128again going back to this you know not want to call someone out and you know put the spotlight on them you know but I think from an accountability standpoint if there is loss it may be explainable it may very well be look the demographics of where my elementary school sits this is what happens um but I think putting it on the table is a good thing to have that discussion around so I don't want to shy away from getting down to school level data because I think it'll inform us so Jim Collins in the book good to great talks about confronting the brutal facts. So I absolutely agree we need to put the data on the table. I just want to have a cautionary note to not jump to conclusions without making sure that we've

129asked the five W's to really understand you know unpack to get to root cause and see what's happening there. So yes to the to the data and being thoughtful about okay let's not misinterpret what we're seeing without saying what other contextual variables might have impacted what we're seeing in the data. Yeah. And I would want to be very transparent with the site leaders and let them know, right? This is not, you know, us judging you and grading you. This is us trying to get to our goal of making Scottsdale school of choice and we need them more to find out and have them part of it. They know, right? And the the, you know, one school visit I've done since I started. Like it was a great conversation. Like they know their school and so

130that's valuable information to bring out. And so again, glad we don't want to shy away. They also know their trend. I mean, I was going to bring this up a little bit later, but Um registars registars see the future. Right. Right. Registars see the future. The registar at you know my kid goes to Cocoa. The registar at Cocoa knows this year you know I'm seeing a 10% increase in kids who are applying to Brophy or applying to Notre Dame right or what have you. So, and of course for any one child, we should focus on nothing but helping that family achieve what they're looking for. Um, so I want to be really careful about that. We would never want to think about it. I don't think we want to call anyone up and say, I

131see you've requested a transfer to go to Brophie. Can I sit down and talk to you and try to convince you to stay as a parent? That would have been very upsetting to me. That said, if the registar is noticing over the last three years, we're seeing it, you know, an increase in the number of families who are exploring other options as measured by transcript requests or counselor recommendations. I think that's again that's seeing the future. That's that's helpful. And and I and it's a within school trend line, right? Which me which I think addresses some of your concerns about differences across schools and and and so I I appreciate that. I I think there is a way to ask the question that may not be threatening. So I had a talk to a parent

132who had had mentioned somewhere that they're a former parent in our district. So I had I didn't realize that they had moved their kids and so I asked was there anything we could have done differently and in that case there was not anything we could have done differently. Our exit surveys do sometimes show where we could do something differently. So there are circumstances where uh the needs of the individual student might be different and there's nothing that we could do or change and then there are sometimes there are. So back to Mike's comment about what's within our control, we have to understand that and we also have to be cognizant that no matter what decision we make, it may uh draw some more and it may cause some more to leave. It goes back to,

133you know, you made the comment during COVID depending on which neighbor and side they would make a choice for a different reason. So I think from a board perspective, we have to be very clear on what the values are for the district. high expectations, high support, high achievement for our students. How do we make that happen across all of our schools? I I think you start with that and then you work backwards. And then the other thing Margaret's been working on this year in addition to attendance is open enrollment. So we would historically people would follow the timeline and and put in for open enrollment, but decisions were made much later in the process. And uh starting at the end of last year and then all through this year, Margaret's been on top of the

134principles to say, you know, we got to go through those open enrollment requests and get them in as quickly as possible. That way parents know that they're accepted into Scottsdale. They can plan accordingly versus sitting on a wait list until just before school starts in August and then they've already made another decision. So I I think we've changed procedurally in a way that's going to help us capture more of the open enrollment possibilities. Barbara, can I put you on the spot just on an overview of what are what are your experiences and thoughts as you have led this charge? Well, one of the things I always say in c in cap what gets measured gets done. Uh half of the on our way to kind of work on this problem was that who's watching? We

135need to be watching. We need to be watching attendance. We need to be watching enrollment. And we need to hold people accountable. And uh again, I want to compliment human resource uh Dr. Cruz and Dr. Lugo. We are watching those class sizes every day to see if our staffing is matching what our our uh enrollment beyond the two times a year. Uhuh. And also um Christine Harrington's um department also has helped us all to with marketing to turn us all to become ambassadors. And one of the things I heard at the board retreat was um when the facilitator says if you really want to know what's going on ask somebody what their friends are saying. I love that and that is so true. So we need to see what are their friends saying why are

136they going to such and such school and somebody I think I can't remember somebody said kids go where their friends go and so we need to really do the research but most of all holding people accountable because um enrollment when we have our uh principles meeting we say don't be smug thinking because your enrollment's high that your school's okay. Dr. Menzel says team one. So if we have high enrollment at Cherokee and we don't have high enrollment at Echko or Puma, we're all team one. We need to work together because I always tell him there's such a thing as changing boundaries if that was if that's what we need to do. So again, it's about educating our ambassadors to sell our schools. And also we as a district office, you know, the GEICO, our eyes

137are watching you. what are you doing? And we do a lot of research and a lot of sharing with like Seoia Elementary. When you look at their enrollment, you look at the principal, she's a master of selling her school and she really reels in those parents. And um so we're looking at all the trends of what's working, but somebody else said here, the principal is the real key. They they have to be unicorns. So that's it. Thank you. Any other staff comments to share? Christine? Yeah, I would just echo what um what Margaret said and in fact at the beginning of the school year, especially ahead of the SUSD expo, we did a lot of work with our principles as far as professional development focusing on the brand identity versus that brand perception and what

138it is. And perception is reality. I mean, we need to to do what we can to make the best brand ambassadors. They are our students. They are our parents. They are our teachers who have that lived experience way better than the prettiest ad in the world. But that branding and the layered approach and taking our tours and being able to walk through our campuses to be able to walk through our classrooms to see the engaged teaching and learning. We find that's where the connection is really made. Um, and we see that even in our marketing campaigns, the number of clicks that our newly designed website is receiving. And then additionally, the number of tours, those have shot through the roof as a result of this work. And again, it's then honing in on the message,

139the culture, the climate, being able to talk to the curriculum and answer the questions and be able to provide sort of a glimpse into what it is to be an SUSD student at Coochis, Sir Cherokee, Cheyenne, Tonalia, you name it. Um, but that's where we've really put a lot of our effort. Um, especially at the beginning of the school year, ahead of the expo so that everybody was primed and ready to have those conversations ahead of the open enrollment period. Shannon, yeah, just I just was going to grab you because I was you were just pointing. No, I was just Thank you. Thank you. So, I I will piggyback on what Miss Cerna and Miss Harrington just said and you know, when you come into a school as a parent and you're taking What is

140that first impression? How do you feel? And what is the experience of that tour? And you mentioned the principal that has the tour down packed. They're able to bring students in. That's so important. And then you have to deliver on what you presented. And I'm I'm a person of my word. So you know, if we're saying we're going to deliver something, we need to do that. And I think that that would make a huge difference as well. So Dennis, anything to add? Shannon. Oh, well, we're looking forward to your chart. All right. Are we ready to continue? Yep. Thank you. All right. So, these next two slides get into where our students live um by learning community. So, at the top left hand side is the Arcadia learning community. that the darkest part of each

141bar shows the percentage of resident students at the school. This isn't capture rate. This is looking at the enrollment at the school and where those kids live. So a resident student is one who lives in Scottsdale boundaries and attend schools school in their attendance area. The next part of the bar are the students considered as in district open enrolled abbreviated as OE for open enrollment. An in district OE student lives in Scottsdale boundaries and attends another school in Scottsdale rather than the one in their attendance area. Finally, there are the out of district OE students who live outside of Scottsdale boundaries and attend an SUSD school. Um, schools that are 100% o open enrollment schools without an attendance area are marked with a star. Those schools are Echo Canyon, Pueblo, Cheyenne, and Scottsdale online. Um,

142for further clarification, for example, at Arcadia High School, which is the first bar on the top left, 47% of the student population comes from within the attendance boundary with 46% of students enrolling from outside the district. At Hopi Elementary, 82% of the student population comes from within the boundary with only 11% of students enrolling from outside the school school district. See no questions. I'll keep going. I I paused because I was looking at two slides. The schools again with open enrollment, no attendance areas are starred and I heard Echo Canyon and I see PBLO and Cheyenne. Did I get them all? You did, but there's also Soul, which is not on these slides because they do not live in they're not housed in a learning community. Um Scottsdale online learning. Um they're just not represented

143here. Thank you. Guess a lot of this is geography, right? If you're closer to a border, it seems I'm just looking at the the schools here. It's where you are geographically. And if you're near the edge of the SUSD borders, you're kind of picking from the I talk myself in circles on this. Like at first, at first I thought school that has a high percentage of attendance is a successful school or that's a positive indicator because it means that you're assuming that there's a fixed amount of open enrollment that can come in. It means that your seats are being filled up by people in your attendance zone and therefore you have less ability to take in. But then conversely, schools that have large percentages of people choosing to go to them from outside the attendance

144zone, that's a positive indicator because people are choosing to go to them. So, I really Yeah, I didn't I don't So, will you walk us through a bar? Sure. Again, just Well, I think we understand it. Well, I'd like you to walk us through a bar. Matt understands it. Sorry. And I believe I understand it. But I'd like you to walk us through a bar. Okay. So, which school do you want to choose on this? I don't care. Okay. So, let's look at Chapperel. Top top right. Um I have to be able to see the numbers. Okay. 50 55 Thank you. percent of the students are students that live in the Chapperel boundaries are assigned to attend Chapperel. 18% are in district open enrolled, which means they're students that are zoned for probably Desert Mountain

145or Sarro or Coronado or um Arcadia potentially, but mostly Desert Mountain that are choosing to attend Chapperel instead of Desert Mountain. Um the last part, 27% are students that don't live in Scottsdale at all and are choosing to to attend Chapel. So feeder school kids this this this is about retention of students in a feeder system I would imagine are proportionately aligned to their feeder elementaryaries but we don't know that just yet do we don't know that okay uh and I know I have to add this to the variables sports program scholarship has been to me many times by parents for high schools that they'd like that that they go to a school because of a coach or a program or a successful record. Yeah. So, I don't know where we get that because that

146just feels like a a wonky ask, but it is a truth to address. I don't know how to ask it. Thank you for taking me through a bar. What do you mean it's a wonky ass? That people want sports and Well, extracurriculars. Say that again. That people want sports and extracurriculars. Yeah. I mean, maybe um you know, the girls basketball team yields 12 scholarships a year, so I want my daughter to go there. She's not saying it's a wonky ass that parents do that. She's saying it's a wonky ask to figure out how that causes some schools than other schools. Yeah, because it's a good ask. Yeah, my family was that. So yeah, um not a judgment on the parents part, just a No, how do we can we that is that is why kids

147go from charters to public in high school and that's why we see the numbers trend up in nth grade like um scholarship for kids. Yeah. Related to the feeder schools that go into the high schools, when you're a family is in our middle schools and it's time to register for high school, um is it correct that everybody's highly encouraged to apply, turn in their registration form for the high schools regardless of their choice of going somewhere else? At that point, they are uh metriculated up to the high schools automatically by our office, my office. Okay. So, we roll all the Cocoa and Copper Ridge eighth graders over to Chapperel and then it's up to the families to uh disenroll or unenroll. Okay. Okay. That's good. That's good information. So, no one has to apply for

148high school if they're already in our system. If you're at Eagleside, we already assigned you to Arcadia for next year, right? But you have to register. You don't have to register. You don't have to. Okay. So, there was an email that went out um encouraging I think it was Kokopa students to complete a form register I refer to this register may not be the accurate so there's an annual verification process where we ask families are you coming back next year and we asked them to uh verify their address for the next year purposes and so that probably is what email went out from Kokopa it wasn't a full registration process but we're basically saying can you let us know now if you're not coming so we know what our we want our numbers to be

149cleaner for next year because yeah a lot of times we don't know who's not showing up until August. Thank you. Just for the discussion, I'm I'm I've been moved by the Phoenix Union School District system that has its boutique schools. It's and we're we're we're playing with some and I don't have a sense of the draw. So, if Coronado has the fire uh program, then we we got 24 students, which is I don't know where we study that for those kind of boutique programs, but it might be a good ask. I know that in Phoenix Union, and I don't have the data in front of me, but I feel like they grew in their enrollment and it was very specific to the boutique programs. Just something to keep playing with. Yeah, it's just a reminder

150that sometimes you don't want to just ask why people leave. You also want to ask why they stay, right? Why they stay and and why they come. And you get you get a lot of good information on why people stay. So, we're about halfway through. I'll ask you questions. All right. So, this is the same information presented on the previous slide at the top. That's this is the desert. These are the Desert Mountain learning community. What their what their enrollment looks like and what Saro's learning community looks like. Um, overall looking at the bottom lefthand part. Oh, shoot. Sorry. Thank you. I always do that. All right. Thank you. All right. So again, Desert Mountain Learning Community on the top left, Sar Learning Community on the top right. Looking at Scottsdale overall, 50% of students

151live in Scottsdale and attend their school of residents. This isn't capture rate. These are just based on actual enrollment. So our enrollment is 50% of stu students are Scottsdale residents. 27% of students, actually it's more than that. 50% of students live in Scottsdale and attend their school of residents. 27% of students live in Scottsdale and attend another Scottsdale school. So that's our indistrict open enrollment. And finally, 22% of students live outside of Scottsdale and attend an Scott Scotssdale school. Um, students residing in 43 non Scottsdale school districts attend Scottsdale schools. It might be one or two kids, but we have kids from 43 separate districts attending schools in Scottsdale. Um, the top district of residents here obviously is Scottsdale. Students are attending Scottsdale schools. 76% Paris Valley School District approximately just over 7 point almost

1527.3%. Uh looking at students the next highest israton/ Phoenix Union students are attending here 3.64% um Baltz to Phoenix Union I'm using both terms because those our elementary districts and high school districts are separate um 3.41% for 1% and then Mesa and then Fountain Hills and Tempe and then the subsequent districts again are just a few students from v various districts. Okay. All right. And I'm gonna let Christine talk for a minute and give myself a break. Well, uh, with the new design, development, and, um, deployment of our new website in July, a lot of thought was put into the marketing of our schools, telling of the story because for the most part, we found that the folks that are coming to our website are those that are school shopping. It's what we link in

153all of our advertising, our marketing, our flyers, and such. And so, we really wanted to make it as user friendly as possible to connect parents with what the best opportunity is for their student. based on their grade level. And so we've driven a lot of traffic to tours and the opportunity for tours in eblasts and social media ads. And additionally, it's just prevalent on our website. And our tours numbers have just shot through the roof. And we're collecting so much data on not only the number of people who are requesting tours, but also where they're coming from. And as such, because every day I ask Stephen for another data point, he's like, "Can I just build a dashboard?" Of course you can. Um and because we do not have a CRM tool, what we have

154is somebody who is a lifelong learner over there and um looking to how we can optimize our resources really learn and leverage tools that are already at our fingertips like um like access like Microsoft access um power automate bookings help streamline some of these systems also for our sites. So, Arcadia, for example, is already using bookings to help alleviate some of the work um that comes with scheduling tours and then following up because we'd like to be able to automate all of the um additional thank yous and then also really track the additional follow-ups with the families to see if there's any additional questions we can answer for them. Again, thank them for touring, um but essentially try to close the deal and get them to enroll. So just so far since July 1, we've

155had 3,569 tours. Now we don't have 3,569 new enroles clearly, but what we found is that our tours are as much a retention strategy as they are a recruitment strategy. So there are a lot of people who are already in the trajectory to go for example myself with my daughter going from Pueblo to Mojave we were already in the system but you know touring the middle school to see what comes next you know just even for gaining a level of comfort. Uh and so what we're trying to ascertain is really who these families are and start to pull back the onion on are they people that are already in our system and would be going to the next place already? are they then looking at multiple middle schools in our system for kindergarten for example

156we know families are checking out a multitude of schools sometimes um and so it's been really interesting and fun to pull back the onion and then additionally to dig into the data to get some you know further insights that are going to make us better at understanding how it is that um folks are choosing SUSD and you can see when they tell us if they're a district resident or from outside and how they're hearing about us so number one there is word of mouth and it kind of speaks to uh what we were speaking about earlier is it is the neighbor, it's the fence talk, it's the sideline talk with their kids and it's where their friends are going certainly and so really how we build those brand ambassadors and focus on our brand identity

157which is what we want to control but also our brand image and how it is that we really nurture that out in the community. We're also looking at a new product that would be new to us, which is Zapier, which would help connect some of the dots between um data sets that live in other systems that aren't currently connected, for example, like K12 Insight. So, we'd be able to help um learn more from some of our customer insights and hopefully then be able to better act on them. Okay. So while when we looked at changes in over overall enrollment over time earlier in the presentation, this slide depicts the changes by grade level band. Our elementary grades had the greatest peak in the data and are now tren trending lower over time. Um middle school

158enrollment has steadily declined over the time period on the slide while high school enrollment held relatively steady until the past five years but started to go down. um looking at this information broken out by grade band and learning community. So um considering that the high school line on these slides is basically it's a one high school um each learning community is listed up here. I will point out that we we forced changes in enrollment during the pandemic year 2020 2021 where our elementary students that wanted to stay in synchronous learning online were all assigned to Echo Canyon for the spring semester of 2021 which is why you see a spike in an elementary enrollment in Arcadia learning community and a decrease in elementary enrollment in every other learning community at that point in time. That's

159an anomaly. Um the rest of it is kind of on trend that you can see. Arcadia High School is has enrollment has gone up over time a little bit to the most current year. Uh Chapperel is declining. Um and then we see some ups and downs in other areas too. Sarro also has seen some or so the SAR learning community elementary students has we've seen some increases in that learning community as well. Yep. Would you walk us through a trend line at Coronado? Elementary school enrollment in the Coronado learning community has gone down from 2014 2015. It was a high of about 1750. Right now it's under under 1,200. So at Coronado in the elementary schools. So that's the elementary feeders. It's all the feeders. So that would be okay. Ho ho come puma and

160not uh you have a pie. Thank you. Yeah. Middle schools tunnel. Yeah. Go ahead. Do these generally I don't know Scottsdale as well as I would would like to. Do these generally align with going back to the demographic side of things? So, are we generally seeing fewer younger families in Coronado and more in Arcadia or an aging homeowner or question? Yeah. Um or it's hard to eyeball. Yeah. I mean, I would say that even there's some new there's some new builds in the Coronado learning community that they're like very high-end apartments that people are renting. So, I'm not sure we're get really drawing students from those populations. Uh, thank you. Anything else? Do you guys want to comment on this area? Keep going. Everybody's quiet. Good read. Okay. Um, okay. So, this finally for me,

161this is the projected encry school enrollment by learning community. Um this is based on the applied economics report from the fall of 2022 based on 40th day enrollment over time. That's the the way that this these studies are run. Um so these pred predictions were generated three years ago. I think the nature of the changing um things in the especially with ESAs being expanded to every family right now in Arizona um could impact some of these predictions. And so I think I want to say interpret these with caution. I think they they could be um higher than what we're going to realistically see. So for that elementary school enrollment by learning community was projected back in 2022 to be going down in every community and that might be something to do with our also our

162declining number of students in the area. Um the highest at point was looking at Arcadia learning community. Actually, it was Chapel and Desert Mount were predicted to be the lowest number of elementary students going forward into 2029, 2030 at that point in time. Looking at middle school, this is the same same idea just looking at middle school enrollment by learning community. Um here it was predicted that middle school grade level enrollment in Arcadia learn and saw learning communities would increase but that the Coronado learning community would stay the same and that there would be decreases in the chaperel and desert mount learning communities. You know from a methodology standpoint since this is from the demographer things like competition you said ESA competition from charters aren't really accounted for here. This is purely demographic trends. Do

163you know if that's the methodology? He does include the charters when he does these reports. So he does look at that. Go ahead. He looks at charters. He looks at at um housing developments and and redevelopments and things that are in the pipeline based on what's been approved or contemplated. So he'll have some of that. The ESAs were not in existence the last time he did a study for us. So that would be the outlier in terms of at least what's taken into consideration. We're getting all those good axon apartments now us up. And finally, the high school projected enrollment. Uh, this is one where I really think there's over over projection for Chapperel, just looking at the current numbers we have at the at Chapperel High School. Um, but at that point in time,

164uh, the predictions were SAR and Chapperel would continue to grow in enrollment. Um, but the other three high schools would decrease. We might be getting full or tired. Yeah. So, so the the one thing that this causes me to wonder again, and it's not a decision point tonight, but um it takes a while for Rick to put together a demographic study. Uh, and so the the question would be for future consideration either on the May 13th agenda or later. Is is that something we want to do now? Even though we're making decision points, I mean, some decisions have already been made, but if we're going to make decisions down the road about buildings being open or closed by the end of this calendar year, it might be helpful to have that updated before then. So,

165so that might be something that we want to think about. Is it is it timesensitive? And if so, then our team needs to work on that. It's usually a four to six month process. I think it's it takes time. Since we've used them multiple times, do you know as part of the report what we got right and what we got wrong? It's really hard to tell with the charter schools um and where those are going to land. Um just from from what they delivered to us. Is that a section in the report since they got you in a backward glance in terms of how accurate were they? No, he hasn't done that. He has not done that. It could be put in the proposal. It could be. Yeah, that is something we could ask for

166um as what you know what did you have in the past and where have we been to see what it looks like. Um I think I mean I have looked at what did he say was going to happen, what happened. Um some schools are pretty close and some schools are not close um is is what you'll find. But we could absolutely add into the proposal. We want to see, you know, a glance back at what you did and how does that fit with what actually happened. You doing trends from exit surveys? I am. Um, so I'm going to take the mic from my friend Dr. Bachna and talk a little bit about trends that we notice from exit surveys. Um, and so what you're going to see in the next few slides are some visualizations

167that really represent some of the um, written feedback along with some of the selections that um, people make on our exit surveys. And so um, what you can see is over um, the past three years knowing that this year is not yet complete. And so every time we're thinking about this year, we know that there's still a couple of months left of surveys to deploy um, and information to gather back um, as we go forward. But we are roughly sending around um between 1,200 and 1,900 um surveys to families that withdraw. And then we um have represented just the number of survey responses that we have received. Um and so that's just uh marked by the response rate that we get within this first slide. What you're going to notice um over each year is

168we ask families to identify the types of schools chosen. Um where where are you headed when you um hit the road from Scottsdale Unified School District. Um thank you for the previous feedback around potentially asking them specifically like a name of a school. There's elements in the survey that I think we can um elevate moving forward. Um, but at this time what we're asking is really specifically to public schools, charter, private, faith-based, online, and homeschool. Um, so I'll just pause there for a moment and any questions that you may have specifically um related to that trend. Why don't you walk us through the bar trend of at least one of the years? Can can I can I just want to talk a little bit about the homeschool trend because that's not unique to Scottsdale. Uh,

169one of the things from a national perspective is that the projected number of homesooled families is going to continue to increase for the next decade. And so when you see that, I mean, go going from 8.6 to 16.4 just in that one year with our sample size, that's a pretty big jump, but that's consistent with some of the other trends we're seeing across the state and nation. Do we know why people are choosing homeschool over? I mean, that's a pretty big jump what you're seeing. So nationally, is there a specific thing that's saying no, I'm going like I is it is there a specific item that you could drill down to and say this is why they're choosing it more? We could I haven't analyzed the data to this capacity, but we asked a question

170about are you accepting an ESA? And we also asked a question about if you're choosing homeschool. So we might be able to make some conclusions that families are choosing to take the ESA voucher and use it for homeschooling. But I mean like sorry even beyond that. Yes, there's the ESA, but is it is it because they want a flexibility to travel as a family because their parents have that flexibility? Is it because of curriculum? Is it because of fears of being on a camp? Like that's what I I I don't know. My wonder. Sorry. It's a good one. Elements of choosing homeschooling to that point. I think you mentioned this before with the next slide of why they're leaving. We know for those who are going to homeschool, we would have the predominance of their

171reasoning. So we could back into say I think we can back into some of that and I think it would be worthy of further exploration as well. Some of my wonderings are around open educational resources. um the ability of families today to provide um an education in their home environment um within realm of alignment to state standards, access to resources is very different potentially than it has been in the past just given what's available in the marketplace that's open. Um so that would be one of my wonderings as well. Um is another way to say that homeschool is not a monolithic thing. It's a continuum. There are people homeschooling that are participating in online curricula and it might feel actually more like a school that's just being directed from home all the way to the

172family that's creating the lesson plans and or the groupies come together micro presumably it's also a place where concerns over curricula and other absolutely you know issues are being indexed as well. I also think co showed us how good it is to be with our kids and um saw that we could do it. You know, families can do it and it's an option for him. So, I think a lot of it stems from co the question that I emailed you. I was surprised by the percentage of people choosing public school since we are a public school. Um, and part of what I guess is that since the largest reason people are leaving on slide 30 is moving out of the area, I wonder if a large percentage of the people choosing public school are I'm

173going to California or New Mexico or Colorado and I'm planning to go to a public school there. So, it might be more useful to look at this factoring out those that are leaving somewhere else to get to the closer question of people who are still in this area, where are they going? Because I would be I mean, am I the only one? I'd be surprised if 30% of people leaving us are going to PV schools. No, no, they're not. So, when we look at the other data set, we are net winner in the school of choice environment. We we get more of theirs than they take of ours. So, yeah, I think that's fair. Nanny nanny boo. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think that those are fair wonderings, ways for us to look at the data

174and potentially ways for us to incorporate new um asks when we're sending surveys over time is are there other granular um questions we would want to seek from families. Um on the next slide, if we're ready to move in, this really trends um some of the uh open source uh families have the opportunity to type specifically some of their reasons for leaving um why they're hoping to go. And so this uh data set really just demonstrates again some of the moving out of the area, different reasons that um families may have indicated through their comments why they are departing. May, can I ask on that numbers wise? So, if there were 400 surveys received for 2324, I'm assuming not all 400 filled out this answer. So, the I'll pick a number in 2324 uh 10%

175for academic rigor. That's not 40 people, correct? That would not be 40 people. And so, um Dr. Dr. Bachna and I did spend some time trying to reverse engineer specifically from the match of parent comment to specific choice and it's just something we would need a little bit more time in order to get all the way down into that because and they could choose multiple reasons that wouldn't this they didn't have a singular option they could choose three of these um but if it's not you know this 400 was the high water mark and um I want to be conscious of the absolute numbers because some of these bars could be five people. I want to make sure we're not saying, "Oh, look at that bar how big it is." But in reality, and so,

176you know, this is always a sensitive area. Like, yeah, there's data, but what are the actual numbers? Um, you know, I like this because this is people telling us and, you know, not quite saying if you asked your neighbor, why would they say you left our school? So, not quite the same thing, but they are telling us directly and you know, I don't think anyone's going to be surprised by the reasons. Um, I would like to understand if we're on the same page collectively that these sort of are the scope of reasons or if anyone feels like they're ones that are left out like, oh, this, you know, I can't believe this. There's got to be some other thing or maybe it's buried inside of one of things like, you know, the bathroom thing is

177buried inside of safety concerns or something. So, that's important because I think if we keep going back to this, you know, What are we trying to do? What can we what can we accomplish? I think if there's differences on why that's going to be challenging going forward. I remember sadly losing a few folks and it was about a staff disagreement and I didn't know where that might live on a withdrawal. I I think there is a a pulse of that that I had a fight with one of the staff members and we just couldn't settle it and I left out you know just customer service happens. Absolutely. We see that in their verbatim response, but they also are typically checking one of these boxes. Okay. And so we have multiple ways to catch it, but

178the verbatim responses is uh pretty telling because they'll get granular. Sure. Okay. These are the exact um options they have to click or There's more than this. There's more than Could we get a copy of the exit survey? Yeah. Thank you. But just want to pause on that. Like does anyone think that there are reasons not covered here? Because I think that's important. So So there's an other category in each one of these where so if they didn't feel like one of these fit for them, they can click other and sometimes they'll do both and then they'll identify something specific. What we haven't seen so far at least is the need for another category based on those others. So if if if we had seen a trend where you know this is a common theme

179in the checking the other box we would have added another category. I don't think we've seen that yet in the conversations we've had. Are you doing the coding on it? Yeah I work on it. Okay. Well Amy proposed one which is um I mean I don't want to put words in your mouth but the curriculum the how would you describe concerns over the curriculum? I think I think we all got the exit sorry we all got the exit survey results. So if you take the time to read through there, I think might help us also come up with um because you can read in there. People do talk about that they talk about curriculum in there. I think that probably falls under the pre market under academic rigor. I don't know if we could add

180academic rigor and I don't know and what curriculum or I think those are distinct ideas. Yeah, that' be useful separating and understanding. Yeah, because it's definitely not noted in those exit surveys. Karen, did you add that? Yeah, you know, it's we're Scott Unified is selling a product, which is what we put out for students to consume and taking a look at what product we're putting out and um parents want the product that we're selling essentially is something to look at and um I think is very broad and you break it down to what is a product curriculum, we probably get a better idea of what it is. Did you feel like you understood what was being asked? Can I add one more thing? I don't know if it was Amy or Karen, but someone suggested

181that we make sure because previously we weren't sending the exit surveys to families that still had kids in the school district. It was you. And and we changed that. And it's been it's been good because we're realizing, wow, a lot of people are only choosing to remove one student from our school district, but they have other students still here. So, it's been great to capture that information on the survey. I have a question. Is there's uh something we can do to to better capture, you know, the information from people because we get so many emails, right? And if you don't really care, why would you take the time to do this? We need to make them care. Um and need even if that's a call from someone at the school um because Why would you

182and you know what I mean? They don't understand the importance of it and and we need to help them understand that. Agreed. I think it's a great high school business marketing class. No, seriously. I think if we were a university, we would use our current students to call alum to do that. I think this is a great student project to activate them against and it's going to create something great for college and for work and and someone's more likely answer probably right a current student reaching out. I would love to see these same bars on the why I stay uh retent especially the long term. Um, and then this final side that you see here really is um to the point of our our parents do type specific reasons and as you go through and

183synthesize you are able to pull individual kernels, you're able to pull some trends and so we were able to synthesize through some of the correlations between the different concerns that were typed in. And these three really surfaced um as the predominant trends just based on the an not anecdotal but what was written um by the respondents. And so we did notice that technology overuse is correlated to academic rigor concerns and so that um the comments related to uh that uh those were connected to each other. Um discipline and policy enforcement was correlated to bullying safety concerns maybe how those are handled. Um you can see in those exit surveys you guys uh received them really how families are feeling about the policies, the treatment, the the enforcement there. Um and then also uh lots of

184special special education comments come through and come up really that the um concerns from special education do have a tight correlation with potentially not feeling uh supported by school administration or things happening at the school site that caused um a level of frustration within supports for students with disabilities and um often referenced our IEPs, IEP meetings and those types of things. Um each of these concerns I think as they trend and rise are are very important for us to see and um to your point previously if there are other things we should be sourcing or or seeking additional information on we would be interested in hearing those as well just so we can also respond by action not like here tonight. We could do that too. Yes, Dennis. We have plenty of capacity in our

185district to grow. I can end it there or I can go on. I actually have something that I put together today. I'm not sure if they didn't give me a good slide because they wanted me to just free flow and just take over this place or if they wanted me to just be quiet and get through this. So, uh, take one, pass it along. Um capacity for from the building services perspective is in the design specific to the fire marshal and egress of our buildings and the capacity of the buildings and not capacity with students but capacity of people. So if you are having a family fund night and or a teacher uh uh conferences, they want to tell us what the capacity of the school is so that we don't overfill it and are

186not be a able to exit in the event of emergency. So when we went to Hopi not that long ago and I shared with them that the capacity of Hopi was 851 people, they about lost their minds. And um it it was for me to explain to them that that number is important for the purpose of gatherings. Okay. So we get capacity data from the health department. how many toilets, how many urinals, how many sinks and that dictates what our capacity is. We get capacity information from the school facilities board and um they don't really look at um any of the specials, any of the resource classes. They only look at square footage and number of bodies of students. So in 201920 Dr. Sackos and Dr. Hoggot at the time Margaret's position um they went

187through and they really drilled down to program capacity. What do you do in your school? What are all the different things the different offerings that you have? Do you have Spanish? Do you have LRC? Do you have ELLL? Do you have all the different alphabets of supporting students? and they did a really nice job and they came up with the numbers that applied back then. That work needs to be redone and I believe we've got plans to to do that again because programs do change. Uh gifted was once at Hopi, then it got moved over to Tavon and then Gifted grew back at Hopi. And so there's a lot of things that have to be considered when we talk about capacity. Since Hopi was a the subject of um a little bit of consternation lately

188recently, um I did this little exercise for uh an over there. And really the ideal number for her school is 660. And when we designed schools, back when I started in 95, when we designed schools, it was really, really easy. We took six grade levels. We multiplied it by four classrooms. We we multiplied that by 25. Boom. There's your school. And not much more than that. It wasn't nearly as complex as it is today where we sit in visioning committee meetings and we talk about every offering that that school has today and then try and design looking forward to what they may do in the future. But if you go to a a program like um Hoocom where we have the six school houses, kindergarten through sixth grade or fifth grade, and each schoolhouse has

189four dedicated classrooms, a midsize room for whatever resource they're teaching, two smaller rooms, and one really small room that's really just an office. Um, that was the model that we used to figure out how we were going to take care of all of the different things that happened because if you just fill every single classroom, which is what's happening at Hopi right now, you have no place for the other things. And so you have to reduce that student body somewhat to be able to take some of those classroom spaces and subdivide them. Another example is at Navajo. We held off and we did not build out the D building. Thank you, Dr. Mensel. And uh we waited and then they started to fill back up. Their population grew and then we determined what their needs

190were. And so that that DB buildingild that was once 10 full classrooms turned into only four classrooms, a cool down space because they have just the small PE room and then uh multiple spaces for the different resource folks that are there. So a classroom can be turned into a 900 square foot classroom can be turned into three different size spaces uh for those resource folks. OTPT, LRC, ELLL. Yes, ma'am. So I I understand the complexity of thinking about kind of a school by school. Imagine like a bar graph and we're at percent of capacity. I understand it's non-trivial to think about kind of what a 100% looks like in terms of the number of students, but just maybe zooming out since, you know, it's it's late in the evening. Um, have we reduced the number

191of sites since 2007 2008? No, we have not. And we're at 75% of the students. So is it fair to say again I know how it distributes is complicated but just as a lay person the same physical plant 75% of the population ergo we have excess capacity yeah that is fair to say yeah we do so ka when it was originally built in the in the late 50s Um, it was a K6, so it was built with more classrooms. When we rebuilt it, we right-sized it, shrunk that school, so it's not a 900 uh student school anymore. It's more like a six to 700 student school depending on their offerings. So, but but to answer your question very specifically, we have plenty of space that needs to be considered what to do with But that's

192a really good correction. Thank you. We could have the same number of sites, but in the rebuild process, you know, we now use space differently. We've got maker labs and this and that and the other thing. So, that's I appreciate you correcting me on that. Um, thank you. So, I'll I'll stop there. Um, I could talk about capacity for a long time. As a facilities guy, um it drives me nuts to walk through classrooms and see one teacher, three kids all day long and they're in 900 square feet. Um we have potential savings in electricity. Obviously, we have potential savings in custodial cleaning services. There are other savings that we could see by either consolidating the school within itself and saying this wing is off limits. you cannot go there. Um, but there are amenities

193in, let's say, Mountainside for instance. There is a sixth grade wing, a seventh grade wing, and eighth grade wing. And those amenities are in each one of those wings for those grade levels. So, you have to be very careful about how you consolidate within the school. You can't take eighth grade and put them in the seventh grade wing and call it good. So, there's a lot to consider and and we're going to really start working on that in earnest because if we're not consolidating within the school, then we need to consider closing. And uh from a budgetary perspective, decisions need to be made by December of this calendar year for something that would be put in motion for 2627. So from a backwards planning perspective, December is an important timeline. Are we at closing thoughts?

194Uh yes, we might be at processing rich information we just received too. Any other immediate comments on the immediate topic of capacity? Okay, I can sense a tired room. All right, what we're going to do is um first of all, staff and and Dr. Thank you for an amazing rich collection of the data you're already on top of but that you took extraordinary amount of time to analyze and consider for this discussion. Job very well done. Uh amazing hours. I'm going to guess a hundred or more when I count each person and the people you worked with and the time you spent to prepare for tonight. Thank you very much. Even though it's data you have, it takes time to work through it, to present it, and put it together. I'm going to ask each

195board member to reflect on three questions and we'll go around the room and share. So, just take a minute to think. What was your greatest takeaway or two or three if you have more uh what what did you learn under that takeaway or what what was what was verified for you under your takeaway as you think about what did you walk out the door going this mattered tonight because I got this out of it. So, that's one. Um then I'd like each of us to share you know well and next we need to consider the following next steps. What are our next steps? And one or two would be great. If you have more fine and then my third question in closure is um what was helpful about this approach to a study session uh

196and was it valuable for you? Would you like to see this approach continue? So uh I'll I'll start with Karen and around counter. I'll skip and go to Amy. Go ahead. Um, yeah. Well, any information is good information, right? I feel like being on the board a couple years and paying attention years prior um I know a lot of this information. and it's presented differently, but um so I appreciate the study session as this is really the first one uh we've gotten to have, but I would like to see uh we didn't touch on private at all and you know I think that information needs to be especially when it's affecting I think Chaparel um you know like Notre Dame that's all I hear about now and what is their weight list like and um

197what you know things like that. I think that's information we need. Great. Was there any particular takeaway that popped out for you? Just the whole thing. Okay, great. All right, Matt. My biggest takeaway um is that demographic curve for Scottsdale. I mean, I kind of knew speaking in business terms that our market was shrinking, but that was much steeper than I really appreciated. Um terms of next steps, I really do think the survival rate is really key to those we keep which is start with of the survival sounds so well yeah I'm using more of like a health uh research term but of a hundred kids who started in kindergarten keep how many are there in the senior year um I really at the end of the day a lot of this question of you

198know are they quitting for this reason and that reason we might be able it it would look very different if 90% of them were still there you know And it would first is these constant ins and outs. But then the big thing is which I fully expected and I appreciate this is a journey. We we covered a lot of the what's happening but not the why. So I I think this did reveal the urgency of systematic thinking about the why. Like to Mike's point, we can't have marketing during tours try to understand using five ways of asking about what's important to you and then ask a um family that's leaving the exit survey five other ways of formulating what's important to you. Really thinking systematically across all the different touch points of the why. And

199then as we talked about also why people stay because if you only index on why people leave, you know, drop your product, you can sometimes go in a bunch of wrong directions versus where the largest amount of your business is in any year, which is all the people who are actually staying with you. So why they're staying. Um, and then I forget what your third the approach to a so to a study. Yeah, I love this. And probably my favorite part was all of us being around a table uh both staff and board members and colleagues and feeling like we're one big group that's all rowing in the same direction. So I really like this feel. Thank you Matt. Mike um similarly main takeaway the seeing the enrollment drop and seeing the headwinds we have

200right again staying away from causality but you know if there's five things hitting you in the face you know that that's causing you to slow down. And so seeing them all there together was helpful um if not apparent before but it's good to see it that way. Um another takeaway I had mentioned before the the basis great hearts and not focusing on them specifically but the fact that we don't abandon our students like that I just think is just so core to our identity and it's hard to bring out um you know that that is our mission and what we do and I just love seeing that there. um next steps. I had said um I could see a similar session going down to a school by school level um because that to me gets

201to actionability. There's nothing direct here from actional that's actionable and that's not a bad thing. This was a wonderful place to start. It was amazing. Um but if we start to say well then so what and what next? To me that doesn't happen unless you start getting down specific and you know people in this room know that really really well and I think for them either people here or you know uh principles to share with us and tell their story um I think will help get us to what can be done and again as a board member I'm not doing it um but I want to know what is being done and I fully believe people are but I also believe we could be doing more and you know Margaret's comment U accountability I think

202is a positive one and that to me gets down to that next level. Uh and then what was helpful is getting to consensus and I don't think we're all ever going to think the same thing. So that's not what I mean but I think what I'm saying is we're hearing the same data at the same time in the same way. Um I'd like to think that if we draw different conclusions from the same thing we're open about it and share um but we have a good level setting point. we can always come back to, hey, remember when we did the study session in April 2025 and we had slide 17 up like that's what that like that's a good touch point to come back to. Um I fully believe we'll be doing that over the

203next months and years. So that's a good thing for us. Thank you. You know, when you have a brand like Starbucks, I go to Starbucks because I know what I'm going to get. So, but when we put the brand out there, the product has to match it. And so, I don't know if our product matches the brand at this time. So, my kids were perfect examples of they were going to go to prochial school and families said, "No, you need to go here. It's better than private school." and it was so but the brand matched the product at the time and um that's really what what I took away. There's a lot to work um I I agree with board member Patinsky. Uh we got to the what but not the why. And I think

204the why is very important and um you know you you were superintendent for a long time, Scott. You've been a superintendent like 24 years and it does amaze me a little bit that you guys don't come in and pinpoint the the obvious of why we are in the spot that we are and we're sitting around, you know, talking and talking and talking, but there are some obvious things that I would kind of expect for you guys to um to have answers to. Uh and the other thing is, and I know I just called you Scott, it was actually inappropriate of me. I would hope that moving forward we would actually hold these meetings and um addresses each other in a formal manner and just bring up the standard of the meeting a little bit. All

205right. Thank you so much. Did you like the study session? I've always liked study sessions. So, great. Great. Um, so I have several uh takeaways and the conversations have just been so rich tonight. I learned so much about our actual open enrollment attendance areas at some of our schools, 43 separate districts coming into our schools, watching the ESA expansion, uh the weight lists that are in place. That was really clarifying for me. I enjoyed seeing the youth under 18 or 19 that helped me realize the the true end count uh of what's happening. Um and uh I I do look forward to more why on families giving us a try or families staying with us. Uh, I do think the next conversations are going to be about demographics, facilities at a site level or boundaries

206as Margaret brought up, rightsizing our schools uh for efficiencies. Uh, so that's kind of where I think I think we're headed. Um, I like that we're wondering what is and isn't in our control. Um, I think the five W's are spot on. Um, I like the idea of focus group of registars getting together and telling us what they really know. I think that'll really be insightful if we could just aggregate some registars insight. Um I like the addressing of the speed of open enrollment as a bureaucratic obstacle to overcome. Thank you for bringing that to the table. Um I uh overall just think that the teaming that happened tonight was healthy and thoughtful and uh productive. So I just app appreciate the culture shift that's been introduced to study sessions and thank you very much

207for accommodating our desire for this depth and honoring the time we wanted to spend in this topic and I'd like you to finalize any sentences or summarize before comment sorry miss Warner when you say like the brand is different in the product that's a great observation you said there's some obvious things that we could they could be doing but when would be an appropriate time to share those and please I'm not putting you on the spot but I feel like it's something left unsaid and I feel like we can't get to a good point if it's left unsaid. So, I would hope there's a place or a time where you could share that because I want to know. I really do. I I value your opinion and I just feel like it was put out

208there and it's gonna I'm going to walk away from this and say I don't know what she's talking about and that's going to stick with me and so please I'm not putting on the spot but I would hope at some point there's a venue where you could talk about those and whether it's one-on-one or whether it's here because I don't know I don't know what the difference is and what you're saying. So board member um Shy I have had many many conversations related to the topic with Dr. and we just haven't gotten anywhere. And so today would obviously not be appropriate, but it follows in with the Y. So when we can put together another meeting with the Y, that would be great and that would be an appropriate time. And I know Dr. Menzel

209knows what the issue is. And um because we we've hashed it out many many times. So um there are obvious things and we should address them, but until you know we can get the the captain of the ship on board, it is it's challenging. Thank you for sharing. All right. Well, in the name of the healthy few things, I'm almost ready to pivot to the closure. Closure. Uh, yes. As we we move forward in that healthy manner of conversation and straightforward addressing of issues. Uh, what are you hearing and what's your synthesis? Well, so there are a number of things. One, I appreciate the opportunity to have a deep dive. I think study sessions are really helpful and and while it's a lot of work for our team, it this was not at all wasted

210work. uh as we spent the time going through the data, asking the questions and interrogating um there are things that that we took away that help us plan for the future. So from that perspective, uh the team appreciates the chance to to do this. Uh I uh agree. I think a table that's closed like this creates a different kind of conversation than when you have an open-ended U or people are standing doing formal presentations. uh and so appreciate the fact that that it seems that it's resonated well for everyone here. My wonders uh are and I don't want my team to shoot me but I still don't know if we have enough study sessions scheduled because the the nature of the next steps. So Mike talked about board member Shy talked about drilling down into

211the next level of of the why and building by building, right? That's one thing. The planned next study session for June was to go over our academic achievement data and that's that's also a a long meeting in and of itself. It's it's also a wildly important goal and I don't want to lose that. So I I think we should think about what's the right cadence. Do we have enough? And then the the third thing is I worry about June in particular because uh we have a lot of core business that has to get done. So to do like we did tonight and say we're going to We had one other thing that was timesensitive, but we we cleared the deck of anything else. Had many requests for, hey, can we put it on the agenda?

212And we said, no, June's harder to do that in because our study session is the last one in June, which is when we have to approve final budget and all of the rest. So unless we schedule another meeting for that, we we are going to bump up against just the practical reality of there is we we need two meetings in June for the work of the board in addition to the study session. And historically we don't meet in July um for obvious reasons. I think people leave the state in July. It's really hot. Uh you get a break then you can get into your normal cadence. So I'm I'm not proposing anything now. I'm just saying that one of my wonders coming out of this, given the nature of the conversation, is if we need

213to to do more, we should think about what that looks like and what the cadence is, and um determine at some point whether or not we're going to continue with the plan on academic achievement, which I would recommend, and then figure out when we have the next step on the building by building because we're not going to lose what we've done tonight. But again, the cadence matters as we're heading into next year. All right. So, we may want to put on the agenda uh an adjustment to the calendar in the future and let's all sleep on that. Think about it. Sleep was the operative word. I think we're ready to call it a night. All right. I adjourn the meeting. Thank you all.