The Fountain Hills Unified School District Governing Board held an open meeting on Feb. 27 to discuss an upcoming high school field trip to Pairs and the issuance of new contracts for FHUSD staff.

The meeting began with the usual informational reports from Superintendent Dr. Robert Allen concerning happenings in the district, such as the high school science fair and the coalition essay contest, as well as a report on district enrollment numbers.

The board also heard a presentation from McDowell Mountain Elementary School Principal Valerie Dehombreux.

Principal Dehombreux walked the board through the report she authored and submitted to the Arizona Education Foundation to have MMES earn the organization’s A+ School of Excellence rating.

The report, which Dehombreux began working on in Oct. 2017, is a 40-page, 15,608-word behemoth that covers all the ins and outs of MMES.

The board congratulated Principal Dehombreux for earning a site visit from the foundation, the next step in receiving the A+ rating, and recognized the hard work she and others put into the report.

Next, the board approved the meeting’s consent agenda and moved into the information and discussion portion of the meeting to discuss a Fountain Hills High School field trip to Paris.

The board asked to revisit the already approved trip with FHHS teacher Karla Primosch to discuss safety concerns in regards to recent protests in the country.

Jill Reed told Primosch that, as the Governing Board President, she doesn’t feel comfortable with sending FHHS students to a country that has experienced social turmoil in the past few months and that the board did have the right to recall their approval of the trip if they so choose.

Primosch reassured the board that the vendor the school is using, EF Educational Tours, monitors the areas that students are going to visit and will redirect them if the area becomes unsafe.

“For instance,” Primosch said. “During one of our trips to Italy we planning on visiting Rome, but something happened there and EF just had us redirected to another place where there was plenty for us to do.”

Primosch also told the board that the group going on the trip recently met and discussed changing the destination of the trip, but voted against it.

The field trip is still schedule but the board and Primosch will continue to monitor the situation abroad.

Next, the board discussed the issuance of new contracts for FHUSD staff for the 2019-20 school year.

Allen presented the board contracts that would see a 5 percent raise for returning teachers, an average of 4 percent raise for classified staff and a 3 percent raise for administrators.

The board will vote to approve the issuances of the contracts at its March 20 meeting.

The meeting ended with the board voting to approve two field trips, the trip to sister city Zamosc, Poland, on May 27 and the FHHS music department trip to Anaheim on April 3.

Due to spring break the next Governing Board meeting will be on Wednesday, March 20.