001it was it's nowhere near you good evening I I would like to call to order this regular meeting of the Scottsdale Unified School District number 48 governing board today is Tuesday January 17th and it is 6 p.m at this time I would like to call Echo Canyon 7th grade student Emily Avalos to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance tonight Emily had the honor of leading the pledge of the pledge at the recent State inauguration ceremony at the state capitol Emily I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you very much Emily and we're going to start this evening with a roll call from my far right Amy Kearney Zach Lindsay
002my name is Julie Sadowski and I believe after heart wells will be joining us remotely this evening glad you're here everybody thank you for being here and at this time I asked if any of the governing board members have any alterations to the agenda they'd like to propose at this time board president sinowski I had a change yes go ahead I would like to I would like to remove item 9k K is in the element symbol for potassium out of the consent agenda please okay you would like to alter the agenda by pulling K overnight out of state foreign field trips any other alterations board member Werner yes I'd like to pull item off which is the bedba policy and from uh consent agenda I'd like to pull f and g uh for December 6th
003and 8th uh approval of those agendas and the co-op which is number I okay so to clarify you would like to pull from the information and discussion items eightf discussion of governing board for policy bedb correct yep okay yes so to pull it that would mean to take it off the agenda okay on the agenda and then you would like to to remove but to Paul um nine f g and I yes from the consent agenda for discussion okay thank you you're welcome all righty I am going to read a statement of meeting decorum for all of our guests who are present this evening citizens attending and or participating in Scottsdale UNIF thank you thank you Dr Menzel um I'm actually going to back up for a moment and ask for a motion to approve
004the agenda as amended for this evening um board member Warner motion to approve okay is there a second thank you to Dr Hartwell um all in favor to approve the agenda as amended say aye aye Kenny opposition nope I think I heard five at this time we have an approved amended agenda and now we can go ahead and I will read the statement of decorum citizens attending and or participating in Scottsdale unified school district meetings either in person virtually or telephonically are required to observe the same Rules of Order and decorum applicable to members of the governing board and staff unauthorized remarks or demonstrations from members of the audience yells outbursts and or disruptions are not permitted members of the public are not allowed to approach the Deus at any time while the governing board
005meeting is in session without express permission from the governing board president and reminding our um public of that at this time I would like to turn this over to Dr Menzel for our student and staff recognitions and celebrations good evening president sinowski vice president Werner and members of the governing board we anticipate that the second half of the 2022-23 school year will be Awash with many student and staff celebrations and we're kicking off the new calendar year with a couple notable ones this evening I would like to invite assistant superintendent of secondary education Dr Melissa sackos to the podium who will tell us about three of Scottsdale Unified School District's outstanding students Dr sakos thank you Dr Menzel and good evening president sinowski vice president Werner governing board members and Miss Wagner our first celebration
006tonight is of someone you've already met briefly Echo Canyon 7th grade student Emily Avalos Emily will you please join me at the podium along with her principal Miss cat Hughes assistant principal Aaron Cadera even though she's the videographer right now and social studies teacher Sharon Hines foreign last month Emily learned of an art competition for Kinder through eighth grade students sponsored by the then governor-elect Katie Hobbs with the prompt of an Arizona for everyone and encouraged by Mrs Hines Emily created her drawing which you can see here on the big screen her entry was chosen as the winner from among several hundred entries that were submitted by students Statewide it is a wonderful depiction of some of the scenery Arizona is known for all under the state flag and observed by one person is that
007you Emily no is it me okay all right just checking not only did the first play first prize recognition include her drawing being displayed at the recent state officers inauguration ceremonies and now at the governor's office but Emily was also invited to lead the events Pledge of Allegiance and we're honored that you were here tonight to lead our Pledge of Allegiance Emily um you've had quite a quite a few past weeks wouldn't you say yeah busy oh no not really okay she's she's got it all down um and we want to congratulate you for sharing your vision for Arizona um with all of us um with this USD challenge coin and I know there's going to be some photo opportunities right out the door there congratulations at this time I'd like to invite up to
008Desert Mountain high school students to join me Morgan aronen and Jared church and yes we can clap now [Applause] as well as the principal Dr Lisa Hirsch and Desert Mountain social studies teacher Janet emund who will uh who you will recognize from a board meeting a few months ago and of course you'll recognize Dr Hirsch and after enrolling in Miss eamon's criminology course Morgan who is a senior this year and will graduate from Desert mountains High School's International Baccalaureate program in May and Jared who was a junior became deeply interested and involved in Maricopa County's team Court program Morgan is the president and Jared is the vice president of desert mountains Teen Court student club team court is a program facilitated through the Maricopa County Juvenile Probation Department which is part of the County's judicial
009branch team Court youth volunteers do not determine guilt or innocence rather they have the opportunity to hear and assign consequences in real life diversion cases involving local youth team Court offers juvenile offenders a pathway toward a fence resolution without a formal court process and allows you to engage in a meaningful restorative justice practices Morgan and Jared's leadership with the foundation The Fountain Hills Municipal Court team court has been recognized by the state of Arizona's team Court Association in November they placed they played key roles in that organization's 16th annual youth Summit with Morgan serving as the event Master of Ceremonies and Jared as its keynote speaker so you guys have been a little busy yeah okay they are role models and leaders for the Desert Mountain high school teen Court Club as well as for
010the young offender young offenders they work with each month Morgan and Jared on behalf of the Scottsdale Unified School District please accept these challenge coins for your work in our community and for your interest in the judicial system and compassion for your contemporaries we are pleased to have provided you with the opportunity to discover your interest in the judicial system and how that may evolve as you continue to continue your studies in college and Beyond congratulations and that's it from the podium Dr Menzel thank you Dr sakos and congratulations to our students it's nice to see our student contributions extend beyond the walls of our schools and into the larger community and we're very proud of our students success our final celebration this evening tonight is actually a view our governing board members the month
011of January is School Board recognition month and we want to join the Nationwide acknowledgment of the work that you do and the time that you take making Scottsdale unified a better school district one that makes the most of the opportunities to provide world-class future focused learning to our 22 000 students you are here because you decided to volunteer your voices to our community and the community agreed that you need to be part of the critical conversations that lay the groundwork for what happens every day in our district you are entrusted with meeting the community's aspirations for its public education students and making wise investments in their future it is an immense responsibility that each of you has taken on and we are grateful for your service thank you president sonowski vice president Werner and governing
012board members Dr hartwells Mr Lindsay and Mrs Carney thank you [Applause] are you going to be introducing our special presentation this evening as well so this evening we are happy to resume the regular report from the student Advisory Board I'd like to invite Zach Oaken who is the president of the Sab this year along with other members of the student Advisory Board to the diocese or the podium to make their regular presentation thank you Dr Manziel good evening president sonowski vice president Warner members of the governing board superintendent Menzel Ms Wagner today it's January 17th and we have our regular school board a student Advisory Board update so on today's update we're going to be talking about the subcommittee updates we're also going to be talking about our thought exchange updates so we did two
013thought exchanges recently we did one for graduation distinctions in regalia and then we did one for graduation dates and times we also did have upcoming events including the teen Town Hall that we're going to be working with our principals to run with that our subcommittees for the 2022-2023 school year just a reminder our technology climate culture Communications College and Career Readiness Safety and Security and equity and inclusion and these subcommittees are chosen by the students of the student Advisory Board we all vote on issues and things that we feel like we can make an impact on and then each student chooses which committees they want to join so with that we'll go on to subcommittee reports and we have some of the chairs and other members of the Committees to do that good evening everyone
014so for our technology subcommittee some of our key topics we've been discussing are phones and pockets and Tech use and classes some teachers have decided to take attendance based on if your phone is in your pocket and that has been some something that we've discussed and we think that might not be the best way for teachers to take attendance YouTube blocked instructional videos when teachers try to log on to YouTube and get videos for class some of them are blocked and we're trying to educate the teachers that there's a way to unblock those videos a computer tracking policy so we've discussed a little bit that uh the district has the ability to look on our uh School issue devices so the Big Brother concept and educating students that um that is happening and then Google
015takeout for our seniors so they have the option and ability to take any of their files from their school account and transfer them to their personal account which at the moment is very difficult okay oh sorry thank you okay sorry for our climate and culture um subcommittee we've talked about four main topics um we're always consistently talking about homework help options and academic and Sport and tutoring because a main concern of not only the teachers but all of our fellow students is making sure that everybody has the best chances that they need to succeed in the classroom we also talked about advanced notice for exams because there was a little bit of concern of teachers maybe saying a unit test could be two days later which doesn't necessarily give people enough time to prepare a
016lot of people are involved in a lot of extracurriculars and can't um just all of a sudden turn everything around and prepare for a test that's in two days and then we also talked about honors class participation and kind of a consistent theme that there sometimes our students who are who feel pressured to take honors classes even though that might not be the correct pace for them or the correct environment and so you have a lot of people not necessarily failing honors classes but not in the best place that they could be to succeed and maybe creating more requirements and knowledge before letting anybody go into an honors class and lastly kind of an overarching theme for climate and culture we talked about a little bit of the disconnect sometimes between students and the importance
017of their education because we have problems in the bathrooms we have problems with behavior in classrooms and in this subcommittee we really thought it boiled down to students not understanding why their education is truly important to them and how this can benefit their future and so we talked about maybe creating more education about education and why people are at school good evening my name is El Walter Sanchez and here are our updates on the communications subcommittee so two weeks ago at our last student Advisory board meeting we were able to meet with our district lead Miss Harrington and we brought up um the disconnect we see between the communication between students teachers and parents so she introduced us to the new announcement portal that they're trying to trial run at another high school and hopefully
018bring into the district in the next year and it really created a seamless way to combine I know there's several programs across all the schools that we get our announcements from at least at Arcadia we get them through remind but combining remind in email and all the other announcement portals into one hub for all the announcements for both parents and students the susd magazine distribution to students we also got the opportunity or I got the opportunity for the first time to look at the susd Showcase magazine and I was unaware that there was a picture of myself in the magazine and as we were scrolling through it was like Wow and it wasn't only a prideful moment but it just made me realize that the students should be aware of what's going on in their
019community and being able to see and connect because not everybody has the opportunity that I have today to talk to you guys and bring up my concerns for the district or my school and principal communication formats this kind of goes along with the new announcement portal just getting more connects between the principals and the students because I feel like the principal some are just afraid of the principle and it should be a community and it's mostly principal communication to parents and not as much students and it does depend school by school basis as well and lastly susd monitored student Instagram um Everybody nowadays is on social media especially Our Generation and it would just add an extra step to not only the susd magazine but to get more information to the students through the student
020governments and have them collaborate on this obviously monitored through the district Instagram to be able to celebrate game wins club successes and just everything across the board thank you so hello again my name is Emma Curley and I attend Chaparral High School so for College and Career readiness one of our big successes last year was the college fair at Desert Mountain high school and so we've decided how can we extend that and help our students even more so alternative credit options I know that the board has discussed some and I think approved opportunities for students to intern and volunteer during for a class and get crash Class Credit so that can be put on their transcript and go towards getting them into college and then the College and Career Fair like I said was such
021a big success that we hope to expand that next year and so maybe do headshots and interviews to get students really prepared for what life will bring them in the future we talk about standardized testing and how we can improve students view of standardized testing I know at least Chaparral when that time of the month comes around and we have to take that standardized test that no one likes not many people try even though our teachers really do push so how can we get that across that it really will help them in the future and then scholarship internship and job portal at Chaparral our College and Career Center I know has a board and how can we push that to other students so they know that opportunity is available for them and easily easily accessible
022thank you and then for Safety and Security so one of the big things that this district has taken on as a whole this year is increasing the Safety and Security of students and staff members on campuses so one of the things that this is also caused it's a new system that's put in place so it's taught some different issues and different things that we believe can be improved in some ways so one of the things that we realized was an ID delay for entering schools so normally at all the entrances students have to wear their ID show that to the security guard however there are still students that don't bring their ID to school that have a delay for dating in the campus so with this in mind we're looking at different solutions including temporary
023IDs and a student view ID so inside the student view app there's an ID card that'll show your name and face and everything so we're looking at different ways to maybe solve the problem of students not bringing their ideas to school and then we're also working on consistency I'm on campus security policies so I know the district's been taking a big thing with all their I think it's called digits the doors all that stuff that whole bid policy and we want to make sure that all the schools are following in the same way in that way everyone's safe regardless of the campus you're on as well as we're looking at different colored IDs for different years and this is something that's in place at most campuses however we wanted to make sure that you shouldn't
024be able to use your idea from past years to get back in the school hi I'm Kennedy Johnson and I'm the chair of the equity and inclusion committee and it's under my understanding that the staff and teachers of susd have many different workshops and so we think that it'd be beneficial if they had a mandatory racial sensitivity workshop and I just feel like that would help teachers navigate how to go through different situations that happen at the schools we also feel like a zero tolerance policy should be I don't know if we already have one but if we do then it definitely needs to be stricter because I feel like it'll help deter students from committing racially motivated actions whether that's just verbally cyber or physical next we also feel like alternative consequences for insensitive
025actions should be um thought about and maybe not everything has to end in suspension or expulsion but also they have to do a workshop or a class or talk to the student that they hurt another thing we think could be beneficial is a central reporting mechanism because many teachers don't understand what actions are worthy of being reported and how they should report it and even with students I know a lot of students are scared to report and they don't know if it's Anonymous or not so I also think that more um just recognition and awareness should be given on how people can report and finally a reward system to re-establish core values I know that we have PBIS but towards the end of the year we kind of forget about you know installing those values
026and promoting it and awarding them and so I think that we should work on being consistent with rewarding values thank you I'm clearly not very good at this with me yeah okay sorry about that um so then going back to our thought exchanges those were our committee reports so we released two thought exchanges sent before winter break it was done the week before finals and we were able to get some good feedback on that however we didn't have a large enough amount of responses for that so we then sent it again I believe last week so it's now done out twice and we're hoping to have a lot more feedback with that and again these topics that we released the thought of changes on were graduation dates and times and for graduation distinctions and regalia
027so we'll talk about those as well uh hello board members my name is nikhil Sethi and I'm from Saguaro High School it's nice to see you today um so we as a student Advisory Board put out a thought exchange regarding uh graduation regalia um though it may seem like a small aspect of graduation which it may be we as the board believe that it is something that recognizes the hard hard work that is put in by all of our seniors in the four years that they are in high school and it can be something that shows you know just different things that a student achieves while they're in their school so one of the common themes even though we didn't get as many participants as we would have liked in our Originals ascending of this
028not exchange we noticed that that point that I just made that you know the hard work that is put in by all of our students in all the four years that they're in high school um can be recognized in many ways but one way is at graduation they're kind of Glasgow at school is going to be shown by the different things that they can be displaying with their robe and with their caps those kinds of things it recognizes special programs there's many rigorous programs and different um individual and I would say unique programs that each of our schools has to offer some of these examples are CTE at Saguaro we have great CTE programs and some of our students even get certified in biotechnology and they can work in Labs or lab certified and they
029have as I'm sure you know the Health Resources class where students can be registered in certain aspects of the nursing area also Desert Mountain has IB these kinds of things are you know very specific to students who put a lot of work into them so having that kind of recognition at graduation We Believe would be beneficial and also you know for the permanent permanent record of all the things that were done in high school that's a small aspect of this but for all the students who graduate from susd we believe that it would be nice for them you know to also have that recollection and memory and also honor of what they did when they were in high school and how that prepared them for the rest of their lives thank you very much that's
030this part of the thought exchange and we're going to move on to the second half okay so the second thought exchange that we did was regarding graduation dates and times and we saw some pretty consistent themes people already had their flights booked they already had their hotels booked and they did not want the dates and times to change for this year which is very understandable but there was also a little bit of concern for maintaining tradition people wanted to graduate at their high schools because they thought it was sentimental which is totally understandable we did talk about um we did see some people say that there are potential benefits of off-campus spaces obviously you can do if you did at the footprint Center for example you could do it indoor and you don't have to
031have people having heat Strokes um in May in Arizona weather but also people did Express concern that in the following years for people who maybe have siblings or cousins in different high schools that making sure that all of the high schools are at different times could be beneficial to make sure people can go see their friends and family thank you I just want to point out the participant numbers on the top of this is actually from about last Thursday that was when this presentation was done and since then we should have received a few more participants and a few more thoughts and we have a student Advisory board meeting tomorrow will we where we'll be going over that as well so then for our next steps for the student Advisory Board we have our teen
032Town Hall which we're hoping to do this semester at all of the campuses and I know we did this last year and we started to do it actually two years ago but we're trying to work as a student Advisory board with the principals to get more feedback directly from students have the district leadership board members you guys are invited to come if you would like and it may get so everyone's able to speak to those people in the higher positions to make change and then we're also that's actually all so thank you so much for listening to us and if you have any questions please let us know do any of the other governing board members have questions at this time I have a few questions go ahead Dr hartwells thank you um students thank
033you very much for your presentation and your excellent ideas I heard many good ideas this evening um I also want to thank you for putting slide numbers on your slides I very much appreciate that and it makes it very easy to cross reference so if we could go to slide four please yeah I believe they're opening it right now perfect I don't know if they'll put it up on them you're not he's held out of that it's the technology thank you technology yeah I wanted to I wanted to dig a Little Deeper on this Google takeout yes component if we could so we're talking about as I understood it it was the student's own work product that you have in your Google classroom or so um that is clunky to export to your own Google
034account or can you just talk walk me through maybe a use case there so yeah so every student in the district is given an susdg apps email address so inside that email address they'd access to Doodle Drive doodle Gmail and all the different doodle services so with Google takeout it's actually the name of a software program inside the Google G suite and that program allows you to take out everything from your account in one like swoop all the way to a new account so I know personally I'm a senior this year and when I graduate my G apps account will be disabled pretty soon after I graduate so I'd like to be able to to take everything from my talent all my work I've done for the past four years or even launder in middle
035school and elementary school and take that work and send it to a new personal Gmail account so what would be the so thank you for clarifying um and what I'm wondering is if there was a concern that there is copyrighted material there that's not fair use or has some restrictions that would be inadvertently perhaps taken out as well so what what is the barrier here to not allow the student to take their own work product with them yes so this is something we've worked on with Dr Watt the chief systems officer of the district and from what we were able to understand last time it seems like it's just a setting that the district has turned off and there may be reasons for it however those reasons haven't been given to at least me and
036I don't think they've been given to the rest of the student Advisory board so we're looking into this as something that hopefully we can turn that setting on I I think that seems like a a fixable situation and it's your own work product so it certainly seems appropriate you put that much Sweat Equity into those work products particularly by the time you're a senior got some pretty sophisticated documents there I'm sure you'd like to keep um could we move on just thank you thank you by Slide Five please yes we're not going to go through every slide here folks it's okay thank you Dr her Wells the advance notice for exams um is this uh could we talk a little bit about what specifically this particular bullet point refers to well so we were talking
037about maybe implementing a mandatory one-week notice policy for example that's just an example what we could Implement um just because yes maybe you have kids who will study the night before for a test anyways but there are people who have maybe two to four hour Sports practices the next few days but they didn't have it on Wednesday and so and maybe the test is on Friday and so mandatory giving more notice lets people allocate when they have time to study for tests and give more preparation and so we just wanted to make sure that students in the classroom have the most knowledge that they can have before taking assessments okay so so this is to um standardize a um kind of a syllabus a tentative schedule so to speak okay um does this intersect at
038all with we had had some uh presentations this was best in the fall with respect to standardization of the weighted percent of final exams uh that there was some lack of standard standardization across the high schools in the district where not everybody was out using the same percent it is that something that you found in your conversations with your peers to be a reality or is that well for the final exams we didn't really find that there was not a standardization but there was more of a question of what it should be because right now it's 10 and um people were kind of concerned that a 10 wasn't enough to bump up a grade but there's also people who had been working hard the entire semester and thought a 10 was nice to award their
039semester-long work I wouldn't say that it doesn't intersect because you know with the Scottsdale Unified School District we want to be unified and we want to standardize our policies across all of our schools but I I do think that they would be separate issues okay so you see a distinction yeah with the difference here very good and on the same slide I'd I wanted to just comment I believe you had indicated one idea you've been discussing is education about education and I just say I applaud that sentiment and would encourage you to think about broader stakeholders um for that discussion because that's a valuable um Credo in my view it would be a really important conversation to have maybe even broader than just with the the within the district you know the school operational staff
040yes I completely agree um we just started talking about it in the committee we haven't really quite gone over how we would implement this in our schools yet but it's a discussion we would really like to continue wonderful that sounds great I also want to applaud all of you and particularly it was um clear in the College and Career Readiness presentation I believe I um Miss Emma from Chaparral uh how you've taken a look at your own schools and best practices that work well with you and thought about how those should be scaled so that your peers across the district can benefit from that and that selflessness and that integrity it shows a lot of character or all of you and and your body of work so I I applaud that um and I will
041take you up on your invitation on the teen Town Hall so if you could share that information of when you have that scheduled that would be great so thank you again for all of your time this evening all your good work and keep it up thank you thank you Dr hartwell's any other comments I would like to ask the um young woman who spoke about the phone Pockets to please clarify to the general public what these are because I've seen them and I think to just say you know taking attendance by pockets in the phone make is kind of deceptive so in most classrooms now there is a a they're called Pockets but it's an organizer where each student has it their own slot with an assigned number where some teachers as soon as you
042enter the room make you put your phone in this pocket with your assigned number and then as soon as class starts they'll take attendance based on if your phone is in your pocket even if you're sitting in your seat and so some students have found it frustrating maybe they've just forgot to stick it in their pocket and are meaning to disobey the teacher and not follow rules and then they get marked absent and then it marked unexcused absence and it's just a big it's not easy to fix you have to go through many Loops to fix that unexcused absence especially with or you're only allowed to miss 10 days per semester right and I really appreciate you clarifying that for the for the general public I know those organizational tools do help minimize the distractions
043that phones can cause in a classroom and I also recognize that not all students have phones so I think we could definitely up our game with our consistency of practices across our district because I know what might happen that's a great practice at one school maybe isn't shared with another so I really appreciate the student input on these very important topics and what makes them important is they're important to you all as student leaders and that's why we are all here so I thank you for that um and I really appreciate your conversation when you were talking about the need to increase input into your questioning and thought exchange from the student body overall throughout the district um I know we talked about that last year and um I think it's going to be an
044ongoing thing and maybe those Collective efforts between students and student leaders but not just the student leaders those that choose to just do their own thing on campus to make sure that those voices are also included in conjunction with working with the employees because they do care about what you guys need and what your interests are so I know I'm speaking for other people but I do believe that that's why people go into the education world so appreciate your candor and your organization with your presentation tonight and if there are no other if Dr Menzel would you like to make any comments I just want to again say how proud I am of our student Advisory Board they take their work seriously they are fully engaged when they meet at the MDA and I think
045they do work outside of the NDA so I'm just grateful that you're willing to come and share your insights as we continue to work to make Scottsdale unified a premier educational system serving your needs and and the future of our community so thank you thank you and really twit we do have one other installment from nikhil hello again um I know most of you were there but I just wanted to make a quick shout out if you will to um sorrow High School's Martin Luther King Jr event which took place uh last week we had a really excellent student speakers and also a guest speaker Dr Benjamin Chavez who is a leader in the Civil Rights Movement um I think it's a great thing that we host at Saguaro and also you know through the
046district and the messages and stories that we hear are things that are important and unique to each individual person and I know a lot of times that gets taken for granted so the opportunity for students to come up and say their stories and tell everybody how they feel about what's going on with themselves in the world um it's just so valuable and I know susd does and I hope that we will continue to Value every single individual story that is told To Us by everyone from every different background that there may be and also just a quick shout out to my principal missey back there Ms odd zigger she put together so much of that and put in so much time um and we're all grateful to be under her leadership so thank you have
047a good night thank you Nick I appreciate you giving that shout out too and a twitch a happy stool board recognition month thank you thank you for all you do thanks all right thank you student advisor thank you and at this time in our business meeting we will move on to governing board reports which is item five on our agenda governing board members do any of you have reports to share out let's start with Dr hartwell's do you have a report uh yes uh board president zanowski I do um it will be brief but first I'd like to start by wishing everyone a happy 2023 uh I hope yours is off to a more auspicious start than mine being sick um but at first I want to thank the community our families our parents our
048grandparents siblings friends who have generously supported our schools particularly through the holidays there was a lot of giving and support and that support in whatever amount it was and in whatever manner it was given that time and treasure I just want you to know that sincerely appreciated and we have on the consent tonight an example of that whether it's the foundation or boosters apts ptos across the board very grateful I also want to congratulate the cocoa paw middle school robotics team on their earned participation this past weekend at the state robotics tournament at ASU I also want to congratulate the Desert Mountain Palm team for their state championship for their division two AIA State Championship win and our presenter our recipients this evening student recipients this evening just add my pat on the back to
049Emily Morgan and Jared for all of their outstanding contributions above and beyond um and lastly but certainly not least I want to thank Dr Menzel for his work um with Community leaders across the state in shining a bright light on the aggregate expenditure limit and it's unnecessary fraud that it will unfortunately have consequences on all of our Arizona students families and entire communities and so I appreciate your leadership and your stewardship on behalf of education for all of our Arizona children thank you thank you Dr Wells any other governing board reports no board member Werner so it has been a fun Journey beginning this uh this new adventure of being a board member and I was able to go to the MLK voices event at Saguaro and it was incredible just to see the talent
050of the students that we have in our schools and I was just super super impressed and as to say of course did an amazing job and Mr Harris back there and and the students here today that came up and spoke and I'm just very proud and honored to serve our students in our community and um just super impressed with the talent and great students that we have thank you vice president Werner and um board member Carney uh yes I too got to attend that uh wonderful celebration at Saguaro and I also got to sneak into my ninth graders class when I was on campus as well so that was uh fun but I did get to attend my first joint advisory Education subcommittee meeting with the city of Scottsdale and I just want everybody to
051know the next meeting is April 12th so it's a good thing to get on your calendar and come I don't know that anyone's ever really come and get involved in and pay attention to what's going on thank you for that and um I don't know if many people have noticed the gifts that we receive from community members and organizations but I always try to include them in my shout out some gifts to recognize this month or since our last meeting her Arcadia baseball boosters American online matching funds Arizona Community Foundation Cochise apt the Department of Economic Security funds for the Arizona Grant Edward Jones trust Jeff and Dina cutberth the real West location and of course our susd foundation and I would like to extend on the conversation that about our holiday that we celebrated
052yesterday the celebration of Dr Martin Luther King Jr it was more than just a day and I hope it was more than just a day off from the regular work schedules his life quest for Equitable considerations throughout our society um still have tremendous application to our world today I think the dreams that he shared in his famous speeches and throughout his work can become more fully realized if we choose that and if we choose to work collectively together our work as a district and specifically as a public school governing board should always be placing the best interest of all of our children as the priority providing learning opportunities to challenge every child regardless of their circumstances we requires that we focus our work and extend these Liberties to our entire scope of the humans involved
053with our students and and in this student-focused business we cannot separate the needs and interests of our students from the care of our employees I do not view the advocacy of our work as an either or scenario but rather an and situation separately neither have meaning all of our students employees community members should be afforded the necessary support to recognize and honor their dreams I note I look forward to continuing my support of all of our students professionals and and communities but more specifically as of January 1 the Desert Mountain Complex was my reassignment as a community liaison um and I was able to start off this with a comprehensive tour and another tour of Desert Mountain and had the opportunity to to view a try competitive wrestling meet match and it was amazing I
054I intended on only staying for an hour but stayed a couple hours because I didn't want to leave it was riveting the students and to see the dedication of the students and the coaches and the the parents there was worth every minute of my time lastly I'd like to express my appreciation for the work that has been completed on behalf of onboarding are many new employees especially most recently are certified substitute teachers you can see this in your agenda packet this will hopefully alleviate the squeeze felt by our employees when we don't have Subs available to cover when teachers are not able to be in their classroom and to be clear there is no substitute for a certified teacher I cannot stress enough that has taken care of our employees we are taking care of
055our students I know often I get painted as an individual in our community with a particular brush but there's a reason for that and I need to make that clear and I'll consider I'll continue to reiterate that point um that concern and care for our employees includes not just compensation or meaningful benefits but also there are opportunities for input their treatment as professionals appropriate mentoring and support and respect of their time to do the job to their highest degree of ability there is no substitute for a certified employee working to educate our students in every classroom every day and with that I conclude my governing board report and we will go on to public comments and as a reminder for public comment the same rules of the meeting decorum apply and your you had the
056opportunity to sign up before the meeting out on the laptops in the entryway and we have five requests to speak to and address the board this evening you will all have two minutes I will call your name and I will also say who is up next so um please be mindful of your time and let's start with Sebastian Dia Sebastian DIA Josh can you help him good evening board members my name is Sebastian I was sitting in my third grade class about a month ago until my teacher gave me an assignment on PebbleGo this is an app on our student laptop she told the class to go to Pedal logo and to go on to social studies then go to how to be a good citizen she told us to click on any slide there
057I saw two suspicious slides one was activism the other was protests so I clicked on protest and I saw a black lives matter on one of the sides now my teacher should be proud of me because we're being a good citizen and an activist thank you next up is Patricia pellet followed by Jill dunikan okay good evening board members first I will say My boys love this teacher they love their teacher I've only heard great comments about this teacher however I was shocked when Sebastian alerted me to this PebbleGo assignment on how to be a good citizen he's a direct assignment was full of one-sided indoctrinating propaganda pictures of black lives matter and climate change protests kids walking out of class for climate change a few clicks away he had access to a slide that
058said a father is somebody who identifies as a male and a mother is someone who identifies as a female a slide saying same-sex couples may have children on their own this is confusing to my third grader as I have told him it takes a male and a female to have a baby one-sided views is not education I'm all for discussing age-appropriate controversial topics if presented with different views and enough information that allows for a healthy debate I'm also shocked that some community members who I thought would be more concerns reactions one accused me of being a liar as there's no way Anasazi would be teaching this this makes my eight-year-old a liar another said there's no way this is possible as his teacher is a good teacher so there's no way she could have known
059what was on PebbleGo the teacher didn't know what she was assigning my friend said actually one person told me PebbleGo is on the approved list and the principal would have had to okay it my husband went with this met with this teacher in person she said she speak with her boss also known as the principal I also submitted the assignment to sgsd supplemental curriculum Review Committee after a week of no follow-up I contacted susd finally they got back to me and they said there was no issue as it met the teacher's intent I then confirmed this is exactly what she said it met her intent what was intent thank you thank you American followed by resale long Becker good evening I have a copy of an email between two susd employees in which one employee
060asked the other where could I find the transgender support plan despite this evidence the district has denied two requests for a generic copy of this plan documents also show that teachers are asking students to select their pronouns promoting the idea that gender is flexible and changeable this is being done not only without parental consent and knowledge but the teachers are specifically asking children if the district should hide the information from their parents the district has allegedly allowed teenage boys to sleep in girls cabins at unit Town Camp if the boys claim they are girls this was uncovered by parents not due to District transparency there's evidence that the district may be assisting students in obtaining hormone therapy potentially without parent consent so tonight I request the governing board's assistance with the following one provide parents
061with a copy of the transgender support plan two share openly with parents how the plan is being created and used and how parents are being involved or excluded three provide a district policy clearly stating the district's position on susd staff engaging in secret sexualized conversations with minors four provided District policy regarding susd staff advising or assisting students in gaining hormone therapy or other Medical Care related to sexuality and gender identity the ask here is to come clean if the district feels that engaging in such behavior is a right path then be transparent so that parents can decide if susd is the right school choice for their child thank you resell longbecker followed by Emmy Cardella hello good afternoon board members um last two weeks ago you have a meeting where just between you guys and
062I was listening and at the end of the meeting you were talking about books removal from the library because they are in groups or for inclusive policy language okay so in the end of the the law they is evidence that you write it down you two guys talk about discriminatory purpose the discriminatory can be both see and for anybody for absolutely anything Okay so I wonder what discriminatory is what are the boundaries from discriminatory the other thing is you guys talk about the the superintendent will give us the parents an available 60 days after the purchase is approved of a book if it's already approved what part what are we doing as a parent reviewing what exactly is going to do they say you are going to send a email I've been 10 years in
063this susd and I haven't received one email about that books from the library um so I don't know if that is a new policy it might be so I mean the on the idea that your susd vowels they are Excellence Integrity empathy and especially to us I think the right things should be that every single book there is a proof shoot for especially for readings okay we parents who have a uh a summary of the book and in that summary we understand what we wanted our kids to read it yes or not and inside that summary you should Mark boxes where you tell me if they have sex and scenes suicided thinking murders controversy Emmy Cardella feet good evening governing board members Dr Menzel and Miss Wagner my name is Emmy Cardella and I'm a
064parent of three susd students tonight I wanted to welcome the new board members Karen Warner and Amy Carney and thank you for volunteering your time I hope that you will work hard to listen to learn and to base your decisions on data several of your comments on the campaign Trail have me concerned that you do not seek out or value data board member Carney during the Scottsdale independent candidate Forum you Justified not supporting the recent susd Bond because you didn't know if the district needed the money you stated that you weren't privy to the details of the seosd budget in truth all budget documents are public record and Chief Financial Officer Shannon Crozier regularly presents to the board also the district maintains a budget dashboard on their website during your campaign data was easily available
065to you to make an informed decision board member Warner in the December Scottsdale progress article you stated that test scores are tanking at susd in truth there is not sufficient historical data to make this claim Arizona has repeatedly changed its standardized testing tools from Ames to azmerit to our current standards of ACT Aspire AZ PSI and aasa no single test has consistently consistently been used across grades in numerous school years making Trend analysis unavailable the best we can do is compare our results to other districts as Dr bachna presented at the October 4th board meeting susd outperforms peer districts the state and the nation consistent with our history of being a high performing District please take this responsibility seriously and do your best to make thoroughly informed decisions in good faith thank you and that
066concludes the public comment portion of our meeting I would like to at this time request that staff members follow up on the allegations that were made during public comment this evening and we have gone over I will just say the and let's have a report back specifically about the law and the removal of and clarifying the textbooks because that is a new law and so maybe the public needs to be better advice but I would like again to request that staff members follow up on allegations made and um report back to the individuals either that made them or they can reach out to me and I will follow up with them on the specifics um at this time we're going to move on to superintendent comments item seven on our agenda Dr Menzel well good
067evening again president sinowski and members of the governing board just a few things of note first four Scottsdale Unified School District robotics teams took part in Saturday's State first Lego League Championship at Arizona State University you remember Dr hartwell's gave a shout out to one of those teams I would like to also acknowledge that Cheyenne Echo Canyon Desert Canyon Middle School and cocopal participated we are still waiting for the complete results to come in but believe we will be introducing you next month to at least one of those teams this Friday January 20th our 24 best elementary and middle school spellers will gather at Saguaro High School to determine who advances to the next level of the annual Arizona spelling bee competition so board members if your schedule permits starting at nine o'clock at Saguaro
068you can come and observe our spelling bee I'm proud to announce that susd will host that competition the the next level the Region 2 spelling be at Coronado High School on February 17th we hope that turns into a home field advantage for the five spellers who will move on from this Friday's District B and good luck to all of our spellers a week from Saturday on January 28th our Middle School student athletes will take part in quarter three sports festival at Mountainside Middle School and Desert Mountain high school this quarter Sports our girls basketball boys flag football and boys and girls cross country another event that's happening tonight is the Middle School honors band festival at the Desert Mountain high school and so I'm sure there weren't more people here because they're at the the
069band festival and next Tuesday the honors Middle School orchestra will be held at Chaparral High School again if your schedule permits and it doesn't conflict with the board meeting we recommend enjoying the talent of our students two other final things of note I just want to Echo the comments that others have made earlier about the quality of the 23rd annual youth basis program at Saguaro I I'm never um I almost had a loss for words in terms of the quality of our student performance and the depth of thinking and the courage that it takes for our students to get up in front of their peers to tell their story and I also appreciated the community celebrating diversities 29th annual MLK Junior dinner that evening finally on February 4th the Charles will again be hosting the
070Parada Del Sol parade and we will have a couple of floats and we encourage governing board members and other District representation to participate we know we have many schools and bands and it's an always a great opportunity to showcase Scottsdale Unified School District just a reminder since January is a long month our next meeting is three weeks away instead of two weeks away so without again my congratulations to the governing board for and thanks to the governing board for your service on behalf of the students of the district they're going to move on to agenda item eight information and discussion items we're going to start off with a which is fiscal year 23 24 maintenance and operations District additional assistance and capital override budget projections by Shannon Crozier yes good evening board president zinowski vice
071president Warner members of the board Dr Menzel and guest this evening we start looking again at the projections for the next year 23-24 maintenance and operations budget as well as our district additional assistance and District additional assistance override otherwise known as capital budget Productions so as we start to look at those budgets a couple of things to keep in mind as we make those calculations the average daily membership we've reduced by 263 or a little over 263. um that's a little bit less than what we've done in the past it's a little bit less than what our five-year average is however this current school year our decline has been less than what we've seen in the past we think that's in part to to the fact that we're really strongly pushing the great things that
072happen in susd we're strongly showcasing um the great things that our students do as we got to watch tonight and at other board meetings and so we think that as we put our strategic plan into place and as we continue to tell that story we think that that decline will get a little bit better so we put that at like I said 263 we do get a student weighted count so we get additional weights depending on what grade level you're in that's a group a count we get additional uh weight for Group B counts which are special needs counts as well as free and reduced lunch and gifted students so keeping that in mind with those weights that puts us at a reduction of 293. we have an estimated inflation rate of two percent to
073the base level so that's the amount we get per student the state is required to um increase that on inflation up to two percent we know that inflation is more than two percent so we anticipate that being two we'll wait to see what happens I know that Governor Hobbs last week recommended a three percent inflation so we'll be watching to see how that affects but we know it should be at least two percent and then lastly this is not the fun part but Arizona State Retirement which we are a member of all districts in the state are school districts are is sadly increasing next year from 12.17 to 12.29 percent um that's a cost that our employees will see but it's also a cost that the district so it's that we pay they paid um
074situation so we know that that's going to be an increased cost of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars so with that we see our formula here for our mno um we've got the 24 fy24 estimate the FY 23 where we're at for this year for our revision one which was done in December and then the change that we anticipate that bringing like I said the total weighted student count that was a decrease of about 293 base level increase of two percent so that increases our base level by about 95 dollars and then teacher experience index um we get additional funding what what happens is every state puts in a report that lists how their teacher experience that's taken and looked at through the state and they've given an average and if you're higher than
075that state average you receive additional funds we went up a little bit from last year and it's funny a little bit makes a difference that little bit that we did is 118 000 more for our budget so that's a good thing so we anticipate that going up we are able to claim our audit for a prior year it's around 47 000 each year so we keep it in that range transportation and then that gives us our Revenue control limit which is an increase of 1.3 million Revenue control limit is important that plays a factor in our m o override it also plays a factor in determining our district additional assistance override so with that it's based off of the mno override is 15 of the RCL that is a set amount so that'll increase about
076a million dollars um deseg and I'm going to skip budget carry forward deseg and Dropout prevention are always the same that dollar amount will always be the same regardless of students that's a set amount so we keep that the same water savings um we that's to pay for the principal and interest on some projects that were done in the past that were intended to help save costs with water and electricity um so we're we're paying for the principal and interest on that and then prop one two three that goes back to the funding lawsuit of several years ago we anticipate that's based off of the Statewide count of ADM so as ours goes down a little bit our amount goes down some so just a small decrease there and then the budget balance carry forward
077um we have moved that down to 14 million last year you can see that that was a decrease of I'm sorry that that was at 15.3 million carryover is important and so I kind of wanted to pinpoint that out because we're going to talk about it a little bit more on the next slide um that carryover is essentially what we have left over so we budget when we budget we budget for every single position as if that position was filled the entire year from beginning to end not every position is filled from beginning to end sometimes unfortunately they're just not filled um and so that creates what we call vacancy savings the primary source of our budget balance carry forward is vacancy savings there's some little savings we have along the way with utilities and
078we don't spend as much on supplies or services but the bulk of that as the bulk of our budget is from vacancy savings we have been working to reduce that because it's been above what the district board's policy is for regulation is for minimums of Maximum so we've been working to bring that down um but I wanted you to understand what that's made of because as we bring that down that also brings down as you can see um it's a decrease of 1.3 million as we bring that down um with our with our budget so as we talk about the budget forward the budget balance carry forward the board regulation this was created a couple years ago by the governing board so they had an idea of where should our budget be with imbalances and
079where should our cash accounts be within the fund balances at that time it was decided that four percent of the revised budget which in this case would be 7.3 million dollars or up to eight percent of the revised budget four being the limit that was that's always been the state minimum before the state had at one point um until prop 123 the state said the max you could carry over was four percent um so that being the minimum I did take a look at because there's been a lot of question of what is the right amount and I think part of that is I don't know that it's what is the right dollar amount what is maybe the right percentage because as your budget increases and changes um that dollar amount looks really big but
080it might not be as much as you think when you're looking at it and in percentage terms um so with that I took a look at what are some of our other peer districts which we do that generally so that's going to be like Mesa PV Peoria Dysart Deer Valley those school districts and look to see what are their budget balance carry forwards and they arranged anywhere from 3.6 or basically four percent up to eight point six nine percent um so I looked at that as kind of a where should we land we're really our policy is within that range but I guess the question begs what do we really think is the right um I personally just because of knowing that um we get judged on this when we do our bonds and they
081look at how much percent carryover do we have six seems like a kind of in the middle of the road spot to be at but again I leave that to to you all as to where do we really think that that should lie because it does make a difference when we're looking at the budget now that we're into that range that's been set District additional assistance this is money that the state gives to the school districts for Capital purchases um we based that off of it's actually based off prior year ADM so it's kind of funny mno is current year um District additional assistance it's prior year ADM so looking at our prior year what would actually be this year's ADM at this time um we base that off of the same dollar amounts that
082we've had in the past the state has not increased that until this current school year they recently increased that amount we had not seen that before actually we've had reductions in our district additional assistance um there's also talk again of will there be inflation will they increase those amounts we don't know that at this time so we base these numbers off of what the current amount per student is and prior year enrollment or prior year ADM So based on that we're anticipating about 10.4 million dollars we're looking at a possible 3 million carry forward for a total of 13.4 million and then in November of 22 the voters of Scottsdale um graciously approved the district additional assistance override for Scottsdale so again thank you for for continuing the support of Scottsdale schools with that the
083override authorized 10 of the RCL up to 14.5 million as you saw two slides back we're not quite to 14 and a half I'm sorry 145 million for RCL which means that our districts the amount we could do for next year is not quite the 14.5 but it's estimated to be about 14.2 million dollars we have some carryover that we're anticipating about two million dollars and then the total override amount would be 16.2 million um strategic goal plan number five is to generate and utilize resources to maximize educational opportunities in order to ensure organizational health commitment 5.1 states that we will align and prioritize our district and site budgets with the goals and commitments in the Strategic plan as we were working on what is the Strategic plan and knowing the optimized resources was one
084of those options or one of those goals and also realizing that every time we go out for um to go sell a bond and we have to get rated by Moody's and standards and poor the first question they ask is tell us your Capital plan and we said we don't have a capital plan I don't know I don't know how long we haven't had one other than I don't know it's been a long long time and so we said we have got to fix that that is not good budgeting that is not good preparation and that's not just good that's just not good for the district um so with that we started the capital planning committee that committee is made up of District Apartment heads directors principals and then we put that on the community
085community Hub and seek applications from the community we received four we invited all four to participate in join I don't think in any of the meetings that we've had all four but we've had different representation from from those individuals and we'll continue to invite them to participate in that um so when we got together the first thing we did is we talked about what is capital what are capital needs what's the difference between capital and mno and then we said tell us what you need what are your Capital needs at your schools I don't know how to budget for your school if I don't know what your needs are and that's an ever-changing list but at least we need to get started so we went back to everybody and said five years give us five
086years and tell us this is something I definitely need in the next year this is something I'm going to need in two years three years four years and an idea of what that's going to cost so that we could start to develop and look at what are the needs of the district and really change how we're budgeting our Capital dollars from that the requests were reviewed by District department heads to make sure that we didn't have duplicates to make sure that there wasn't something on there that was already anticipated or to make sure that we weren't purchasing something that doesn't align with our district goals with our district standards but you know you don't want to buy a software that's not going to work with our computer systems or curriculum that's not in line with
087what we want to be teaching so we sent that out gave people time to look at that we went back out to our sites and departments again this year because we know principles left we know that there's some department heads that left they might have different ideas or thoughts on what's needed so we've gone back out to our staff again and said take a look one more time make any changes tell us if we need ad stuff take things away and so that we can start to finalize that which we are in the process of now so we'll be bringing that committee back together again in February to review those items and to start looking to say okay we have 14 million or 16 million in District additional override we have 10 million or more
088in District additional assistance from the state what are our priorities and what are we going to do with that money and really looking to shift the budget from just every school gets x amount of dollars per student where they hold on to it because they can't do everything they want to do this year so they're holding on so they have money for next year to do something else and really saying we don't want to do that tell us what you need let's prioritize it let's get what we need for the schools and budget based off what are the needs instead of just allocating out so with that like I said we'll be working on that prioritizing that and then in April when we come back to the board with the um Capital tenant of approval
089then we will be bringing that list of what you where where how are we allocating those dollars out and where's that money go so we have that my other hope with that is that we also get rid of carrying over you need to carry over some you don't need to carry over what we've been carrying over and a lot of that stems from people holding on to that money with with dear life saying I've got to have that for next year in case something comes up we don't want to do that let's buy what you need now and then um we can move on to the next need for the next year um so hopefully that will get us more in line with um 5.1 as we look at what our needs not um just
090allocating out um as we look at the anticipated budget and the capital budget for mno and capital um I want to share with you the process that we've gone through with that again we have been working with the interest-based negotiations with our employee groups we will continue to do that we're changing how we budget mno again we've gone through this process of just each department gets the same allocation every year we're trying to move away from that and saying to the Departments tell us what your needs are prioritize them and we'll develop a budget based off of that not just giving the same amount year over year same thing with the capital planning committee we have the departments in on that we have leads on that as well as we have community members in on
091that with their input and then we also have in um let's talk there is an opportunity there's a drop down that's there for Budget 2324 so that input can be received through let's talk as well so we're trying to make sure that as we do this process um one we have the input for everybody that's involved but two we really focus on need not just allocation which has been the process for a number of years so this last slide then just looks at the the budget preparation calendar um February 21st will come forth with the salary and benefit review that'll be based off of what happens within the IBN process March 7th we do immunoteminative approval that's just so we can and contract approval so that we can issue contracts to employees we start role
092we roll our financial software in February so this gives us the we know where we're going we know that we've got the direction and the way that we need it to go and we can start getting things loaded and issuing those contracts April 18th would be the capital approval tenant of capital approval again so our sites can start putting those requisitions in we need them in right away so that we can get things ordered because the lead times on Capital items are ridiculous and then June 6th is the proposed budget and June 20th would be the public hearing and adopted budget provided that hopefully we know what the state Direction the state is going for that time frame so with that I'll open it up for questions thank you Shannon thanks very much um vice
093president or I'm sorry vice president Werner do you have something to ask just a quick question of the carry forward the 14 million is that going into the cloud into the school year of 23 24 or is it going into the 24-25 school year the carryover from this year from the 22-23 school year would go over into the it would be in the budget for the 20 324 school year thank you yes board member Kearney sorry I just had a question on the capitol planning committee is all that information on the website on the committee Hub right now um the committee Hub does have that as a active team and so it has the team members names does it just it just has the it just has no many members names it doesn't have like
094minutes and all that stuff in there will that be coming um it's it's a committee um it's not we have the minutes so they're available um but it's not something that's been posted so it's not we don't need to post that publicly no okay thank you yeah word remember heart Wells do you have anything to add I do I have a few questions um thank you Miss Crozier could you uh explain the difference between the ADM and the total weighted student count those numbers are different and the budget is um turns on the latter and the difference in terms of the decreases are also um there's a Delta there so if you could just explain for everybody the difference there I think that would be helpful sure um so ADM is based off of student
095enrollment and so we have our ADM that is just the students that are enrolled and that are looking up and how when they enroll and how many days are enrolled from that ADM there is a weight that is given to every student so group a weight is any student um and they vary depending on if you're in a kindergarten through eighth or high school um or I'm sorry it's K third eighth in high school so there's different whites there for that there's different ways also for Group B which is sped um gifted and a friend reducer for lunch so when we're looking at the student weighted count that is the ADM times those weights that we receive additional weights that we receive for students depending on what grade level they're in and or depending on
096if they qualify in one of the group b categories so that's why you'll get a difference because they weigh one student isn't just one ADM doesn't equate to one student weight count because there's additional credit given for them thank you and I have a specific question and I was looking at the Arizona auditor General's website uh this afternoon um and specifically their assessments of the financial health of the school districts across the state and one component is the operating budget limit reserve and are you familiar with that I know you are but I am but I it's I would prefer to be knowing like looking at what you're looking at to answer the question okay well it's just that category of operating budget limit Reserve which has to do with um not necessarily uh and
097it's different than the capital budget limit Reserve but relative to uh size uh this District in terms of student count and the budget versus the expenditures so I my question is maybe not to be answered tonight but something to think about and when you were talking about the maximum policy and asking kind of just rhetorically are these numbers the right numbers for us my question is maybe we need to think about how those numbers impact or or intersect with how the auditor general determines the operating budget limit Reserve that data assessment I would be interested to understand a little bit more about the data analysis there and how that might we might use their data analysis that rubric to inform answering or informing a answer to the question of do we have the right Max
098men's and I don't know what the answer is I'm not suggesting we have the wrong ones at all but it seems like that bigger picture it might be worth taking a look at especially because we've got one of those two numbers look like it could use some improvement too okay thank you yes we will definitely look into that and how that would how making any changes would impact that report thank you very much I have no I have no more questions thank you Shannon thank you board member hartwell's um Shannon I just want to applaud you and your team for um recognizing the need for Capital plan and forming a committee to receive various stakeholder input on that so thank you and thank you for your presentation I do not believe we have any more
099comments okay so we will move on to 8B our strategic Plan update Dr mental would you like to introduce our presenter I would so as you know we've spent a lot of time developing a strategic plan but the most important part now is execution so tonight Dr Benson will lead the discussion related to the Strategic action teams that we put in place and where we are related to moving from planning to action for Scottsdale Unified School District Dr Benson thank you I appreciate that I'd love to see the magic of our Tech Team supporting us so thank you shout out to our Tech Team good evening president sunowski vice president Werner board members Dr Menzel and Gladys and all here with us this evening tonight I'm happy to have the opportunity to provide a brief
100update on the progress we've made over the course of the last six months as we begin to implement the Strategic plan this year and provide an update on the work we're currently engaged in as we continue to do so pretty much everything we do is aligned to the Strategic Plan and there's a wealth of examples of good work happening as you've seen evidence tonight in the previous board agenda items and you'll hear in a few minutes with the first read of our Middle School planning guide so for the purpose of the update tonight we'll focus on three main areas first we'll revisit the kpis the key performance indicators and the priority kpis established earlier this year and share our timeline to begin to report out our progress on the kpis using a district dashboard for
101these purposes we'll share out a couple of key data points that don't require year-to-year results specific to enrollment in attendance this evening as well next we'll remind all of the five district initiatives we are prioritizing this year and share our timeline for our strategic action teams leading those implementation efforts in these areas to provide you with an update on their learnings their actions some of their outcomes and their next steps this spring and finally we'll provide a couple of examples examples of our intentional acts to align the work happening across departments and our schools to our strategic plan including our district-wide accreditation efforts we're wrapping up and submitting for review in the coming weeks to get started as we're welcoming two new board members this month we've included just one slide as a recap of
102the strategic planning efforts over the course of the last two years to remind all of how we got to this point many are familiar with the work of the three phases that resulted in the updated visions vision mission and values and the establishment of five strategic goals and commitments the aggregate strategic plan including those pieces the identification of five district initiatives to support implementation efforts and the proposed kpis that were recommended by a phase 3 team members was all approved by the board in late June important progress since then includes that cabinet members and the executive team members identified initial baselines for kpis over the summer we invited our board members to share insights and shape those performance targets for kpis at the board retreat in August and the board approved the kpis to prioritize
103for this year and performance performance targets to measure those at the September meeting we launched the Strategic plan with our site and District leaders during the July admin Academy and kicked off the plan with our teachers leaders and classified employees during pre-week at the start of the school year prior to sharing more about the progress of our strategic action teams we wanted to spend a few minutes highlighting our kpis the full list of our kpis and the priority kpis identified with performance targets are linked to this slide but they're also both now linked on the website under the Strategic plan area while it's premature to report out or get in the weeds with the kpis as the bulk of them lend themselves to be measured out and reported out annually we're continuously monitoring data points
104we have access to and working towards meeting the performance targets that are identified as we've referenced in previous presentations internally this fall we had a big new development and that we began using a dashboard dashboard our simar team developed in collaboration with PowerSchool to allow our teachers and leaders quick and easy access to data to identify the strengths and needs specific to all students they serve to report out on our district progress on kpis we have identified a second type of a dashboard a platform that will allow us to most easily share our progress and we're putting those pieces in place this semester and that will be available prior to the end of this school year as we'd indicated previously foreign kpis are areas of focus for which we do have daily metrics now include
105student enrollment and attendance as you heard Shannon just referenced in our previous budget presentation both of those areas are reflected in goals two and five and that we're committed to increasing both average daily membership ADM of our student enrollment and attendance for students and staff as of last Friday Pre-K 12 enrollment across susd was 21 610 21 610 students up from 21 thousand five hundred and eighty nine at day 13 of this school year while that's momentum in the right direction enrollment continues to be a priority for us moving forward and like many schools in districts across the country we're prioritizing attention to our attendance rates given the negative short and long-term effects of students missing school are significant as that's just been echoed again recently by Helios and West Ed the first quarter of
106this year are daily attendance was at 93.1 percent it dipped to 91 second quarter we had a lot of persons or kiddos reporting out RSV and other illnesses during the second quarter and so far this quarter we're back up just to 92 percent a couple of key learnings on our part that will be important for our context as we report out on our progress include that we established our kpi and our Baseline to include attendance of all student students we serve pre-k-12 and the state reports attendance at grades first grade through 12 only the State numbers also do not include absences excused as a result of chronic illnesses often establishes homebound students we'll share this context again when we report out as the board may want to revisit this context about our attendance data at
107the culmination of the school year we're responding in layers to our the attendance concerns across the district State and Country our CMR team communicates to students and Families Our assistant superintendent and executive director supporting our principal's established student attendance goals with our principals our student services team is partnering with our sros for support and just recently our Communications Department has recently initiated a campaign to promote attendance across school and District social media platforms as is reflected in a couple of snapshots in the slide in front of us and our January District early release will include structured time for our teachers to discuss how we are creating positive classroom cultures and using instructional strategies to most or best engaged all students and that PD time will have embedded time for our teachers to go kid by
108Kid through our rosters to identify those with high absences and other needs that may require more support connection and belonging as we know the connections with our teachers has the biggest impact on our students and for that we continue to be grateful I'm going to shift back shift gears again and move to our next area of our update and a reminder of the five district initiatives we identified in phase three of the Strategic plan to transfer our goals and Visions into practice just as a reminder there's tight alignment of the initiatives with our goals mtss two areas academic excellence and culture and climate talented attraction strategic Partnerships optimized learning Resort resources are there's a direct alignment the only outlier is our Innovation and teaching and learning which kind of cuts across all areas of the
109Strategic plan at the culmination of the phase three work last year strategic planning team members assessed the Readiness progress in each of our initiative areas as in some areas we are further along than in others given the scope of the initiatives the team mapped out a draft three-year implementation timeline to guide our efforts and allow us all to kind of manage our expectations collectively across our stakeholder groups we know the success of our initiatives will require a multi-year focus and a multi-year commitment of those involved in each of these initiatives I think I might have one slide out of order there we did so we're just going to stay with this guy here was speaking to this slide about the multi-year implementation timeline so we're going to flip to this slide to initiate these implementation
110efforts last summer we identified co-leaders for each initiative and created an application process to invite our school and District leaders teachers and classified team members to apply to serve in this capacity those teams have been up and running since September we have 72 members on the team including three community members representing the Scottsdale chamber Charles and the susd foundation on the Strategic Partnerships action team as a team of co-leaders we meet monthly to report out highlights of our progress share budget implications pose questions to each other and align our efforts to each other and to the projects we are leading outside of our strategic action teams key examples of this purposeful alignment that your heal more you will hear more about in the coming months include aligning our summer school plans involving our optimized resources
111strategic action team and our ed services team our human resources department our assistant superintendent and executive directors overseeing and supporting our site leaders you'll also see a clear definition for Innovation and systems to invite innovate Innovation across susd from our Innovation and teaching and learning team including how we might rethink and use time differently for students and teachers we'll hear about alignment from our mtss teams to our cognia work and their work to identify evidence-based practices to lead our continuous Improvement efforts in both academics and Behavioral Services we provide to students in tiers one two and three you'll learn you will learn more about our strategic Partnerships um that action team and its purposeful partnership with our CTE director who serves on that team to create opportunities for workplace and Workforce experiences all of that
112aligned to our high school planning guide and finally you'll learn from and hear from our attracting and retaining Talent strategic action team as they share out continued plans for recruitment supporting the work to adopt the new teacher evaluation tool that's happening this year and staying in step with the work of our IBN teams big shout out to our colleagues my colleagues as those of you that are serving as co-leaders and to everyone of the 72 persons serving on these teams for the time and energy people have given and continue to give to support these initiatives finally we wanted to be sure our board members and all stakeholders are aware of the intentional ways we are aligning our continuous Improvement efforts and the district-wide accreditation process we're engaging in with our strategic plan susd actually initiated
113a district-wide or a systems accreditation process in 2020 with cognia as a result of a host of factors including that we were all navigating the challenges of a pandemic the timeline to finish the accreditation review was actually delayed until this spring over the course of the last six months district and site leaders have been working together to align these accreditation efforts with the susd site continuous improvement work and with initial efforts to implement our strategic plan during this first semester we're trying to ensure our accreditation story reflects the real work and areas of focus across the district besides the obvious reason for pursuing accreditation in that it promotes the conditions for continuous Improvement earning accreditation is particularly important to our high schools as completion of courses from accredited high schools assures that colleges and employers
114accept credits and diplomas or in good shape to earn district-wide accreditation as a result of the collective efforts of a whole lot of people including our teachers site and District leaders and our classified and other team members across susd we'll submit all narratives all evidence and expected documentation by February 1st of this year big thanks and a shout out for the partnership between our site and District leaders to get us this far and move this along thank you for affording us an opportunity to provide a brief update on the many happenings and work that's happening to implement and support the Strategic action teams and in progress towards the meeting of our district goals next steps include that you'll learn more about the learnings the actions the outcomes and the next steps of our stat teams
115in March and April at governing board member governing board meetings you can expect to see our public dashboard thoughtfully established and ready to report out by the end of this semester and you can expect to learn of the results of our accreditation efforts by May of this spring with that I'm happy or we're happy to entertain your questions thank you so much Dr Benson doctor no um Vice uh vice president Werner do you have something to add yes I have a quick question um how does the superintendent's goals align with the organizational goals so um the superintendent goals were taken from the key performance indicators that the governing board adopted back in September so they're aligned directly with respect to that and then there are other things the governing board identified that were not specifically
116a part of the kpis but were tied to the Strategic plan that were in addition to but the performance pay plan was tied to those key performance indicators foreign thank you board member heart Wells do you have anything to add uh yes thank you for president Sadowski I do um Dr Benson did I understand in the attendance calculations for the kpis that the district is using a bit different a more I should say a broader uh rubric than the state does in calculating student attendance boy president sonowski and board member hartwell's yes and so we wanted to make that transparent in the event anybody was comparing that which we were reporting out and looking at State dashboard metrics we included in our kpi Baseline data and in the performance Target that we established all of
117our kids so we went Pre-K 12 and we wanted to make sure that that persons were aware of that and we can talk more about how we factor that in if we want to redact those two grade levels at the end of the year but wanted to be transparent and intentional to include all of our kids in our attendance report outs I appreciate that do you have an idea and and maybe you don't have the number at your fingertips which is fine a follow-up would be fine is what's the difference in the attendance number using the state's rubric versus using kind of the all-in uh rubric that we're using I appreciate that I don't know if I'm going to answer the question fully by responding to what the rubric looks like but we get um
118Dr bachna sends us a weekly report on attendance that shows our Pre-K numbers and our first grade through 12th grade numbers every day and so she's approaching the mic right now to support a follow-up phone a friend type situation welcome back hello um yes we need to we will look into how it compares to the state a little bit different because we did include our preschool and our kindergarten and preschool attendance rates are very variable which is why in preschool is not mandatory in the state either so um they definitely vary and kindergarten is half day kindergarten excuse me is what the state supports so the attendance on that kind of looks different too so we can follow up with you Dr hartwell's on how that compares to what's at the state thank you Dr
119Buckner I would be interested to see what that difference is um and if that if it's significant if it's necessary for us to have one number as opposed to maybe two um I don't know maybe subsets in terms of attendance so that there is some ability to cross-reference to the state data um and okay and then I just want to also add my thanks to everyone who's been involved in the cognia certification I am imagining that restarting an initiative took some activation energy there uh and then getting the ball rolling again and I appreciate everybody doing that I also think that's also quite important so thank you for leading that charge Dr Benson and for everyone who's been involved appreciate that colossal team effort very grateful Dr Menzel and I have no further questions thank
120you thank you Dr hartwells okay we're gonna thank you Dr Benson we are going to thank you I think you might be staying up here though and Dr manzil would you like to introduce 8C our first read of the middle school so actually Dr uh Dodds Karen will be doing the presentation on the Middle School planning guide we appreciate all of the work that was done to put this together and look forward to hearing the update thank you vice president Werner governing board members president Dr Hartwell is in the cloud Dr Menzel and Gladys I am grateful for the opportunity to bring forth tonight the Middle School planning guide for the 23-24 school year as a recommendation for your consideration the Middle School planning guide process is an annual review we provide edits and updates
121as a stakeholder group we recommend new courses that I am excited to share with you a little bit more about tonight and we work thank you Tech we work closely with our seminar Department to ensure that we have our course codes the the presentation tonight is going to be aligned chronologically so when I go through it it's by page which I did hear you say Dr hartwell's you like page numbers so I hope that this can help you flip through the the planning guide a little bit also the the recommendations tonight for our planning guide they highlight the ways in which our district truly is working to ensure that we are providing that world-class future focused learning experience for our students additionally the courses that we are recommending tonight align beautifully with the different initiatives
122that we have for our Innovative learning for our Community Partnerships as well as our prepare our preparation for career Pathways for our students on page 25 I want to draw attention to a program we have been planning for the expansion of currently in Scottsdale Unified School District we have a dual language immersion program that many are aware of that is at Pueblo and at Mojave we also have an immersion program at Desert Canyon that has been for Mandarin we are proud that we have been been preparing this year for the expansion of the Mandarin DLI program to move into Desert Canyon Middle School so on page 25 specifically I want to draw attention to the science we are adding in the new course for DLI science in Mandarin we already have mandarin 1A and one
123B so those are not new courses in our planning guide but they will be new for our sixth graders who are part of DLI but we are quite excited and thrilled for that on page 28 we have an update simply to maybe we have an update we have an update to the Civics language as you are familiar there was legislation passed in 2015 regarding the Civics test the Civics test began then with the graduating class of 2017. we thought it would be appropriate to eliminate that particular language because we've seen those kids we've prepared them but we did want to be sure we added in an update that is most recent for us of the passing rate of 70 percent or greater this will impact all of our students in our middle schools moving forward
124on page 37 we also want to highlight a new course working with our principal groups working with you Dr Hart Wells with an interest and of course Dr Menzel saying Kim attend meetings learn more we are proud to make a recommendation to revamp our coding 1A and coding 1B to computer science 101 introduction to python that you'll see on page 37 and then cs102 introduction to python 2 on page 37 also but these courses again we believe are a form of innovation in our schools we also believe it'll be a great opportunity for Clear career exploration and Pathways a perfect alignment with strategic Partners as we work to internships and learning work experiences for our students on page 37 and also on page 39 you're going to see a course that is not new to
125the planning guide itself but it's new to all of our schools currently design my future is a elective course that is available at Mountainside Middle School we have taken the feedback from our principals who are very much interested in this course and we have opened it up Beyond IB we've reformatted the language thanks to our support of Amy downden College and Career we've Twisted a little bit from what IB has said to align with all of our schools and design my future as a recommendation for an elective we thought it would be appropriate to include it in the stem section as well as the general election election a general electives section near College and Career enhancement and then lastly there's a simple edit for gifted on page 56 currently in their honors criteria rubric it
126states the azm2 assessment and given that our assessments do change quite frequently we thought it would be appropriate to put State assessment we also thought it would be appropriate because Scottsdale is a destination district for many people especially people moving to Arizona so people who are coming to us from another state who don't have azm2 we don't want that to dissuade anyone from considering this course for their student so with that I'll take any questions thank you Dr Dodds Karen are there any questions remember hartwell's do you have any I do thank you board president sinowski and Dr Daz Karen thank you for your presentation and to all of those that put all the hard work into these amendments I am sincerely thank you for adding the python classes uh very happy to see those
127um those included this year my question is will those be offered at all of the middle schools in K through eights or or is this a scaling kind of Walt crawl run approach yeah thank you for that question Dr hartwell's a few a few responses to that so we actually have been planning this course for about a year a year ago Dr Menzel invited me to attend a meeting with the Arizona Tech Council and that's when I really jumped in with both feet into computer science and the world the world of coding Beyond code.org and so after I attended that first meeting that it also included people like Johanna Kaiser and our Tech coaches at the time Amy's counterpart Aaron Shear it got us really excited so we invited a member of the tech Council
128to come speak to our principals to see is this something of interest to you we have had a few principals who immediately thought this is this is what my campus needs as you know we've also had some turnover in our in our school leadership so we rebooted this year with our new principals and we have several principals who are ready for it we have others who are trying to figure out will kids be interested if I put this on my course selection sheet will kids select it and then what would my Staffing look like so two-part answer we have a few campuses three in particular who are ready to do everything in their power to make this happen and then we have others who want to see what the interest is of their students as
129we we do strive to create courses that are of high interest for our students okay great thank you and the design my future um class that was that was part of the middle years IB Program requirement at Mountainside that's my understanding yes it is and in our first meeting with our principals to talk about courses that we have available the principles were all talking about a concept of a course and then Adam raised his hand and said I have that course at my school and so that then led to Amy saying well there's no reason we can't redesign that course outside of the middle years program and have it available for all of you fantastic thank you I have no other questions thank you Dr hartwell's and that's awesome that's the importance of meeting together
130and having those discussions right thank you just to clarify that graduation requirement with the Civics exam it's given in eighth grade but students have to pass it by their senior year in order to graduate from our high schools correct correct thank you that's it I'm seeing that there are no other questions or comments thank you thank you we will move on to uh D Dr Menzel actually this one is um board member Carney with respect to board policy ba sinowski and Dr Menzel for putting this on the agenda so we can have a discussion uh tonight uh following policy BG I would like to have a discussion about the updates that were made to policy ba in 2022 I just would like to understand why we approved to change this policy and if you could
131put that policy that I'm talking about up on the screen so our community can see that you're looking for the current policy or the one that was one the red line right okay and the reason I feel it's important to discuss this policy is because we're starting off a new year with a new board and this is a ba is about our school board operational goals so if we can open the one that says 5 13 [Music] yes thank you so originally this is uh was our policy ba School Board operational goals which says the governing board is responsible to the people of the district and therefore should be aware of opinions and attitudes in the community and have identified District needs as representatives of the people who own and support the schools the board
132accepts the responsibility to identify Community attitudes and opinions and District needs and to require short and long range strategies that are responsive within the budgetary limitations of the district and then if you could show the updated policy of how that changed and I think that um we should talk about who exactly the governing board members represent right who who were we elected uh to serve and I think that's a lot of people we are representatives of the people the taxpayers of the district who own and uh you know frankly pay for our schools and then we also represent the parents who you entrust you know their children to be educated in our district schools we obviously represent our students first and foremost we wouldn't and none of us would be here without them and we
133represent our hard-working dedicated staff and employees so we represent a lot of people and so I just wanted to have a discussion on why we changed this language to basically um tell our taxpayers in our community that their opinions and voices really don't matter and that we really don't represent them and if we look at that original policy if you look at peer districts they are all using that original language still in policy they have not made any updates um to their policies so why are we the only District we know within I didn't see any but um you know within our peer districts within that have changed this policy and I'm just wondering how you feel about that because I know you voted for that this changes Julian I'd like to know you're specifically
134asking me to well I don't know or anyone that voted for it okay I would like to share it was an eight-year-old policy and um we updated it appropriately to actually be more inclusive of as I see it the individuals we represent I don't see there's any omission of community members in here or families at all because it specifically States the impact of the district's operation on community and the environment District financial and budgetary consideration related to all the district students employees and it even says amongst other matters so I think it's actually it is more detailed to honor and recognize all of the members in our community so the language that was struck about being aware of opinions and attitudes in the community and I've identified District needs you know and all that I
135think uh should be brought back I think that we should look at um you know bringing that policy back at the next meeting so so in terms of next steps on a request like that is we would work with the proposed language to bring back something with we'd work with Jennifer McLennan to draft how that would look and develop that proposed suggestion so what I would recommend is scheduling a meeting with Jennifer and with me to be able to put together what you're thinking would be a good addition to ba and then we can bring that back for our first read at our next meeting okay that sounds great I have a um I have a comment go ahead Dr Hartwell to know what language in this board member Kearney in the in the board
136policy that we're looking at now that's currently in place I'm not I'm curious um and Keen to to learn what you're reading in the policy or what's the language that you're interpreting is um offensive to to you and I don't mean that to be offensive I just I'm not sure what the word is here so I'm I'm struggling with identifying the express language that is of concern here and I don't think it's the express language that's of concern it's a concern that we that the original policy I feel is better represents uh you know the board and who we represent and I would like to see us go back in line with uh what other districts around us are still using um and I think it's easier for the community to understand I think this
137is um unnecessary so I'll just I'm gonna just speak for myself only here okay I'm not going to speak for anyone else I have no no concern whatsoever not being a follower so so just take that for for the lens that I'm looking through when I say that uh the policy okay look let me say I do not feel that we are politicians I believe that our responsibility is indeed to the district as a whole to serve our students and they're learning and their achievement and their well-being and everything else is a feeder into that main goal and so you asked why did why did we vote for this that's why I voted for because that's exactly what that policy says it puts the center at the student achievement their well-being and their learning and
138all of the other components that are important which includes family interactions parent interactions Community attitudes Community uh opinions we couldn't have passed that override if the board didn't happen to those connections and everybody at that dies is or was a parent so I'm not exactly sure I agree with you I I do not agree that this language flies in the face of anything and I also just will point out just as factual point the policy that you're wanting to go back to is asba's language it's not susd's language so and I think I've already expressed my point on uh compliance policies so um and I again not to be provocative but you did ask the question so um I don't I still don't see the language that you're referring to is is so offensive I
139really don't uh I'd like to I'd like to understand where you're coming from but a blanket we just need to throw this out and go backwards uh that doesn't that's not really a reason so I'm struggling with the reason here yeah thank you and I think that's why I wanted to just have a discussion uh you know today but I'm not saying that this is offensive I'm just saying I would like us to go back to saying that we are responsible to the people of the district and should be you know aware of their opinions and attitudes in the community and I just feel like we can you know if go back to the language it was before I think that was serving us um or to discuss as a board how you know how
140we move forward maybe in a better way do any government other governing board members would they like to weigh in on this board member Warner can you go back to the other so just switch over to the previous policy on the slide can we go back to the May version of the policy language thank you uh so I will add I think it's very important that um uh we have a responsibility to identify Community attitudes and opinions of this District because we do want the input of our um our parents even our teachers and our taxpayers and so I definitely support um adding this back into the policy and making some modifications are there any other comments that would like to be made on this uh board president for Council yep he's making her way
141to the podium okay thank you I can't see you so that's what I figured Madam president Dr hartwells thank you Miss McLennan um the language that is in the compliance policy the copyright policy of aspa that we're looking at on the screen is that verbatim from the statute no ma'am the statute ars-15 321 and ars-15341 do not contain the language in the former District policy that was approved in May of 2014-14 thank you okay so this language was written by the policy Folks at asba yes ma'am okay all right thank you for for clarifying that I appreciate it my pleasure seeing that there are no other comments well I'm gonna uh just finish off so we're just um so I'd like to propose that at the next board meeting we bring back uh policy ba
142for consideration in action and revert the policy language back to uh This original language that is a future item when we get to agenda 11. and we will move on to eight e discussion of governing board policy BCC for member County okay if you can pull up the two policies um that I had requested from Dr Menzel on policy BCC yeah but I'd like for the policy that was approved on December 6 to be put up on the screen that is not the policy that was adopted on December 6th if you could show the policy that was adopted on December 6th please I think Jennifer McLennan can speak to what you're seeing on the screen and what we think you might be pointing to in terms of what was in the board packet Madam president
143miss Carney so on December 6th the government the board the governing board adopted this policy governing board policy BCC if we could go back to the one on in February please for a moment thank you so the governing board adopted this policy BCC request for information it was a new policy in February of 2022. um the the language of that policy was the four paragraphs that you see here and now if we could go to December the December version please the December version there was a requested change to only two paragraph three and the requested change was the language that that was added was that at the board member's written request in line three the request would be placed on the next agenda item the backup material to the agenda item on December 6 2022
144did not contain the second paragraph that is up on your bulletin board but the boards changes to that third paragraph didn't undo the changes that were adopted in February so in other words the backup information was incorrect due to my own clerical error for which I apologize but the um the board did not alter the first two paragraphs only that third paragraph was changed so could you show me the policy BCC that was presented to the board on November 15th as first read I don't have that information I do can I pass that out sure and I would like for it to be put on the screen if there's a way to do that so the Hub the public can see I don't think that we have the ability to do that Miss Kearney because
145I had I had requested that um because this policy that was adopted by the board this is not the correct policy that was brought to the board for a first read on November 15th and was approved by the board on December 6th is not this language so again and I Dr Menzel emailed me on January 4th how I came to understand this is uh Dr Menzel sent me this policy BCC that I was supposed to be following and sent me this but this was not what was approved by the board on December 6th so this is not the policy that was approved the policy that I just handed out is what was approved okay and so I I have reviewed the December 6th backup information and the agenda item the only proposed changes were to
146that third paragraph that's up on the screen there were no proposed changes to the first two paragraphs so that the motion at the December 6th meeting was to amend the policy as presented and again the presentation was only the changes to that paragraph three so in my opinion you don't need to redo the revisions to the policy that was adopted in February 2022 and then changed on December 6 2022 only with respect to that third paragraph but it's the discretion of the board the board can bring back any policy at any time as you've indicated tonight that you'd like to see an additional policy revision to governing report policy PA you may all also ask for a reconsideration of the changes to governing board policy BCC yeah I understand that but I don't want to
147remember something to add I just want to I want to add that if it had been the intention of the governing board to delete that second paragraph it would have had a strikethrough like it does under this rule which is changed to a requirement so in any red line or black line version of a policy revision new language is highlighted in one way a language that's deleted is shown as a strikethrough there's no strike through that second paragraph So as Miss McLennan has identified that was a clerical error not including that paragraph but it was not anything that the governing board considered removing because if that was the case it would have been shown just like the delete through rule it would have shown that for the second paragraph are there any other comments board
148member Carney yes I mean I understand that you made a clerical error but the policy that was approved is the one I handed out the two paragraphs um so what was is presented to the community in the policy book right now is not the correct policy that's was adopted by the board Madam president miss Carney I don't think that my clerical error can undo the work of the board in the adoption of what was adopted in February 2022 so again if you want to make clarifications to governing board policy BCC I would suggest that we put it on a next agenda but my cleric career including the wrong backup wouldn't undo this board's action in February could I remember Kearney okay so what was brought forward to the board on December 15th um was a
149two paragraph policy for first read and that was what was presented on the screen if you go back to those meetings you can pull that up that is what is there for the community that is the policy that the board was given same thing on December 6th that's what was presented that was presented to the community that's what was approved 5-0 and now we have a different policy that is up on our policy book and I would like for this corrected policy BCC to be instated on our policy board by the end of day tomorrow I have a question go ahead Dr herwells thank you and I don't mean to interrupt I just when board member Kearney is done I have a question I do not see her request to speak light on so go
150ahead Dr hartwell's thank you Miss McLennan and the board docs and policy um portal that is available to the community on the susd website and also available to the board members uh that policy manual is what we refer to it as electronic policy manual uh included the relevant second paragraph that's a question at the time of all the Amendments I believe I know the answer I'm looking at it now and it only has the second paragraph it does not have the first or the second only it only has a third paragraph that is if a board member requests information that is the only thing that is in that background um document yeah in the description Dr hartwell's Madam president Dr hartwellson Dr Menzel I believe that what Dr Manziel is saying is that in the
151agenda item Dr hartwell's the only change that was proposed in the agenda item the agenda backup was the uh third paragraph again the changes the addition of at the board members written request and the delineation or elimination of the word Rule and the addition of the world requirement because the only change that was proposed by a governing board member at that time was with respect to that third paragraph but the the uh the board included as a part of the backup to the agenda item a um word compared version and that is the point that Ms Carney is Raising now is that the word compared version was incomplete because it did not include the second paragraph understood thank you board member Werner so uh transparency is key to a successful district and I think that
152we need to go back and watch the video and really confirm what was passed at that meeting because I'm under the same belief that Ms Carney is that that uh the incorrect policy was approved the policy that was approved is not what is showing up in our war dogs okay and Madam president Ms Warner again I don't think that the incorrect Word document that was attached as the backup could change the will of the board as taken in February so that would be my concern in just revising the policy without further board action so my suggestion would be that we bring this back I would support that I believe that we cannot um just says you're raising a question about it not being identified there the fact that it wasn't strike through language in the
153policy doesn't indicate that the board was intentionally removing it so to revert to something when there wasn't clearly an intention to remove it which would have been in the redline copy likely requires bringing it forward to the governing board on the February 7th meeting in order to clarify the full intention of the board thank you to everyone for this conversation if there I don't see any more requests to speak lit up so we will move on to and I do note that uh the original 8f was deleted so we are going to move on to our consent agenda at this time and I ask for a motion to approve our consent agenda as amended and then we will have a discussion on those polled items so moved is there a second second all in favor
154to approve the consent agenda as amended say aye aye that motion passes five zero and we are going to discuss the items by the individual who pulled them and in the order that they were pulled so the first one would be um Dr hartwell's the uh K 9k overnight out of state foreign field trips go ahead thank you board president sinowski um I I simply I pulled this knot because there was any issue and quite the opposite I'm I'm very happy to see that the field trips have resumed in Earnest um but rather I would ask Dr Menzel if you could just share with the community remind the community how the funding of these field trips uh work and the support that might be available for students that um families where those field trips may
155not may be cost prohibitive sure thank you Dr hartwells we have a number of examples with field trips and oftentimes they're supported through the generosity of parent-teacher organizations other sponsors sometimes through tax credits but always we're cognizant of the fact that if there's an additional cost beyond what the district is covering and students are expected to raise or provide funding that we do not want any student who might not have the ability to provide the funding to be denied the opportunity to participate so I confirm with principal eireman that on this trip that he's unaware of at the present time anyone who had a financial barrier but if there was one they would either approach their generous PTO or tax credits or find some other way to to ensure assistance for student participation another example
156of this is we've got an opportunity for the Coronado Orchestra to go to New York and and again the fundraising has been taking place in Earnest with the support of the Scottsdale Unified School District foundation and many other partners throughout our community so we want to both provide these meaningful learning opportunities for our students and support those who may not otherwise have access to the resources and we did have an opportunity to confirm today that that is the case with respect to this particular request thank you very much Dr Menzel I don't have any further questions or comments and I have absolutely no concerns so I would move to approve item 9 k and I would second that motion all in favor say aye aye aye that motion passes 5-0 thank you and moving on
157to f that would be 9f the approval of minutes from December 6 2022 regular governing board meeting board member Warner so this was a board meeting that I was not a board member um that I I was in the audience but I was not an official report member at the time so it's not something that I can vote on to whether to approve or deny so I'm not going to do that oh um there's nothing else anyone else like Toyota oh uh board member Kearney yes I same goes for me I'll be abstaining from this since I wasn't a board member at that time okay how can we abstain when I do the calling for approval or at that point in time I appreciate that input at this time I would like to make a
158motion to approve nine F approval of minutes from December 26 2022 regular governing Boardman meeting all in favor say aye aye aye and denying abstaining abstain obstain thank you that motion passes three to zero with two board members abstaining practicing the same thing on the next one okay so the next is a consent agenda item 9g approval of minutes from December 20 or December 8th 2022 governing board meeting and executive session superintendent mid-year evaluation board member Warner um I'm going to I did not participate in the meeting it was not something that uh elects were probably to be a part of so I will be standing abstaining okay thank you any other comments all right at this time I'd like to make a motion to approve the minutes from December 8 2022 special governing board
159meeting and executive session superintendent media your evaluation is there a second second thank you all in favor say aye aye opposed abstain and abstentions abstain thank you that motion passes 3-0 with two extensions and the next item is nine nine nine I approve the renewal of the Cooperative agreement between the State of Arizona and the Scottsdale Unified School District Board member Werner so a quick question on this um when this Cooperative is approved that means that the superintendent or people can just go into this large Cooperative that has vendors several hundred of them for things that our community may approve or may not approve of and they can choose any vendor and not have to come before the board as long as they're not spending over a hundred thousand dollars is that correct go ahead
160Shannon um that is correct um if the at the beginning of the school year we sent to the governing board on Cooperative agreements that we would like to use that we use from those terms with vendors and dollars amounts for those cooperatives as well as other are so if the dollar amount is under a hundred thousand dollars then that does not go to the governing board it's only if it's over 100 the co-ops that we utilize there would be nothing to stop them if they found something that they're hell we would I understand that that uh buying oh I'm so sorry get this um if you're buying Nails you're buying supplies I understand that that you know those vendors are just fine but I went through the vendors last night and uh speaking to one
161of the concerns today that from public comment regarding books and so on another vendor inside of this Cooperative is Easy A to Z books which sells a very controversial book that's um uh hammering our social media lately was just genderqueer which is essentially um a cartoon porn if you would you know if you take a look at it so what would stop somebody from purchasing these books knowing that the community doesn't want it in our in our schools and yet it is on the approved purchasing list from the cooperative and I'll tie it in with another one um the other one is Health waves they bring in and they'll come to your school or to wherever that hires them and do vaccine clinics and so on so we have 16. employees in our purchasing department
162and that's excluding the ones that that connect with um with teaching and learning so wouldn't it be more prudent of us to actually bring in the spending and where we spend our money and have our purchasing department really take take a little closer look at the suppliers that we're using as opposed to just going to a Cooperative um such as this one protect your mental so I just want to add a little bit more context to what Shannon shared so while the Cooperative gives us the ability to be able to move the purchasing process forward the hundred thousand dollars is one criteria for bringing it to the governing board if we were recommending curriculum there's a second requirement we can't just move forward on curriculum without governing board approval if we're going to adopt a
163new curriculum that requires specific action there have been times where we've come to the governing board for something less than a hundred thousand dollars when it's a new purchase or something that we believe needs to be brought to individual board members attention the problem with not authorizing a cooperative and in this case this is one that was expiring and and we just learned of late as that's why we're bringing it to you now and it wasn't part of the original list is is because we have many other routine purchases supplies and materials like you referenced earlier that if we were to have to procure every single one of those with three informal quotes and or formal quotes the amount of time it would take would far exceed the value in that in that instance and
164so we've got a process for books so you you mentioned the book if that was a book that someone was going to propose be purchased in a library that would fall under the new provision of Statute where uh if a book has been purchased you've got a 60-day review period parents have an opportunity to say no I don't want my child to read that book so there are checks and balances that are built into this and and if there are areas of concern governing boards can I the governing board can't identify other areas around purchasing that they would like to see before purchase is finalized there's a real concern about the delay in being able to get what our schools need if we don't have access to something like the purchasing cooperatives that's being recommended
165here okay board member Kearney um so you're saying there's a lot of training professional development companies uh within this cooperative like Catalyst learning who partners with Panorama and surveys and all these things so you're saying if you were to enter into a contract with this company it would become in front of the board no matter the amount of the contract um we so we did provide a list there are certain within that Cooperative there's lots of vendors we don't necessarily use all of those vendors so we did provide a list of the vendors that we are currently using through that Cooperative agreement at the beginning of the school year we do come forth and say we are using um you know the the State Cooperative agreement these are the vendors we utilize on the dollar
166amounts that we estimate that to be if we're going to use a different vendor that's you know yes there are vendors that we could include that would be under a hundred thousand dollars generally when you're using a state bid like that or a Cooperative agreement it's generally going to be above that hundred thousand hundred thousand dollar Mark that's why it's we put those in place so that when the orders come in we can we can fill those quickly um so if there was one that was going to be of a high dollar amount that yes we could bring that back to the governing board and say this is a vendor that we'd like to utilize um based on the dollar amount we think it's going to be the requirement is a hundred thousand dollars and
167like I said we do provide now is a hundred thousand dollars that can be addressed but we do provide a list at the beginning of the school year that says this is the cooperatives we use these are the vendors that we purchase off of that Cooperative on the dollar amount we anticipate using this year with that that major and cooperative okay so if we approve this Cooperative we approve all the companies this is It's a thousand over a thousand I think companies and organizations we're approving all those whether we use them or not correct well it is you're you're indicating that the district can utilize The Cooperative there are multiple cooperatives within the state not every one of the cooperatives have um procured all of the supplies materials that we might need and so the
168list from this one that we use is the 84 that Shannon set out earlier not the thousand and so we're very cognizant as a leadership team about the environment that we're operating in we are very intentional about our strategic plan goal and and alignment with those planning goals so whatever we do in terms of expenditures first Must Fall within the the budget that was board approved in in Broad parameters how we get there becomes the vehicles related to State procurement requirements and we're cognizant of optimizing our resources goal number five and so utilizing these purchasing cooperatives is helpful that way it's it's um one of those things where if there's a particular concern about a particular vendor in any any cooperative please bring that forward to our attention it will give us something else to
169look at as we consider who might best provide services that the district needs in alignment with our strategic goals Dr Wells did you have a comment to add yes thank you for president sinowski so um Miss crowser just to confirm the list that you sent out today to the board that included 80 just 84 vendors that's who currently perhaps we have active transactions with through this transaction The Cooperative which is the contract portal right Dr Hartwell yes that is correct those are the vendors that we are currently using on this agreement thank you thank you I note that neither one of the vendors that the other board members have brought up is on that list so I feel like we might be um a little bit of a red herring here um the efficiency of
170using a Cooperative in order to enable efficient and effective administrative function I believe is important and time is money so if we're gonna go to 84 different vendors have to submit three proposals that that just seems very inefficient um and and not cost effective in my view from an operational standpoint as in terms of stewards of of the you know time is money of money so that's my view I also want to ask that we uh ensure that we are sensitive that there are folks listening and rhetorical inflammatory phrases that are used to incite emotional responses are inappropriate and I would ask that we just all raise the game raise the level here of professionalism I realize that we all feel passionately about certain topics and that's fine and fair but I think we also
171have to ensure that we maintain a level of decorum and professionalism when we are referring to operations of the district and companies uh these are people that you know you don't have to buy things from a company but you certainly don't need to malign them either so thank you thank you board member Warner so you're saying that a professional development product is is more than a hundred thousand dollars it depends on what we're what we're purchasing what I'm saying is that the list that we provided is um the list of the vendors that we're using from State Cooperative agreement um when we're talking curriculum yes that is I mean there's other things there's other steps that along the process that to make sure that we're getting what should be purchased um some of those things
172do end up costing more depending on what you're doing we can make it that um if we're going to purchase from anybody other on the state contract agreement other than the people who are on that list which is who we're purchasing from now that that would come back to the board I don't anticipate that as an issue because those are the vendors that we are currently using for purchases through the state Cooperative agreement okay so what you're suggesting is that uh the list that you send out would be for lack of a better word a approved list and we could approve that list in that way it would alleviate some of the concerns that Ms Carney and I brought up today okay fair enough I would be agreeable to them seeing that there are no
173other requests to speak in place right now I ask for a motion to approve nine I up at the renewal of the Cooperative agreement between the State of Arizona and Scottsdale Unified School District motion's been made is there a second or I asked for a request for a motion thank you so moved and I second that all in favor to approve the renewal of the Cooperative agreement between the State of Arizona and Scottsdale Unified School District say aye aye aye um opposed no no that motion passes three two thank you we're going to move on to our action items oh yes yes we are um certified and special service providers performance pay that's also known as the 301 plan for the 2023 2022-23 school year Miss Wilson good evening president sunowski governing board members and
174Dr Menzel you have before you a recommendation hello and welcome to the 301 performance plan for 2020. you don't need to play the slideshow but thank you nor my voiceover that was a pre-recorded uh presentation but thank you Tech Team that has just provided as backup materials so uh president sanovski governing board members Dr Menzel you have before you a recommendation to approve uh as uh pointed out the 301 performance plan for the 2022-2023 school year um this is a requirement through Arizona revised statutes 15977 um it does require an affirmative vote of at least 70 percent of uh teachers and staff eligible to participate the changes to the plan from the previous year are very minimal we just had to update language to include the alternative evaluation for those teachers that are highly effective
175and have been so for three consecutive years the breakdown for the pay is outlined in your materials at 60 60 of the total pay combines summative teacher evaluation outcomes and school median growth percentiles and then the other 40 is based on District level performance for our special service providers speech language therapist OTS pts certified support members as such the performance is 60 of the total pay is based on their summative evaluations and then 40 percent for district level performance um we don't yet know the exact dollar amount that will be paid out we know that it'll be in the uh three thousand dollar or more range and um I'm happy to entertain any questions if you have any I would like to just start off with um I really appreciated um the fact that this
176was an inclusive process and it included the stakeholders who would be held to this and I also appreciated the Q a that was also attached to all board members that was good to be able to see frequently asked questions and then the responses because often we will receive questions about the 301 plan and now we are more informed to be able to respond to this other than to reflect deflect them back to you so thank you thank you um are there any other questions or comments about the 301 plan board member order I'm a big proponent of performance Bay base pay and bonuses and rewards um so I don't have a issue with with the plan itself I actually am again very supportive of it what I have an issue with is the process of
177how we're getting there and I sent an email to superintendent Mozilla last night asking for some specifics because this is a committee that was put together and it is coming before the board for a vote and in the statute it says that uh when any committee that's come coming back to um whether it's going to be making a recommendation concerning a decision to be made or considered of a course of conduct to be taken or considered by the public body that is coming before the vote and that's those meetings and committees should be open to the public our community definitely has a say in this so while I support performance pay I am really questioning the processes of how we're getting places and that there's a whole lot of operating in the gray and I
178absolutely don't support it I'm going to ask Miss Wilson to maybe re-clarify what this recommendation is and that it does actually receive the vote of the employees in the district as stated in the recommendation can you kind of go over what the pay for performance plan is in addition to the salary that our employees receive and and that it is a state regulation that we're abiding by president snowski yes as outlined in the revised statutes the there are components of the plan that can be addressed in the performance plan we had various stakeholders as outlined in the PowerPoint um and that was presented to staff so we had special service providers certified teachers District administrators and then the plan was presented with the PowerPoint with the voiceover to the staff and then they were submitted
179ballots either to a firm or not the support for the performance plan itself and so a overwhelming uh support at 98 of the employees supported the plan by some of the um substance of why we have a 301 pay for performance plan throughout our state of Arizona board member Werner I want to clarify so there's no confusion about where I stand with the plan and the support for our teachers I absolutely I absolutely support it but I'm just bringing forth some of the gray areas that I'm seeing not from your perspective but from how things are being done with committees and transparency that's also I do support your plan okay seeing that there are no other requests Dr hartwells do you have anything to add no I do not okay seeing that there are no
180other requests to speak at this time I ask for a motion to approve this action item 10A for the certified and special service providers performance pay 301 plan for the 22-23 school year so moved and I would like to second that all in favor say aye aye aye opposed I believe that motion passes 5-0 thank you all right this is a time for governing board members to propose topics for future consideration are there um I I see board member Kearney go ahead again um I would like the corrected language on the policy BCC uh to be instated in our public policy manual by the end of day tomorrow that was approved the language approved by the board on December 6th and then as stated earlier I'd like to propose at the next board meeting that
181we bring back policy ba back for consideration and action and revert the policy language back to its former and that is um under policy bgb any other requests okay all right I have some please yes go ahead recognize thank you thank you for president sinowski um one I request at an appropriate time hopefully sooner than later uh that the board here from the students voices from The Martin Luther King presentation unfortunately I was out of town and did not get to hear or participate in that event um but I would very much like to hear at least an Abridged version of the students if they'd be willing to share uh their words in honor of Martin Luther King Jr's Legacy of Social and economic Justice a second agenda items uh also sooner than later uh
182and that's a policy discussion on our board ethics with respect to board members serving on advisory committees and site councils and Etc uh specifically I think it's policy b c a uh and the framework that's outlined in the express language which prohibits using the governing board position to unduly influence the district or the site level through site level committees uh and you know for example advisory committee is like a curriculum committee I think we uh could benefit from an honest conversation with respect to that policy and some of the fact patterns that exist um today is that it Dr hartwell's was that it I assume yes okay um board member Warner so I did make it I did make an email request for a future agenda item to Dr Menzel regarding special ed and that
183request has been honored thank you okay seeing that there are no other future agenda item requests I note that our next meeting is Tuesday December 7th sorry February 7th I know I have December on my brain because I'm looking at those policies February 7 2023 at 6 pm and that will be a special governing board meeting at the MDA um Tuesday February 21st 2023 at 6 PM we will have a regular gardening board meeting back here at Coronado High School at this time I make a motion to adjourn this governing board meeting is there a second second there's a second all in favor to adjourn say aye aye aye this meeting is adjourned at 8 43 pm on January 17th