001check foreign I called to order this special meeting of the Scottsdale Unified School District number 48 governing board today is Tuesday June 6 at 6 pm vice president Werner can you please lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you start with a roll call vote from my far right please Amy Carney Zach Lindsay Karen Warner and I'm Julie sunowski we do have a quorum this evening with four of our five governing board members present I believe Dr hartwell's will attempt to join us remotely this evening at this time I'd like to ask for I'd like to make a motion to approve the agenda as presented is
002there a second second all in favor say aye aye that motion passes for zero thank you we're going to superintendent's comments Dr Menzel well good evening president sunowski vice president Werner and members of the governing board just a few quick Updates this evening we do have a full agenda but first we received word today that three more Scottsdale Unified School District students will receive National Merit Scholarship Awards they will be announced officially tomorrow all three are from Desert Mountain high school and that brings our total of National Merit Scholarship winners to 10. the the college-sponsored merit scholarship winners whose names will be announced tomorrow are part of a distinguished group of more than seven thousand one hundred and forty High School seniors who received the National Merit scholarships for college undergraduate study totaling nearly 28
003million dollars second thing that I'd like to talk about is good news Arizona Helping Hands is an organization that supports Foster youth here in the state and it was one of the Charities that was near and dear to Dr creekgard and he had worked with them on raising funding for a mobile unit to be able to serve parts of Arizona outside of Maricopa County they were successful in raising the funds for the mobile unit and on Sunday morning at 7 40 there will be a feature on Channel 3 highlighting the the mobile unit and the work of Creek guard friends and family related to that successful fundraising efforts I just wanted to bring that to people's attention I think it's a really positive thing and a testament to his care and concern for all students
004also want to make a plug we have two positions available on our self-insurance trust board so if you are a member of our community and interested in serving on the self-insurance trust board you can find the application on our committee Hub two year there's one two-year term and one three-year term available and just want to encourage people to check that out and express interest and then two other things that I think are really important to highlight tonight first is our summer PD Institute it's in its second week over 100 sessions were offered with nearly 1 000 session registrations this is just shy of a sixty percent increase in registration from last year sessions have been available for classified certified and administrative staff spanning pre-k through 12th grade the topics varied from creative play science of
005reading curriculum mapping educational technology design thinking and project-based learning CPR and so much more in the next few weeks we will be able to confirm registration to provide you final participation numbers as well as teacher feedback that we're Gathering From a survey that's being provided across all of these training opportunities I want to give a huge thank you to each teacher who attended and the other staff members who participated as well as those who facilitated the training and finally summer learning while high school summer school is in its second week of session one serving 1400 plus students from susd as well as non-susd students Elementary and Middle School summer programs began this week Elementary programs include boost offered at Pima and Redfield along with gifted at Redfield ELD at hohokum in 21st century throughout the
006district at Tavon Yavapai Pima Navajo and tonalia the extended school year program for special education students is hosted at Navajo in Coronado the Middle School bridge program is being hosted online for standards-based synchronous and asynchronous learning learning time for students in grades six through eight plus we've partnered with ASU for a special algebra Readiness course for incoming 9th grade students which is also hosted online lastly yesterday we launched a summer learning website for all students to take advantage of this is a One-Stop site designed to keep kids engaged in learning or even help them get prepared for the next grade level featured in The susd Source this month and promoted by teachers and principals we have initial statistics from the first day which was yesterday where people are not only accessing the website from here
007in Scottsdale but also various States across the country and other countries Canada Mexico France Spain Albania and India so far nearly 300 people have accessed the site in the two days it's been alive I want to give a shout out to our Dynamic teaching and learning team who put together these robust engaging summer learning opportunities for our students and staff and especially thank Carly Donna Diane and Bernie for getting this online summer learning portal available for families to support their students during the summer break thank you Dr Menzel I wonder how many of those students that are logging in abroad are from our district could be some yeah we're going to move on to the information discussion portion of this meeting first up is the first read and the AP European History by Dr Benson
008and Dad's Karen and Ms Scott I believe good evening governing board members president sinowski vice president Werner board members Dr Menzel Gladys those present those in the cloud I'm here tonight with Jill Scott our social studies coach and we are presenting to you a first read for a recommendation for advanced placement European history course tonight we are presenting to you information about a curriculum review we've completed in preparation for a new course that has been added to our high school planning guide next year we will offer at Saguaro High School a new elective for AP European History so we kicked off a curriculum review to select the materials for that course artwork was really driven by academic excellence and optimized resources specific to our strategic plan and as you might remember last month Johanna and
009I were here and we shared the robust process for the science curriculum adoption I want you to know we followed that same exact process but the scope of the work that Jill and I have done with our committee was a little bit different this is one course an elective being offered at one school so rather than the breadth of a 612 we're sharing with you recommendations tonight for one course but on our district website that we've linked here for you you will see the committee recruitment the timeline and our posting of all committee documents our committee was a small But Mighty group comprised of two parents and two teachers two of the parents that we had on our committee one was a AP art history teacher and a reader for AP art history and another
010is a parent in our community who has a passion for AP European History and still to this day has their textbook from when they were a student in AP Euro and the two teachers that we had on our committee one is the teacher who would be teaching this course next year and then the other teacher is a teacher who hopes that at their school in 24 25 that they will offer this course also Jill and I were there along with our trusted deity from our teaching and learning team our timeline we started in March and we've been running through today and our material is on display over at the MDA outside of our office area which is Illustrated here in this picture this we just wanted to share a little bit about our process in
011terms of dates that we've met I wanted to highlight that we were wondering when we would see you we didn't know if we would see you in May or now which it's now and that was all pending when the materials would arrive for us to actually begin reviewing but again this just captures the timeline for our committee meeting and US reviewing curriculum our overall process we identified the criteria based on the course requirements referring to the AP course guide we then sent out the materials excuse me the the criteria that we were looking for in our materials to all of our Publishers to see if they would be interested in participating once materials arrived we used our rubrics to review and then as a group we came to consensus on a recommendation that we would
012like to have a vendor come present to us which they did we had some follow-up conversation and our small group consensus for our rubric we were fortunate that last year we had done an AP econ and an apgov adoption so we were able to utilize that same rubric we found it to be appropriate for the AP course we liked that it was aligned for standards and depth of knowledge ease of use and support in terms of teacher use of the material and student use of the material and that the resource would allow for engagement and the ability to meet student needs through differentiation the recommendation that we have for you is published by cengage it is Western Civilization since 1300. our proposed budget again a little different than what we came before you with a
013large Comprehensive Science adoption we are looking to not exceed ten thousand dollars we are requesting a four-year agreement for the first course that would be for approximately five thousand dollars our second year if we expand it would be an additional forty eight hundred dollars and you will see we have a four year and a three-year agreement commonly we would do a seven year agreement but we do know that many of the Publishers will be creating new textbooks and we wanted to be able to see what the new materials would look like perhaps in the next four or five years so we are committed to appending your approval a four-year agreement with cengage any comments or questions board members any questions board member Kearney thank you so much president sunowski thank you for that presentation I
014just have a question on um what metrics we'll be using to decide if you're going to be expanding this course or not so typically add a new course to our high school planning guide what the school does is they then put it out to see if there are teachers who are interested and that there are students who are interested so that's typically our first metric when we are launching something like a new elective like this so after our new teacher does this for us next year we hope all goes well based on what we see across the valley other districts who are utilizing AP Euro as well as across the country we do know it's a popular course so we do anticipate that there will be high interest the other school would be Chaparral next
015year okay thank you and then what other districts are using this same curriculum for this course in terms of the cengage probably have to look into what Paradise Valley is using using for AP Euro but we could certainly get that information to you from our neighbors that have AP Euro okay just wondering if you looked at that at our neighboring districts and what they were using we didn't look to the neighboring districts we used our rubric okay and our our committee's thorough review okay thank you yeah thank you any other questions all right seeing that they're none thank you okay we're going to move on to academic achievement updates Dr bakna and Dr Simonson I believe Simpson thank you good evening Dr president zinowski vice president Warner governing board members Dr Menzel and Mrs Wagner
016I'm here tonight to provide an academic achievement update for susd Dr seamson is also present to answer any questions related to the statistical analysis components that she conducted while we were compiling this presentation tonight we are going to look at the results of the four assessments listed on the screen the first test is given to the majority of our students is called the aasa for short that stands for the Arizona's academic standards assessment we give this test to our third through eighth graders and it covers English and math standards for each grade level the English test is a combination of reading and writing with students across all grade levels required to respond to a writing prompt on one of the testing days the aasa is a multi-day exam generally taking between three to five days
017to administer during the testing window if a student does not complete all sections of a test they do not receive a score AZ Psy is Arizona's Science assessment which is given at the end of 5th 8th and 11th grades since it is not given at every grade level the test covers multiple grade bands of science academic standards next we'll be discussing the results of the ACT Aspire which Arizona administers to all of its 9th graders this test has been phased out by the testing company but several states are still using it with some populations of their students and finally we will be reviewing the results of the act or American College Testing National exam both this and the ACT Aspire cover English science math and reading I also want to point out when we get
018to slide 11 which will go into further detail later that our 11th graders are double tested in science during 11th grade once on the national exam and once on a state exam assigned a line to the Arizona Science standards this is the preliminary data that we're talking about tonight that's been released by the testing companies to all of the school districts in Arizona the final results will be released by the Arizona Department of Education in the fall and at that point in time the results will only include full Academic Year students that spent the majority of the Year enrolled in our schools the results generally shift modestly at that point at that point by a percentage point or two and generally those results are slightly up on this slide you will see our preliminary results
019in comparison to the state averages in English language arts arts which I'll refer to as Ela going forward you can see that we are consistently significantly outperforming the state averages across all grade levels by as many as 24 percentage points our highest Ela achievement was demonstrated by our fourth graders this year with 69 of our students passing the state exam and here are two-year Trends by grade level these are unique groups of students not the cohort Trends here you see that in the third and fourth grades our students perform the same in Spring 2022 and spring 2023. a highlight on this slide is our sixth graders where our current your sixth graders outperform the prior year group by of six by six percent for going from a 53 passing in sixth grade sixth graders in
020Spring 22. to the current year sixth graders that just finished up having that 59 passing rate we saw modest decreases in fifth seventh and eighth grade performance on this test our cohort Trend data is on the screen here now the top box is Scottsdale unified district and the bottom box are the state comparisons what we mean by cohort data is these are the students going from taking the previous year test as third graders in Spring 2022 to how they performed as fourth graders in Spring 2023 and so on and so forth down the line through to eighth grade again we're looking at English language arts on this side um we saw we saw a decline in fourth to fifth grades fifth to sixth and seventh to eighth grades we do show an increase of four
021percent in our third to Fourth and sixth to seventh grade cohorts in comparison the state data shows a similar but smaller decrease in the fourth to fifth grade cohort and a bigger decrease in the seventh to eighth grade data we'll be meeting with our middle school principals next week to discuss the fifth to sixth grade decline in ela as the state overall showed an improvement in these scores while susd did not we need to better understand if it's the test or if it's our instructional practices that need refinement to better suit the needs of our learners this slide portrays the relationship between student attendance and aasa performance level there are four performance levels on the aasa from left to right the four columns represent the lowest to highest performance Levels by grade level the navy
022blue and yellow columns display non-passing test scores while the teal and blue columns represent passing test scores along the vertical axis are attendance rates a hundred percent attendance rate would be a student who has perfect attendance while in ninety percent attendance rate indicates a student that has missed 18 days of school across all grade levels our students who have better attendance are passing the tests at higher rates than students with lower attendance levels moving on to math we continue to significantly outperform the state across all grade levels in general math achievement in Arizona is measured by the aasa's low especially at the middle school grade levels our own results are lowest in eighth grade with 47 percent of students passed in the exam while they are highest in third grade with 70 percent of students
023passing the AAS aasa this past spring Scottsdale students outperform the state average by 29 percentage points in fourth grade our two-year Trends in grade level math performance show an increase of current year third fourth sixth and seventh grade math scores over the prior your students in the same grade level we saw five percent decline in fifth grade performance and a three percent decline in 8th grade math performance it is when we dig deeper into our cohort Trends in math that we need to take a more detailed look at how we can improve the educational experience there are some bright spots our sixth to 7th graders and seventh to 8th graders showed year-over-year improvements in math in fact even when the state declined in sixth to seventh grade performance our sixth to seventh graders increased their
024passing rates our third to Fourth Graders maintain their performance it is in fourth to fifth grade math where a decrease of five percent points in susd was larger than the state decrease and in fifth to sixth grade math with susd cohort went down 13 percentage points that are the biggest causes for concern sixth grade math covers new domains at the elementary grade levels do not which we think is part of what's happening in our data going from fifth to sixth grade is also where the majority of Scottsdale students switch schools which we know that is a big time of transition and looking a bit deeper in the sixth grade cohort in particular we found that two of our three K-8 schools showed Improvement in math scores from fifth to sixth grades so there's something to
025be said about the impact of that school change on academic achievement we need to look further at how we can foster the increasing achievement we're going we're seeing in the 7th and eighth graders among our sixth graders we know that our students and teachers are working hard at all grade levels but our current methods need review and refinement in certain areas again looking at our attendance much like we saw with English language arts across the board are students who Miss more school are not doing as well on the state assessment it's especially pronounced in our minimally proficient 8th grade math students moving on to our AZ size scores it's interesting to note that we saw a significant increase in fifth grade of 11 percentage points over spring 2022 a one percent increase in eighth grade
026and a three percent decrease in 11th grade we did not include State averages on this slide but the state averages for fifth grade was 34 percent for grade eight it was 27 and for grade 11 was 22 percent susd again outperformed the state averages in all three grade levels looking closer at the lower 11th grade AZ PSI our Juniors take both the a CT exam which includes a science component and then the separate Standalone AZ PSI exam while AZ PSI is focused upon content or Essential Knowledge the ACT science test requires a broad application of science skills to demonstrate depths of knowledge in other words AC PSI is more focused on demonstration of factual knowledge while the ACT requires students to analyze and interpret data we've heard from our students that they do not take
027the AZ size seriously at this grade level as they are more focused on the ACT there is also a certain degree of testing fatigue for our Juniors who have just are double tested in science during a two-week period while the ACT scores can help a student on a college application the AZ size scores do not have greater transferability Beyond being a state testing requirement for 11th graders again as we saw with our other assessments students with higher attendance rates outperform those students who attend school less across all grade levels moving on to ACT Aspire which is given the 9th grade a transition Year from middle to high school while there are National comparisons the ACT Aspire exam as I mentioned earlier has been phased out by the vendor as they transition to a new test
028which is called the pre-act Arizona does not have a Statewide contract for the pre-act and requires that all students take the ACT Aspire in ninth grade Scottsdale outperformed the state averages across all four domains Scottsdale also outperformed the national average in reading by five percentage points what we what we were unable to determine is the number of students included in the national results as I mentioned this test is being phased out since we know the test is no longer being promoted by the testing company compared to Spring 2022 our reading and science scores increased by two percent and three percent respectively our English scores decreased by four percent and our math by three percent the state math scores also decreased by three percent finally moving on to our ACT results for our Juniors our Juniors
029either met or exceeded the national averages in every area the largest difference was in English where the susd averages were 1.1 percentage points high or 1.1 points higher than the national average while not displayed on this slide Scottsdale outperformed the state averages in every area the national percentile ranks listed in the final column are the latest ones provided by the testing company susd scores ranked well with all being above average looking at our susd composite scores which is the overall score on the ACT by campus over time we see three years of data on our screen we have seen modest increases at two campuses substantial increases at Coronado and Saguaro and a slight decrease at Desert Mountain however it should be noted that Desert Mountain scores Remain the highest in susd Acadia scores improved this
030year after a decline last year in summary susd is a consistent leader in state assessment scores we have and continued to significantly outperform the state averages there is a clear correlation between student attendance and test scores are students who are right at school regularly are outperforming their peers and with lower attendance rates and finally there is work to be done especially in middle school math as far as next steps both last and this week we are holding the summer PD Institute for our teachers where they are receiving extensive professional development and multiple content areas as Dr Menzel noted in his comments there are over 100 sessions offered and nearly 1 000 registrations for those sessions on things such as the science of reading problem-based learning and leveraging Neuroscience to increase student achievement all of this
031powerful summer enrichment will help our teachers start with new and refined instructional Tools in August I won't spend too much time on the next point on my slide here because it will be discussed the next presentation but a systematic implementation of mtss or multi-tiered systems of support in both academic and behavior areas will start district-wide in August there will also be a renewed focus on tier 1 curriculum instruction with the use of District adopted materials this will also come up in the next presentation we also will have newly adopted science curriculum in 2324 and a K5 Ela adoption taking place in 2324. and finally we are committed to the continued refinement of professional development plans in our teaching and learning Department and with that we are happy to answer questions all right who has questions
032or comments board member Kearney hi thank you very much for your uh your presentation um I'm just wondering if you did any or do you plan to compare with our peer districts so we can see how we rank with our peer districts and not just Statewide great question yes um we will share that in the fall when data is public but right now since we're still in that early release fact we will be happy to bring that back okay that'd be great thank you vice president Werner thank you thank you thank you for your presentation uh I'm going to talk about the raw numbers that were sent to us by superintendent Menzel and as an example in ela I'm sorry for math in third grade Cherokee came in at 97 which is excellent and then
033you have Yavapai coming in they did increase the share but it's significantly lower and have those teachers ever communicated and talked about best practices so it's instructional material at Cherokee and Yavapai the same and is it or isn't it and then do they ever talk and share the best practices and best ideas so that maybe some of the things that are happening at Cherokee can then happen at Yavapai good question yeah I might need to look to some of my peers and teach and learn to answer that question I'm happy to respond to that question and thank you for the presentation um Cindy uh board member Warner thank you for the question uh short answer yes we use the same instructional resources across our schools with the exceptions of when we have a traditional school
034if they have different adopted can you guys hear me different adopted materials whether or not our teachers get to collaborate they collaborate on site through plc's grade level plc's collaboration time uh depending on the topic of the district early releases sometimes we do cross collaboration by grade level team one thing we have noticed or identified as something we'd like to have more of moving forward is embedded time during the school day to bring our persons our teachers together to have afford more opportunities to share ideas and best practices and about what's working we have some of the least embedded time in any of the districts around us so some of the the celebrations that have been already highlighted tonight in terms of teachers that are participating in the PD Institute that's cross our district too
035so there's opportunities for collaboration there as well okay thank you yeah I would love to see some collaboration between the different schools that are performing really well and having them share their ideas with with the lower um schools so that we can you know rise all our students up keyboard member Werner and I'll note that Dr Hart Wells has joined us remotely as well Dr her Wells do you have anything you'd like to add to this part of the presentation or the meeting no thank you not at this time I apologize for being so tardy no you're right you're all right I'm glad you're here um are there any other questions uh board member Lindsay sorry I'm not seeing any of the requests online just want to thank you for putting this together and including
036the cohort data um can you report back root cause analysis on that Middle School Cliff absolutely thank you thank you whoever changed that because I am seeing the request now um I do have some questions and first one is you had mentioned that the test is changing again what has been the practice in our state historically with tests and how frequently they change it seems they change quite frequently so in terms of the aasa it's essentially covering the with this change a little bit with the standard changes in the state but is scaled the same way as the previous azmerit which we had for several years starting in 2015. so there is there is consistency of scoring over time for high school we have had a lot of changes absolutely act this is our I
037think second third is it second or third year giving it consistently I'm not sure on the future of that ACT Aspire with the fact that it's been phased out by the vendor I assume we're under contract for one or two more years historically the assessment contracts in the state run on like a three to five year cycle so I think we have a we have a lot to unpack here with this new information and I want to recognize the successes that we've made throughout the district I know our teachers and support staff work extremely hard throughout the school year many of our students do as well I hope that we're able to roll in that um the importance of all everyone playing an important role here parents students teachers administrators that this we need to
038have an all hands on deck approach to becoming that great success and destination District I'm always somewhat suspect about um determining our success overall as a district based on test scores alone it's really easy to go down that rabbit hole because this is what we're looking at right now but there's so much more to our successes as we share every board meeting many of our successes and Dr Menzel shared some of them already this evening can you please share to the public who what students participate in these tests sure so we test all of our students on these tests there's a very small subset of our students that take an alternative assessment for that have a special need but that's less than one percent the majority of our students are taking the state mandated exams
039and we're required by law to test at least 95 percent of students that are enrolled with us so this isn't selecting which students we want to test this is testing everyone thank you I appreciate that and you answered my next question so um how are we going to include employees new to susd that we're rolling in now and hiring onboarding to these professional development opportunities that are now going on some I know won't be hired until right up to that first bell rings in some situations so how will we ensure that we're going to support the teachers new to susd this year in best practices as Dr Dodd's Karen is making her way up here I'll start a couple of different areas to highlight we do have a mentor program that has been initiated over
040the course of the last couple years and that's significant in tucking in new to susd teachers and brand new teachers and we also have the work of our collaborative teams that share information that they learned here as they return and work with their colleagues in the fall Dr dad's Karen hello I would just add a few things we have been very fortunate this year that HR has been a great partner with teaching and learning in allowing us something that we that I'm aware not aware of having done prior to this year we are allowing our teachers who are new to contract to attend professional development so teachers who had already gone to new higher orientation through HR could come to Summer PD Institute also Arcadia has a lot of teachers who are attending Avid summer
041Institute which will all be pedagogy and content driven additionally we offer AP summer Institute that is held throughout the valley so there's apsi in Paradise Valley apsi held in Gilbert Plus for some of our courses like AP Computer Science or AP environmental that might not be available here in the valley we offer online where teachers can take apsi through accredited institutions those are a few key highlights but also we're looking forward to new teacher orientation those are three days prior to the teacher contract day and because because of the relaunch that Dr bachna shared with mtss we have sessions at new teacher orientation dedicated to multi-tiered systems of support as well as content sessions so they meet with all of the curriculum coaches to learn what their District curriculum is what our Curriculum maps are
042and how can they be prepared for the start of school thank you Dr dots Karen appreciate that information um seeing that there are no other requests to speak um thank you very much for that informative presentation Dr Menzel do you have anything you'd like to add feed in I just want to thank Cindy and Anna for the work that they do to Crunch all the numbers as soon as it comes in they are on it very quickly because they know we like to see the data so that we can begin to drill down and analyze you know what's working what can be improved and and asking the critical questions so thank you both for your attention to detail on this yes thank you date Dr Benson thank you to our Tech friends in the back
043appreciate the support good evening president sunowski vice president Warner board members Dr Menzel Gladys and all here with us this evening tonight we are happy to have this opportunity to provide an update on the progress we've made in this first year of implementation of the susd Strategic Plan Three key areas we'll address this evening include co-leaders from each of our five strategic action teams will share highlights representative of the biggest actions and learnings from each team we'll share out our progress specific to each of the kpis indicating whether we've met partially met or haven't met yet and those we've established baselines for this year and will review the public dashboard we've developed to share our progress towards each kpi with all stakeholders which is situated on our district website and is going live as we
044speak to set the stage we wanted to take a few minutes to show how we've been intentional to align the execution of our strategic plan with the cognia accreditation process we've been engaged in this year susd actually initiated the district-wide accreditation process in 2020 and as we all know a host of factors disrupted those efforts including a pandemic and changes in District leadership so given the approval of the Strategic plan last summer we took the opportunity to relaunch our accreditation efforts making purposeful connections with the work of our strategic action teams The Continuous Improvement plans written by our sites and the key areas required of cognitive accreditation our commitment to site and District leaders has been that our cognia narratives and evidence will reflect reflect the real work and story at hand using our strategic
045plan as our guide to our continuous Improvement efforts expected of the process I'm happy to report that the initial feedback and results from our engagement review were very positive indicating that pending approval by the cogni accreditation commission susd is being recommended for systems or district-wide accreditation and that susd's continuous Improvement efforts are tap tier that doesn't mean we've reached a pinnacle in every area or that our work is done as you've heard in previous agenda items this evening but it does mean we're validated that we're engaging in the right work creating and employing aligned and coherent systems across our schools and departments we look forward to sharing the final scores and results of our accreditation with you all as soon as we're given the green light from the cognia accreditation commission scheduled for some time
046yet this June one of the first key steps in engaging in the accreditation process involves identifying strategic priorities and key goals thus the work of those that participated in the first three phases of our strategic planning process initiated by Dr Menzel in February of 2021 has been critically important as it resulted in the updated vision mission and values it established the five strategic goals and commitment specifics specific to those goals identified five key district-wide initiatives to bring bring our strategic plan to life and it established the kpis we're using to measure our progress towards our goals as a reminder the governing board approved the plan and the kpi is just a year ago late last June and we established baselines for the kpis and launched the plan with our leaders and across our schools and
047department just late last July and August additional steps have included that we identified baselines and performance targets for all kpis and in conversation with our governing board we identified dollar subset of kpis to prioritize for the 2223 school year key to our implementation efforts has been the identification of five district-wide initiatives aligned to the goals in our strategic plan as reflected on this slide mtss or multi-tiered systems of support areas A and B academic and behavioral align with goals one and two and the initiatives to attract and retain Talent establish strategic Partnerships and optimize learning resources aligned perfectly with Goal three four and five our innovation in teaching and learning initiative is cross-cutting it intersects with all five goals our most important step I believe in executing our strategic plan has been the establishment of
048the five strategic action teams and co-leaders of each of these teams to lead the implementation of each initiative you might remember that last fall we created an application system to invite site and District leaders teachers and classified team members to apply to serve in areas of interest and expertise and we extended an invitation to community members for our strategic Partnerships stat team you'll hear from our co-leaders listed on the slide before us in just a minute but wanted to pause and publicly thank them for the many hours given to lead the learning and actions of each of our teams we met monthly as a group of co-leaders to report out teams progress and align our Improvement efforts and we simply wouldn't have made the progress reflected in our accreditation review without them and the 75
049plus members sharing their time talents and commitment to make forward progress in each area at this time I'd like to invite any members here serving on any of our strategic action teams including those that are our leaders to stand and be recognized thank you [Applause] thank you appreciate that I wanted to remind all that to truly make forward progress on the initiatives of this scope each involves a multi-year implementation timeline we did an initial assessment of the Readiness of each initiative last summer and we'll reassess this summer yet as a team and make adjustments to our timeline before turning it over to our my co-leaders just wanted to remind all it's impossible to capture the progress of each of our teams in one presentation so we provided a b memo to the board to provide
050some of the additional details of our work and progress in the interest of Time Each of our teams is just going to share one slide reflecting some of the most impactful highlights happening from their teams it's kind of like a clip note version of their work with that I would like to welcome Dr sakos to turn on their mic we've decided that we're going to try to spread this out if that's all right and allow persons to stay seated and share out the highlights from each of their teams great thank you Dr Benson and three out of four of the co-leaders for mtss are here tonight and and thank you yes for your dedication and work on this initiative team so as Karen said mtss is multi-sear assistance of support and it's an integrated comprehensive
051framework that focuses on first best high quality instruction differentiated learning student-centered instruction individualized student needs and align systems we have in place necessary for academic and behavioral success so simply stated the first uh big accomplishment in our year one was to establish a common understanding and knowledge of mtss while our team was very diverse from teachers counselors administrators social workers principals assistant principals leaders come into a common understanding within our strategic plan was a first step our next level was really making sure that we rolled out professional development during the year so that our school campuses and teams also had that same common understanding so while we were working throughout the year to accomplish our initial year one goals we were simultaneously planning for and implementing uh some of the same exercises that we took
052our strategic plan team through as a team and then also we also exercised that on campus while getting feedback from campuses to consider back with the with the team so like I said that first one is to establish that common understanding and we continue to and will continue to refine and enhance that understanding of mtss secondly we wanted in this year one to evaluate analyze and interpret best practices in behavioral academic and social emotional success so off to the left there what you'll see is a pyramid and for example this is a very high level overview I wanted to put this here and and show everybody that when we talk about tier one practices as you heard from Dr bakna this is all students that is the green level there we want to make sure
053that all students are receiving the high quality instruction based on and meeting their individual needs um the the Yellow Part there is what we call tier two um if we're doing well in tier one then we would expect approximately 20 of students to be in that tier two in which you would need some type of targeted instruction that doesn't mean we take away that best practices tier one but we layer in some tier two practices maybe some enrichment opportunities or intervention opportunities if you are not meeting um uh if you're in that that category at the same time when we're looking at formative assessments from teachers if a teacher is looking at a particular unit or math concept and says wow only 50 of my students are understanding this concept and and achieving Mastery then
054we want the teacher to reflect back and say how can I re-teach and differentiate what I what the Learners need to know and how do I enrich those who have already met that and then when you go to the the red that is your tier three so that essentially should be three to five percent of students who need individualized instruction um and that means the one-on-one uh different supports um uh that are offered in our schools what's important to note when I talk about mtss as a framework it's not a program it's a way of thinking um so common terminology that you may have heard in the past um RTI response to intervention and you've also heard uh positive behavior interventions that supports PBIS so it's a nice blend of the academic and the behavioral
055process in which we look at how how well we're doing in the tier one level and what do we need to do to readjust our instructional practices to make sure that 80 of our kids or more are getting it the first time um so the as we went through um and uh on our third step here identify the areas of strengths and opportunities for improvement um it was really important for us to go and and gather some additional data um to see where we were so it was a nice tie with cognia as we implemented um we created and implemented the classroom walkthrough tool that looked at some of these best practices engagement differentiation of instruction as well as a classroom behavioral expectations so that we decrease disruption in the classroom so that students can
056learn and yes there is a correlation between students classrooms that are are disruptive and the learning that's happening in the class so this that's why these blend so well together within the framework um so we were able to gather classroom walk through beginning quarter three and quarter four that we were able to analyze as a team we also were able to have a what's called a set to school-wide evaluation tool um with the vast majority of our campuses that also provided us some feedback on where we can strengthen um uh what what the majority of our campus already now PBIS structures and so that's establishing school-wide behavioral expectations um and would you know what does it look like to be respectful that's to raise my hand that's to wait for the turns a turn to
057be able to to speak in class um so with that uh within the within the framework we're always going back and looking at our academic and behavioral data what Cindy um Dr bachna presented tonight as an example of some of the data that we we look at but we also look at the teacher common formative assessments the behavioral data is oftentimes our office discipline referrals we also have Arizona Youth survey that also gives us behavioral data and then of course in terms of sense of belonging to school we have that the Hanover data that we've been looking at so the last thing that we accomplished year one was identifying some tools and resources needed for successful refinement throughout the year and to ensure that we were progress monitoring all of our our tier one instruction
058and and strengthening what we're doing at that level while continuing to evaluate um uh tier two instruction this year so the big implementation for 2324 is specific to increasing best high quality first best instruction in the classroom by utilizing our materials that are adopted through the adoption committee and making sure that again the vast majority of our students are we're meeting their needs within the classroom with that as we go into year two as Dr Benson said we're going to have to really be creative about that embedded time for teachers for their PLC and also embedded time for um our our students to get the intervention and enrichments that they need so at a high level overview I hope I set a efficient enough Pace as I was asked to do that is mtss okay
059thank you Dr sakos going to make a transition and invite up our Christine do you want to do it right at the table um to share out an update on community engagement and partnership thank you Dr Benson thank you president sonowski members of the board Dr Menzel and Gladys for the opportunity to share with you tonight some of the good work that we accomplished through this stat team Community engagement and partnership I am a co-lead along with Amy Downs our director of College and Career Readiness who is not here with us tonight but here in spirit and um and welcomed me to lead the charge in sharing this with you tonight so our two kpis are priority kpis that we worked most closely on this year related to increasing the number of formal Community Partnerships
060that enhance opportunities for students and or staff as well as increasing the percent of students successfully participating in mentorships externships and internships now to accomplish this our commit our team really is essentially a representative of the district's site leaders District leaders as well as Community leaders we are the only stat team that has a representation from the the community so we have principals assistant principals coordinators counselors as well as a chamber representative a Charo representative and a susd foundation representative and what's been really neat about this is in some ways we're able to respond immediately to meet the need of one of our campuses and other times really work to initiate plans to propel this work forward with both of our kpis these were we did not really have any Baseline data associated with this
061because while these things are happening they weren't really being captured and tracked and measured with any sort of fidelity and so what we're trying to do now moving forward is just that and so first what we had to do is essentially create an audit of what we know to exist and then try to find those additional Partnerships for example that we know are out there but just haven't really been accounted for we started looking at what mou's already existed and we found that of those 260 mousse some of them are DJs like not a partnership in the real way that I think we all can agree we want to measure Partnerships and so we kind of had to sift through all of that and recognize what is a partnership how many of them exist but
062weren't yet formalized and then additionally weed through to identify many of the student affiliation agreements that were those mous so the universities that provide us student teachers and you know psych interns and and folks along those lines and so that was really a lot of the work and then additionally meeting with principals and directors to learn more about what Partnerships already exist and then capturing that and formalizing it moving forward so that was a lot of this first kpi then we also wanted to make sure that we had the right tracking tool again to capture this but then also to track the conversations that we're having with prospective partners and then being able to follow up with those partners and and maybe see how we might be able to Parlay that partnership into something more
063and align it with another initiative somewhere in the district and so what we found was Salesforce has an education Centric version if you're familiar with Salesforce it truly is a business development sales tracking tool and we're using it in a similar fashion quite frankly to again Prospect Partners follow up with them but then also formalize these Partnerships moving forward so those were two um two big things associated with this first priority at kpi and we did show gains we we were aiming for 10 additional mous and we had 22 but they're changing all the time 23 and again a lot of it is more Partners brought to the table but just not yet having that formalized agreement so we're excited to see more grow there the igas was the other component and when we look
064to next year this is a this is one particular indicator I might ask that we reconsider just because igas are much larger and there's much more that goes into that than um than our team can work to achieve sometimes it's as simple as an mou and it doesn't really require an IGA um then as it relates to our CTE components this was another one where we know that students are involved in volunteering and internships but there wasn't any place that this was really being tracked with Fidelity and so we put together a team to go and review some different tools that exist um knowing that we wanted to replace Naviance and so we brought in students from the student Advisory Board as well as guidance counselors again principals APS CTE teachers and the likes thereof
065to evaluate a number of tools and they landed on major Clarity one because of its robust offering and then again it's usability so if it's easy to use then we believe the data will be additionally collected there moving forward we also made significant updates to the high school planning guide providing seniors specifically at least out of the gate year one with the opportunity to participate in work-based learning which provides time for students to essentially be dismissed from campus to go participate in an internship that aligns with some of their CTE studies so the caveat is that this unit must have completed year one of a CTE course and or be enrolled in year two or have that second year already completed it's starting with seniors since they have transportation and can get where they need
066to go to and engage in this work based learning and that is available at all of our high schools we also updated the high school planning guide to include Community volunteering again we know our students are volunteering this provides an opportunity for us to capture this information and for them to earn credit additionally so different than Service Learning which is something that our team is also very interested in in providing as an opportunity again here in the future this is going to be more student driven in that the student will identify why that volunteer opportunity and then receive credit for it so those are the big gains that were made specifically as it relates to our community engagement partnership goal foreign there we go again appreciate that update update thank you Christine next up is
067an update from our strategic action team Innovation and teaching and learning Dr Michelle Watt and Dr Menzel led the Innovation teaching and learning stat team again this strategic action team crosses across all or across Cuts all of our goals Dr Watt is actually supporting an event with the Department of Ed tonight so she can't be with us so I'm going to hit a few of the highlights and invite Dr Menzel to add his insights significant highlights of the work of this team include they set to work established a definition for Innovation and spend a fair amount of time identifying the why Innovation is important across our schools and departments to invite Innovation this team established a prototype process for supporting evaluating and scaling Innovation to encourage Innovation innovative ideas and support a pilot and scale
068framework to improve achievement moving forward additionally Michelle and other members of the team made a purposeful purposeful purposeful connection to the next Ed next education Workforce participating in with ASU in a cohort to learn more about how we might rethink how we use time better or differently for kids and for teachers and most recently the team members are exploring the use of chat GPT in educational settings to kind of get our footing in that and get ahead of it because some of that can be really really good Dr Menzel did you want to share some of the other additional insights or highlights from this team thank you Dr Benson one of the things that we talked about in The Innovation and teaching and learning team is the importance of being able to try new things
069if the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting the same results or different results so we we want to be able to move into the future and Empower our Frontline staff people closest to the problems have the best ideas for how to solve them so we wanted to create a robust framework for supporting teachers with innovative ideas and buildings within grade level teams so a lot of the work was spent identifying what the framework is but then also providing someone we've got some budget set aside for next year to be able to support pilot projects related to innovation in teaching and learning we think it's important to do that on a small scale before you work to expand and replicate you want to have meaningful data to determine
070did it work or didn't it work so think about in in private sector it's rapid prototyping fail fast fail forward figure out what worked build on what worked if it didn't work try something different but do it in a way that's intentional and purposeful to improve outcomes for students and so I'm I'm impressed by the thinking of the team members who are part of innovation and teaching and learning the other thing that is an important area of focus is thinking about how we use time differently and that one we don't have the answers to but we know that there's only a certain number of hours in the day we only have students a certain number of hours both during the day and during the school year but how do we maximize the use of time
071in order to produce better outcomes for our students appreciate that did want to make a purposeful connection to the work of our Coronado strategic planning team Dr bruninski serves on this team The Innovation teaching and learning team and he's also been a part of that and so to bring some of the ideas about how we rethink time differently we have a commitment from each of our Coronado leaders that we shared with you about a month ago to find additional time not by using subs or changing Master schedules with or embedding early release time but by using the time that they have differently and creating more spaces for teachers to collaborate and so there's a there are connections and ripples that extended from this team too and just wanted to highlight that with that we're moving
072on to Team Four attracting and retaining qualified and talented employees I believe are Alexis assistant superintendent of Human Resources is going to take the lead on this one good evening president uh sunowski governing board members and Dr Menzel I just want to also give a shout out to uh initial co-lead Miss Amy Goff who's out there in the crowd and also when Dr Lugo joined us mid-year she jumped in as well to provide some leadership for our team um we were taking a look obviously at goal three our talented and uh qualified professionals and one of the priority kpis for us was around Pathways and so what we discussed in our group was that not everybody necessarily wants to move up a career ladder but they want to improve their skills in their current position
073so one of the first things that our group did was to come up with a definition regarding what a pathway actually is which you see on the screen before you which is to creating and supporting opportunities and incentives for ongoing development for increased capacity in their current position or for career growth so in order to understand what people's interests are or were we created a what we call the pathway survey to get some feedback from our employee group so we sent one out to the classified employees certified employees and administrative employees and so of the respondents [Music] um that that participated in a survey one indicator from the survey was that less than two-thirds of them feel well trained in their current role so they would like to improve in their current position another indicator
074indicated by the classified employees was that they were interested in becoming a teacher but time was or money excuse me was an obstacle for them to to be able to do so and as the governing board uh previously approved we were very fortunate to enter into an mou with NAU in the easy K-12 Center to support a teacher residency so that again was for our classified employees who had a bachelor's degree did not have a teacher certificate but were interested in pursuing that and so we're very fortunate we had several people attend that meeting and we have five classified employees who are going to participate in our teacher Residency program so we're very excited about that additionally we have the ASU teaching fellows which is targeted towards classified employees who have an AAA degree not
075a bachelor so they once we complete that partnership with them the hope is that those folks would not only earn a bachelor's degree but they will also earn their teachers certification so we're building a pipeline for future teachers additionally um as was mentioned earlier you know I I know this falls under teaching and learning but I'm also so excited because part of what we're talking about is supporting the capacity for people to grow in their current position and and that aligns with a district mentorship that we put in place a couple years ago we originally had 15 brand new teachers that were supported this year we increased that to 34 teachers so these are 34 teachers brand new to the profession of teaching that are getting support from our district mentors and while not on
076our kpi I just want to point out that later on the board agenda there's a recommendation for a teacher evaluate a new teacher evaluation instrument which is intended to you know maximize student outcomes by growing teacher skills so no matter where they are on the Continuum of experience whether they're brand new or their seasoned teachers the the hope is that they increase their practices in the classroom and then the other kpi was around increasing the compensation for all of our employee groups the kpi was specific to making competitive wages compared to some of our peer districts we have not conducted a salary study that is a very large undertaking however we did bring forward a reclassification for 15 classified employees at the board approved back in March I think it was and this our strategic
077action team has some crossover obviously when we're talking about compensation because that that is part of the work of the interspace negotiations team so or in the fall we were able to with the additional monies that came in classified employees got a two dollar an hour raise in the fall and for 2023 they or 23 24 they are getting a two percent increase and then again those positions that were reclassified and moved up a pay grade as well and then for the other employees in the fall of 22 they got a three percent raise and for 23 24 is approved earlier by the board a two percent increase for almost all of those employees so um we're very excited about the work you know we are we are work in progress um and certainly want
078to refine some of these and do some additional work around looking at compensation and classification for our employees to make sure that we are both recruiting and retaining um highly qualified Professionals in in susd thank you Alexis and our fifth of five to share out is optimized resources and I believe our CFO Shannon is going to lead us in this year out yes thank you so um first I would like to thank Dennis for being on that team and helping to co-lead this team we looked at optimized resources and recognized early on that resources encompasses a lot of things it's it's the people we have it's the it's the software we have the resources we have for the classroom it also encompasses um money and the budget that we have to use that so in
079looking at what all are our resources we decided it would be good to kind of break off into three subgroups to look at three different areas so with that we created a budget development group a capital standards development and information technology which fed into one of our key kpis so with that one of the priority kpis that hit on the information technology was to look at the software that we have and develop either training videos or FAQs for our parents to understand what software is out there what resources are out there but also for our employees our own District employees to understand what's out there so that team worked through that and created a I think they did a great job a video on parent view and the different things that you can do within
080parent view be it seeing grades calculating out what your student might need to get on a test to be able to get the grade that they're seeking and so they're just short videos that don't take a whole lot of time but really highlight what are the things that you could do within parent view additionally we created a video on Synergy and how to enroll your student into our schools so we have those ready to go they just need to be translated and then they can be posted online and then for our own staff um we thankfully the board earlier this year approved hiring a um Visions person Visions is our financial software and so she has spent part of the Year cleaning up things but she's also spent time doing training manuals developing those as
081well as training videos on how to enter requisitions how to do an epar how to check your budget so we have those resources available for our own employees secondly we wanted to look at budget development and capital standards within the capital standards Dennis and purchase our director of purchasing Roger worked with a team and a vendor and developed um a standard for a classroom what you can expect to have in your classroom what furniture you should you should have in there and can expect that and so they've been working with one of our vendors to develop a catalog one of the things we found when we were rebuilding schools is we'd go to the principal and give them this three-inch thick book of different furniture options out there and it's very overwhelming what we wanted
082to do is take the take a look at what of what is our standard in the classroom and really get that down to a small this is what you this is what you can expect in your classroom and if you need to purchase new furniture this is what it looks like and what you can expect to have um so Dennis has almost got that wrapped up he'll be meeting with principals um next week to go over that and finalize that and then it has an idea so you know when you go into a classroom what that should look like knowing what we think want it to look like and actually having um all that furniture purchased that's going to take time but at least we have that standard of what you can expect to have
083in the classroom preschool through 12th grade and then the last part of it was budget development we changed a number of things when it comes to budget development this year the past two years we've worked with the interest groups or the employee groups on interest-based negotiations on developing our salary and benefits packages but we also changed when it came to Capital instead of just rolling over the same dollar amount every single year we um we said let's tell us tell us what you need and let's develop our budget based off of need versus just rolling over dollars or allocating dollars based on the number of students you have so we've put that into place as well as within our own departments our mno budget was developed by saying a modified zero based essentially tell us
084what you need tell us what things you plan on doing and then we'll develop the budget off of that instead of again just allocating the same amount that you got last year additionally one of our kpis was also to increase the Ada or maintain or increase the ADM from what we budgeted in the spring of last year for this year and we were able to meet that kpi by increasing our ADM from what was originally budgeted by 70 just over 75. so um that's kind of what we worked on throughout this entire year and happy to say that we made great progress thank you Shannon prior to sharing our kpis wanted to provide just a little context and make a connection to the previous presentation Dr Buckner shared with us at the this evening as
085we've been analyzing our results we're using our data to ask a whole host of questions we recognize the impact of chronic absenteeism on our students learning data data and the complexity of comparing our results of our Hanover data given our response rates and Sample sizes vary a bit from year to year these are complexities we will continue to address in our continuous Improvement efforts some requiring different and more targeted approaches moving forward also as our co-leaders have already shared during our analysis some of our team members have identified important tweaks that need to be made to our kpis in the future and additional kpis for consideration we're continuing those conversations over the summer and at our cabinet and extended cabinet Retreat and we'll bring them back to the governing board in August the link on
086the right side of this slide includes the results we have at this time you've heard a handful of them shared out by our co-leaders already we've listed the priority kpis specific I think it's going to my and we have an update we'll try the other one and we're still gonna have an update my technology friends is there any chance you could do the update while I'm talking through this slide the timing not ideal we listed the priority kpis first specific to each of our goals but results of our kpis that have been included in this draft document and we've indicated whether we've met partially met or not met yet for all the kpis with pre-established baselines in the interest of time we won't click through all of the kpis during this study study session but
087noteworthy to point out is one of our first kpis that we accomplished this year increasing the number of sites participating in quality first preschool rating programs our Baseline for 2021-22 um was one and as soon as this kpi was established Christine Dr Bono went to work and during the 22-23 school year with her team we now have 16 sites that have obtained a quality first preschool rating we share this example not just because it's a clear met this year but also it's an example of a kpi that'll need to be revised moving forward given the kpi as we know need to be dynamic and modified to stay aligned with our continuous Improvement efforts how are my friends at the back doing can I click on it hold on stop clicking gotcha we'll give them just
088another few seconds because we've actually got the results showed on the next slide too in a different format so if I'll write with you guys I'm going to click forward don't do it go ahead there we go as we've indicated all year we wanted to be able to create some sort of a dashboard to show our progress towards each of our kpis on our district website being completely transparent and holding ourselves accountable for the work we are leading and the results we are getting I wanted to remind persons that we actually initiated two dashboards this year to avoid confusion because we had an internal dashboard that our leaders have loved ease of access of enrollment information attendance Behavior data and academics so the second dashboard that's live today is the external public one we're referencing
089here it reports baselines and progress towards kpis in the format that you see to the right I took screenshots to begin it is live right now they're um with the link I can click on that one I'm thinking we're going to have an update there too maybe we'll get lucky does it work when our board members click on it yes so it's just the presentation of the the I like that so much so I'm happy to hear it's working there and that means it's working in more documents too um so persons can access it that way if it as soon as it as it is live the easiest way to find it on our dashboard is to go to susd.org strategic plan and you can see the entire dashboard in that format so so can
090I just add very quickly when you're on that page the home page provides the overview of our five goal areas as well as the full strategic plan the susd annual report and the auditor general report so that you know it's all in one place here we go easy for people to see and then the indicators are on that other tab just want to make sure from a navigation standpoint you see that we're both trying to drive the bus at the same time so I'm not clicking I'm just I'm just going to stop there there we go that's the first document that we were referring to and that each of the tabs at the bottom reflects a different strategic action team and goal so we don't have to click through that but thank you for going
091to the work to bring that up so those that are here with us tonight can see that and if we could go to the second dashboard link that would be great excellent and if you could click on indicators there you go and I'm going to have you scroll down just a bit and pick your favorite go ahead and click on let's go graduation rates the dashboard looks like this where the kpi is listed and baselines are indicated and measures of our progress are indicated as well per kpi thank you Tech Team you can head back to our slide deck and we will wrap up as our tech support is helping us do just that prior to wrapping up wanted to give a shout out to Dr Buckner Dr Watt and Christine for initially we've been
092talking about this dashboard for months and months but just in the recent uh the last 10 days Laney Triplett and Catherine Miller are situated in Communications and in as our grants writer they have just been significant in pulling all this together so it could be ready for you and our public in time for this presentation so shout out to all involved in that creation of the public dashboard and as we wrap up I wanted to just share a couple of key other areas we've been focusing on and prioritizing this year they are reflected in the narratives and evidence we submitted to cognia and across governing board agendas throughout this entire year and that includes most persons are aware we've had a significant focus on school safety and on student and staff Wellness we've had conversations
093and focus on enrollment you've heard about curriculum adoptions including one this evening we have the work that we've learned from and action and direction from previous task forces and we're going to hear about the El Task Force at the next meeting on June 20th you heard Alexis our assistant superintendent of Human Resources referred to the time and commitment of persons to serve on the interest-based negotiations attendance is huge for us and our colleagues across the valley and state and we're always working towards aligning and cohering that which we have going on all the time our next steps include we're going to finish up any measures on our kpis that we're waiting on data yet or that need a little more analysis to assess for this year we'll identify changes to kpis and additional kpis to
094guide our continuous Improvement efforts and bring those back to the board again in August and we'll be reconvening our strategic action teams for the 2324 school year and with that we're happy to entertain your feedback and or your questions they're running board members do any of you have any questions for this group of leaders or comments to make Dr Hart Wells do you have any uh thank you board president snowski I have a just a few questions um in I have many others but I think it'd just be better for me to digest the dashboard which I appreciate you getting up it looks like some of the data's in there that's um longitudinal so the academic proficiency for example as Dr um Dr Benson you mentioned coming up with proposed kpis for the next school
095year but it looks like the academic proficiency and if I recall correctly we developed those originally for this school year those were to be three-year stepwise correct increases yes great question that's the area that we had the developed the most significantly to be overtime or across time so in that area we have the least suggestions for additions or changes because we those were crafted in such a way to reflect increments over time great Point thank you for bringing that to person's attention okay okay great and then um and then on the mtss could you please remind me when did susd start um this kind of concept this structure this mtss structure do you have Dr sack goes to sure so um beginning and Shannon cron may have to correct my my years but going back
096to 2008 I would say that we had a um Oh I thought you corrected me um uh we had a very strong focus on RTI response to intervention that was done at our elementary school campuses with Fidelity we we did an excellent job in that area shortly thereafter we received a school safety Grant a five-year safety grant for two of our five high schools to be PBIS schools and Saguaro and Coronado and at that time that came with a lot of resources and a lot of Staffing and that was the um the the soft launch I would say of PBIS um the the the concept of multi-tier systems of support probably probably Blended itself maybe six years ago and we call that now multi-tier systems that support a and multi-tier systems to support B so
097academics and behavioral but still within the same framework after that time frame we received another gra Grant we were hand chosen by the U.S Department of Education to implement mtssb at five of our elementary schools and that Grant lasted for three years and so there was um some some great starts over the years and we were always as good as the resources that we had both in hiring individuals to to monitor the progress to implement the training that we needed and so over time I'm very proud to say that when we look at mtssb we have 26 of 29 of our campuses with a pretty solid structure in place for Behavioral expectations and that was very evident when we received our our set data back our school-wide evaluation uh tool um so we have some
098work to do specific to academics in looking at what interventions work and which ones don't and so we've dabbled in different interventions over time and so that's really going to be where we roll up our sleeves going into next year is strengthening tier one across the board behavioral expectations we need to get this attendance under control get to the root causes of why kids aren't coming to school get to the root causes of why kids aren't engaged in our in our classrooms and otherwise acting out with anti-social behavior and so this is probably a very long response to your initial question but we've been able to over the many years that I've been over student services have some type of grants that helped us move ourselves forward well and I don't mind the long answer
099because I thought that the district did have some uh you know a decent amount of history with mtss so it just struck me that one of the actions was to have a common understanding of what mtss is across the district at this point given the history um so I just found it a little surprising but um but if that's what needed to be done and that's what needed to be done with respect to um rolling out specifically PBIS but um in the construct of mtss we've heard from parents we've heard from others over the course of a couple years and I know PBIS is it that's a that's not a Arizona or even Scottsdale specific program right none of these are these are National programs it's the importance of parent collaborations with the schools and
100implementing these programs um with success and I I don't I'm not going to use the word Fidelity I don't particularly like that word I prefer rigor um and that is something that we've heard as at least in the last couple of years as an area of growth for susd is to better engage parents and families in this process um to the benefit of the students which ultimately is the goal I believe everyone's on the same page can you comment on that what efforts are being made to better enfranchise uh the families and parents where there are needs for maybe maybe not tier one but maybe tier two so the tier two which is the targeted interventions um and I'll just I'll talk I'll give an example for behavior and example for academic so um a
101an example for Behavior would be perhaps a student is referred to as Student Assistance Program and that could be in good decision making executive functioning skills time management how to again have good use of time within your class how to get organized things of that sort were the the communication goes to the parent to say you know here's an area that your students teachers have identified as room for growth and so here's something that we have happened to have on campuses that's offered by the school social worker I mean those are what we call our Student Assistance programs and so they're able to engage in in in the tier two um I the same thing for tier two academics so there may be targeted students that are um uh identified to perhaps participate in my
102path with iready and the communication to families is is you know in order to to help your student and to see this growth you need to and we'll won't use Fidelity we'll use consistently engage in the the practices of math concepts that the student is missing and so that's where that that communication goes between um mostly the teacher and the the the the parent and when we get into more of the mental health concerns and you've got your social worker that's talking to parents to say we don't do individual counseling here but we've got partners partners in the community that you might want to look at and we would refer them out but hopefully that helps with two different examples well and I appreciate that in both examples strike me as critical for parent family
103involvement to be successful so um I think it just underscored the point that if that's an area of growth I'd like to just offer that as what sounds like a continued area of growth where the district is enfranchising the families maybe a little bit more closely as opposed to pushing it out bringing in maybe that perspective but thank you um can I ask another question Dr sackos have you on tier 2 interventions um what so we had seen several I'm trying to I'm going to knit together a couple of different things one is the Esser funding made concerted efforts to address in the in the hospital under the auspices and as required of learning laws addressing learning loss um interventions whether they were behavioral math reading and particularly in the elementary school and what if
104anything um have in you learn I'm not you personally but your team your stat team in the culture and climate initiative through the course of the Year from those pilot programs that were funded with Esser that could that fall under tier two interventions that could be something that we could learn from We're successful um because it seemed to me this year there were some changes and I don't know if it was a funding related reason in some of the schools were those interventions uh were not so not going to be supported going forward and I I'm trying to reconcile all of that um just from an academic standpoint but it seems like those would also be intersecting in the culture and climate I don't and maybe that's a deeper conversation but I'd like to put
105it out there as something I'm still unclear on and I would like to have a deeper conversation on that appreciate the question and Dr sakos is the first to try not to uncouple that which happens with the behavioral side of the house with the academic side of the house because there is such a close connection um just a one bit of a response to your question Dr hartwell's Alice spingel is here with us this evening and she the reporting out and the tracking the progress monitoring of our students using intervention tools and those that are serviced by interventionists is kid by kids significant and so we we monitor that Alice has just shared out you know most recent data reports on that so um we've shared some of that fast bridge and I ready data
106you know with the governing board at this level but we we monitor that this and infer success of our interventions based on multiple data points and explore further digging deeper into what the program really offers because it's difficult to correlate to the success of a student to one thing there's a whole bunch of factors that include time and resource and um those bids yeah it agreed and I I'm not suggesting that anyone's looking at these in silos in fact I hope we aren't um because that doesn't make any sense but um maybe if we could have a present not an independent presentation but just in thinking of how to present um the outcomes of addressing the different kpi categories is show a little bit more of the intersection of these areas just a suggestion I
107think it would help map some of the successes and and there are correlations across the board and and I think you can already see some of them now um and I will just uh thank you for the additional data crunching that's taken place over the last week I know I had asked for some additional data Dr bachna in my mind's eye I was envisioning you and your team late at night a bunch of computers with smoke coming out the back burn it up so thank you very much it was very rich data a lot to learn nothing you could really distill into a 10-minute presentation at all so I'll leave it there but thank you very much I I hope to continue this conversation in depth thank you thank you Dr hartwell's any other comments
108from governing board members the question about um number one when we went through that the mtss so there was conversation about that classroom walkthrough and um other things so aside from providing that District early release which is not regular and it's not frequent what are we doing to create that time for teachers and support staff to actually utilize the information that they get and then be able to other than changing it on the fly with instruction intentionally change their practices middle school high school teachers could have 150 to 180 kids every day so that preparation period that they're given other than to go to the bathroom and catch their breath there's hardly time to analyze data well and so what are what are we going to do this may be a rhetorical question maybe we
109need to be thinking about specifically what are we going to be doing to allow this time and be creative and innovative so that our Scottsdale standard of Excellence is spread across our entire district and not just bits and pieces throughout our district so I I was I'm sorry I was looking at Melissa but it's not directed just at Melissa I know that she had responded to that particular slide so what I would like to add to that is some of our campuses have already found ways to have that embedded time in their schools it's a lot easier with elementary and middle school because in elementary you can have your grade levels have a common planning period when they go to specials per se or for instance you know at a middle school you're able to
110have again a period where you know your your subject level teachers have all of the same time off or not time off but the the planning periods where it gets very complicated is at the high school level and that's where we need to be creative next year in our year too thinking about how do we have that embedded time within the school day not only for Teacher professional development and and and and and collaborative teaming but then also for student interventions and enrichment so that really um that has us looking at what do our school schedules look like it's not necessarily you know six periods a day all at 53 minutes each with the five minute passing that may not be the model that is really going to get us where we need to be
111so our motto with the um and I've had to been I I'm the one that has to be told this by my team is we need to go slow to go fast um and really do this tier one well um and and then in this next year we're still we're implementing tier one but we're also planning for the evaluation of our tier two practices um and one example would be when we're meeting with our the middle school teams uh next week we're looking at this data looking at the root cause analysis this is this cohort data these are individual students and now we can go back and say oh well let's look at some of the the behaviors occurring in that class not only that maybe the changes in in New Concepts that we test
112but we have to get down to what is the root cause analysis and so what we what we have to model what we're doing and the expectations that we expect at the site level at our district level so we're looking at the big picture looking at how we can provide the right supports and resources for our campuses and it begins with professional development appreciate that um Dr psychos I just want to make one more purposeful connection some of our most of the colleagues know that we have applied for four different grants that have been available this spring and we've received um one of them one of them is on the agenda for you to accept tonight we've got notification that um we will be afforded the third but the fourth one we haven't heard back
113is the big one the 50 million dollar one that's really supposed to invite Innovation and teaching and learning and because we know time is an issue we've crafted that one um to enlist more Partners to create more space for teachers so bringing more Partners to be engaging our kids in targeted learning experiences like in stem stem lab type situations because we've heard from our parent groups that they do like the kiddos in school and learning and haven't fully supported extra additional time for early releases so to kind of meet them our parents where they're at as partners we wanted to keep the kiddos here find other learning experiences for them that would allow our teachers to have more time to be collaborating so that's the fourth of four we have not heard back from stay
114tuned and and I do really appreciate the conversations that I think are necessary of doing things differently as a district if we're expected if we we really expect ourselves to be world class we can't be doing the same old thing so I do appreciate those big ideas and people being allowed to fail forward um I think that's great learning so that's it for me I do not see anyone else requesting to speak uh Dr Menzel Dr her Wells did you want to add something I may I please yes go ahead may I please I'm sorry I didn't mean to cut off Dr Menzel I know actually this is I just wanted to say um I appreciated hearing the Innovation uh and teaching and learning segment and Dr Watt I know that you have field a
115number of questions and appropriately so about um generative AI bringing that into the fold and I appreciate that you are tackling this as a um it is important and it is definitely relevant in future focused learning but there's also real concerns around it so I appreciate you being able to uh have a you know a tough conversation in an authentic conversation on this topic and it is very important that we um that we hit this straight on so thank you for having that uh I think frankly courage to go right down the road where we need to go because that's where our kids are going to be so thanks thank you Dr Hartwell it's Dr Menzel well I just want to conclude this segment by thanking our team Dr Benson R stat co-leads and every
116teacher uh classified and and support staff member who participated in these teams this is a culmination of hundreds of hours of work above and beyond for which people weren't um the the the gratitude that we give is is the product that you see here but they really are passionate about this work in helping move Scottsdale Unified School District forward and and tonight is just a sliver of the depth of the work that's been done Dr sakos's point about going slow to go fast it's the flywheel concept and Jim Collins is good to Great you know sometimes if you're going to build things the right way sustained over the long haul you have to take the time to lay the foundation the right way and I'm so grateful for the team members who are here and
117those who couldn't be here but who participated over the course of the last year because this is an extraordinary amount of work the cognia accreditation that we'll hear about later this year the work that was done by Dr Benson the team to to collect the data that that resulted in the recommend Nation for accreditation is also significant so thank you team I appreciate it um I make Nick too but I see all of the employees of this district is playing an important role in structural leadership so thank you to those who are also willing to step out of their boxes and do things a little bit differently as well as administrators thank you we're going to move on to our 16 action items on our agenda this evening hang on here we go action item
1185A is first approval of the proposed fiscal year 2023 2024 expenditure budget and call for public hearing Shannon Crozier Shannon's going to be up here a lot to begin with yeah we I do have a lot of uh items on here this evening uh well um president sunowski vice president Warner members of the board Dr Menzel and guess tonight we are taking a look at the fiscal year 2324 proposed budget the exciting thing about the proposed budget this year is unlike the last couple of years we actually had a state budget done before we had to put this together so I'm super excited to be able to do this knowing what resources we'll have for the most part instead of guessing for for the first time in a couple years um so with that with
119the budget development there are several dates that we are statutorily required um to do one of them being is we do have to prepare a proposed budget by July 5th as we don't meet in July we take care of that in June so that's what we're doing tonight um we have to have a link on our website to the Ade showing where people can can view that proposed budget and so that will go up uh before Thursday then we have to do an adopted budget and a public hearing which we'll be doing later this month and then that's posted um on Ade and sent to the state by the 15th of July so with that um and developing our budget for next year we did estimates to the governing board and what we thought that
120was going to look like throughout the year starting in November provided updates in January and March we did that based on a two percent inflation that we knew was going to have to happen we'll talk about what really happened um in the couple slides in we did Capital estimates in January and April and then we did a capital planning so we started meeting with the capital planning team actually in October of 21. this has been a really long process to start to develop a capital plan and and develop a budget based off of Capital needs and so we started that in October 21 kind of took a pause for a few months and then really hit that up pretty strong from December through April to develop that capital budget and then we met with the
121three employee groups through interest-based negotiations starting in the fall and I I think I think one of the last groups might have met or is meeting tomorrow so we're we're finalizing that up but the at least the salary portion of that was taken care of and finalized so with that and developing the budget that we have here we um did do a reduction in ADM of 263. to come up with that number I really I take a look at what have we done in the past several years and of course covid years there's a little bit of a wrinkle into that but then also looking at what has our Trend been um for this year our Trend this year was better than it has been so that's a positive so we really that number was
122developed looking at what has our history been with ADM and then what was really um for this year we are funded on current year ADM so this is our we put forth our best guess of what we think is going to happen for next year base level four thousand nine hundred and fourteen dollars and some change which is an increase of 139.44 from the prior year so nice increase there teacher experience index increased .002 and I if you're like me you're looking at that thinking how much could .002 really increase the budget oddly the smallest little increases there really do play a strong role in our budget and what that looks like and what that's really based off is saying what is the average experience of our teachers in our district how does that compare
123with the state and if you have a higher experience then you you get some additional funding for that unfortunately State retirement um is going to increase for next year that's kind of a bummer because they decreased it for this year just to turn around and it's like the same amount that they had decreased it this year for so we got a one year reprieve on that but unfortunately it's going to go up next year which sadly impacts us but it also impacts our employees um so that's about 140 40 000 increase that we had to think about with the budget so um I said that the state fortunately has a budget that was done early enough for us to factor that in here so this kind of looks at what changed between March when we
124presented and said this is what we'd like to you know what we think the budget is going to be and to move forward with with offering contracts out and now we know what actually happens so this takes a look at what those changes were from March to now um the base level we estimated at two percent and that's based off of a requirement inflation for Arizona is more than two percent so the state was required to do at least two percent they actually did 2.92 so that increased our mno which is great teacher experience index actually increased again ever so slightly from from when we did this in March and what happens is um school districts have until March 1st so they submit their data we get our Tei or teacher experience index and then
125you have until March to go back and make sure that your data is correct and so that's why some changes they don't normally happen but some changes slightly can happen between what we think it's going to be earlier in the year and what it actually finally ends up being so it went up just ever so slightly but again that actually equates to money for us the free and reduced weight lunch or I'm free in reduced lunch weight that's a new weight that we got this year it's going to be increasing next year ever so slightly so that helps out our mno budget as well and then because of those changes it did an increase to our Revenue control limit and our immuno override is based off of that that Revenue control limit so small increase
126there as well from what we originally thought and then within the budget that the state passed was an allocation to school districts of one-time money so it is one time we have it next year that's it um that is estimated to be about 5.5 million dollars for us which is huge but again one-time money so we have to be very strategic in how we use those funds putting that into the base of a salary that we won't be able to sustain that so we'll have to think about ways that we can utilize that money the best for our district but knowing again that is one-time money um and then as a part of that increase to the base level in m o and 0.292 percent is the state took away results-based funding for all districts
127and for some districts that worked out to a huge benefit to them because if you were at school or School District that wasn't receiving results-based funding having your base increase just means you now just received additional funds our schools do very well on results-based funding and so for us it actually was unfortunately a little bit of a reduction so we increased our mno um because of that point 92 by about 1.6 million but the reduction in results-based funding is 2.3 so we're at a little bit of a loss when it comes to that however we have been very our schools have been very strategic with the results-based funds have held reserves knowing that they wanted to be able to sustain some of those programs for future years so we still have the cash that we
128can use but that is that we will not continue to receive results-based funding moving forward and then again like I mentioned we have the 5.5 million in one-time monies so because of that our mno budget went up about 7.5 million from what we originally thought um in March which is great we're excited to have those additional funds and look forward to working with our teams on how to utilize those those one-time Monies in addition to that the state also put a small amount of inflation on capital or District additional assistance per student so there was an increase from what we originally anticipated in our Capital da of about 1.6 million right now we put that on an unallocated we had a lot of projects that were requested or items that were requested in capital we
129had millions of dollars more in requests than what we could actually um cover or be able to do so we have that in unallocated and we'll look at as we get through the year are the estimates for the prices are they accurate of what we thought we you know what it would cost to do the things we wanted to do for Capital and then we can start to look at what other things you know maybe did not get placed on that Capital plan that we can now take care of because we have these additional funds so we'll keep an eye on that and make adjustments to our Capital purchases as the year goes through and then for our estimated tax rates and I just this evening was looking at this and realized a little typo
130on there but um this looks at what was the the tax rate for this year 2223 what is the estimated we don't actually set the tax rate uh Maricopa County Board of Supervisors does that and so this is just estimating what we think it'll be so with the primary tax which is essentially your regular mno and your um State da monies that's the primary tax rate that's an increase to the base or increase um of um three cents to that per 100 and really what that comes from is when we did the budget last year we budgeted what we thought was going to happen the state did even more than what we thought was going to happen so our tax rate was based off of last year um a lesser amount than what we were
131actually going to receive from the state so that increased that just slightly on the secondary I have 0.8 is really 0.08 it's going to go up 8 cents because of the capital override which is what we shared um back in the fall or back last in the spring of 22 on what the the capital override was should it pass what that would be so that's in line with what we stated um it's very minimal increase because of the immuno override and then our bond in debt bondat increased ever so slightly there so with that and again this is estimates I think the Bond actually might be a little the bond debt might be a little bit estimated a little bit High but um basically 13 cents change from prior still very low keeping us at
1323.47 per 100 of assessed valuation which is still the lowest of all of our peers by almost um almost half so with that I'll take any questions governing board members do any of you have any questions or comments for Shannon at this time on this topic board member Kearney thank you president zinowski uh thank you Ms Crozier for your presentation uh just a question on the results based funding can you tell us what what was being funded with that money uh previously sure um great question um board president Carney um so the schools that met a certain that had us scores high enough to to receive that money um had their own allocation that they were used so a portion of that money came back to the district that we use for professional development we
133had earmarked some money for next year to be able to use for um Pre-K expansion as well as some Mentor teacher type programs um they're still Reserve in there so we're oh and it's a performance pay for our principals and APS where it was in there as well um we still have reserves so we feel that we can cover that at least I mean obviously for next year probably a little bit farther into the future as well but then the schools also received it as well and the schools kind of varied um we saw we saw schools use it for TOA to help with um some administrative duties in the office we saw um uh we saw a couple schools that used it for math Specialist or reading Specialists um some use it for instructional
134support in the classroom so it kind of varies um by sight some of them use them for the professional development before school gets started kind of that team building before the class you know School even gets started at the beginning of the year um so it kind of varied by sight one of the things that we're going to have to do and take a look at we knew we were going to have to do that anyways this anyways because Esser will be going away is really taking a deep dive into what are all the positions we have across the district where are they funded from and um what what stays and what unfortunately doesn't stay because with those with those monies going away um there are definitely going to be some some things that we
135have to look at there's not enough money within the mno to cover all of the things we've been doing through Esser and and some of these other areas so we'll have to take this year will be a look at taking a look at what what's there and what do we really need to focus on making sure that we keep it and and what what Matt have to change okay thank you any other questions Dr hartwell's do you have a question for Shannon on this topic no I do not okay seeing that there are none I'd like to make a motion to approve 5A the approval of the proposed fiscal year 2023 2024 expenditure budget and call for public hearing is their second to that motion seconded by board member Carney thank you all in favor
136say aye aye aye that motion passes five zero thank you we're moving on to 5B approval for classified retention stipend Shannon yes um board member uh president sinowski vice president Warner members of the board um this is an item that came up through interest-based negotiations early on in the year the classified group had asked that if we were able to that we would again provide retention stipends as we had for the past two years for all employees um at the time there was questions whether or not Esser which is where it had been paid for was really going to be able to continue to afford that knowing that we had um things within us or we were required to do and the amount of money that it would cost to do this for the entire
137the entire District as we had in the past also knowing that once you do something a couple years in a row it becomes an expectation and unfortunately is not an expectation that we can continue um so kind of got put to the let's see what we can do and see how things land um and so that's why it wasn't brought forth earlier in the year in spring when we did the present when we brought forth the salaries for um uh for all staff with that we kept looking and seeing okay what can we do what is possible and really wanting to honor our classified folks they do a lot for this district and they're kind of behind the scenes people who are making everything um continue to work and so how do we honor them
138knowing that with um with the certified teachers we were able to do a pretty extensive um longevity stipend to them using the 301 monies we were able to as well as performance pay we were able to do performance pay option for our assistant principals and principals so what is a way that we could honor um honor that group knowing that the monies that we have for some of these other areas can't be used to to increase their salary so with that we worked took a look at what we could do and so the recommendation um is not as much as it had been we changed it to 500 knowing again that this is phasing out because we will not be able to or we don't anticipate being able to do this in the future but
139it would be a 500 one-time stipend per FTE that would take place in August once everybody returned so it would be a if you were here this current year you return in August based off of your FTE would be a 500 one-time payment in August on a separate check we did not want to utilize Esser funds for this we were concerned about one using Sr funds for it but also for only one classification group and so we looked at we have some cash balances that had some good good reserves in there and so we took a look and decided that perhaps Civic Center which could or rentals which can be used for mno type needs would and has a very healthy balance in it would be an appropriate spot to to offer that retention step
140into our classifying thank you Shannon governing board members any questions board member Kearney thank you president sunowski uh how much what is the balance in that Civic Center account over 7 million thank you any other questions Dr hartwell's I do not okay I am I'm very grateful Miss Crozier for you finding a way to make this happen yeah me too and I hope it it can I hope um My Hope Is that we have more uh funds that are dedicated to on an ongoing basis to our employees and it doesn't have to be paid out in the form of stipends so put that forward I would like to make a motion to approve uh 5B approval for classified retention stipend is there a second on that second seconded by vice president Werner all in favor
141say aye aye aye that motion passes five zero thank you Shannon stay put is Roger going to join you on this one uh it depends on if there's questions okay um this is to 5c approve the award of requests for a proposal also known as an RFP 23014 visitor management system Shannon yes uh so president sinowski vice president Warner members of the board um so this really stemmed from we had a couple schools that we knew had software in their classrooms that or not I'm sorry in their office that checked um volunteers or anybody who came onto the campus and kind of did a screening they put in their driver's license and it then printed out a visitor's badge for them um as we're trying it was we're looking to enhance our security at all
142of our schools this became something that really came up as a need for all schools to be able to address anybody coming into a campus and so with that we worked with security and um Michelle Watt and put that out for a proposal and this is the recommendation that was brought forth from that team that would be a software that goes into all campus all school campuses as a check-in verification process for anybody on campus Shannon will this be uh readily available day one before this next school year I guess I do need Roger good evening governing Moore president members of the opening board this would be a phased implementation okay the plan would be to implement the the volunteer portion first which would be available the beginning of the school year and then implement
143the rest of it in the first quarter of the school year because there is equipment that would have to be delivered and training that would have to happen so a portion yes all of it no question for you maybe you're to this um what if someone does not have a state issue great question I do know the answer to that one too good they would still put in um like their their basic information their home address name that type of information and my understanding is that it would still go through as a verif as a quick check um so even if you don't have a state issued ID you would still be able to use the system to to check in and and have it do a real quick scan it's good to know yes
144yes thank you board member Werner just a clarification so the visitor portion is going to be available at all campuses beginning on day one so if a parent comes to the school they can slide their information in and get printed pass the volunteer portion would be available day one uh the visitor portion would not the visitor portion would be a phased implementation as we're able to get the equipment okay and what's the timeline for that it would probably all be throughout the first quarter of the fiscal year can I ask you how many schools currently have this system three four I oh this system none I know there's a system I know Copper Ridge has a system in it I think there's a couple of schools that had put that in outside of us but
145not this particular system this would be a new system for all schools okay so you this will be replacing what the other schools are currently using yes so all schools will will be on the same system we'll be on this okay and will this also then cut down on volunteers the process for volunteers to to be approved because I know we've had a lot of people complaining about how hard it is to get down to district office during the hours to to you know get approved volunteer in the classroom is this going to change anything with that process it will so the volunteer portion of it will have to work out internal systems right on how that'll work but each campus would have the ability to run checks on volunteers with the system once it's
146so they wouldn't necessarily have to do what they're doing now they wouldn't have to schedule appointments and it would take some of that burden off of HR yes exactly so when will we know exactly what that new process is going to look like for volunteers because it's important beginning of the school year okay yeah to be clear depending on the type of volunteering would require a different type of clearance is that correct like if they're going to be supervising overnight trips with our students they're going to still have to fingerprint clearance remember president snusky yes they would still if you're if you're if you're going as a chaperone on an overnight trip there's a there's a more in-depth screening that we do to make sure everything is okay before we send out on a field
147trip one of the things that we've talked about that I think will bring some of this more to the surface is what's a volunteer really and what somebody who's just on campus sure helping out visiting yeah they're they're helping out with things but but they're visiting and I think that will help eliminate some of the the burden that's been placed by just calling everybody a volunteer when maybe they're just visiting on campus that day helping out in like the office so we we anticipate this will this will cut the burden for HR um and the process for our parents significantly do you feel that you have the tools and infrastructure in place to implement this fairly quickly so I.T like all the people that are involved in in installing and implementing the system we do
148so Michelle was very involved in the evaluation and so was Josh I mean they were confident they both recommended um the solution and that's great I know that an exciting um tool for our schools to have and to help our parents and volunteers get on campus Dr Wells do you have any questions on this particular item uh thank you for president ask you I do have one question who has ownership operationally over this system uh board member hartwell's it would be the district that has the overall ownership of that yeah so that would be Josh I.T Josh and Michelle kind of a split between um security with Josh and it with Dr Watt okay so they're going to share the responsibility for op for rolling this system out and maintaining it operating it yes okay
149I would just ask that we make sure that that's clear before it gets rolled out that there's Clarity and who's the tech support absolutely thank you Dr hartwell's seeing that there are no other questions or comments on this particular item I think it's a great idea by the way um I'd like to make a motion to approve the award of requests for proposal 23014 visitor management system is there a second second vice president Werner seconds that motion all in favor say aye aye I that motion passes five zero thanks let's go on to 5D approve the use of strategic Alliance of volume expenditures save contract for the purchase of supplemental education resources Shannon Rodger I guess her up on this one too no I think this is Dr Dodds Karen is it okay yes they're
150Dodd's Karen thank you Dr Mansell Dr dots Karen's going to get us started on this we see if our technology team can pull up the Powerpoints or slide deck that she's prepared to help us thank you certainly good evening again president sinowski vice president Warner members of the board Dr Menzel Gladys and all present I want to give a brief update on Capstone just to provide some information about Capstone for clarity purposes a little bit of information about Capstone susd has been utilizing Capstone for more than a decade it is a digital tool that is for grade level and discipline specific content Capstone includes a few different features interactive ebooks published books for Library use as well as PebbleGo the screenshot that you see on the bottom the images that you see this is what
151you would see on the platform there are two tabs here that you can toggle between it's highlighted right now on ebooks but the blue tab would be for PebbleGo to elaborate our digital book features have a lot of neat things that our schools really enjoy Capstone digital books are accessible for all students and teachers grades K5 24 hours a day seven days a week it's Unique that there is a multi-user feature that is simultaneous that don't require holds so some of us when we go to the public library we're longing for that book but we're on the list waiting for somebody to turn it back in or for that Digital Book to be available to us well with the Capstone ebooks they are available for all kids at all times so all students could be
152reading the same book in second grade across our school district if we so choose or a teacher could have their entire class reading the same book there's also an audio function with a professional voice over this is neat especially for our younger kids when they're learning to read and they're listening for fluency they're listening for intonation from really good readers it's a nice model for our students as well as the neat feature of sustained reading so in using these ebooks children can read for longer periods of time equally important however are the alignments between our grade level standards and our reading units of study so Illustrated here is again a screenshot of our ebooks and the corners on the left and the right you'll see that there is a fourth grade unit aligned for Emma's
153new beginnings and then on the right there's Hansel and Gretel for second grade align standards for a reading unit of study and then in the middle just wanted to highlight that there are high interest books for our students to also select from in addition with Capstone we utilize Pebble go this is designed for students and teachers to use in K2 but it is available for kids in K5 it too is accessible 24 hours a day seven days a week this is primarily a source of research for kids who are doing projects for non-fiction research there is also an audio function for guided reading and more common topics for susd based on our usage reports our animals and biographies and as I just kind of shared on the ebook screenshot you see that there are alignment
154between our reading units of study we also see quite a few units of study for first grade associated with sciences and specifically I took note of all about rainforest all about the desert songs about animal adaptations things like that that can be found on PebbleGo as well in terms of managing content currently our teachers our instructional coaches and our Librarians are selecting the resources that would supplement or add to what teachers are doing for their standards-based content learning parents may always opt a child out of the use of any of our tools just like they could for any lesson we would provide an alternative assignment or an alternate resource right now as a district we have the ability to turn things off and we would do that as an entire District so we would eliminate
155it for the whole District we don't currently have the ability to individually buy student turn things off in terms of future practice we want to continue to work with Capstone receive their monthly notifications via their newsletters of what is being added in terms of their content and also you might remember that earlier this year the state put into a effect a new law related to our library books so the e-books through Capstone also would fall under that Library law as well where we would post for 60 days this year we haven't added any new since that law took effect but they too would fall under that same expectation that we have set forth in our library procedures and without any questions or comments that you might have your dad's Karen um governing board members any
156of you have questions or comments on this topic I'm sorry board member Kearney thank you thank you president snowski thank you uh Miss Dodd's Karen so we really need to be diligent in which vendors we're purchasing curriculum from and be sure that what we're providing our children fits you know high quality education and is in alignment with our goal of world class education and PebbleGo does not meet the standard and it can kind of concerns me that you said that you stated parents of kindergartners through fifth grade May opt their child out of lessons that utilize this resource and that an alternative assignment or resource is always an option we should not have any curriculum or assignments in our elementary school that parents have to worry about opting out of um second is that you
157said that um susd can turn off content deemed inappropriate yet the district has not chosen to do so and while I understand and respect that most teachers are probably using the animal and the biographies modules that you pointed out we've got to be honest that PebbleGo also promotes activism and controversial cultural topics for example I reviewed the curriculum and under social studies you find a module about being a good citizen which has tabs for activism and protests striking picketing boycotts and petitions another one titled healthy habits promotes masks face coverings for your good for your health and physical distancing Hubble go also promotes several topics under social action it promotes pride month as a holiday and several other controversial topics which are currently approved for use in the classroom so we've got to recognize all
158that is in this curricula because PebbleGo feeds right into the distrust of parents and the culture War controversies that are unnecessary and unacceptable in our Elementary School curriculum so I feel like if we're serious about attracting and retaining families and students in Scottsdale unified approving curriculum like this is not the way to do so so I'm disappointed that we're even entertaining spending funds on this um and spending any more time on capstone's PebbleGo icon just to see board member Warner so publico has been a Hot Topic in our district for many many months as a matter of fact Dr Menzel and I had a conversation about in our first one-on-one meeting specifically to the gender ideology under the family plan section and I actually believe you were a little taken back by what I was
159sharing with you at the time about a parent as someone who or a father or someone who identifies as male a mother or somebody who identifies as female now that may be great for some of our families but it isn't for a lot and as a matter of fact had a meeting with a parent yesterday who had three students in our district that happened to be in the same grade and she had no idea and she was appalled and she would have never known to be able to opt a student out of these modules inside of PebbleGo and and again it just these are kindergarten through third graders it is not age appropriate for our kids to be learning this or finding it like you said they can go on this 24 hours a day
160little students particularly the ones that like my son who's autism he'd have been through every module on his own time going through all of the stuff our vulnerable students are going to do that so I think it is it's disingenuous to say that the district can control the and turn off modules because you haven't we have spent hours and hours in curriculum review over PebbleGo and you seem to be fine with it and our families are the majority of our families are not so it's completely unfair to our district and our our customers because we are here to deliver top quality educational materials to our students and to be a world-class School District this doesn't cut it um what was used was the protests so in the modules of how to be a good citizen
161well if we're teaching our kindergarteners through third grade how to be a good citizen well how about how to be kind how to be a good friend you know how to be good to your but not teaching them to protest or um uh a picketing and holding up inappropriate signs that don't that are not age appropriate and that's my biggest thing with this and so I think we really need to be honest and stop being disingenuous about what we are providing for our students and I wish it was about the rainforest and the Animals I really wish it was but PebbleGo has proven otherwise so I I'm absolutely against us continuing to use publico especially since Dr Benson you and I have had many conversations about it you and Dr Menzel have had many conversations
162about it yet here we are in June and it's all the same so you guys are not protecting our kids you're not doing what's best for our kids and I'm appalled thank you I appreciate um the opportunity to respond I don't know that there's been a question in either the comments that have been posed but I wanted to make sure that the history of how long the district has had uh PebbleGo is recognized and understood you know it's well over 10 years Shannon and I were actually trying to find the root cause or the root year that it was first adopted and clicked here by year by year and it's it's over 10 so we just stopped clicking but also wanted to make sure I hear a few comments about the you we asked Dr
163Dodds to provide a scope of what we use from Capstone so thank you Dr Dodd's Karen for doing so we also asked Gail oper to give us the usage data and reports and we've shared that with the governing board in terms of PebbleGo specifically we've had 42 000 animal article views this year and 10 000 science article views this year so it's utilized by our campuses across the district um and both of the resources actual modules or lessons that have been referred to did come to the supplemental Review Committee earlier this year and the parents and teachers while the vote differed there's not like a hard line people voting by a line both of those resources on citizenship and families were approved at seen as appropriate so it's not that we haven't addressed that but
164so I wanted to make sure that that context was clear here too we appreciate the concerns and the questions but also wanted to make sure this wasn't like a personal challenge to Dr Dodd's Karen when she's just sharing the data and presentation as we asked her to do so so thank you thank you Dr Benson Dr hartwell's would you like to weigh in on this uh yes thank you board president sinowski I would like to apologize to all of our families and community members who were offended as I this parent was offended by what just came out of the mouse and my board colleagues very talk about disingenuous indeed and I will just close by wishing everyone a happy pride month thank you Dr hartwell's um a couple things we have curriculum specialists in this
165District that are trained professionals we have Educators we have a professional Librarians which I'm very thankful for because I recognize that not all districts have that and they're the ones making the decisions based on our state standards which these people do not weigh in on those are determined by our state Board of Education and officials elected into those positions and that are employed in that department so when we talk about what where these standards come from that that Capstone supports the curriculum that's where it's coming from it's not people in our district choosing to offend people which by the way I think using the terms culture war and assuming you speak for the majority of our families saying the majority of our families don't like this I think is extremely disrespectful our our families look
166very different in this District and so do our students and for us to be assuming that um we're all the same and we should all walk the same and same step is ridiculous and um I am sorry also to anyone who felt marginalized by those comments made by elected officials on this board tonight I do not support that I I support individuals growing and being who they need to be and who they want to be and not all the same and I think it's very offensive to assume that every student in our district has the same interests I respect their parents as a parent myself I was engaged in my students education my children's education and I trusted their teachers and that was the bottom line now as a parent I could have additional conversations
167with my children about issues that might have been concerning but I definitely would not assume to speak for everyone in my community because I had a particular point of view and I'm going to leave it at that any other comments before we take a vote on this issue because this isn't an argument or debate this is a we're having discussion so you can share your ideas and then we'll vote as individuals um board member Warner thank you so um it was not you as in personally you as you as in the people that are deciding um and so I apologize for that part but there's a time to be responsible and we're a very diverse District we're made up of so many different families from different backgrounds and who have different beliefs and cultures and
168that's what makes us great um and some of the things in publico like I said before it's about the age-appropriateness of the content that's being delivered and I will say back to the committee that was a very um not a parent friendly committee and so I know that it passed but there was a lot of contention and I also know that there was some silencing of both Dr Dodd's Karen and the parent that who had a um had filed a complaint on it so just let's take a step back and just be responsible and also recognize yes we're a very diverse district and every single one of our families that of our students who attend here they are our customers and they deserve the absolute best thank you thank you thank you for agreeing that
169being kind is not marginalizing our kids and our families with that let's um I call for a motion to approve 5D the use of strategic Alliance of volume expenditures save contract for the purchase of Supplemental Educational resources is there a second I made for a motion I made a motion is there a second to that second board member Lindsay makes a second all in favor to approve 5D say I I all opposed no we have passed that with a three to two vote moving on to 5e and that would be approve the use of Omnia Partners contract for the purchase of a feedback and service solution for schools that would be me Dr Mansell good evening president snowski members of the governing board at the last meeting we um pulled the conversation with respect to
170the recommendation to extend the contract with K-12 insight for the tool let's talk at the time the budget parameter was a hundred thousand dollars which is not actually what the cost for the tool is while the Cooperative has a higher amount for school districts we have negotiated a lower rate so for us it's 55 000 for let's talk is my recollection and then we also contract with them 7 500 for a survey instrument called engage so I want to talk about why we brought let's talk to Scottsdale Unified School District in 2020 and why I believe it's important to continue utilizing the tool as the board members know I sent a copy of the dashboard that we have that just is one example of the value when I interviewed for this position one of the
171concerns that was expressed by not only members of the governing board but by members of the community is the need to improve communication two-way communication between our parents with our staff with the larger Community I don't know how many of you have had this experience but I've heard it time and time again not only here but in other places when someone sends an email then I'll get told I never got a response from that principal or from that teacher or from you know someone in central office and when it's sent by email I have no way of knowing when it was sent if it was responded to when it was responded to so it's all a matter of guesswork we have expectations for timely responsiveness with emails but sometimes that happens sometimes it doesn't sometimes
172people go on vacation they get inundated with emails let's talk is a tool that builds in an accountability mechanism for communication so that when any parent any Community member submits a dialogue a request in the system it's logged we know who was assigned that dialogue we know how long it took them to provide a response if they've identified who they are they're given an opportunity to provide a customer satisfaction score after the response is complete so to date since we started let's talk we've had more than ten thousand dialogues submitted our customer service average is 8.1 on a scale of 10. that's a good score our dialogue age is 2.9 which is not where we want it to be we want it to be less that number is inflated in part by a few really
173old dialogue so sometimes people forget to close them if they've responded and so it might be 30 or 40 days we have a way to go in now we've been reminding people once you've responded close it sometimes a parent will will send a follow-up response that reopens the dialogue in the individual staff member forgets to close it but our goal is to have those closed as best as we can in two days or less we're able to flag critical dialogue so if there's certain words that are raised that are ones that identify a Potential Threat bullying harassment areas of concern those get flagged automatically in the system so I have a way and my leadership team has a way of monitoring what's been asked what what the trend date is what the concerns are we
174do see that there are periods of time where we have higher levels of inquiry than others Dr bachna is the recipient of the highest number of dialogues and that's not a surprise because you've got student information and management records you have any number of things related to data I get the second highest number and then we parcel it out from there but the ability to manage this system and each each building you know has a place for the dialogue so it goes to the principles they can add team members as needed so you have the right people answering the questions this Builds an accountability with communication for our parents for our staff for the larger community and so with that I'm happy to answer any questions but I believe it's an important tool to ensure
175accountability and communication with our community thank you Dr Menzel governing board members any questions or comments board member Kearney thank you president sunowski um so I know that you use this in Michigan where you were at service agency that you worked for and that you really like it I just think we really need to think about how much money this is costing us and I really want to see us putting more money into the classrooms and into our students and into our staff I also think that this takes time away from our administrators having to keep answering questions that could easily be answered at the child's School site and I think it's really important we talked about this before that they are building relationships uh you know on their students campus and the parents know
176they can go to their school administration and they can you know go to their individual School sites with any questions or problems and then they can escalate anything that needs to happen to District administration I just have a question on um you mentioned the engage surveys have we used that in the past or why were we paying for Hanover if we had this so so engage is a survey tool or we build the survey so I think um SurveyMonkey as an is another tool it's not as sophisticated as engage so we're able to so for example our exit interviews that we send to families when they leave we do that through engage we can do sophisticated branching surveys so that if if we send out a template survey if if it's parents then it can
177get a set of questions if it's Staffing get another set of questions it's a it's a useful survey tool to gather information that allows us to to do the kind of reporting that you want in a way that's easier than a Google doc or a Google form or or Survey Monkey so we've we have been using that it's a pretty low cost for the power of the tool and then with respect to the let's talk component there's nothing that stops people from having individual conversations we always suggest that people address concerns as close as they can to where the problem is so if it's in a classroom talk to the teacher let's talk builds in accountability for those other dialogues those other questions those other comments and it's not only questions but it's also compliments
178suggestions concerns and it allows us to take the Pulse of the community in a way that you just can't gather the kind of evidence just from emails or anecdotal one-off conversations so let's talk provides an ability to look at what are the emerging themes that are surfacing when we have things like our maintenance and operating override vote we can create a separate tab for that so that you have an FAQ and then people can click on that button and ask questions specifically about that so it can be targeted to the right people to respond in the most efficient way so it actually saves time rather than something going out and then someone's saying well I don't know the answer to that and then they have to hunt and figure out who the right person is
179we can do that centrally so that we save time from the rest of our staff so this so the 70 000 includes engage well yes it's actually it's 55 000 for let's talk and 7 500 for engaged so it's less than seventy thousand sixty two five okay and we'll engage b um we'll be using that next square instead of Hanover or we'll still be have both for different purposes so so we will be prepared to talk about the Hanover contract on June 20th Hanover does more than just the climate and culture survey but that's absolutely something we we could do we could create a different climate survey use engage to launch that and that would be a relatively easy process the question would be are we confident in the questions that we're asking they're the
180the right ones that we want to be able to measure over time but engage would be a great platform to be able to to do that kind of surveying among other things yes okay I just want us to be clear and know ahead of time that I did go on a school district that's uh using engaged surveys and it worked this exact same way as Hanover I was able to go on and take the parent survey in a random School District in a random state so we that's not anything that we're going to want to do so we need to make sure that we can't do that so with the engage survey tool there are a lot of ways of setting it up so you can set it up so that anyone can respond to
181any question you can set it up so that it only individuals can respond to a survey because it's a unique IP a unique email address so there are settings within the survey template that can ensure that only one response per person and then there are things that can be open to the entire Community for as many responses as people want so the one that you found that's not what you have to do it's just one of the options within the tool okay great thank you Dr Hart Wells would you like to weigh in on this no I have no comments seeing that there are no others Dr Menzel can you um by chance you kind of mentioned how this can be rolled back to a building if necessary can you tell you know share with
182us how frequently that happens where something comes in and that it needs to really be redirected so the the um the common thing for for many community members when they don't know where to go is they click the ask anything button which comes to me and and then I have a team that's built in here so it's the dialogue is assigned to me there are team members cabinet uh primarily on on my team but then when I get the question if it's if it's something that's specific to Athletics I'll assign it to Nathan Slater as the dialogue owner and then he can answer the question and then I can Circle back just by looking at the tool I don't have to talk to Nathan and see when he responded how he responded and what the
183customer satisfaction score was so it's a relatively simple process and I'm not the only one who can reassign dialogues other members on the team can so whoever's in the system can make that determination to make sure that the right person who can answer the question is the one who is assigned the responsibility for responding but if someone knows the answer to the question so on an ask anything if it's a T question we don't have to reassign it to Dr Watt she's on the team she can answer it and close out the dialogue so it allows us to be able to respond more quickly whereas if someone just emailed me and then by the time I checked it out sent it to them and I had this happen this is part of why I um
184Wanted let's talk back in my prior District I would send something off to my business official or to someone else on my team and I would assume that they took care of it three weeks later I'd get a comment from someone that I saw at a meeting saying I never heard back from X Y or Z well I would have no way of knowing I assume that once I sent it to him they were going to finish it when it's in let's talk I know and so that helps build the accountability and so that you know that expectation for timely communication being responsive to our customers is built into this system in a way that we just can't do with email alone thank you I I do appreciate it I mean when when I hear
185from our community that we need to be better about communicating we need to be more timely and we need this transparency um you know it's it it takes an investment in a system to support that and that includes our marketing that we've been doing a good job of I think and specifically you know this device although I'm not dealing with it individually um from what I've what I've know and what I've heard is that this is a good tool for us to be supporting um seeing that there are no other questions or comments on this issue I'd like to make a motion to approve the use of Omnia Partners contract for the purchase of a feedback and service solutions for school is there a second to that second seconded by board member Lindsay thank you
186all in favor say aye aye I like my post no no all right moving on to action item 5f approve the use of Mojave Educational Services Cooperative contract for the contracted transportation services district-wide on this one Shannon okay okay thank you for president sinowski vice president Warner members of the board I am doing a phone a friend and bringing up some some extra support here for this one for this particular item it was pulled at the last meeting and so we have provided the governing board with some more information in regards to the use of the various contracted services that we use for transportation obviously we it would be our desire to not have to contract out any of our transportation services however um with a bus driver shorted nationally as well as in our
187district and districts across the state unfortunately that's the reality that we're in is having to use the services so this is um one of four various um contracted services that we that we have utilized and so with that we'll we'll take questions as to what there might be for this Mr Jacobson thank you for being here are there any questions for either Shannon or Mr Jacobson on this particular topic board member Carney thank you president sunowski um I just want to say before we get in into this yesterday I was taking a walk around the neighborhood and I saw two big yellow Scottsdale Unified School District buses come by right and I just don't want us to lose sight of that being awesome marketing right for our schools because it's an iconic uh you know
188symbol of public education and so um I just know that we're struggling to find bus drivers it's a nationwide problem right and I and I get that but I really really want to make sure we're doing everything we can to to use our yellow one and white buses um on hop skip and drive I am the mother of a special education student who has been transported by hop skip and drive this past school year so I've got personal experience with this vendor and I've also read the emails that the board of we've received from parents who had positive and negative experience um it is unfair though of us to put a young vulnerable student in someone's random personal vehicle and have them ubered to and from school I mean our special ed students need and
189deserve consistent drivers and safe modes of daily transportation that have cameras even in them parents have got to feel comfortable putting their child in in our District transportation each day and I'll say for personally as our school year progressed that my son did end up having kind of two main drivers that were wonderful but I've got screenshots of tons of random drivers that would uh come pick him up and it's very uncomfortable as a mother it also was very chaotic for teachers that sometimes the drivers could never find them they didn't know where to pick them up and they would have to wait there with the student until they got picked up so I understand we're in a predicament with drivers but the Hops give and drive needs to be our last option um after
190we've exhausted all of our other professional local special Transportation companies that we already work with so that's where I'm at with that do you I I agree with you 100 um we have a couple vendors that are local vendors that we use they use vans that are wrapped and marked and how we do it is once we get the transportation request forms we submit it to those two companies and once they reach availability are they they have no more availability then we reach out to hop skip they are it's not we go there first and then no it's the local companies that have the Vans one that's economically makes sense because they get you know up to seven people in one vehicle versus uh the the one in a car two in a car the
191other challenges is um when it comes to our our McKinney vento students a lot of those are one student you know clear across town so it makes it hard they won't do those in a van they lose Revenue so there we have to use hop skip because that's the only one we have left so I agree with you that is our preference to use the marked Vans for many reasons I do want to address we are doing everything we can to hire drivers I don't know if some of you heard we did a sign and drive and we were successful we have six people starting tomorrow so we are doing a lot too my staff is amazing they came out on a Saturday a lot of them are salary so they came out on their
192time on Saturday to try and get drivers so we are doing everything we can to get drivers um I'm not a camera person not a public speaker person but I've been on the news several times so doing everything we can to get drivers but I do agree with you it needs to be our last resort but that is what we use them for it's a very last resort we use the other companies first I did reach out to care Transit today they did say they will be able to help us significantly more than they did last year they want to help us more they're in the process of buying some more Vehicles hiring some more drivers so we'll continue those talks but they are there's companies that are we send out to First just because
193of the economical factor and the identification of the vehicles in the conversations as well that David had today with with the other vendor one of the things that came up is that they too are going to be providing more or producing more cars and going again to that car model where it's where it's tracking I mean more uber-esque as as the other companies are but that is one of the ways that they're trying to also be able to provide more more services to them yeah care Transit is hoping to roll out a parent app this summer I was told which will be just like the parent app that the other vendors are using uh with their with their sedans that they're bringing on um I think yeah and I think that's the grade the one-on-one
194I think is fine it's the consistency of the driver you know that can make the students scared make them anxious you know make them nervous heading to school and um so that maybe would be a good option if it's more of a consistent driver that a parent student can expect so in my conversations this morning I had a year in review oddly enough with hop skip this morning they are rolling out it's not out now but where parents can opt to narrow it down to three drivers is what I was told so the students would see because that was my concern too any any change for some of these students it throws their whole day off and so that was one of the questions I had for them is is there a way that we
195can narrow that down and they are they have told me they are rolling out where parents can opt to have uh certain drivers or rate their drivers like I want this one over you know type of a thing that's what they told me they're rolling out this summer so I'm hoping that that comes through okay well I want to thank you so much for what you're doing and for your thoughtfulness in this and for um just listening and doing your best and so we appreciate that board member Warner so um I do do you want to acknowledge I'm I received four emails from score parents who had very great things to say about hop skip drive and um and I'm hopeful for their confidence and I understand these kids are older so it's um it's
196definitely easier for them we do have an incident and I'm bringing this up as I had a conversation with Dr Menzel about this and it's still not resolved and so there was an incident with a special ed non-verbal student in third grade who was kicked scratched um and had his hair pulled and had his face slopped and hop script Drive did reach out to susd but the email was not returned apparently somebody was on vacation and this was downplayed in the email that's pretty horrible things for a non-verbal student to go through so is there a way that we could work with hop skip tribe can they get cameras in the car it's like how do we make sure that this never happens again because no student should ever experience this absolutely I when I
197found out about it when I got the email that night I was like whoa what's going on so the the when the account was set up um prior to me being director it was set up with one contact and so those emails for those incident reports were only going to her and she was on vacation I have immediately when that happened I found that out I made sure that I'm on that contact list um and I every conversation I have I I ask our representative am I still on that list I need to make sure I'm on that list so that I'm getting those because believe me if I would have got those that that issue would have been resolved immediately because I feel about that even happened but um that was not a hop
198skip thing it was the account was set up with only one contact and they did contact she was on vacation and so um I apologize for that but I have been at it as a context so that we have more than one person getting those alerts so that we can deal with incidents when they happen okay and um we've acknowledged in president announced well we do house district communicating back to parents so have you communicated with the parent of the student and it has it been resolved I have not Diane reached out to the parent um and tried and she said that she she was okay she but others would be reaching out to us and then that's where it was left um I mean if I I'd be more happy to to have a
199conversation with her um but I have not know okay all right I appreciate that so thank you we just want to again it's like our students and our families deserve that absolutely absolutely like I said when I got the email late that night when it was escalated I went what is going on so yeah student safety is everything to me and I'll stand by that so I'll say one more thing and then I'll end so if um if there's just a structure in place that when and I think it's great that you're on top of things and you're getting the emails now but that the parents get communicated to right away it's so important because that time when they're not being communicated with is when things brew and people get more upset and so on
200and if we can really just narrow in the times that these parents are communicated with I think it'll be very it'll be good for the whole district and also for our vendors absolutely absolutely thank you hmm um interesting uh to clarify I did not say as our district has issues with communication I said as a priority for our district to improve our communication so to make clear but the communication as I understand from that hop skip and drive is a parent receives up to five messages yes on each end of their transportation they receive they receive a an initial alert as to what the vehicle is a picture of the driver all that information they get uh they get a notified when the students picked up when the students dropped off and then opposite in
201the afternoon and that a parent can actually directly engage with the company correct if there's an issue or a perceived issue anywhere yes and I do understand that some of our students are non-verbal but I think if a driver is reporting issues and Reporting it to the parent or maybe it's a nanny that maybe that communication is in place but it's just not being addressed properly because as I understood it and I don't have a child who has utilized this service so I'm only speaking on the experiences that have been shared with me the the one particular issue is a horrible issue totally agree that one student is hitting another student and I I started thinking back to the summer road trips with my family in a car four kids in the back seat before
202the seat belt regulations and all that and it was the nudging and constant um and I know it's different having your kids go to school versus your chosen family trip and kids should be safeguarded but there's also um I think there's an expectation the driver reporting stuff the family engaging in communication immediately to help us get better as well if something happens so and I appreciate to know that it wasn't going to you the communication wasn't initially that it was going to an employee who was on vacation employees deserve vacation so um we're here to improve absolutely absolutely thank you thank you for all that you're doing especially for trying to get more and more drivers to sign up to transport our students because that first person agreed them every day is often the school
203bus driver kids love the big yellow bus yeah they do um I see uh board member Carney has a request to speak again thank you president sneski I just have one question so if we approve this contract of 550 000 does that mean um if we can find other vendors we will not be using that full amount right just because we would approve that amount does not mean we will be using it if you can find alternative transportation options absolutely that's just that's I think that came from what we spent this year or something I don't know but that's where we ended up at uh uh for this year so yeah I mean if I can use another vendor then yeah it wouldn't go to that number yeah with with that same question with any
204of the um uh Cooperative agreements that we bring forth to the board when we bring a number fourth sometimes yeah we're buying it's an exact that's the amount with a lot of the cooperatives that we bring forward last week this week um it's a we could spend as needed if needed up to that dollar amount but there's no it doesn't doesn't hold us to a you will we will spend this dollar amounts it's we can go up to that dollar amount if we don't need to we won't board member Warner so I just wanted to re redirect a little bit so uh the app notifies the parent when they pick up drop off and so there's a notification that they receive when there was incidents like in the situation it doesn't get reported directly to
205the parent immediately I believe it comes it gets reported to the top skip drive and they report to susd so um and that's just and again I'm supportive of doing the best for our kids but I want to make sure that everybody out there knows that this was not a I know that the driver ultimately reached out to the parent which is how this all came about but we just want to ensure that we have talk communication with our vendors and that our vendors are taking care of our students thank you seeing that there are no other requests I'd like to make a motion to approve this particular item and that is um 5f thank you approve the use of Mojave Educational Services Cooperative contract for the contracted transportation services district-wide is there a second
206to that motion seconded by board member Lindsay thank you all in favor say aye I post that motion passes five zero moving on to 5G Personnel action items good evening president sonowski members of the governing board Dr Menzel I'm pleased to present very uh truncated version of a Personnel report tonight two items on there one notably a retirement for a long time susd administrator I want to thank Gina Aikman for her service and then additionally exciting news that we are promoting from within Kelly Perry to the position of principal at Yavapai Elementary School and well we hope it approved kids I should say a recommendation to approve such thank you any questions from the governing board members on this particular Personnel item seeing that there are none I'd like to make a motion to approve
2075G which is Personnel action items for 5 11 23 through 5 30 23. all in favor say aye aye aye I opposed here any so that motion passes 5-0 yes if I may just quickly Miss Perry is in the audience with her husband so congratulations Upon Us stand up so we can embarrass you appropriately I'm sure that you have a high school Community is looking forward to you the Baton getting passed off to you because it's been under great leadership who has got your back yes I see that that's why I said that all right thank you we're going to move on to 5H approval and revision of supplementary salary schedules and job descriptions Alexis Wilson is going to help on this one president sonowski members of the governing board and Dr Menzel we have
208a recommendation to approve the revised supplemental salary schedule as outlined before you there were some clerical omissions of a few positions that are identified in the recommendation and then additionally a change to the athletic camps fee structure that are in front of you so specifically on that one which is new that 70 percent of that fee amount would go to the coaches 15 percent to the the building the site school if you will broken down further 10 percent for site Athletics and then five percent to the site program and then the additional 15 percent would go in um five percent increments to community ed District Athletics and susd indirect cost governing board members any questions or comments on this Dr harwells do you have anything to add no I do not I do have a
209question on the Sports Camps actually I'm glad that the money is going to the coaches and being split up the way that it's being split up I have a question though um are these are they necessarily are certified teachers that then will receive these funds or is it possible that they're not certified teachers as well I uh Mr Nathan Slater is here and can speak more directly to that camp fee structure okay president sinowski vice president Warner Dr Menzel Miss Wagner thank you these are camps that are run generally during the summer by our own susd coaches so they may be certificated teachers but they are certainly cleared through HR approved coaches okay thank you so they are not having to pay for no correct that's why we run them through Athletics and Community Education
210and then they also do not have to provide proof of liability insurance correct because they're not renting because they're there are kids our camps our facilities are people running the camps or so if an art teacher wants to teach an art class in the summer um can they with the same 70 of the fees going to the art teacher and not having to show not having to rent the facility and not having to have proof of liability insurance I would have to defer on that one I I see a lot of stuff eyes going back and forth here so we're going to defer to Dr Bono for that question president High board President snowski we would love that right now if a teacher or any employee has you know Dr Bono's underwater basket weaving and
211I want to run a clinic or a camp I would go through that Rental process and have to have an LLC have to show my certificate of liability and I would go through the facilities Department to be a renter um if I want to teach a class of if I want to do a tutoring session let's say I want to do some enrichment or intervention I'm paid at a it's a flat rate of 30 30 right now July one it'll be 35 that's different than what our camps are paying for athletics so let me rephrase that if an art teacher wants to hold an art camp and I'm saying this gen with sincerity because we've had teachers that have wanted to provide their expertise to our students over an extended period of time but they
212have to fall under the rental and the insurance and it just becomes this not worth it to the individual I would love that if that was something we could explore to offer enrichment opportunities to empower our maybe our own staff correct I would love to explore that at the same rate that we are empowering our Athletics me too it's kind of why I brought that up um I I do like the idea of doing something different I've said that earlier but I think we need to be open-minded moving forward on making sure that it's not just about Athletics here that this structure can also apply to other employees and their skills they share want to share with our students in our community okay um I see no one else requesting to speak can one more
213question can you tell us how the retentions were determined so particular retentions like the retention the 2000 a year to retain them I'm not sure I understand that maybe it's under it's under the sub extra Duty I might be on a different nope I'm on my mind right here um shoot I was going through this so where is the uh like the psychologists and the lead teachers and oh on uh president sonowski on the entire supplemental list is that what you're referring to as those those particular dollar amounts yes um they some of those were modified like the esy psychologist was omitted there were recommended hourly rates for sop otpt Sykes I do think this is something that we can certainly take a deeper dive looking at next year perhaps through the IBN process to
214make sure most of these were in effect um from previous years some of those were changed in March some of the athletic and Fine Arts stipends on that particular athletic curricular extracurricular supplemental salary schedule those some of those were revised so these were amounts that had been previously recommended but have have been part of conversation through IBM but not identified as a priority interest for um other positions if you will okay yeah yeah yeah I know there's been conversation in the past of how many are per campus and what's their role President sunasco we are still engaged in those conversations with the certified IBN group to definitely identify exactly what the responsibilities Encompass for the till so both in the certified group and and the administrators group to better Define that moving forward we may
215not land that plane entirely this year but we certainly are having some robust conversations around it well good I'm glad because I know some campuses utilize them very effectively to support instruction so yes I'd like that'd be great across our entire District I should add that there is definitely a conversation about utilizing them in Mentor roles for second and third year teachers so that we mentioned earlier about the mentorship for our brand new teachers and then also to support the work of the MTS s as outlined previously on our strategic Plan update okay thank you Alex is I appreciate that um they had about the um those that big long list of how are we getting those and is again some of those were previously had been in place and there have not been recommendations
216to prioritize looking at some of those different ones that doesn't mean that they're not a priority they just weren't identified through IBN as uh in particular to look at addressing those so they've been in place we can certainly take a okay correct to support opportunities for people to be part of our strategic plan right right okay good uh quests I'd like to make board president go ahead Dr harwellski thank you um Miss Wilson I'm not gonna hold this up tonight because this was a fix from a previous vote that was approved but I'm going to flag this and I've flagged this before and that's the earned doctorate stipend I'd like to have a conversation about re-assessing when a earned doctorate stipend would be paid at earning perhaps but rather than an annual stipend and each
217year I realize that we've expanded this so that it's at least inclusive of the teachers who are in their doctor which is appropriate but I don't believe that the earned doctorate is something that should be each year I'd like to talk about this more as a milestone payment as opposed to an annual stipend and for the next school year so I'm just flagging it here I see Dr Menzel making note of that all right thank you Dr harwells um I'd like to make a motion to approve the revision of the supplemental salary schedules and job descriptions is there a second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor say aye aye aye that motion passes five zero thank you we're going to move on to 5i approval of Award of requests for proposal RFP 24005
218teacher evaluation tool for the 23-24 school year Alexis president sunowski members of the board and Dr Menzel you do have in front of you with a recommendation to award that RFP but before we get to that we would like to take this opportunity to share the work that has been done prior to bringing this recommendation for tonight if I could I would just like I know we have I have some people that are going to help present but I also want those that participated in the teacher eval steering committee that to please stand up so I see Dr Williams Mr spangola yes I just want to recognize that in addition to some of the other work that you saw earlier tonight that some of these folks not all are here some are hiding behind the
219pool uh has spent days and days uh getting us to this point so I just want to give them a big shout out so thank you and um just about 30 minutes or so everybody good rough group tonight uh I'd like to bring up with me Mrs Jonah Wallace at Eli's coach for secondary Dr Junior Michael principal of Ingleside Mrs uh Larissa Beckstead Cheyenne teacher and Dr Susan Lugo our director of HR for certified who are going to help tell the story about how we got to Bringing forward this award for an RFP so turn it over to swallis good evening board members I'm almost asleep this is way past my bedtime just gonna say so we had came up with 10 top reasons why we needed to change our evaluation system and it's rather
220robust one of them is the Arizona revised Statute the big one or a big one is alignment with our strategic plan and we had a presentation of our committees that have been working on that develop a common language for teaching and learning our current tool that we're using is over 20 years old and we noticed that there are some inter-rater reliability issues that would we would like to have addressed we have principles that are dissatisfied with this instrument it's not one of the easiest ones to be using there's teacher dissatisfaction actually we were talking about it today I was working with some teachers in a class that I was teaching for our professional development Institute and a conversation came up with setting goals and the biggest one though is that teacher efficacy leads to student
221growth and that's where we want to go so oops sorry got so excited our process for selection we are in a three-phase process phase one happened last fall with uh stakeholder groups of teachers site administrators and District administration and currently we are in phase two with our steering committee and coming to you this evening with this presentation wanted to give you just a little bit of information about phase one with our stakeholder groups our teachers our district leaders and our school leaders in each of these groups met individually and when the groups met they identified what works and what's not working with our current teacher evaluation system as well as identifying priority issues that need to be addressed and some of those things were that the tool is outdated it's not research based there were
222questions of fairness and great inflation and just going through the motions with feedback and I am going to turn this over to Dr Junior Michael to continue thank you and good evening so as Miss Wallace said uh there are three phases in this process and we are currently in phase two and uh one of the first things we did was establish a steering committee and uh the steering committee came together to First establish uh what do we want this evaluation system to achieve and then we moved forward and brought together from across the state some evaluation tools and then assessed it versus criteria that we had created and then went through the benefits of these tools and the risks and then went through a decision analysis to arrive at the point that we're at we
223also wanted to make sure that we were adhering to Arizona revised Statute and these two specific Parts first the objective of a teacher performance evaluation system is to improve instruction and maintain High instructional standards and then second to involve you good folks and certified teachers in the development and periodic evaluation of a teacher performance evaluation system uh our committee also established beliefs uh about the teacher evaluation system and what we hope you'll see is that what we're going to bring forward uh there is alignment between the tool itself and these beliefs first and foremost teachers have the greatest impact on student learning we want the evaluation system to stimulate professional development and growth also we wanted to set high expectations for teachers for leaders so that we are achieving optimal student outcomes the feedback that
224comes from this tool has to be meaningful timely and once again have that continuous learning for our staff the process should be clear and consistent [Music] um and then ultimately our purpose statement that we created is uh the purpose of teacher evaluation is to maximize student outcomes through the growth of teacher skills and demonstrative practices and now I'm going to bring over Miss Larissa Beckstead good evening this is the list of the criteria that we use to help us review the different evaluation tools and help us and eventually end up selecting our tool the tool that we ended up selecting will be able to use on our platform that we have talent Ed and the company will work with us to be able to implement input the data into Talent Ed and there's a difference
225between the evaluation tool and the platform we look just at the evaluation tool the procurement process we wanted the proposals to meet the criteria that the Committee created the rpfs were sent out to over 600 vendors 37 vendors downloaded and four responded we did extend the date to allow more but we ended up which is four responding and based upon the criteria set the procurement committee determined that one meet met all the criteria and the one that met all the criteria is oops I went too far Danielson framework for teaching and learning Danielson is this tool is that met all the criteria in the list the procurement committee ranked it the highest out of all four options it has Decades of research the tool is used in multiple States and different countries it allows teachers
226to reflect upon their teaching and provide evidence on whether they're being effective or highly effective when teachers grow professionally students grow academically and this tool allows this to occur when the steering committee what the steering committee likes specifically about this evaluation tool was the explanations on the rubric for each category so Donaldson provides very specific and very clear detailed examples of what's the difference between an Effective Teacher in whatever category they're rating themselves in versus highly effective and that's what we like because it made it very user friendly so moving on to phase three I'll let Dr Susan Lugo explain how that's going to be implemented all right good evening Madam president members of the governing board executive team in cabinet I am very proud to have joined this steering committee in this past January
227and one of the uh things about the Danielson model that it promotes is when teachers Thrive our students Thrive and so I just wanted to share with you a little bit about pending governing board approval of this model what phase three would might look like so I I don't want to read all the slides to you but it's really important that we have an integrated thoughtful rollout and phased planning for for this evaluation tool because it's not only an evaluation tool what it is is it's developing a Common Language and kind of that umbrella that encompasses the different initiatives that are going on in the district as you saw this evening the students test scores are looking great in this district and teachers are on all levels of the Continuum in their practice when they
228come to us from other districts or they come to us right out of the university and this will help a proficient teacher work towards becoming distinguished and giving them some something to to really help grow in their practice and help kids become the student facilitated learning so that's kind of that there's four domains uh in the in the Danielson framework for teaching and learning under those four domains uh there are 22 components and those 22 components then have 76 indicators so as you can see it may sound very overwhelming this is not a simple easy lift for the district but what we want to do is make sure that we have clear criteria and that we train really well one of the things is we need to train our administrators and they become through the
229training process that can be done online but the committee really recommends in person they get certificated that you know they have inner radar liability amongst themselves and then every year that training becomes you have to recalibrate on the tool and it's an online kind of a test but it makes sure that we have that but then it's also really important that we provide the professional development for our teachers needed so that they know what the expectations are and they know how to go along the Continuum another thing to be very um clear about is that making sure that teachers feel good about where they're at and not feeling like you have to be perfect all the time we know those of you have been in the classroom we know that great teachers live in threes
230and meaning they they work every day in that you know there's four four continuums they might go and seek out the level four where it's student-led learning and the engagement but then they're going to go back to the three give that solid direct foundational instruction and then move in and out of those continuums so it's really important that they see this tool as as a reflective growth so I'm sorry I'm babbling I don't know where that came from um so I kind of talked to you a little bit about the framework and our recommendation um and the purposeful rollout and that there are there are a number of research that you can find online about the Danielson tool and the base the research base for the individual components and then using evidence in the classroom
231to determine the teacher quality so um with that I will turn it over to Alexis Wilson my boss and then I just really get to close it out here and again thank my co-presenters here as well as all of the other folks that are identified on this slide that gave so much time and very very thoughtful in put into arriving at this point where we are tonight and as Dr Lugo said we want to make sure that we are very intentional and purposeful in this next phase which is the most important because if we fail in the implementation of it then the tool won't be utilized as as well as it could be so this group is coming back for two more days to really take a hard look at what are the next steps
232to make sure that we plan for a successful implementation and with that we're pleased to make the recommendation for the Danielson framework for teaching and learning and award the RFP for a new teacher evaluation tool governing board members are there any questions on this board member Warner like I have lots of questions um so who will manage this tool who's in charge of it and the implementation and like who does it fall under so a president assistant sonowski Vice President Warner there are many parts to managing it as you're talking about so initially right we have to plan for an implementation whether that's a phased implementation or full implementation we need to be mindful of other initiatives in the district to make sure we don't have too much on on everyone's plates there is training
233that has to be done provided by the um Danielson folks to both our administrators and to our teaching staff so ultimately when you get down to who does observations that is the school administrator principal assistant principal and then there are some other folks that also provide those observations and and formal evaluations the platform for where it will be housed has typically been um the responsibility falls to the human resources department and as Ms Beckstead said the idea is that Danielson will help us get it into the platform and then we've got to look at data make sure observations are being done in a timely manner so that would fall on both Dr sakos Mrs Cerna for who supervised the principles to make sure that that work is getting done as well so there's many parts
234to to managing it and I think you know obviously the folks here listed on our our members here that brought us here will be instrumental in helping as they are familiar with it most familiar with the tool and um you know be the the leaders as we roll This Out survey and you may have said this in your presentation did you survey the assistant principles and principals who will be doing the evaluations using this tool and do they want it so at the in the fall of 2022 there were three different groups that were that came to that were met individually so School administrators were in that group assistant principal's principals and identified what criteria what things that you know looking they we had to look at what our current tool was and what's working
235and what's not working so they did that teachers did that on their own no administrators were in the room District administrators did the same thing and from those three groups the committee members that you see we just gleaned a few from from each of those groups and then what measures uh will the teacher what are the measuring sticks that the teachers will be evaluated on so there are four domains I'm going to lean on Dr Lugo who's a more of a resident expert on that okay thank you so I briefly spoke about the different domains so they're the four domains there's planning for instruction there's uh the learning environments they they changed the name in this new rollout Edition for 2022 learning experiences and principled teaching so when you think of domain one think of
236the planning and preparation um teachers coming up with instructional objectives at the correct level of difficulty for their students designing coherent instruction the learning environments really talk about you know what is the classroom like developing a mutual respect and Rapport in the classroom setting a climate for learning managing behaviors in two and then learning experiences the components in that I think there's five of them but really about student engagement and using questioning strategies those things that that are observable the last one the principle of teaching sometimes it was called professional learning responsibilities oftentimes when we have this this portion reviewed by our by an attorney it's recommended that that's not part of the portion for the teacher evaluation system but that's evaluated separately because I want to say it's a professional responsibility so one might
237want to use if somebody's not participating the way that they need to to develop Community attending plcs having those conversations we might want to use a corrective action rather than putting them on an improvement plan okay and um this has professional development and I know that there's a team in the administrative staff that does creates the professional development now um will this replace that well the professional development that's into Danielson framework replace that so that's that's where the thoughtful intentional rollout is is very very important so like the the mtss process I can hear on the side uh that that's a a district initiative and this this framework for teaching and learning it was really if you think about it the outside of the box will help take all the initiatives together so there's not
238going to be a replacement but what's going to be very important is that we share with teachers that when you do this for supporting students with interventions this is how it looks in the framework and so that there's that crosswalk and deep understanding so there's going to be a lot of professional development I do believe that if if it's paced correctly and it will take teaching and learning and all the different departments working together the uh there are components for psychologist speech therapists but they they require refinement um social workers have not been yet addressed in the framework um to be on the mtss committee also and one of the get to be and one of the things that um that I have to say about the Danielson framework is we're looking at mtss we're
239looking at good strong tier one instruction and this framework can help us with that too so that and when you were talking about on professional development they just kind of go together which is really it's nice it's neat and we're supporting what we're trying to do as far as that teacher efficacy and and raising that I mean what's considered an Effective Teacher versus a Highly Effective Teacher so the distinguishing characteristics between effective highly effective and developing those are the categories that the state has adopted for classifications for teachers and with their final annual evaluation that includes the observational portion so the current portion that the district has plus the academic growth and proficiency attributed to a teacher's individual so the Danielson framework is solely the observational portion and the Professional Standards so their categories are
240more towards they're not considered highly effective effective they're considered the highest rating is distinguished proficient I think it's emerging and basic are the four ish the four differentiations if you and I can't give you a quick blink of what the difference is between distinguished and proficient because it's it's pretty complex teaching is very complex the the short version is distinguished you will when you walk into the classroom you will feel the children leading the the instruction they are questioning one another on topics and the teacher is facilitating the learning uh if if you look at basic basic is very basic sometimes what we would consider you know our student teachers or those coming out that need significant support from a mentor okay and at 100 180 000 annually it's a significant um amount of money
241that would be coming out annually and you know we're not taking care of our staff and teachers properly at this point um were there any how is that comparatively priced to other products that would serve the same purpose yes so and I I would not think of this as annually of a hundred and eighty thousand that's our initial because remember we're going to need a big training package uh to go out uh that when we have the people from the Danielson group Train us the ongoing uh training is going to be dependent upon the needs of the district and I've come from another District where we utilized a trainer of trainer models and we had expert trainers in the room that were already District staff but they do need to become experts in the process
242and that's really where the partnership with teaching and learning comes in that our instructional coaches and those teacher support mentors that they're all familiar with the Danielson language so I don't believe that it's going to be an ongoing of 180. I do know that the other packages check with procurement they were more of a platform and they were not a i because I was one of the evaluators on the procurement they were more of a technology technological platform in which you could input uh whatever criteria that you wanted this was the only one that was really research based on the attributes of a classroom and the teacher okay thank you lastly do you know about how much it'll be or did you guys go over when you were looking at the pricing for this what
243the annual cost would be moving forward good evening good evening uh the annual cost moving forward really is going to vary depending on how fast the implementation goes okay but the reality is I mean I would estimate that it's probably going to be about half the cost of what we're going to pay the first year and when we did look at the other proposals all of the proposals we received even if they weren't necessarily what we were looking for they were all within 10 percent of each other of what that first year cost was going to be all right thank you very much I appreciate it appreciate the presentation board member Kearney thank you president sunowski uh just a few questions I might have missed but what's the current tool that we've been using for
24420 years you said it has an acronym for which I'm going to fail at remembering right now f f thank you that's f-t-p-a-i-r is what it stands for yeah of course you do formative teachers approachment performance assessment index revised what do we thank you Dr Bono should have put you on the committee and what what does the district currently pay for that it's been in existence for quite some time and uh I believe it if someone wants to correct me since I wasn't here at that time but I think it was developed in-house you sure you don't want to come up here developed it in-house in 2003 and then revised it in about 2009. okay um can you just clarify because I'm a little bit confused on what we're getting for the 180 000 are
245we purchasing an actual tool or so president sonowski board member Carney we are purchasing an evaluation tool that we can utilize additionally we are purchasing professional development for the individuals that will be both performing the observations and evaluations and the teachers that will be participating in that as well and as Mr Spivey mentioned it is depending on the outcomes of of the phase three and how we determine how we're going to implement this we could be paying up to 180 000 this year if we're only able due to you know making sure that we implement this well that we're doing a partial or a phased rollout it could be less than that amount for this year and then a different amount for the following year okay and that and that Mr Spivey can correct me
246if I'm wrong but I think if that's true we would be coming back each year for that approval but I'll let him speak to that that's correct this is a one-year Award with four optional annual renewals and those will be back brought back to the board every year between April and May okay and say we weren't um we didn't weren't going to renew this next year what what would we get for 180 000 what would we still own what would we would we still own the tool um president so now remember Carney we if we weren't going to we would have to go out and and adopt a new bring a recommendation for a new evaluation tool to that that would be my understanding and I want to point out too that this is funded
247through Capital funds which are not directly impacted or impact salaries okay and then my last question for you is uh what other districts are using this tool currently as Dr Lugo mentioned in her former districts and she's handing me notes uh Creighton School District Peoria and Mesa but much like um previous presentations tonight it was really important that we hear from each of the groups the teachers the school administrators the district administrators to make sure that we were picking the best tool that would speak to the standard of Excellence that we want for our teachers here in Scottsdale okay thank you Dr Mansell did you have a question no okay um I will just say that our budgetary decisions that we make really do support our priorities and improved instruction helps improve learning and I
248can attest that this is long overdue and I also think that this comprehensive committee did a fine job I look forward to hearing good results about this tool if it's approved this evening and with that I'd like to make a motion to approve the award of requests for proposal rfp24005 teacher evaluation tool for the 2023-2024 school year is there a second to that motion second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor to approve this tool say aye aye aye the motion passes five zero thank you [Applause] um we're going to move on to 5j recommend approval of job description for human resources technical analyst Alexa Wilson thank you president sunowski members of the board and Dr Menzel um at the previous board meeting the job description for this or the recommendation for this was
249tabled and there were some specific asks regarding this position and so I'd like to just present some additional information regarding the recommendation so it team if you could advance to the next slide or I guess I could do that myself so I want to connect it back to the audit because that was one of the questions that was raised the Nexus for the audit and and this recommendation one of the findings from the audit committee was to talk about improved reliability and availability of data that would better inform our retention strategies and and performance monitoring tree so I listed um what the human resources technical analyst will do in support of that finding so I'm not going to read them all to you as you're quite capable of doing that but I want to make
250sure that we understand that this position is really working [Music] um getting some of our our platforms up up to speed and to be able to provide us more data to make sure that they're providing professional competence in the area to make sure that we are looking at all of our data and that we can audit some of the standard standards within our own systems we want to make sure that we're looking at current coding practices make sure that improvements can be recommended by this individual and then go ahead and Implement those it this position will provide our own internal audit if you will So currently we've had we've been doing a lot of data cleanup as a result and that once it's cleaned up though we need someone who can go in and take
251a look and make sure that the data continues to remain clean we want to make sure that we can look at other ways that we can improve our data collection and further digitize some of our processes we are since doing a lot of paper or email things and we believe this would be more efficient and also um provide you know data that is that doesn't get lost in the shuffle or request that doesn't get lost and then again to test our internal controls to make sure that everything is functioning the way it's supposed to be the second finding from the audit was you know recruiting Effectiveness may be improved by monitoring the recruitment progress and metrics increasing HR oversight and then standardizing our procedures these are some of the platforms that HR and and also
252some of our other departments utilize our application our records Personnel records our onboarding system our evaluation system we have compliance trainings that we require for our employees to complete and those processes specifically I'll talk about the application process right now it needs to be revised so that it is not cumbersome that we're asking the right employee group the right questions on the application or having them complete certain parts of the application and that is just a function that we are unable to do with the current staff that we have they would additionally we've we talked about our volunteer management platform um the society for human resource management is a national Global recognized HR organization and their recommendation for Staffing is is one to one hundred and we are currently where we are today is is
253about is 16 FTE The Proposal is uh would bring us to 17.4 because one of those positions in there right now will be reduced and the administrator on assignment for next year and so the not only are we well below the the recommended ratios but we also are I think over 2 000 volunteers that HR help process in addition to supporting uh close to 3 000 employees so that's an additional burden on the um on the department although I'm pleased that based on earlier recommendation that some of that will be mitigated in some way and then additionally this position can help provide data we have reports that have to be done that are very cumbersome the teacher input application is annual the sde sder report is an annual and the ee05 report I believe is
254every other year and so they can help to support um those reporting mechanisms lastly the audit found that process improvements are needed to alleviate alleviate workload pressures and help the department move toward its strategic goals and as I said before we are small but I feel we are Mighty but we we want to meet that standard of Excellence that Scottsdale Unified School District has we we need to be able to um support every employee you know Human Resources is one of the only departments that that touches each employee that comes to us and also as they leave and to do that and to meet that standard of Excellence we feel like this additional Position will help to provide to provide the support necessary to meet that standard um we want to make sure that we're
255always refining where we are looking at what we're doing uh evaluating that reporting out on that we want to be able to provide better data than we've been able to do thus far and we feel that this position would be able to do that um again I would say that human resource every every department is important we've we've talked about that we saw that through the Strategic action team but when we talk about you're we're in a National Labor shortage and now more than ever we need to make sure that we're providing both a positive onboarding supportive and off-boarding um experience for our employees that are coming to us and so that they stay with us and what I hear over and over is that employees want to be they want they want to be
256able to ask those questions and get the answers and get the necessary support when they call us and we want to be able to provide that so um I hope that this explains a little bit more about the the the reason for the request for this position we are as I stated at the last boarding board meeting very mindful of of the employee shortage specifically the teacher shortage there are almost 3 000 unfilled teaching positions in the state of Arizona Scottsdale Unified School District is a destination destination district and very fortunate that our percentages of unfilled are not as high as some of our other districts but in order to continue to be that destination District we want to be able to provide this level of High customer service for every employee that's coming to
257us we think that we'll be able to more efficiently with the restructure of the of the department provide more support to the learning communities as we outline for each of those positions so that people get timely responses so principles when they make a recommendation that the employees are getting a call or an email with a letter of intent and a contract saying yes please come work with us so with that I'm happy to any questions Alexis on this topic seeing uh Dr Wells do you have any um I I just have a comment thank you board president zinowski and thank you Miss Wilson for the the content um I had asked for this um these dots to be connected and I appreciate that you did so um with earnestness um so thank you for taking
258the time to do that I appreciate that thanks for the opportunity to do it again and do it better um vice president Werner thank you so I um I had concerns with this position adding another 81 000 uh dollars annually to HR um really when we have teachers are in dire need of AIDs that have not received those we have facilities workers who are making 21 an hour which is really not a livable age for a middle-aged person with a mortgage and kids um and so uh when I pulled this I said I wanted to have conversations specifically around how we're going to make those things happen and I did have a brief conversation with Dr Menzel at our meeting and you know I shared my concerns and I just haven't heard back from anyone
259regarding how we're going to support our teachers in the classroom with AIDS and how we're going to work to get more funding to our staff that you know need more money so I'm not in support of this until we have a solution for our teachers and staff who are the really the bread and butter of our um our district and they're the ones who take care of our students and we have to we have to provide for them first so I just I haven't seen it but thank you I'd like to make a motion to recommend um the approval of job description of Human Resources technical analyst is there a second on that second that motion has been made and seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor to support this position say aye aye
260aye opposed no no that motion passes three two thank you Alexis I believe the next several are going to just be q a no presentations correct because we've received the information we needed in advance is that right Dr Menzel that is correct okay thank you um uh 5K recommend approval of amendment to agreement with education Staffing LLC ESI also known as for the 2023-2024 school year Alexa do any of you have questions for Alexis on this particular issue or item I have a quick question for you in reading through that contract it stated that they would replace supervise discipline and terminate employees is that true president sinowski the they are ESI is considered a contractor much like some of the other contracted agencies that we work with to fill some of our positions we certainly
261work with any individual because we have both classified certified and maybe an administrator I believe that works through ESI so if there are issues we certainly work with the employees directly if there's some sort of corrective action but ultimately like other contracted Services knock on wood of not had that experience but okay thank you I just thought that was odd I didn't recall that as part of what they did can you quickly tell us too the number of employees we employ through secondary Services did you you made that face like you knew I was going to ask you I was new and I didn't write it down I don't know I I'm going to say it's in the third would you say 30-ish 20 right now it depends on the year and how many folks
262retire um and choose to go through ESI to to work with them okay okay I was just curious all right um yeah are there any other comments about this particular contract seeing that there are none I would like to make a motion to recommend the approval of the amendment to the agreement with Educational Staffing LLC ESI for the 2023-2024 school year is our second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor say aye aye okay that motion passes 4-0 next updates to Kids Club tuition billing structure Dr Bono I believe is going to be able to answer questions do any board members have questions for Dr Bono okay seeing that there are none you get to stay seated and I would like to make a motion to um update to the kids club tuition billing
263structures are second to that motion second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor say aye aye that motion passes four zero moving on to 5m approval of award request for the 2023 summer enrichment program Grant does anyone have questions for Dr Benson on this particular issue nope okay again I'll make a motion to approve the award request for the 2023 summer enrichment programming Grant is there a second second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor say aye aye aye that motion passes 4-0 and um in second read and approval governing board policy gcca regarding professional support staff General and sick leave I believe uh Jennifer McLennan is going to be leading this discussion Madam president members of the governing board Dr Menzel this is the second read of governing board policy gcca with
264proposed changes the board did review this last time the changes relate to the use of a crude leave and what it can be used for it has a provision regarding misuse at the very end of the policy and so this is presented for governing board policy discussion and approval this evening governing board members do any of you have any thoughts to discuss on this topic board member Lindsay just going to confirm that HR is going to communicate the change right okay good one yeah awesome board member Lindsay would you like to make a motion on this one okay I'll I'll do it second read and approval I'd like to make a motion for the second read and approval of governing board policy gcca regarding professional support staff General and sick leave all in favor is
265there a second second all in favor say aye aye aye aye that motion passes 4-0 thank you moving on to O approval of settlement agreement to resolve litigation in [Music] cv2002-002418 Ms McClennan Madam president vice president Warner members of the governing board and Dr Menzel the approval of a settlement agreement is coming before you tonight for your ratification the matter has already been resolved in November with mediation but the signature of Dr Menzel is required to finalize those actions this relates to the lighting at Chaparral the district will not be expending funds to settle this matter thank you any wishes to discuss this further based on the information we have received seeing that there are no requests I'd like to make a motion to approve oh the approval of settlement agreement to resolve litigation cv2002-002418
266is there a second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor say aye aye aye that motion passes four zero last of our action items for this evening approval to hire of governing board members dependent pursuant to governing board policy BCB Madam president members of the governing board and Miss Kearney Miss kearney's son is then selected to participate in a vocational training program for the district he's one of approximately 7 to 15 students who would be eligible to participate in that vocational training program as such he would be employed by the district that requires governing board approval under state law and governing board policy any discussion on this employers yes it does requires board member Kearney to abstain no questions or concerns okay Madam president and Miss Kearney and I have already had that discussion
267but she should abstain from the vote Yes yes team seven is sure I do can you share that with us I can't so it's a vocational training program that assists Scottsdale high school students in preparing for the world of work through the academic school year it's run by Stacy Parker at the district and it's designed to transition students from school to work to teach both the soft and the hard skills in an employment position postgraduate so it's on the job training it's generally with Journeymen supervisors and classified employees under their supervision and guidance as well as a certificated teacher Mr could answer any other questions if because most of the team seven work under his team no more I think this is it for the night people are like let's finish okay so I would
268like to make a motion to approve the hiring of governing board members dependent pursuant to governing board policy BCB is there a second second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor say aye aye aye that motion passes 3-0 the time is Miss Wagner can we also note that Ms Carney has abstained yes in the minutes thank you thank you the time is 9 57 p.m I'd like to make a motion to adjourn this meeting is there a second seconded by board member Lindsay all in favor say aye aye aye aye meeting is adjourned