Last week, The Times recapped some of the biggest events of the school year in Fountain Hills. This week, The Times will focus on major events from over the summer and into the fall semester.

Private school

This summer, former Fountain Hills Charter School teacher Lisa Ristuccia founded The Inspiration Academy (TIA) for children who were displaced when FHCS closed. TIA is open for K-12 students, and Ristuccia leads them in what she calls “an engaging education option.”

TIA utilizes “Community Modules,” something Ristuccia and her husband came up with while planning for the school. In these modules, Ristuccia gets professionals in certain fields around Fountain Hills to share their knowledge and lead the students in projects around town.

Among the many community modules, students did an entrepreneurship module with the help of the Fountain Hills Chamber of Commerce, and they teamed up with staff at The River of Time Museum and Exploration Center to do living history projects.

Ristuccia said she wanted to recreate the hands-on and interactive approach she and her students enjoyed at FHCS. She and her staff teach in multi-age classrooms.

Students rotate between three locations in town to utilize their facilities for different activities. They attend class at the Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and students attend the Community Center and Library and the River of Time Museum on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Ristuccia also founded a new 4-H Club in Fountain Hills this year and has several connections with STEM and wildlife groups around the state. She took the 4-H Club to Flagstaff for an educational field trip earlier this year, and they do several science-based lessons at regularly scheduled meetings throughout the year.

School board

The Fountain Hills Unified School Board had three seats up for election this past November, and three new board members were elected. Board members elect Lillian Acker, Madicyn Reid and Libby Settle will join sitting Board members Jill Reed and Dana Saar after swearing in at the first Board meeting of the new year on Wednesday, Jan. 11.

Each candidate carries out a four-year term in an unpaid position to serve the Fountain Hills community. Nadya Jenkins and Dr. Wendy Barnard decided not to run for reelection, but the late Judith Rutkowski did and passed away before election day.

There was over an 81% turnout of Fountain Hills voters and 14,980 ballots cast in the November General Election for school Board members. Settle led convincingly with 28% of the vote (6,293 ballots cast), while Reid, Acker and Tara Lamar were within a few percentage points of each other.

Reid received 21% of the vote (4,719), Acker got 20% (4,425), and Lamar was just short. She received 19% (4,200), and fellow challenger Jenny Amstutz-Guerrette got 13% of the vote (2,898).

Jenkins served as Board president in 2022 and Rutkowski served as vice president of the Board. After Rutkowski’s passing, Reed was named interim vice president, and one of the first orders of business for the new year will be office elections for 2023.

Reid and Settle are both mothers of school-aged children in town, and Settle has two years of teaching elementary school experience. Acker is a retired educator with over 25 years’ experience teaching, and she also earned administrative certificates while teaching in Ohio and Illinois.

Bond and override

The Fountain Hills Unified School District Governing Board put two items up for election this past November, and both failed to pass. The final numbers showed 57% of voters were against approval of a $20 million bond, and 55% were against the approval of a district additional assistance (DAA) Override that would have brought in no more than $750,000.

DDA Overrides raise funds up to 10% of the district’s budget, and those funds can be spent on school buses, technology, athletics and facility repairs and renovations. FHUSD was the only school district in the state to reject a DAA override this year. Six other districts around the state passed a DAA override, and FHUSD was one of six districts to reject a bond proposal. There was still a 60% pass rate of school district bonds across the state this year, according to azednews.com.

FHUSD has passed one measure out of four proposals in the last two years. Both failed this year, and last year there was a split ticket between a DAA override and a Maintenance and Operations (M&O) Override. In 2021, the M&O Override passed with 51% of the vote, but only 48% of voters were in support of the DAA Override then.

Turnout nearly doubled between the 2021 and 2022 elections. In 2021, 8,087 local voters participated for a turnout rate of 41.53%. This year, 14,980 local residents voted, for a turnout of 81.31%.

Rutkowski passes

Judith Rutkowski was completing her second term on the FHUSD Governing Board and was running for a third term before she passed away suddenly on Thursday, Sept. 29. She and her husband, Dr. Richard Rutkowski, married in 1987 and moved to Fountain Hills in 2001.

Her two children, Maggie and Adam, attended FHUSD schools and Rutkowski volunteered her time in the health office and in several classrooms at Fountain Hills. Rutkowski was a registered nurse, and she spent much of her life involved in pediatrics.

Rutkowski regularly did “Tar Wars” with her husband. Tar Wars is a tobacco and drug use prevention program, and Rutkowski also volunteered annually to run the Bingo table at the Falcon Fiesta graduation celebration.

Rutkowski was a dedicated Board member who often volunteered for Arizona School Board Association conferences and always came prepared to meetings. She was involved in other activities as well, such as singing in the choir and teaching religious education to children at St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in Scottsdale.

“I appreciated Judy's open heart. She had such warmth and a genuine compassion for all,” FHUSD Board President Nadya Jenkins said. “Judy displayed her care and love through high expectations for our district, its students and staff. She equally had high expectations for the Board and its responsibilities to all its stakeholders as well as the Board members to each other. She took pride in the work the Board did to provide academic programs, increase staff pay, and offer safe learning environments.”

The remaining Board members missed Rutkowski’s joyful presence in each meeting after her passing. They found ways to honor her memory, and the Board provided Dr. Rutkowski with a plaque and commemorative coin at what would have been Rutkowski's final Board meeting of her second term.

Field woes

The field at Fountain Hills High School will reach the end of its safe usability following the end of the current soccer season. The current field was estimated to have a 10-year life span when it was installed in 2014, but it has deteriorated faster than expected.

This past summer, two things happened to the field. There was a formal inspection that said the field would not be safe to play on without maintenance, and former head football coach Jimmy Curtis and other members of the community did some patch work maintenance to make the field playable for this year.

After the inspection into the field, Dr. Cain Jagodzinski was hired as Superintendent, and Sean Moran was hired as the new head football coach. Both had lots of new responsibilities off the field, and the condition of the field seemed to fly under the radar until the beginning of the soccer season.

Back in 2014, the FHUSD Governing Board approved a $1.4 million landscaping initiative that included projects on all district sites, including the artificial turf field at Fountain Hills High School. The cost of a replacement will not be as steep as $1.2 million.

In 2014, Fountain Hills High School’s natural grass field was flattened and dug out to make room for the artificial turf. The subbase under the turf is likely still in good shape, because subbases are typically made of stone, and only the artificial turf will need to be replaced.

The Fountain Hills Athletic Booster Club will be championing fundraising campaigns for a new field. There are only two options if the field is not replaced or repaired to the point where it can be used. High school field sports, like football, marching band, soccer and track and field, will have to be played on the middle school’s grass field, or all competitions will have to be away in upcoming seasons.