Superintendent's Message:
Dear Kyrene
Staff Members,
As the school
year comes to a close, let me take the opportunity to thank you for
another very successful year. During the Employee Recognition Ceremony
last week, I made the comment that it is the phenomenal staff that makes
Kyrene the great place it is to send children to school. My feelings
about this are deeply felt and very sincere. I have never worked with
such wonderful people and I have been doing this for over 30 years in a
number of places! Your dedication, enthusiasm and commitment are
amazing and greatly appreciated by the entire community.
We are close to
the end of the first decade of the 21st century and there are
so many things to look forward to,
as well any number of great challenges that must be faced. Nationally,
there appears to be a desire to become more unified,
as so many of the complex and daunting problems can only be tackled by
pulling together and working toward policies and resulting actions for
the common good. Great wisdom, skillful leadership and cutting edge
research are critical during these turbulent times.
Thankfully,
Kyrene has a stable financial foundation because of thoughtful planning,
community support and the commitment of past and present Governing
Boards and district leaders to important values we hold as an
educational community. Students come first and always need to be the
top priority in everything we do. This is well understood by all of us
who are members of the Kyrene community. While a stable financial
foundation is reassuring, the scarce
amount of dollars the state allocates for public education continues to
inhibit us from doing everything we would like to do for our kids and
staff. Our voices need to be heard as we move into the extremely
important election next November!
Once again, let
me tell you how proud I am to serve as Superintendent of the Kyrene
School District. There is no where I’d rather be and nothing else I
would want to do at this time in my life, and I greatly look forward to
my continued work with all of you. Have a wonderful summer!
David
District News
ACA Accruals
On May 13
the Kyrene Governing Board approved the standardization of ACA accruals
across all employee groups, effective July 1, 2008. The reason for this
change was due to the inequities that were observed when we went to a
daily accrual rate in Visions. ACA was previously based on the number
of months an employee worked which, in part, created inequities. There
were also changes that were made to contract lengths that evolved over
time. Since ACA accruals were based on contract length, the daily
accrual rate was different for nearly every employee group.
The
Governing Board approved a cost-neutral solution that provides every
eligible employee the same rate of ACA daily accrual. For many
employees, there will be no change. For example, teachers,
administrators, social workers and elementary secretaries will see no
impact. Other employees will see either an increase or a decrease in
their ACA accruals that will range from a fraction of an hour up to
approximately 8 hours annualized over the course of the entire contract
year.
At the
very extremes, some employees, such as 12 month support staff, will see
an impact of an annualized one day gain (approximately 8 hours), while
another employee group (bus drivers), will see a decrease of
approximately 8 hours, annualized over the contract year. This issue,
and the impact that it has across all employee groups, was discussed at
some length during our meet and confer sessions this year, as well as in
the Kyrene Administrative Council, and employee input was solicited and
considered.
Please
feel free to contact Human Resource Services if you have any questions
about this change.
Hatha Yoga offered at the District Office this summer!
Enroll now for summer yoga. The class will run from June 3-June 24 from
1:00 -2:00pm. The fee will be $28 for four weeks of yoga. Register at
www.kyrene.org/eservices.
The
bar code is 10678
Trip Reduction Program winners:
February 2008: Grace Cota of Milenio and Ron Polanco of Ninos
March 2008: Julie Ann Weissberg of Waggoner and Diane Cornell of Paloma.
April 2008: Julie
Ann Weissberg of Waggoner and Mark Collins of Sureno.
April 2008: High
Advisory drawing- Ron Polanco of Ninos.
Kudos to our Performing Arts Teachers!!
A great big thank
you to all of the performing arts teachers for all of their planning and
efforts to bring high quality performances to the Kyrene community during
the 07-08 school year.
School News:
Art Honors
The Arizona Alliance for the Arts is honoring two schools in Kyrene next
week. Each school will be presented with a certificate of achievement in
the area of fine arts. They are receiving these honors because
we were in the top four Phoenix schools being considered for the Mayor’s
Award of Excellence in Arts Education.
Akimel-A-al Middle School
will be recognized on Monday, May 19th
at 12:15. and
then on Wed. May 21st
Estrella Elementary will be
honored with a
presentation on our school video announcements at 7:45 a.m.
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