MESA, AZ — As the rain fell Tuesday morning outside of Irving Elementary School, casting a gloomy sky, it felt anything but gloomy inside the classrooms.
Elementary-aged kids were dressed up as 100-year-olds, wearing wigs with drawn-on wrinkles. Students did several activities that involved the number 100 as Mesa Public Schools hit its 100th day of school.
That means a little more than half the school year is over, and Superintendent Dr. Andi Fourlis says they’ve reached some achievements in that time already.
“We have 27 ‘A’ rated schools, 25 ‘B’ rated schools,” she said. That’s out of the 81 schools in the district and 12 of those schools moved up to ‘A’s this year.
Fourlis says their students are testing around the state average. But they’re continuing to strive to do better. That is one of their goals for this school year as well as improving graduation rates by 2% to 83% of kids graduating.
“We also wanted to make sure that our kids who are proficient are also growing to becoming highly proficient so enriching their learning and moving them at a quicker pace,” she said.
Fourlis has been the superintendent for the district since 2021 and has been a public educator for around three decades now. One thing she’s seen change this year compared to years past is the increasing use of artificial intelligence. While the district embraces it, finding ways to help kids learn with AI, they also have guardrails in place to know when it is and isn’t appropriate to use it.
“When we think about the productivity and the efficiencies that artificial intelligence can bring to our employees, that's something that we're focusing on is how can artificial intelligence increase the efficiency and reduce some of the redundancies so that we have more time to spend being creative and attending to the strengths and needs of all of our students,” she said.
The 100th day of school is also an important one for public school districts. That’s the day they do a head count, take a look at enrollment, and use that number to determine a school district’s funding.
Mesa Public Schools’ enrollment has been declining for the last few years. Currently, for K-12, they have more than 55,200 students. In 2019, the district had about 61,500 students.
The district estimates enrollment will continue to decline next school year, so, they are budgeting for that.
Fourlis attributes the decline to a few factors, and one is that Mesa is ‘landlocked,’ while other districts in the Far East or West Valley are growing exponentially with the need to build more schools.
“These landlocked school districts throughout the county are seeing declining enrollment just be based on an aging population and less and less families having large numbers of children,” Fourlis said.
Mesa is also not unique to the declining enrollment. The Paradise Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) is in the middle of getting feedback from families, looking to possibly close down four schools. The PVUSD superintendent says it’s also because of different factors including an aging population, lack of affordable housing in the area, and that some families are using the universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.
The continuing decline is a worry for Fourlis. She said they will start having conversations with their governing board next month to talk about their master facility planning.
“The challenge before us is how do we size right, the square footage that we have to the numbers of students that we had, and we believe that we have strategies that would put school closure at the very last priority,” Fourlis said.
As the district looks toward the future, Fourlis said she’s grateful to the community for voting to approve the budget override, which a majority of that money goes to staff salary. However, the community very slightly voted against the bond in November. Fourlis said they will have to put a pause on some projects they hoped to do including modernizing and upgrading older schools.
“We will go out for another bond but the million-dollar question is when,” she said, adding that they’ll be discussing it with the governing board along with the master facility plan. “Then, that will help us to lead to when is the just right time to place the bonds on the ballot.”
As for the rest of the school year, Fourlis said there’s still work to be done. They plan on implementing what’s called a ‘Graduation Plus’ model, hoping to equip kids with more knowledge and experience beyond a diploma. That means that more kids would have college credits or work-based learning experiences.
“That Graduation Plus model begins in preschool. And it builds a curricular pathway for students. So, when they graduate, they are ready for college, career or community, whichever they choose to pursue,” Fourlis said.
