Town Council - Regular Meeting

signed by um a lot of the liquor licenses are that way after the council proves that the clerk can sign every once I feel like it was like that before.

The timer keeps it has a hiccup. Good evening. I'd like to call this meeting the Pinetop Lakeside Council to order. Um, we do have a quorum. I'd ask everybody to make sure that your cell phones are silenced, please. Um, I'd ask you also to stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance. And please remain standing for the invocation. I pledge algiance 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.

Pastor Jurgensson, privilege and honor this evening, Pastor Gary Jurgens from Emanuel Lutheran Lakeside. We pray. Lord God, heavenly father, we thank you on this Holy Week where we see how much you love this world so much that you gave your only begotten son who came riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and then laid down his life where you punished your son on the cross for the sins of the whole world and our sins became so much of him. Christ died for us, but death couldn't contain him. And as we're about to celebrate on Easter, he will rise and give us victory over sin, death, and the power of the devil. Be with this meeting. Give wisdom to the members of this committee and give them so that they can make the best decisions what's best for the citizens, the the employees, and the property of Lakeside Pinetop. We pray in our your son's holy name. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, pastor. We appreciate you coming. Item B on our agenda tonight is call to the public. This is a business meeting of the town council. The town values and welcomes public input. Please address the council as a whole and not individual council members. Do not address staff or members of the audience. Council action on items brought up during call to the public is limited by the open meeting law. The council may direct staff to study the matter and reschedule for further discussion at a later date. Um items on the agenda will not be heard during call to the public and individuals are limited to three minutes. Um I've got Larry McCormack who would like to address us.

Good evening madame mayor, vice mayor, and councel. What's left of you? Um just wanted to give you an update on the community center. Um a lot of things have been changing and want to keep you up to date. First of all, um uh we're always looking for volunteers. Sterling gets my text message once a month and he showed up last Thursday. There was only 10,000 pounds of food. The month before there was 15. So, we're always looking for volunteers and we're lucky enough uh Lisa, do you have that picture handy? Oh, okay. We were lucky enough to have both the Pinetop Fire and Timber Mesa people show up the last two months and it really helps out, let me tell you. So, in any case, um uh we're always looking for volunteers in many different areas of the of the center. Uh the thrift store has been remodeled. We're looking to expand the hours. So, anybody that's got a few extra hours, maybe their wife Jerry instead of playing cards can go back and take care of the thrift store for a while. In any case, um, always looking for volunteers and again, thanks to Taber and Timber and Pinetop Fire. Uh, tonight's agenda item with Jonathan Roloff. Um, uh, Megan and I were invited to Blue Ridge and we met with Jonathan constructively to talk about the transfer of possible property over to the city andor the the senior center, community center. Um, and he also appeared last night at PVC at the senior center and we hosted

him for lunch, him and Mary and Courtney and he had Jonathan had a friend from Puma, Arizona, I believe. So in any case, um last thing on there is we do have been getting donations and uh we got a large grant from Dell Web which uh paid for 6,000 foot of uh vinyl flooring which was sadly needed. There was no 32 rule involved in the drop things at our old at the with the old carpeting. So in any case, that should be done this week. They had some had to back order some damaged flooring and they had to be transferred here from California by Home Depot. So in any case, as I spoke before, we did apply to the gaming commission at the state of Arizona for a bingo license. We should be getting that hopefully pretty soon. Uh we have the Lu House coming up in July. I don't have the exact date and we have some raffle items coming in if anybody needs a barbecue. $5 a ticket and uh it's sit sitting on the little uh stage we have set up in the dining room so you can see it all. So in any case with the donations that are coming in and our grants and we applied for the NATO grant of a half million dollars hopefully that might come through. Um we're trying to be self-sufficient not have to worry about funding from the town and uh that that's our goal to be self-sufficient. So thank you for your time.

Thank you Larry. We appreciate that report. just uh we have Sada Chudnaf that would like to speak to us tonight.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council. I'm here to just do an update on the Project Wet Water Festival, which will be taking place on April 30th. NPC has come through and agreed to host the event, which was great because insurance is very stressful up on the here on the mountain. We're also fully funded. So, thank you to Pinetop and a number of our other sponsors. Um, that's going to happen. We have over 500 students that will be coming up, all fourth graders. We are looking for volunteers still. So, if anyone wants to come out there from 2:30 to 4 on the 30th or I'm sorry, 7:30 to 4 on the 30th. Um, they'd be welcomed. And we're also going to have our training here at the chamber on the 29th from 2:30 to 4:30. So, I have a QR code if you want to scan it and volunteer and we'll feed you. So, it's worth it. Thank you.

Thank you for that update. We appreciate it. Okay. Um that I don't have any more requests to speak. So, we'll move on to item C, which is our consent agenda. All items listed are considered routine matters and we enacted by one motion of the council. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of town council requests that an item or items be removed for discussion. Council members may ask questions without removal of the item from the council agenda. Consent agenda, excuse me. Items removed are considered their in normal sequence unless called out of sequence. We've got three items tonight on our consent agenda. Excuse me. I'd like to invite Jay Charm from the Lion Stand to come up and tell us what you're asking for if you don't mind.

Hi, my name is J. home and uh I'm lying in I've owned it for 13 years and at one point we had a uh racetrack out of Prescuit Arizona Downs who came in sat in front of this council to get approval through the to allow the gaming commission to let me have this um to bring in the machines and do off track betting. Well, they only lasted for a few years and so now we have been without OTB for probably four or five years. We have been working closely with uh Turf Paradise and Turf Paradise has agreed to come in and continue the Altra bed betting which I believe generates a bit of revenue for the town and also for my my tax revenue that ends up going into the the city and state taxes. Okay.

So, if you'd like to, I can have Dave Johnson come up here and say a few words if you have any questions. Okay. Thank you. Jay, are there any council members that have questions? Okay. I just want you to be able to present since you showed up tonight. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Are there any questions from the council on any of the consent agenda items? No. I would entertain a motion then. Vice Mayor, I move to approve the consent agenda. I second that motion. Thank you. We have a motion, a second. All those in favor, please signify by raising your right hand. Thank you. That carries unanimously. Good luck, Jay. Thank you.

Um item D is business before the council. Um, we have one item tonight which is a presentation of Lage School District 32 2026 bond override. Superintendent Jonathan Roloff. Welcome.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Irwin, members of the council. Um, I'm happy to be here. We uh All right. Thank you. Oh, I appreciate that. Wonderful. Thanks. Um what we did uh on February 27th is we went around and we heard that in the nation there was a state of the union address and we know that there's a lot of people who talk about the school and wonder about the school just like they wonder about our town. And so what we decided to do was take that theme and we wanted to do a state of the district address. So, what I fully expect is as we're going over things tonight, we'll have half of the audience stand up and cheer and the other I'm just kidding. I try to be funny, but Larry's already funnier than I am. He's told better jokes and most of my jokes last night I gave to the PVC committee just they just landed flat. But I'm going to keep trying. I'm going to keep trying. All right. All right. So, with that being said, um we always like to start with celebrations because people want to know what's going on in the school and there's a lot of narrative, a lot of stuff on the news, but what's really happening? Well, first of all, we have a 2026 Flynn Scholar. That is a lot of people would say the most prestigious award a high school student could get, right? And so, we want to celebrate Rain. Um we just found out about a week ago that she got that and that's that's really exciting. And that shows that if you come to Blige, you can get the best education anywhere. If you can be a Flynn Scholar at Blige, any student can be successful at Blige. Another thing we want to celebrate is our theater production. I don't know how many people were able to come out to see Hello Dolly. I'm tonedeaf, but everybody that knows how to carry a tune said it was the most amazing production. And our theater continues to get better and better every year. And so we love that we're doing things that we're we're teaching kids, but we have other amazing things happening at Blige. And I'm

sorry, this presentation was originally an hour and I was told I have 15 minutes. I didn't notice the timer isn't start, but I'm truncating it down. I'm trying to give you guys the brass tax. All right. Okay. Secondly, we had Ariel. We had the top two spellers in Navajo County from We're We're both from Blige. Ariel got to go down. Ariel Pineda. She got to go down and represent us in the state spelling bee. Of course, there's only one winner, but she did a good job. She represent us really well and we're we're proud of her. She also had an entry in the state um science fair and so she was a part of that and so we're waiting to see how she did in that. But once again, if you come to Blige, you have a you have a chance at an amazing education. All right. Um, continuing on. So, Rain was also recognized by the state board of ed in January. She was nominated and received student of the month for the state of Arizona. So, once again, we have some great unique things happening uh at Blige with our students. Um, in addition, we have an amazing staff. So, Alexis uh was our employee of the month. She is our registar at our high school. This year we had to redo registrations for every single student in the district and Alexis was one of our registars. All three registars did a great job and she was on it. Did an amazing job. Miss Blake was our teacher of the month. She's our FBLA teacher and I don't know how many of you guys are aware of that but our FBLA program has grown a ton in the past few years from my understanding. They have their own coffee shop in the school. So, if you guys ever want to stop by the beginning of the day, get some uh support our high schoolers in the FBLA. It's in the front office of the high school that they sell a lot of the drinks that the kids like. I'm I was asking for coffee and they kind of gave me a weird look cuz they sell a lot of the, you know, high energy

potent drinks uh that the kids like. And then I also want to thank Mr. Bosley. Um, one of the things we're going to get into is how our facilities are are aging. Mr. Bosley, he's running around. And I think I'm going to get the guy a pair of roller skates if that wouldn't be a safety hazard. But he is around fixing air conditioning units. And this is him the other night. Um our our sound system at the elementary school, Miss Olsen, our music teacher, couldn't get it to work right for our music concert. And Mr. Bosley, I don't know how many of you guys know, but he's a DJ on the side. So he came in, brought his sound system, and made sure that Miss Olsen could focus on our good work. My point of all this is we have amazing people working at Blige trying to do great things. our kids are doing amazing things. Um, in addition, here are our students of the month and um I believe Adeline Cobb Cobb, who's our uh our high school student of the month, she's also on a town advisory committee or something and I'm not I'm not sure the details about that, but she's on our superintendence advisory committee. So, I have a committee with uh community members, students, teachers, classified that that help me know what the pulse is on the town before we make big decisions. and all of our students are doing amazing things. Once again, if students come to Blige and they apply themselves, great things happen. In addition, our athletics, I know people talk about the way Blige used to be. But I want to point out that our football team was the only team to beat Round Valley this year. There was the if it weren't for us would have been undefeated. They were state champions and our football team and I was at that game and our guys played tough and even though our record hasn't been as good as we'd like it to be the past few years, we think good things are happening and we got tough kids that are coming out of there. They just buckle up and and and they beat Round Valley. That was such a great moment for our kids and for our school to to do that. We're we're so proud of and and lots of amazing things are happening in sports and sports are such a good way to um to have a co-curricular

education. Oh, I see someone's name up there that I recognize, too. Thank you for sponsoring. Um, so what's the future of Blards? I I get a lot of questions. What does the future look like? Well, what do we need to achieve excellence? Because we got the people, and the people are what the school is. The school is the people. But unfortunately, um, there are some things that we need to support our people that we're in a state of deferred maintenance and some things and we need to fix some things. And once again, we're looking for function. We're not looking for fancy. We just want the Chevrolet that goes down the road. We want the teachers to come in, flip on the lights, the lights work, have climate control classrooms where it's not 100° and it's not 50°. Um, we want our school to be a safe place. As you guys know, um it doesn't matter which side of the aisle you lean on and what news you watch, school safety is a big deal and schools have become an increasing place where this is something we need to consider. It wasn't necessarily considered as much as 1963 when our school was built. So, what we need to do is is look at some infrastructure things to make sure we have as safe of an environment as we can get. Granted, with that being said, as you guys know, there's no place that's perfectly safe, but we want to do what we can and take the measures to keep our students and and staff safe. um ADA compliance. We have some things that um were grandfathered in on ADA compliance and unfortunately we've had a couple things happen where it's been brought to our attention. And so those are things we feel like we need to get fixed so that we're um supporting our disabled students and disabled adults who come through our campus that it's not something that we're grandfathered in, but that we're actually taking care of people the way that they need to be taken care of. Once again, we're not looking for fancy, but I think we need to be able to serve people with disabilities who come into our building. um and maintenance and operations. And we could talk a lot about the Roosevelt versus Bishop lawsuit and how states have or schools haven't been funded, but I don't I don't want to bore you guys to

death, but if you guys want to look it up, um basically the the state continues to to appeal it as opposed they've been ruled against that they haven't appropriately funded schools. They've been funding below the minimum. Um but they continue to appeal it instead of fixing that. And so we're we're scraping for funding. And I don't know how many people know, but we don't currently have any bond or override money that comes in. And part of the uh premise of that is that the state legislature has counted on us to pass bonds and overrides to get to the minimum funding. So, and and the state was found guilty, but like I said, instead of um fixing that and getting us that funding, they they're continuing to wrap it up in appeals court. So, we're not asking for a lot, but we just want to be functional. Um and so, I want to point out some of the things. These are cooling towers. This is what feeds our air conditioning unit. You don't need to be an expert in cooling towers to know that these cooling towers are past their life. And I'll tell you, these are about 30 years old where the expected life is 15 years old. The the people who came out and did our uh facilities assessment said if you punched it hard enough, you'd go through the wall. They're they're frail and brittle, right? Um, in addition, when we're talking about infrastructure, if you look at the piping, the pipes are corroded that feed from the cooling towers to the system. So, what happens is Mr. Bosley, our superhero, and his crew, they're running around and they're fixing our air conditioning systems. But what happens when water runs through the corroded pipe? Well, the corrosion flakes off the pipe and comes back into our air conditioning systems and they break. Our air conditioning systems are also 30 years old. and and they're HVAC units, so they're what what pumps heat in the winter and um air conditioning in the summer. So, it's the same unit. So, it's not separate units. So, they're basically being used every day for 30 years. And so, once again, kudos to Mr. Bosley and his team and all their predecessors for keeping these things running. But, there's certain things like corrosion on the inside of pipes that you can't maintain without just replacing.

Bathrooms and lockers, as you can tell, they're getting worn out. They're not in ADA compliance. I have some jokes I say about the showers because back in the day we were expected to shower like this and now it's nobody wants to shower in these type of showers because when you're standing 3 ft away from somebody showering, it's something that's not kids don't do anymore where we were forced into the showers and corral now it's something that's awkward and kids don't do. So, you know, there's plans for partitions and and to bring it up to ADA compliance as well for that. Um, and I don't know how many of you guys have been at the elementary school, if you can see it, but there's a lot of heaving in the hallways. And um, it was something that when the school was built immediately, the the foundation wasn't done right. And so, this is a newer building. So, people, I think, question some of the things that have been done more recently and newer, but they weren't done necessarily correctly, and we can't go back on the contractor. And so, you can see that there's um, heaving all throughout the hallways. Well, the picture on the right is some doors aren't able. That's as far as that door will open with the heaving in the hallway. So, um you know, and these things to go in and get a core sample and to fix these. So, we're investing into our buildings and our community. So, our buildings aren't you know, cuz if you don't take care of these things, if you don't take care of your foundation, the whole building's going to be bad soon. and it's too new of a building and and the community has invested too much money and and time and effort into this building to let it continue to deteriorate like that. Um and so some of our maintenance and operations, as you guys know, we have our capital funds that take care of the buildings. Um the district was allowed esser funds when um when COVID was happening and all of those esser funds are gone now and so a lot of things have hit an edge. In addition, um we're in a we're in a district where the enrollment has been declining. First and foremost, we feel like we just need to provide an excellent education for all of our kids. And so, we have some examples of excellent education happening for our

for our students. But what we want to do is we want to expand that and make sure all of our kids that come through our door are getting service have access to that amazing excellent education. So, as we we're at the edge of a maintenance and operations cliff where if we don't um if we don't pass an override, we're going to have to look at making some cuts. And so, when we talk look at making some cuts, we have to make a decision. So, which one of these things will we have to cut if we are unable? So, we're going to be able to be good for next year, but beyond next year, we're going to have to consider cuts. Um one of the things, the fourth thing on the list, full day kindergarten. I don't know how many people aware the state does not fund full day kindergarten. They only pay us for half of the day of kindergarten, but they have very high academic standards. Kids are expected to read by the time they leave kindergarten. It's not like when I went to kindergarten where we colored and played and just, you know, had fun. Like kids are expected to read now when they leave kindergarten because of the competitive world we're in. But the state doesn't fund us to do that. They only fund us for half day kindergarten. So we have to pick up the bill for full day kindergarten. So, if we if we're if we have to make budget cuts, that's one of the things on the table since we're not funded and and I could talk to you about the research because we have we're we're a title one school now. We have se almost 70% of our kids on free and reduced lunch. So, we have a lot of students in poverty that are coming through our doors. The research shows that full day kindergarten is almost a necessity for our our kids to be successful because a lot of the achievement gap is how the kids come to us and what we do in their early childhood. And so that's a very important program in my book. But if you look at all of these things, class sizes, we don't want to overload classes and have bigger class sizes. Health insurance, I'm sure you guys are well, but health insurance prices are skyrocketing. And as a district, we're trying to keep up with that, but there's a point we won't be able to keep up with the skyrocketing health. The past two years, we've had a 16% and 13% increase

in benefits. So it's not like little increases. They're jumping. Inflation for several years has been jumping. And so we're trying to keep up with salaries. We don't want our teachers know that we're never going to be multi-millionaires, billionaires. Um, but, you know, just it would be nice to try to keep them up with inflation and then if we're talking about cuts, but it's not just teachers, it's our bus drivers, it's our custodial staff. Um, you know, and it's struggling. The cost of living in our community is not easy for for people on an hourly wage. And so, once again, we just want to keep them up with the cost of inflation. Special area honors and AP classes. The reason that we'd have to talk about those is because those are the classes with the lowest numbers right now. So, if we have to combine classes or if we have to cut classes and if we're talking about providing a top-notch education in the Pinetop Lakeside area in the Blige school district, we have doctors who come to our school because of our high level education that we provide. They bring their kids to our schools because of our high level education that we provide at Blige. So, what we want to do is we want to continue that because we know as I'm aging, I know at some point in time I need access to highquality medical professionals. Like the more the older I get, the more I'm finding out that I need to go stuff's breaking down and I need to go to the doctor. I want to provide an education so the top doctors in Arizona, we live in a beautiful town, right? I want to attract people because I want the beauty to be more than skinde. I want us to have substance and and I feel like as a school district goes, the town goes and I want to have the most amazing school district. We have amazing things happening, but we just want to be able to continue that. And those are things that I've heard from our doctors and our professionals that they really appreciate the high level AP education and honors education we provide. Right now, we have sports fees. Okay. Our our athletic department is bringing back camps this summer. I'm excited about that. So, we're going to try to eliminate those sports fees for kids. And so, we want to move forward and and

and make it more accessible to all of our kids by our work, by us rolling up our sleeves. And so, we want to meet the town in the middle. We don't want the town to have to pay for that. We want to self-und that. We want to say we're doing things to meet everybody in the middle. We just we want to take care of as much as we can, but there's some things we just can't hold bake sales and sports camps to cover all of these things. There's certain things that are beyond that reach. Also, senior center transition, we want to work with the senior center. They're eligible for a grant if we can pass that over to them. And you know, I've talked with Larry and I've talked with the folks at the community center. I'm sorry, we're not calling it senior center, right? Because of the youngsters.

We're one and the same. Absolutely. I got to tell you, I know this is being recorded, but I hope my dad doesn't see it cuz my dad makes liver and onions. I I had to disclose to Larry that going there last Thursday and getting the liver and onions is better than dad makes. But I'm hoping my dad doesn't stream this tonight to see that. And you know what? And and when I walk into my house, you know, there sensations that hit you. And when my dad's making liver, I I can smell it and you can feel it. And and it was I I didn't have any. It's kind of like a pungent nostalgic thing to eat liver and onions. I didn't have that. It was actually really good. And I was kind of expecting that pungent like weird like super livery taste and it was it was really good and I was pleasantly surprised. So thank you Larry. But what we talked about is right now they if we want to transfer over that land um it's all part of the same campus. It's one piece. It's not already separated. So to take the fees to to have, you know, the land assessed and separated and have all that. And what Larry and I talked about is is if we're in a budget crunch, I can't take money away from our our kids and our teachers at this point in time to look at doing that, but we want to be good neighbors and we want to be good partners and we see that they want to grow and we want to grow, too. So, these are things that we can't afford right now, but if we have a little bit of relief that we can work with the senior center and they and you know what, last night they even talked about having people come in and help and do it in like a town way where we're helping each other. And so, I'm excited about that and to build these relationships um with good people and um to continue to grow our school district and hopefully be a point of pride throughout the state of Arizona like some of the things that are already happening. Um, so the summary of the state of the district. We didn't have any wild cheering, but we didn't hear any booing. So, I'll just I'll just uh I'll just wind it up here. Um, a lot of amazing things happening. And I want you guys to come in and be part of us

because like I said, we're one and the same. As a school district goes, the town will go. If our school district fades away, I'm I will be scared for the town as well if we if we're not moving forward and having an amazing school. I have a lot of work to do. I'm not putting that on anybody else because I know it's me. The buck stops with me. I'm the one who needs to take care of it. But, you know, I can't do it myself. So, I'm going to count on a lot of people to help me out and to have my back. But, I think it's important to enough people. And I've had great people who want to help me out. Whether it's Sada back there, whether it's Bridget on our board, whether it's you guys, you guys have been so great to me since I've come here. I appreciate that. This is a great town with great people, and I want to see things continue to move forward. and we have excellence in teaching and learning happening and we want to continue that. Um and just we want we're looking for support and we're looking to support each other us support the town and town support us and you know what looking for the best Blige ever. My goal is at one point in time before I leave before I retire I don't ever want I want to get to the point where we don't talk about how good Blige was. We talk about how good Blueridge is and that's the end of the conversation. So that's that for me. I'm happy to answer any questions. I'm sorry my football coach comes out a little bit. I get a little excited and passionate about things, but uh but yeah, I'd be happy to answer any questions. And I do want to introduce you guys. I'm sure you guys know. We have Cynthia Roth Rothless Burgger. She's our special education director. Um Mary Ford who is our HR and administrative executive. And then we have Courtney Hoffmire who's our business manager. And I got to give kudos cuz these ladies I was this was one of my jokes that I tried at the senior center last night but it fell flat. I think Courtney Hoffmire's really good at making copper wire cuz she's been stretching out those pennies as far as we can see. So yeah, it fell flat here tonight, too. But I I'll keep trying. I'll keep I try to be funny because you know when you teach, you got

to keep the kids on their toes and give them jokes and they they've respond about the same as well. But I'm open for any questions. Anybody have questions for Jonathan tonight? So, I have one question. Um, you you referenced a hundred students that you've declined the numbers this year. Yes. Um, I know that there's a lot of factors involved in that. We all know what all those factors are. What's Blige doing to get some of those kids back?

That's great. That's a great question. So, we are taking a multi-tered approach. And I think first things first is um we need to have an excellent education. We need people to want to come to Blige because they know and a lot of that's marketing because we really do have good things happening at Blige. So, we need to get out there and promote ourselves and let people see what we do. You know, things like this cuz I don't know how what you guys knew, but that's a multi-ter approach. Another thing that we're considering and it's something we've talked about in superintendent advisory. We uh Blige for a while has had closed enrollment and so about 80% of our kids I know there's a lot of talk about where people might be going but our withdrawal codes W1 which means they're going to a different school. When we have open enrollment closed, we don't accept kids coming from other schools who want a chance at a different education. And we know there's good teachers all across. So, we're not trying to disparrage anybody or compare ourselves to anybody, but sometimes we know it's about fit where, you know, you might get with a teacher and and they'd work well for you, but maybe I don't respond well to the teacher. And we live close enough in proximity to other districts. Same things with athletics. So, we had a few kids transfer out for athletics um to go because they would be a backup on one of our teams and they wanted to go back up on other teams. We had kids who wanted to come into our district because of our theater production and things like that. And so, that's one of the things we're considering. We want to provide an excellent education, but then we want to consider cautiously consider open enrollment where we're not going to overload our classes. we're we're going to take in where it's a one for one where if we have a student leave and we have a seat open, we can consider someone from outside the district. And so these are all things that we're considering at this point in time and looking at how can we recapture students and coming coming back to the idea of just having the best education around

and um so that people don't want to go anywhere and people will fight to stay there. So do our neighboring districts currently have open enrollment? I believe most of them and I don't remember district by district some of them are a little bit more picky about their open enrollment and some of them it's just open and so um so yeah and I can tell you I you know we're in a public meeting here but you know the districts accepted some of our kids and when you talk about athletics there's certain waiver processes that they have to go through to be eligible at other schools and and so we know specifically at certain schools that our kids have transferred to so they could start and play on other teams and um yeah. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions?

I have a question for um well comment too. Thank you. It's good to hear all this stuff. Um yeah. Um tuition tax credit, how how big of a dent does that make in the budget? I mean like if is it are people are people doing it? Do we have a a group that's educating people so that they can go out and get more tuition tax credit? Is it worth it to do that?

It's so tax credit is great. It's a it's a great help for our district. And once again, that's something Courtney, she really looked at and and that's probably something we don't promote enough is our tax credits. And now that we're getting to the end of tax season, it's something we probably should have promoted more. But those are funds that we were able to stretch and use. And those are extracurricular funds, the tax credit. So you can't put them towards teacher salaries per se or um you know, inclassroom things. their their uh extra credit or extracurricular their field trips their um extracurricular type components and some of that there's a little bit of a gray area and like I said Courtney found all the little places we can use that and we had gotten a fair amount of tax credit money and that is something that has helped us out greatly. So we anybody who wants anybody who files taxes who pays taxes in the state of Arizona, we know some accountants, right? If you do a tax credit to Blige School, it's a dollar for-doll tax credit up to 200 or 400. Correct. I don't want to I'm not a tax attorney, so I I won't I will say consult your tax attorney, but I believe if you're single, filing taxes up to 200. If you're married, um filing jointly up to 400. And we'd love for you to put it for Blueridge. And any area that you choose, we'll we'll use it.

Great. Thank you. And you have um that available online, I believe, right? Yep. And we have um paper versions as well. Some people aren't as adept online. Come on into our office and Miss Ford will get you the tax credit brochure and take a good oldfashioned check. And that is something you can promote year round because while people are trying to get their taxes done for last year, they have till April 15th. You can already do your 2026 tax credit donations. So I would encourage you to point that out to people.

Correct. And that's something you're right. And that's something I used to beat the drum as a school principal and I used every dime of that money to help our students and I could talk about how I've used it in the past and and that's something that I need to get I need to get better at in in my first year here that I need to it's a continued thing of growth for me to get get after that because if it's a another revenue source that helps our kids absolutely. If I only knew some accountants that could you know maybe leave some brochures with them or something. I do my best. I do my best. Anyway, any other questions or comments?

Okay. Well, thank you very much for coming. We look forward to hearing more news about the plans and the progress. And I know I saw Hello Dolly and it was incredible. Um Rain used to be on our mayor's youth advisory commission and she was a lovely young lady and so it's it's really encouraging to see all these folks and Adeline as well. Absolutely.

Um so it's great to see where they're going and what they're doing. I'll do one last plug before I go and I'm sorry I'll give you the last word but uh I would be remiss on April 23rd we are having um an open meeting where it's going to be a study session so it'll be open we won't be making any decisions but it'll be all the information on our bond and override we'll be having an open session at the um Blard's boardroom and we would welcome all the community because one of the things we want to do is be transparent and we want to say here are our needs here's here's what we would like to do if we are able to pass the bond and then the community can see we can do it so that we can restore any trust that people feel like might not be there so we can say what we're going to do and follow up and take care of it. So thank you. I'm sorry any

No, I don't have anything else but thank you very much for coming and bringing your team and support. We appreciate that. We look for great things from Blige. Anyway, um that concludes our business tonight. I just want to wish everybody a very happy Easter with your families or wherever it is you're going to be. And this meeting is adjourned. Thank you.