The Higley Unified School District Governing Board approved its latest batch of staff expense vouchers Oct. 11 over the objection of a board member to one item and questions about some others.
Board Member Anna Van Hoek questioned four different vouchers among the dozens listed as up for approval by the board. Ultimately, the board approved the vouchers on a 4-1 vote with Van Hoek dissenting.
Governing boards routinely pass expense vouchers together as part of their consent agendas, where a number of routine items are passed together without discussion. However, since joining the board in January, Van Hoek frequently has scrutinized the vouchers and had the item pulled from the consent agenda for separate discussion and vote.
District officials answered her questions about the vouchers, but when she voted, Van Hoek said she continued to be concerned about a voucher for PebbleGo, a supplemental learning tool for elementary-school educators to use that comes from educational content provider Capstone.
Van Hoek said she was worried about the potential exposure of students to inappropriate content, including sexual education, which is against state laws
However, Heidi Lindsay, the HUSD elementary education executive director, clarified that the app is used in a limited, teacher-directed manner, and parents are informed about the content their children will be accessing.
“It's not students having free reign to explore (what is) used with elementary students for research purposes,” Lindsay said. “And we've done a lot of training with our staff around our Higley professional practices for responsible use of instructional resources, which basically is a checklist to ensure that resources that we're using are aligned to standards and have a legitimate educational purpose — and that we're being responsible with how we're using our resources.”
Lindsay added that parents have the option to opt out of any lesson they find inappropriate for their child.
Van Hoek continued to press whether students could dig around the app and find content that parents might object to, but Lindsay said the teacher controls the license and students do not have individual accounts.
PebbleGo’s website shows it has assistance for early readers with read-aloud audio and text appropriate for K-3 students. It has learning modules for grades 3-5 students on the states, science, indigenous people’s history, social studies, historical biographies and health. It also has a Spanish app for dual-language development and content-area literacy.
The voucher to Capstone was for $1,487.14.
The Scottsdale Unified School District faced objections to PebbleGo earlier this year like those voiced by Van Hoek. Those were organized by a group calling itself Scottsdale Unites for Educational Integrity.
Van Hoek also had questions about vouchers for three other items:
Learning A to Z’s Raz-Plus, which Van Hoek said has some social-emotional content, but which Lindsay said teachers use for intervention tools with struggling readers;
GoGuardian, which Higley Virtual Academy once used to monitor what students are doing on their devices. Interim Superintendent Sherry Richards said the subscription auto-renewed but has since been canceled and the district refunded its money;
Kaplan Discipline e-DECA, which Lindsay explained is an assessment tool used in the district’s preschools and done with parents and teachers. Parents have the option to opt out.
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on X. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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