School Board Workshop: February 7, 2022

001good afternoon it is monday february 7th 2022. the time is 101 and this is a school board workshop today on the agenda we have a human resource presentation for 90 minutes with mr dodeck and hr team the agenda review of the february 8th 2022 regular agenda for 60 minutes and are prior to prioritizing the workshop topics i know ms jaminelli is not here with us today she is in tallahassee and miss patricka is five minutes out and we are here to start the meeting so thank you mr dodeck if you will please introduce sure who's with you good afternoon aboard dr savage miss bruno shelly dr halstead is with me dr shelly halstead she is a coordinator in human resources and works directly for me she is kind of our guru of data and surveys

002and has been for a number of years so we're here today to present information to the board regarding where we have been where we are and where we're going with regard to the status of retention recruiting and our general employment situation we also were going to be joined by miss rivera unfortunately she's out sick today so we will cover her area of recruiting without her unfortunately the information in our presentation is fairly comprehensive so it's up to the board whether or not you want to ask questions as we go or leave questions to the end i have no preference necessarily however the presentation does flow so but we can certainly go through the data and then you could ask questions about it if you choose but the data does have a flow to it so

003you all tell me how you want to ask questions well why don't you go ahead and start the presentation and then if there is a need for a question then we will go ahead and proceed with that if not we'll wait till the end and then collect them all right perfect so the first slide is what we're talking about today which has because of social media and the way things work in america or around the world when something big is happening we give it a name and the name for what is happening around us is the great resignation this has also been known as the big quit and dr spiro just leaned over and told me he heard today a phrase called the great upgrade people are upgrading their professional lives so depending on how

004we take this but we do have a name for this and this is the great resignation and it has obviously impacted the school district so the first slide is data from october 2021 from education week and this slide shows that of course we are not alone nationwide this was a survey where individuals on the left talked about or were pulled as to staffing shortages at their school or district this school year and this is our current school year 2122 and at that time in october it was very severe or severe to up to 40 of the respondents said they were having staffing shortages at their location if you look on the right which i find intriguing the top three were substitute teachers bus drivers and paraprofessionals and that is no different in our school district

005that is our statistics essentially mirror that and if you see fourth at 48 percent were full-time teachers where they have struggled to hire a sufficient number of those individuals next is a follow-up survey that was done a month later in november of where the shortages significantly worsened and it was up to 52 percent versus the beginning of the school year which we're talking august and september so we know one thing about november omicron had come into our lives and we have experienced a similar trend here i arrived in september in this role and the word omicron was just beginning to be stated and obviously we saw a significant spike in october november and december here in our district and around the country relative to vacancies go ahead so as mr dodig presented we have some

006national data national trends to look at but in terms of lee county we want to see what the size of our problem is like how is it impacting us directly and so we have a few things that we're looking at here their categories categorized in two ways we have vacancies that are longer term vacancies where people have terminated and then as you'll see we have these short-term vacancies where people are out on leave for between one and forty-five days but both of those are combining to impact the school's ability and the district-level ability to operate efficiently and safely the termination history is what we're looking at now so if you recall back in fy 20 we had fairly low turnover rates for us we had 20 percent for instructional staff and 23 percent for non-instructional

007and we did particularly for teachers see that spike at the end of fy21 went up to 29 and we knew that was going to happen because a lot of people stayed in that environment of fy 20 where no one was sure what was going to happen and then as we got more clarity in that more people turned over so what this is showing is the most recent data so we can't compare fy22 because we're still in the middle of the year but what we can do is look at the months so what you'll see is we start with july because for us that's obviously the beginning the fiscal year and we go in order down to january you'll see instructional on the left and non-instructionals on the right these are counts of terminations by month

008the green is going to be the older data fy20 the blue is fy 21 and then the orange you'll see is the fy 22 so just by looking at the bars you can see the difference between fy 22 and the previous years in almost every month and you'll see at the bottom there's a year to day count year-to-date count for instructional staff the 21 and the 22 were actually quite similar but when you look at the non-instructional that's quite a big difference for us and that's one of the things the data is telling us that we're losing non-instructional staff right now at greater rates than we've seen in the past and so that's contributing to the shortages that we have do you know i would just point out that exactly what shelly said there's been

009161 more individuals that have terminated from the non-instructional versus last year at this time so just trying to make that up we don't have 160 applicants possibly in a week so it's a very difficult chore that we're trying to deal with can can you explain so the non-instructional can you categorize who i mean sure who are they non-instructional are paraprofessionals bus drivers food service workers custodians all of the above yes all of the above other than essentially what we would typically call teachers and administrators thank you i just want to make sure that was clear yep so another way that we can look at the size of the problem is looking at our job advertisements so you'll see this is arranged in the same manner going from july to august and so on until the

010most current month of january and again instructional is on the left and non-instructionals on the right the orange is the current year the blue is last year we always expect in july and august to see a lot of job postings the continuation of them and then the difference between this year and last year is what we want to point out in terms of not only are we terminating people not we're terminating that's not the right way to say it people are terminating and we're going to look at the reasons why but people are terminating but also we're having these these postings that are at a greater rate than they've been in the past too i do want to clarify i know that there's some regular reporting around job vacancies these are a little bit different

011these are counts of advertisements by month so they're not as filtered down as some of the other things that you may have seen in the past and may not be able to be compared to some of that data so i just wanted to point that out the goal here is again how big is our problem so we looked at it with terminations then we're looking at it with job advertisements and i would just point out you can see january again the rise in in postings for 239 and non-instructional and 182 in instructional so and this is based on shelly initial posting dates correct okay so initial the initial time a job was posted so in addition to terminations like we just discussed and vacancies we're having to deal with what we're calling short-term vacancies when

012people are sick or ill or taking care of a family member and dr savage in business cabinet charged me with a portfolio item as he calls it regarding short-term vacancies and short-term vacancies have been defined by us as up to 45 days when an individual is out for up to 45 days and shelley with her ability to prepare surveys did just that with our principles we surveyed them for the impact of short-term vacancies on them and we received 55 responses to this survey and as you can see the frequency of school-based absences the importance of them or the the occurrence of them i should say is with teachers more than half the school behalf of the respondents 56 percent indicated that they have a teacher out every day and fifteen percent three to four times

013a week so upwards of over 70 percent of our schools are dealing with a teacher absence three to four or every day of the week the second highest of course was paraprofessionals and i don't have to point out to you all that those are the people that deal with our children face to face every single day paraprofessionals and teachers so we recognize that frequency by itself is not as useful as having a context for that frequency and so the next slide that we're going to talk about provides that context in terms of coverage difficulty and disruption caused so on the left is the difficulty the principals are having covering these positions and if you would look in the middle of the left left box paraprofessionals lead the way and that's a combination of a couple

014of things we believe one is paraprofessionals are a significantly low paid position in this district historically and we don't have substitutes for paraprofessionals so their ability to fill those coverage areas for paraprofessionals has proven very difficult honestly i was quite surprised that it was higher than teachers but it is so that's our most difficult area to cover the second box on the right is the disruption that it's causing when individuals were out so of course the teachers have said 60 percent five have rated it a five when a teacher is out which i don't think is any surprise to any of us when a teacher is out it's clearly the most disruptive and then second was paraprofessionals and then custodians so miss kittens yes question okay let me make sure because this one when i

015looked at it good afternoon first of all thank you this is the one that gave me a little bit of angst like so this is just answering the questions on the survey this is not saying that on a daily basis 23 of of para professionals are out and 56 of that's correct so it's just how they rate them one through five in the previous life okay so in other words you asked educators or who did you ask on this principles so principles are giving you the data that 23 of the absences are paraprofessionals am i correct no principles are rating how are you which slide are you talking about miss kittens like i'm on number seven that you were just talking about the frequency or the frequency okay so the front slide yep so with

016the frequency yes it's from the principal so we had asked the principals to rate as it says for each of the staff types how frequent that absence is so this is the information from them it's not saying that 23 of the absences are paraprofessionals what it's saying that 23 of the principals said that they have at least one paraprofessional absent every day and one teacher absent every day for the fifty percent i think at 50 65 okay so that's where it's confusing okay as to the 23 and the 56 i mean so in other words principal said that every day 56 percent of principals said so if you think about our school locations 56 percent of our school locations every day are missing at least one teacher or 23 percent of our school locations every

017day are missing at least one paraprofessional so do you see how that's confusing though looking at this anyway the frequency of this is frequency of absences yes but it's saying each principle it's just to me it's a little confusing i understand what i'm saying the question that was asked is on the left yeah no i get that but looking at this data and saying frequency it comes across like you know every day 56 percent of i mean maybe maybe no one sees it that way but me but see how you could read it that way no and i'm glad i'm glad you asked because we do obviously this there's people watching this as well right so i think it's important to clarify yes that 56 of the schools are missing at least one teacher every

018day so if we're going to leave this information out there can we add to this slide under whatever answer questions or put some additional eg 56 percent yes of our schools miss at least one teacher every day teacher every day that to me clarifies sure okay thank you thank you so we're on to really one of the big questions that i know you all and several times have asked me since i came back why why are people leaving and there's really no great answer necessarily but we do have data some people as we know have simply just dropped out of the job market we also know that others have chosen new professions but we're going to show you our most recent data that suggests that we're probably no different than the rest of the workforce

019in the area and possibly around the country for that matter ahead so we've had discussions over many years now about why our staff leave and the result of those discussions and the result of of doing analysis and working towards improvements and where we can best put our resources has been we now look at the reasons they're leaving from multiple angles understanding that not one source is best but if we combine all the sources we can kind of triangulate to what we think the biggest pain points are so the first source that we have that in some ways is the most comprehensive is from peoplesoft which is where we collect the information when someone terminates we get the personnel action form and that has a reason on it so this is representative of the reason history

020for instructional staff for terminations fy 22 is included here note it's as of february 1st so it's not a the best comparison to fy 21 but we did include it as a percentage to help you get an idea there'll be things that haven't happened yet so contract expiration happens at the end of the year that's why that's zero percent for fy22 a highlight obviously for this one i think is the increase in personal reasons which is a bit of a black box here but we'll talk more about that as we go through the other data that we have yeah the other thing i wanted to point out which i think is somewhat within our control is currently if you look under fy22 probationary release is at 5.1 percent so as you probably know probationary releases

021have to happen within a certain period of time depending on the employee group well i believe we need to focus a little bit on that because that's preventable we don't have to release someone on probation so if that means they need more training they need something else that they're not telling us or that we may not be able to provide but maybe we could we need to know that because we need all hands on deck we need everybody working and to release people at that higher percentage already this year is a concern for human resources and we need to address that through pd or other things to try to get people to stay so i do i want to clarify that when we talk about termination we're meaning terminated employment with the district correct so

022there are people that when we look at our overall turnover numbers like we do with a strategic plan that includes people that have transferred to other locations but are still employed with the district this does not have any of that transfer data these are all people that have left employment and as you can see retirement is a is another reason that's on there so it includes the retirees that have left employment so go ahead miss vaughn and then ms kittens all due respect i take not that much off from this because i've done a whole lot of reading on this subject i have a whole lot of friends here and in other states and the bottom line is not only underpaid but not respected and to say in florida in in florida the teachers are

023in some schools and i'm sorry but this is the truth in some schools the principals don't respect the expertise of their teachers and keep piling more and more and more on the teachers and if they're not particularly in love with a particular teacher then they really make life hard for that teacher and that's a fact it's not just here but that's how it operates in in the world but on top of that in florida now we have parents that are constantly wanting their eyes and cameras in the classrooms our legislators are piling it's it's it's amazing to me every time i read through the bills that are being that seem like they're going to be pushed right through and no doubt get desantis's signature so many of them just add to this disrespect and the

024research that i did you know my last my op-ed was on this very topic and that's that's what it is i'm i'm absolutely positive that's what it is and it didn't just start with coved but covet is like the icing on the cake the cherry on top like of all of these things and now we get this disrespect coming from everywhere and there's nowhere here that's addressed it can't be because it's not a black and white piece of data and i know we're data driven but frankly when i look at this i look back on my own experience and the experience reported to me by friends of mine who have been teaching for 20 30 years and all of it points to i love this profession but i just can't take it any more i'm

025done and until you know we can look at data all day long but until we address what our legislature and in texas and oklahoma and other states are doing to teachers and what our own principles do to teachers this crisis will not be solved so i'm sorry you know that i'm very passionate about this because this was my lifetime career and it just makes me ill to see what's happening in some states and as i said my friends who are still teaching or recently retired in texas they are feeling the same thing so it's what we need to do something about and we just don't speak up enough about it and i'm going to speak up as a board member and i'm going to continue speaking up and i'm done now thank you miss vaughn

026i appreciate your comments miss kittens please i find it interesting on the slide 10 the instructional staff termination that if we look at the retirement whether it be for personal or personal meaning early retirement or just personal needs let me clarify for you so personal is a reason that they can select and that for us is a little bit of a black box and i think it probably a lot of the things that we're just spoken about fall into that retirement is a different reason and it would be lower for fy22 because typically people retire at the end of the school year they're not waiting but now they're not waiting so we do see a number of that but i would expect that by the end of the year the retirement percentage would would likely

027increase to be similar at least to what it's been in the past yeah i just found that two things interesting about those two lines on the personal you know we can we attribute a lot of the things that are happening to covet but we did not have covet in 2019 and the jump in retirement from 18 to 19 is like six seven percent which is interesting and then it just continues to get higher but it's like it's saying to us well what happened between 18 and 19 that we're not seeing and the other thing is i don't know that's 7.5 in the retirement reason so in other words you're saying that reason is going down well unfortunately well not unfortunately but it's that 7.5 is representative of the year we're in and so i would

028expect by the end of the year it would be a higher percentage so right because i know a lot of people retired in december correct that could have waited until the end of the year so yeah so in other words that's looking kind of bad right now too all right i just would be interested to know in what were we doing or not doing that was causing those numbers to go up so well a contributing factor could be an aging workforce but i would have to go back and look at you know how many people did we have that were potentially ready for retirement the percentage that decided to do that so that would be certainly something we could investigate particularly around retirements and it may be there may be another cause that isn't that

029would be interesting to identify well that i would really like to know what that was because we just like i said keep talking about 20 and 21 and covid right so what else could we have done thank you so this is the same data in terms of coming from the personal action forms in peoplesoft the same timelines but it's for the non-instructional staff rather the instructional staff can i ask real quick because i know i've heard this out there in the community the deceased one okay it's very high on both of those that you just showed on 10 and 11 is it because of the aging population that we have we would not have any knowledge or has that been because of covet or i don't know and i would be remiss to even guess

030but i do see what you're saying special fiscal year 22 this year it's up to 2.2 so but it has it has risen and then went down again in fy 21 but it's up again so 2.2 and 2.7 i think it was that was i thought was pretty interesting yeah the other thing i would point out on this slide for this current year once again we you know our probationary releases are high again and accepted other employment and that's you know the exodus we've talked about where support staff because this is who this slide applies to have left for other jobs and that is within our control i mean it certainly is it's just a matter of where whether or not we have the wherewithal to try to get in that situation where we want

031to compete and if the government will certainly allow us to do that with the funds that they provide us so but it is within our control to try to prevent people from moving to other employment miss kittens the other thing that might be interesting to to share is that moves from the area is 5.9 but there what's the percentage of people moving to the area right to see is it equivalent is it less is it the same because if it's around the same then it's you know a flat line but if there's more people moving here that are potential employees that would be an interesting thing to see as well is there any other comments on that one i just think that would be kind of hard to figure out who's moving into the area

032that would be well no you're just talking about they hired teachers every day from out of florida so i'm just saying what percentage of those hirees that we have are out from out of out of state yeah we could potentially figure that out absolutely thank you so as i started out saying we try to look at multiple sources of data to help triangulate the issues and this is from the annual instructional survey that we started a few years ago and i've got the two most recent here years for comparison the this year's the fy 221 was just out the past couple of weeks so we don't have the fy 22 data yet to look at for this slide the idea was to get a sense of what the climate was in the schools during fy

03320 and during fy 21 on every year that we've done this survey one of the questions we ask is what it says here if a friend asked me i would recommend that they take a job at my current school or department it says or department because there's teachers obviously in the building that answer the survey as well and we use this question as a marker of satisfaction so for teachers that are willing to recommend a friend that's a potential marker of satisfaction with their workplace where people aren't wanting to recommend their friends we're looking at as a marker of dissatisfaction and so we use this we have a number of items on the survey around things like teachers having a voice or the support of administrators those sorts of things so we connect the satisfaction

034here the agreement here with those sorts of things to help us target initiatives that we have so having said that i wanted to show you the comparison between fy20 and fy21 because we actually saw last year an increase in the strong agreement and a shift there which to me was interesting knowing how difficult last year was i don't know what we'll see for this year as i said the survey was just out so i don't have the data for that yet yeah and i would point out that the 25 that were i would call them dissatisfied went down to 19 but that's from our perspective that's still too high so because honestly if all of those people were to leave 20 of the teachers all left that's a difficult situation to deal with and i

035believe our staff response to this was about 59 shelley is that what you told me earlier for fy20 it was 59 and fy 21 it was 75 percent went way up so that's good miss fawn and then miss kittens i'm just wondering if there's any data early years of teaching mid-career later i think that would tell a lot and you know it could be that some of the people that would have said disagree were already gone because we have lost a lot of people that have been you know i hate i hate being so negative on this but there's there's a lot going on out there that i mean if you just read social media across the country what teachers are saying not just here but we're just we can only take care of ourselves

036it's a it's it's a crisis and i don't think the data again i know we're data-driven but forgive me for being so unorthodox in taking some anecdotal information into this as well thank you miss famous kittens the only other thing that i would say about this slide 12 is the concern that we hear all the time about surveys within the district the fear of you know working at a school and saying well i wouldn't hire anybody to work here you know i wouldn't tell anybody to work here is can skew this information i'm just saying and that's a valid concern we do emphasize repeatedly that it's anonymous but i understand you're that's a valid concern and there are some people that will never believe them yeah okay thank you so the question and the or

037the comment rather about years of experience actually transitions very well into the next slide so thank you for that one of the things that we have added in the past few years is we've started asking the instructional staff that are taking this survey their intentions with the idea that we had an exit survey which we'll get to in a few minutes that captures when they're actually leaving but let's look at their intentions to stay and then the people that are saying they want to leave more quickly figure out what their reasons are to try and address that earlier rather than waiting until they're out the door and so we have here again it's an fy 20 to fy21 comparison and the question relates to how many more years they see themselves working in the district

038so the first top bar is probably should be red not green but it's zero i plan to terminate this year and then it goes up one to two years is next three to four years and so on and i wanted to share that we do this because it connects to what we're going to talk about next do you want to add yeah i would just say that so if you add them up the zero one to two and three to four which are a significant concern for human resources in fiscal year 20 32 of the respondents said that's how much longer they would stay and it's about 26 in fiscal year 21 and we'll soon find out what it is this year hopefully it goes down but that's the current state so for the instructional

039staff that were on that end where they said they're terminating at the end of the year they took the survey or they're staying one to two more years we ask them to select the primary reason why they're terminating and you can see the bottom one is retirement but then going up we have salary and performance pay now when you look at this it's the past two years combined so or compared so the blue is not the past two years sorry this is fy 21 which we had a 75 response rate for the blue are the people that are terminating or saying they're terminating at the end of that year the survey was in november so they're terminating by the end of may and then the orange are the ones that are saying they're going to

040give us one to two more years before they terminate so the top four are essentially retirement inadequate salary working conditions and leadership which this centers around some of what ms vaughn just spoke about the fifth one is relocation but i will say this even with retirement the top four are all things that we can control or at least impact whether people want to retire whether they think they have an inadequate salary working conditions and the leadership in their buildings so these are something that we're going to focus on obviously in human resources to try to alleviate those being the top four reasons why people are leaving so this is also from the fy 21 survey you'll see two sets of data compared on the left side we asked about 15 factors and we had the

041people again in that bucket of zero years or one to two years i'm leaving answer rank these in the order that they would relate to their increased likelihood to stay so what would have to change to have them stay and then the ones on the right are the ones that positively in experi positively influenced their time with the district so these are the people that are staying three or more years and these are the things that have they've seen as a positive influence when you look at the positive influence side you'll see that the top two things are the work itself so the why why we do this why we're all here today and then the second part is the relationships and i you know we heard some conversation about that before so i wanted

042to highlight that and then on the left side the people that are out the door potentially mentally or about to be the salary is popping up as the thing that they want change yeah and i would just comment with the superintendent search that you all just conducted i think both candidates that were finalists talked about relationships and that appears to be a significant reason why people are positively reacting to the district and want to stay there stay here obviously salary is a significant aspect of what we need to try to improve for our employees in this district and ironically we have bargaining sessions with both our unions this week and that's one of the charges the board has given the superintendent and us to work on so it's not surprising that those that are considering

043leaving within one to two years list salary as the number one thing thank you miss kittens just backing up because the two go together but on slide 14 at the bottom when it where it has general working conditions yes that plan on leaving this year correct are doing so because of general working conditions but then nine percent will leave in the next two years because of working conditions am i correct in that well it would be 10. she's looking at this one right here like that because the one is 13 and one is yes so the blue is representative oh yes so this is this is last year's data from november of last year but at that time you're correct the blue line represents the people who said they were planning on terminating at the

044end of last year and the orange is the people that said they would stay one to two years so then when we get this year's data will know if we did anything to shift those two numbers around correct any any predictions or all right you have your crystal ball with you i didn't bring my purse with the crystal ball in it well and then okay so then on the next slide on the right working conditions on the left it's it's 10.8 okay interesting all right thank you i'll look at it some more so last year we launched the non-instructional survey which was modeled after the instructional survey we did simplify it a bit only because the instructional survey we've been building up over multiple years and this was our first year we also made this

045particular survey available in both english and spanish and so we don't have that fy 20 comparison but i did want to share the fy 21 results for the same questions we just talked about in terms of recommend a friend and then how many more years you see yourself working at the school district and i would just point out that on the right if you look from zero to four years how many more years do you see yourself 33 percent only see themselves working here from zero to four years and that's that's significant so the non-instructional survey we also had them rank those fifteen items and this was a single question that wasn't broken out it was interesting that for the non-instructional staff as well the work itself and the relationships also came out as top

046areas that positively influenced their work here and i would also point out the third highest was responsibility and i asked shelley in the future if we could sort of drill down as to what that means does that mean a responsibility the individual feels a responsibility to work here or to their families or to themselves i would like to know more about that it's interesting that it's the third highest response on this slide the responsibility i think that's great i just would like to know more about that to determine what the individuals mean that are responding to that thank you yeah i think that'd be a great idea miss kittens on on the ones that would leave don't that do you see yourself working in the school district in lake county in one to two years

047do you have that disaggregated let's get into this are you on the same page that they were speaking on are you on a different page yes slide i think i'm just yeah because i thought they all go together anyway for the non-instructional survey we're planning on adding that for this year but this was our first year running it and so we went back to the most simplified version we could and as i said the teacher one we've been building up over the years and the relationship with the teachers and taking the survey so we've increased i think our first response rate on the teachers survey was around 30 something percent last year we had worked up to 75 so that's been a whole process with the non-instructional we're just starting that process so some of

048the things were different we wanted to keep the items the length of the survey shorter for the first time out as we start to build that relationship with them but that is something that we're looking to add for this year we have not done the fy 22 non-instructional survey yet and that's we're planning to launch that this spring now that we've got the instructional survey out there and we're working on wrapping that up well the main question i have about that though is are teachers that are just coming into the system planning on staying two years or are there teachers that have been here a long time that are near nearing retirement you know because if it makes a whole big difference if you've got some coming in so i'll do this for two years

049and do this and get a pension and i'm out that's right so we do on the survey it's an excellent point on the survey one of the questions we ask is how long they've been teaching and we have buckets for that because we know if you think back to our strategic plan as a district one of the areas that we've looked at is those first five years of teaching and we know that historically we continue to lose the first year teachers at a higher rate followed by the second and third year teachers and so on the survey we did as you pointed out we want to have that information as well with the idea that we can then compare those years of experience with different survey responses okay thank you which brings us to another

050survey we're almost done with the surveys so with the exit survey so this is this is a bit of an older survey that we started several years ago now the most recent version of it was revamped in fy 20 to include non-instructional staff as well as instructional staff and there were also many changes to the questions there's two versions of this survey one is expected to be completed by the supervisor and that's what you're looking at right now the other is expected to be completed expected asked to be completed by the exiting employee and that's the next slide that we have one of the things i want to clarify about the reasons given to the supervisor for leaving these are on a scale of influence in the idea is the extent to which that reason

051influenced the employee leaving they are not ranked it is not a for selection of the primary reason someone could go in and say all give 10 maximum influence for every single thing so it's it's not forcing them to pick one i just wanted to clarify it's the same when you see the next slide for the employee version and shelly has told me that the significant numbers are 8 and above so excuse me if you look the under the instructional for fiscal year 22 we have three areas that are above an eight and for non-instructional support we have two areas that are above an eight so those are obviously areas of significant concern for us other job opportunities family or health which maybe we can't prevent or maybe we can depending on what that exact situation

052would be and then of course inadequate salary and performance pay weighs heavily as does retirement for the teachers i'll be quick okay so supervisors are being told at a rate of 10 the reason is other job opportunities but the employees are saying other job opportunities is only 6.9 correct so that's right that's the next slide right correct oh okay all right explain well i mean yeah who who's i mean i i could offer probably a few explanations which i don't think are probably germane or accurate because they would be my opinion so but i think i understand and i think i had the same question when shelly and i started looking at this data so there is always a potential for an exiting employee to not be completely honest with their supervisor or forthcoming they

053may have other reasons and they didn't want to tell them that we don't know what is important to understand is that the supervisors are mandated to fill this out so we hope we're getting data from everyone that has an exiting employee although there are times when we think maybe that's not happening across the board the exit survey for the employee version is completely voluntary we have no way of compelling them to fill that out however since i've been here we've been talking about finding out a more robust way to conduct exit interviews and i know that's something the board has expressed to me and we're working on that because we can only be as good as our data and if we don't know why people are absolutely leaving or absolutely know why people are leaving

054it's difficult to work on these issues so we are working on that shelly's a point person for that to try to figure out how we can contact and it may simply be phone calls to individuals spending time talking to them on a telephone to tell us exactly or please be honest with us why you left right now it's they're sent a link and if they don't click on that link and they say oh i'm gone from that district i'm not going to fill that out there's nothing we can do to get that data but if you do if you are able to reach out and have that conversation sometimes maybe i mean just i know in my line of work we were able to persuade them not to leave you know i mean if people

055are dead set on leaving you're not going to be able to stop it but if there is that maybe just that little piece that reassurance that could keep them here like you were talking about the probation i think that's a great idea and thank you for doing that and can i can i add to that personally if i was looking at this data i would tend to go with what the employee says rather than what they tell their employer because they could be trying to say you know i got another job you keep me here you know i got another job keep me here so that might make a difference as well but i don't know it just i tend to think that the second one the employee version that would be a lot closer

056to the reality so if you if you look at that slide i think it's important to note within non-instructional employees that the inadequate salary performance pay has risen to an eight and it was a five and a six point eight in the previous two fiscal years that really stood out to me and family or health is still at the top if you will for instructional staff so working in k-12 education you hear often this phrase about reinventing k-12 education and we're probably at one of those times in history where that might be necessary and so in doing that the workplace also has to be reinvented for the employees to keep k-12 education relevant in this area and certainly around the country so that's why we have the slide reinventing the workplace and we're trying to

057or are going to try to reverse some of the trends that you've just seen in all that data i mean that's our role in hr and recruiting and professional development under under lynne harrell all of those areas come into play in this and pd was not part of this presentation but certainly can be in the future if the board so chooses to know what we're doing to train people which also allows them possibly to stay so the nationwide view of of what we're doing to reinvent the workplace or what employers are doing this is also from ed ed week in in october and if you look at the top it's quite striking asking current employees to take on additional responsibilities well we've in a lot of ways in this business been doing that for a

058long time but we're even doing it more now and it speaks to me because we've bargained in four out of the five sessions i think i've been here for with talc coverage for planning time coverage for teachers that are out has been a huge issue in our bargaining sessions and that's about individuals doing additional responsibilities and compensating them for them some of the other things that are on here are things of course that ms rivera would speak to but posting on social media we've been doing that for years raising wages 39 well of course that's something that we've talked about throughout this presentation contracting out isn't something necessarily that we've talked much about but within my group we have a task force dealing with guest teachers and we're talking possibly about going with someone that

059might facilitate that better for us like other districts do in the state orange county stands out to me i'm of course filling gaps by having volunteers we've instituted a process where dr has created a google doc where we can go in individuals in this building to fill in for coverage during lunch and parent pickup and parent drop-off hallway coverage so individuals in this building can help schools out when they put that information on the google docs so we're doing a lot of all of these things and that's a nationwide view of this some of our retention strategies and i just think it's important to point out that i think since dr savage has been superintendent certainly since i've been here i've said repeatedly that one of the most important things we can do is keep

060the people we have there has always been a huge focus on recruitment and recruiting is certainly important but right now just keeping the staff we have is probably just as or maybe more important so what can we do to incentivize people to stay and incentivize loyalty this is from a harvard business review article in november that talks about the top six items that they believe employers can do to keep individuals to stay and there's a couple on here the third and fourth bullets that i would ask you as a board that you can help us with and two of them are elevate the company's purpose well this isn't a company necessarily but it's an agency and an organization and certainly you as the leaders of this organization can help us elevate what we do i

061think that's so important prioritizing the culture and connection to the employees is also huge we sit in this building and we have 100 schools out there and what is our connection to that staff and we're constantly trying to figure that out but it's so important right now in this culture of the workplace to keep employees they want to know that they're wanted they want to know that we need them and so that's a really really important strategy go ahead so what are we doing to retain people so here's some of the things that we've done on an ongoing basis we provided a retention bonus at the end of the 2021 to employees a thousand dollars we are also without getting into any more detail about that negotiating that in the future that's why bargaining is

062up there we're also negotiating hopefully some additional compensation for individuals esser has given us an opportunity to do some of that we are expanding mental health wellness initiatives through we're rolling out a handbook that's going to be given to each school regarding mental health things that can help the employees at the schools that we're going to ask the principals to present to their staff there's also the lift project which i know ms vaughn heard about at at insurance task force the other day which has helped a lot of individuals in this district regarding anxiety and depression and things like that we are asking district staff to support schools which i already talked about with dr spyro's google doc we are attempting to create a more robust interview process for when people leave but we also

063still are doing it stay interviews is another thing why are you staying here it's important to ask people not just when they're leaving but why they're staying or you could ask someone like me why did you come back and there are legitimate reasons why people do that professional development of course is a huge ongoing thing for our staff our teachers and the ability to do that not just in person but virtually that means a lot to staff to not have to drive down here or stay late at school and doing it virtually some of the proposed things and there's a couple of things i don't have on here dr spyro may want to talk about this but we're proposing possibly a different schedule for the high schools that would be something that might help retain

064staff a no meeting day in this building gosh for someone that has seven or eight meetings a day i would love the idea of a no meeting day once a month there are companies throughout the country that are doing that we're exploring flexible schedules i will probably in the near future be bringing you a proposed policy about remote work for individuals in this building or 12-month employees that aren't k-12 the challenge here is in k-12 education coming up with a policy because obviously teachers need to be in front of students so how do we do that but that is something that i am working on guest teacher pay and benefits i have asked our guest teacher task force to bring me a proposal to increase the pay for guest teachers and other factors i met

065with ms vaughn about this a month or two ago it's an important thing because with our shortage if we could attract more guest teachers it would help us immensely and also help us possibly with future employees because some of them would become full-time teachers benefits that support work-life balance we've talked some of to some of the board we've talked to the board about this family leave possibly family coverage under our medical plan things like that additional career paths that's about a career ladder for support staff we have that in food service so why not roll it out for paraprofessionals or other professions that we have in the district like we do for teachers diversity equity and inclusion that is important to to workers today how does your how does your organization value diversity equity and

066inclusion and we i'm going to work with our diversity office to hopefully expand some initiatives in that area fostering employee engagement already spoke about that principles all of us as leaders including myself need to talk to our staff we need to engage them we need to i have quarterly division meetings it's important for everybody on your staff to know that you care about them to know that you're thinking about them and what can we do to help their lives and expanding support for leaders this is the focus of miss harrell's work in professional development and leadership and it's an ongoing thing but it can always be expanded and it's going to be expanded because of some funding through esser so those are some things that we're doing moving forward so this is just the statistic

067for sure yes or a comment yeah when when you and i talked we also talked about the chat the child care yes aspect that would be under a support work-life balance thank you i just that's that was remiss but i wanted to mention it because one of the things we talked about was there there doesn't seem to be a consistency among the schools when i worked at estero i mean my kids were grown but there were you know a number of teachers you know a dozen maybe less of the teachers who brought their kids to school i mean we started at they were there before seven o'clock and the elementary school bus for the kids came by and what you and i talked about was maybe having a play actually it wasn't a big gap

068of time but it would be the same thing after school depending on what level the teachers were teaching at and i know that those that had children in elementary school i mean this was a huge a huge boon for them because high school starts so early and if you have young kids you can't just say hey just that's right get on the bus at the right time and when we talked about it you said not all the schools were doing that and we also mentioned some other possibilities for partnerships with daycare centers and all has there been any movement on that we have had meetings with academic services about child care in our elementary schools not necessarily high school and the focus there is in some way to try to provide our employees that at

069a very discounted rate right or even free however the schools obviously fund some of their programs or they're self-sufficient because they have people pay tuition for their students to attend but we were talking about our staff and that's what the focus of this presentation is so we have had those conversations in fact dr desmore's weighed in and got involved in one of those conversations and then we haven't had an additional i think we had two meetings maybe and we haven't had an additional one because of some intervening events so and the thing about the buses and allowing is that something that's still allowed but it's up to the school principal to make that decision mr one can you clarify that a little bit remind me a little bit okay the easiest one to illustrate is

070high school right because high school teachers need to be there well before seven o'clock okay and if they have elementary school children those teachers and you know they may have a spouse they may be a single parent the bus hasn't come yet for for their child and we used to i know of teachers that had elementary school so the bus would pick up there and the bus the elementary school bus we picked them up at the school picked them up like at the entrance of the school yeah and i do recall they made a bus stop yeah right there this is obviously something i'd have to talk to mr lloyd about yeah and it was well i mean it would be like any other bus stop because it's a residence oh i get it area

071and probably for some of the teachers they may have had to select a school that was in near their area you know if they live in cape coral they're gonna have to if they're gonna do that and you know i mean as i said i never had to use it because my kids were older grown up grownups but it seems to me that something that small is a great benefit for those teachers because i know when my kids were little i had to take them to because i had to be earlier i had to take them to daycare and they were at daycare for like 10 minutes and then the daycare center would bust them and it's just so much easier to do it this way if it's permissible and it really doesn't cost anything

072right i will it's down here on my list and i know we did talk about it yeah yeah mr lloyd may be in the room so at some point i'll have a conversation with him so thank you may i also on that note because i know we had several bus drivers coming in because it was not just about the teachers it was about oh i know that zones yes different zones with day care where they could actually drop off their children where they could afford to because of their their pay so i think we still have to continue to do it and we're still exploring that we're well aware that a large percentage of our bus drivers live in three or four zip codes correct so if we could offer daycare for them the problem

073is it's very early in the morning so we would have to obviously figure out a way to staff that if we're going to do something like that but no that's definitely a priority and it's it's i'm remiss by not having it up there because i've heard that repeatedly right about nature okay thank you're welcome so from sherm this past december the survey and here's a poll of you at 110 us executives and i don't think we're any different 65 percent of them were very or extremely concerned about recruiting new talent so and ms rivera she was here would speak to this but this is very concerning and has been for a number of years in fact dr adkins dr pruitt have focused on this in the past but if you look at the openings for

074teachers nationwide 83 946 teacher openings and there's only 20 000 graduates from our colleges of education here in florida it's even more desperate we've only graduated in 2019 that's the most recent data we have 4 college of education graduates so that means our focus has to be on career changers and other individuals who want to come and teach because we're just not getting the graduates and in fact yesterday there was an article on cnn which i could teach send all of you a link to but it says teachers are leaving and few people want to join the field experts are sounding the alarm so and this is really concerning when you read the information in that article so when we are recruiting what do current prospective employees or applicants expect and this has changed used

075to be pay and benefits pay and benefits well now the number one thing we're hearing is flexibility flexibility in their jobs the ability to take a mental health day family leave remote work i mean those are the types of flexibility employees are looking for and in a k-12 system as i spoke who earlier that's somewhat difficult because it's hard to tell a teacher they can't be there because they need to be there so can we do things like job share a teacher teaches two days a week another teacher teaches three days a week for that classroom yes of course we can that's not new that's something that's been around forever but we really haven't done that officially in this district i think some principals do it occasionally with staff but that's certainly something that we

076can take on can we offer employees like under in the spouc unit can they do two different jobs one in the morning and one in the afternoon yes we can do that and we've spoken to spouk about that and their willingness to participate in that with us so the answer is yes so that's some type of flexibility for people miss kittens you had your hand up i was gonna bring this up later but in discussing with some of the people that are on social media with me and we were talking about the great resignation and all and i got some suggestions from retirees that are in their 70s that do not want to do they were interested in subbing but they don't want to do a whole day okay so i wanted to talk with

077you about that later and i was at an event on saturday night and i asked how many you know people were retired teachers and all and how many might be interested in doing a half a day many hands went up awesome that if if we had someone doing you know a morning over here and you know once a week or morning two mornings a week or a half a day that would help to cover some of the classes absolutely people were coming up to me on saturday saying oh you know make sure you get in touch with me about that so it's something that we could do sooner than later if you're i'd have to talk to you about that okay the second bullet frustrating candidates so our on-boarding process and i did have a

078board member i think it was miss kittens asked me that question for today's workshop i'm sorry for today's agenda review and our boarding onboarding process if it if everything is in from the employee takes three to five days so it's not long in fact last year it was 2.9 days so they are measuring this in we are measuring this in human resources safety and health is important obviously the pandemic is a significant issue in this article believe it or not from cnn there were people teachers legitimately concerned about their personal safety because of gun violence so these are real concerns for people working in schools benefits are more important than perks like i talked about mental health and physical health reputation for diversity and social responsibility and growth opportunities and that's one of the things

079we've spoken about here from the podium when a teacher is transferring to an additional to a new job that might be a promotion we're trying not to hold people back although we realize that we need teachers in classrooms because that's what applicants and employees expect so these are the things ms rivera has listed as ongoing in recruitment the in-person events the virtual events we she did want to tell me that we are meeting with and i think we had an inquiry from miss patricka about a company that facilitates h-1b visas she is actually meeting with them tomorrow they've done work in polk county so that's something we're exploring even at this point we've resisted in the past from doing that but at this point you know we'll take or try to figure out any way

080we can to employ teachers some of the proposed things recruitment bonuses we've talked about this specifically possibly for retired teachers wanting them to come back focusing on bonuses for sign-on and relocation for others flexibility which i already spoke about benefits and then we've had discussions about billboards and mass transit advertising with the district dr desmore's had indicated a willingness to possibly contribute and use some funds to do that to help our employment deficit if you will i think that is our last slide so if you have any additional questions looks like we have about 15 more minutes can i can i just say i love that the visa and in the hospitality industry that's how we solve the problem of shortage so we country clubs resorts they go out every year they bring in people

081from all over the all over the country to to work and then once season's over they go home so they're hence we have enough staff to cover so and i did think i thought that dr peter genuinely had said that they were bringing a group of years people over as well next school year yeah next school year but i think that's something we definitely should look at it's brilliant going to go to miss patrick because you haven't had opportunity and then miss kittens so my the question i've written here is what about the company that sponsors teachers from other countries so you addressed that yes why didn't why were we hesitant to do that in the past the indications we got from we have this is back when i was an attorney here from the

082east coast districts that were doing it at a significant volume is there was a significant need for in-house staff to facilitate this and so that's why we had shied away in the past and i understand that's not a long-term fix but correct patch the hole that we have right now absolutely and that's why we're revisiting it for sure and then this is kind of a related question but an unrelated question it piggybacks on what ms vaughn was saying about working conditions and legislative proposals frustrating teachers and driving them out of the profession dr savage to what extent does the proposed legislation regarding cameras or audio recordings in our classrooms put our students in danger and what i mean by that is a parent custody battle if the wrong parent gets their hands on an audio

083or video recording and finds out where their student where their child is attending school that obviously puts that child in danger i don't need an answer right now but if you can look into whether we've considered that might be a way to push back against that just for some reason every time i hear our legislators talk about that i think that really puts kids in danger more than it does anything else and that's the number one reason but if you can think of something more i'd appreciate it those are my comments for now thank you thank you miss kittens yes i was going to say that we had discussed the visa program in fact some companies had sent some information previously about that so i'm glad that at least we're revisiting it on the growth

084piece so we're looking at making sure people have the opportunity for growth have you considered though a caveat that during this time of shortage doing the job sharing piece in other words you might do on you know tuesday and wednesday you would work in your new position and monday and friday are basically our roughest days for getting enough support to cover classes so maybe a gradual move into the position as opposed to plucking someone up and then providing that whole again in the classroom yes and relative to teachers we certainly have discussed that with academic services we've even discussed hiring the person for the job but not letting them come to the new job down here until july 1st we have and so those conversations will be will continue them ongoing i'm happy to say

085like today's job information coming to the board to approve for approval for new employees or transfers we don't have a lot of transfers today so we're not seeing as much as we were a couple of months ago but i think if you people will work towards hope that and a promise for the future so even if it were you know one or two days a week even one day a week getting into their new position that even makes them a better employee when they do finally get into it i agree the other thing i was looking at the number of classes to be covered i know this is getting into bargaining and they're but i'm not going to get into the details but if we look at the positions like the tva positions in each

086in each school and multiply that by the number of classes in other words if you got five teachers at high school and each day that represents 20 classes and if we can only get two substitutes then we're only covering eight there's 12 classes left that we have to scramble in the building to cover correct yeah i have no reason to argue with your math no no i'm not just talking about the math but i think people need to understand how how critical it really is and seeing those numbers it's not we get the vacancy numbers every week but the vacancy numbers multiplied by how many classes that represents is phenomenal i mean people understand at one school you may have you know 50 classes during the week that you can't cover that to me would

087bring to mind how critical this is so i agree i mean when i hear numbers like 20 to 25 staff members out on a day that's very very upsetting and concerning and exactly just like when we have 14 000 18 000 students out a day those are incredible numbers thank you are there any other questions for mr patricka i get concerned about cutting back on growth opportunities for staff i think that if we look at our sister districts to the north and to the south and if if we're allowing them a part-time promotion when the north and the south are not doing that then we're going to see people leave and the point of retention is to give them those growth opportunities so i get really really hesitant when we talk about holding people back

088with the understanding that the need is in the classroom i get that but if we're losing that expertise the if the institution the organization itself is losing that expertise i think that's far more dangerous so i just would like you to keep that in the back of your mind as you absolutely absolutely thank you miss morgan first of all i want to thank you i thought that was a terrific presentation and looking at the data the way you presented it really really helped me understand what's going on i have an absolutely unrelated question and i don't expect an answer today it's really more of a comment my concern is that we are providing executive level compensation we don't have executive level compensation and policy and we don't have a protocol for executive level compensation and

089i think we need to do both so that's just an hr and i think that's on the list that it's on the workshop list yes i just wanted to be yeah once again i know that we have to follow up on that yes okay thank you miss fisher we haven't heard from you do you have anything i just want to say thank you and this was a really comprehensive presentation i kind of know what's going on with teachers and you really put it together and dr halstead i definitely pre appreciate your data and the presentation of it was very easy to understand and i think we just need to roll up our sleeves now and get to work and really implement some of the strategies that we have proposed thank you dr savage did you

090look like you wanted to say something you know i just i think it's just more important to offer a comment here as well so while we addressed a lot of the data and severance in front of us one of the things that's really going to be important for us as we really think about what's ahead is addressing some of the foundational pieces that actually create some of our supply demand issues so i would just put out there you know just nature bringing kind of different thinking to kind of existing paradigms is very very important let me give you a specific example we have the opportunity with technology now to really reconsider the way we deliver instruction we know that students we want them to come to school we want them to be supervised so parents

091can go to work and we want students to learn an engaging environment but what that looks like is kind of what you've heard through here the flexibility of what can be done is work that needs to be done it's the work that can change the underlying demand you know just simply the way we schedule our students in our schools creates the number of vacancies that we have just by changing the methods that we schedule we can substantially change the amount of teachers that we need in various subject areas at various levels so it's really going to require us looking at a lot of these pieces these institutional pieces and system level issues that we aren't always looking at and that we need to be looking at a lot of that wasn't addressed in today but

092it's something that we are deeply looking at right now because as we are we're deeply underway for all of the planning for next year and some of these major system level issues if we were to be able to make adjustments we may be able to dramatically enhance the working conditions because we wouldn't necessarily need teachers to cover as many vacancies they wouldn't have to forego their planning periods things along those lines but it is going to require a lot of very difficult you know looking at these various these very aspects are in front of you here the other thing i would mention is and i've said this numerous times i will say it again you know the major issue of like our transportation shortage right now we have substantial substantial shortages in transportation not unlike

093the rest of the country we see that everywhere but one of the challenges that we have in lee county is that while we have a choice system that we are proud of where families get to choose their schools the nature of the choices that we offer and again i'll use the example of each subzone e2 in the in lehigh because families can pick 17 different elementary schools in that middle zone and we will transport them that is simply adding to the issue that we have that we just can we continue to do it maybe maybe years ago we could but but knowing how much how much school families are even having to miss strictly because a bus can't get there to pick them up it's just these are the type of larger system level foundational

094issues that we look forward to bringing back here very very soon as we talk about any any of the thinking that we must get into for next year i said just wanted to take this opportunity to bring that up as well because that impacts the bottom line as well not just the retention of the existing staff but making it better for those folks who are here by addressing some of the underlying foundational system issues as well thank you thank you for sharing that dr savage ms patrick and just to follow up on that dr savage i think that's going to require political will by the leadership team because any change to a bell time or any change to the school that i get to choose from my fifth grader versus my incoming kindergartner is going

095to those changes initially will be very difficult but understanding that in the long run it's it's best for students families and teachers because we'll have enough teachers in the classrooms enough buses to pick up kids and get them school on time it's all but facing that initial resistance is going is something that we really need to put on our shoulders and take and i appreciate you bringing that up ms patrick because one of the concerns that i have is that other districts we haven't brought them for they've only kind of been mentioned anecdotally when school systems have shut down or when some systems have just stopped providing transportation or significantly diminished change the out in fact there's a bill in the legislature right now to change the amount of miles to walk to particular bus

096stops people are addressing these underlying systems all across the country the more nuanced our thinking the better we do in this time period and the more we as a leadership team are really prepared to make some difficult decisions but really student-centered decisions the more it can really have a tremendous payoff for our entire organization so thank you for for bringing that up as well yeah and the other thing you and i talked about was when the blizzard hit boston last weekend the weekend before the headlines all over massachusetts were please be patient as we try to remove the snow because we can't hire enough plow drivers because there aren't enough qualified drivers so you see it with with garbage pickup in cape coral you see it with bus drivers in lee county school district you

097see it with plow drivers in the northeast this is a nationwide problem any other comments or questions cnn did you i just want to thank my colleagues for their questions because those were questions i didn't have to ask and also for your comments i appreciate that we're all out there communicating with our staff and the rest of the public and i think this is it takes a village so this is something that the whole community is going to have to be on board to improve so thank you thank you miss fisher for your comments seeing no other comments thank you so very much both of you really appreciate it and then next on our agenda is dr savage it is the agenda review yes madam chair so i'll go ahead and order that i have

098them here of the first question i was regarding item h1 approval of the 2021 head start early head start child care partnerships program community assessment the question was please explain quote while the priority of the grant targets results for students with disabilities there will be incidental benefit to non-esc students and quote and we have with us mary grace romo to answer that question this is hard we didn't give you that time to get up here i apologize no we should have done that good afternoon all right take your time sit down relax would you be so kind as to just repeat h1 for me yes i will and just board members with your permission i would like to kind of break custom a bit usually we go in order of the agenda but because i

099have a number of questions that will be answered by miss mary grace roma in the past we have sometimes offered those questions for that person in succession so if that's okay that makes that makes perfect sense i'm gonna go one question at a time for you mary grace and that way we can continue to try to answer these the first was for h1 please explain while the priority of the grant targets results for students with disabilities there will be incidental benefit to non-ese students thank you dr savage so i needed a little bit of clarification on that question because i wasn't sure if that was a quote from the community assessment i couldn't find that but our grant actually does not target students with disabilities we do serve 10 of our enrollment our students with

100disabilities but our grant targets poverty levels and enrollees must be 100 percent below the national poverty level and that was miss kittens yes i'm looking it up right now i thought i copied it from the actual statement and so as not to waste time i will get with you afterwards about it i was just this man who was interested in the incidental benefit so we can talk offline if about that one yes ma'am i look forward to that okay dr savage if you will yes yes madam chair so the next question for mary grace romo that she'll be here to answer today is for item h7 and this was the approval of the state of florida amendment to the mirror lakes elementary statewide school readiness provider contract the question was please explain does this have

101to do with expansion of early learning at mirror lakes well no it doesn't i would love to say that it did this was a kindness performed for our colleagues at mirror lakes i guess for many years long before i arrived we have been uploading their after school and before school school readiness documents this is for school-aged children it is not school readiness for our pre-kers we do have three pre-k classrooms there and so i inquired like why are we uploading these documents but to do that you have to have board docs training as new principles come in sometimes they don't have it or or someone on the staff in fact i'm getting ready to be trained myself this month so i also you know i'm not able to upload anything so i think over the

102years former directors because we do partner with them with pre-k sites would do that at the beginning of the year with hours but because some of the rate changes have happened they needed to upload a new contract so i apologize for any confusion and i am sending bordex training links to my friends at mirror lakes so hopefully they'll be i'm sitting with me february 23rd taking for duck's training with a strong hint to do well in the course like this is your last chance i'm just kidding thank you dr savage thank you the last one i have for mary gus romo is that item h8 and that's the approval of the state of florida amendment to the early childhood center statewide school readiness provider contract the questions were please explain the change assessment composite scores

103the amendment of the school readiness agreement for the early childhood center is required to change the program assessment composite scores yes sir so the early learning coalition comes every year and performs a class observation and this is a very well known assessment of adult child interactions and this is done for our birth to three-year-old classrooms and it's it's a quality measure so it's a subjective assessment but you must be certified every year to be able to perform the assessment and it measures what is the quality between the adult child interactions so the state is upping those those thresholds and i have the number here for you i'm gonna i want to make sure i do not transpose those numbers and that's okay the general answer then is that it's the measure of adult and child

104interactions when i saw composite scores it was like okay is this a children's score or or not yes ma'am and it's for each classroom and then we get the one composite score and we have done well i've i've only seen one set of scores we were higher than the state average in our last observation very good congratulations and thank you well thank you too to the wonderful staff i have to give them the credit dr savage well those were all the questions for mayor grace romo so thank you very much mayor grace for answering those questions yeah thank you appreciate it all of you next here we have for item h3 it's the approval of the modification to the florida post-secondary comprehensive transition program the startup enhancement grant agreement now the question was is this

105position already filled or will this mean a teacher taken out of the classroom to fill it and our response today is from mr todd everly the senior director of our technicologist good afternoon board dr savage council to answer that question no there's already two people existed in that all this is an extension to february 28th for the currently we still have about 60 thousand dollars sitting in that grant and this will give us the opportunity to spend the rest of that you will be seeing another grant coming forth for march 1st and it will run all the way till 2025 for over 900 000 dollars but that will be continuing and that will be coming in front of the next board or two but we already have two people we're not pulling anyone else is

106to expend the existing funds that we have okay deal thank you that was your only question there mr generally so you guys see this thank you sir with us yes thank you very much item h4 this is the approval of the title one part a school year 2122 improving the academic achievement of the disadvantaged amendment number one the question was please explain i remove line 96 gateway high school via strikethrough k code and replaced with line 97 gateway high school as being submitted through b code so we have is terry kennedy here and i would have oscar here to give you the complicated version but the simple version is okay the pses is our eligibility requirements when we send in title 1 when we actually sent the application it was may 1st and so gateway

107if you recall last year was not all grade levels so the k code was just a different coding for new school and different type of school so we now that it's all four grade levels we were advised by the director to of doe to change it to a b code which is which is saying it's a traditional high school full-out title traditional high school receiving title one funding thank you and ms ken if you want to hang on for just one more minute here potentially also be joined by ms rita davis for this next one which is h6 this is the approval of the farm to school grant for 2122. the question is please explain is this a program for tech centers or k-12 schools which schools will benefit from the program hi good afternoon

108and miss kittens you asked this question so it's k-12 it's a very exciting opportunity it's a cross-departmental grant application with the u.s department of agriculture so i can read off all the middle and high schools if you'd like okay so it's quite a few and a key component in this is that we're using two grants that cte has already acquired and we put that into the application to show how we're working with food and nutrition services and also the curriculum department to really bring what schools are already doing growing farm to table lettuce etc for their cafeterias and how we can combine all these diverse opportunities under one umbrella okay i just wanted to add that it's a competitive grant and as a competitive grant there is a match requirement and that's why we have

109specifically it actually it can serve all schools because of the training but the specific schools we had three high schools that have a program and we're using those three high schools to mentor three other high schools because again the matching requirement of the grant it's competitive so we're hopeful to receive it and what were those three high schools i know south is one right we have quite a few high schools though lehigh senior high school lamp dunbar high school those are the three a part of the training component but the two matching grants also include island coast high school south fort myers high riverdale high east lee county high yes okay so the first grants are the ones that the first high schools that she told you are high schools that have already received grants

110so the three new ones and i know it's specific in in the grant as to which three high schools are mentoring actually i think i do have that printed so the new high schools would be dunbar high lamp and lehigh senior those are the three high schools that will be mentored by the three that have the existing ag programs okay thank you thank you mr patrick can the produce be used in their culinary programs absolutely and actually straight to the cafeteria so what we're trying to do and what they're doing such an excellent job is obviously we're having supply chain issues so why don't we what we're already growing in our in our classrooms and outdoors and you've heard about the suncoast credit union they gave a tremendous donation 35 000 to support outdoor classrooms

111so this will be that matching component of it and then we also had a member in cte mary graham who applied for a classroom grant from the foundation and so that's expanding so we're kind of combining it all together but one of the end games is to get that produce onto the lunch plates for our students and so i kind of tricked you because i knew the answer to that question but i wanted to highlight eastleigh county high school and their culinary program and apparently they have a new room out there where they're going to be having events and the students will be catering and serving at those events and so i urge all of us to if we have events coming up you know i brought marshall bauer over and had him speak directly

112with principal robery out there actually it wasn't marshall it was the new president dr laboda i brought her over and suggested that perhaps you know a foundation board meeting could be held there on some morning giving the kids the opportunity to anyways i knew that they were using the produce to to serve and i wanted to highlight that yes thank you because we've combined hospitality and tourism out there with culinary arts so they have both sides of the house operating and that's how that room came about with donations from cte and also suncoast so we're very excited and they're so talk about hospitality they're so excited to host your meeting and we already know how awesome the food is there from chef art phillips and his team so thank you amazing par part of the

113grant is to continue the work and to actually form a team called the healthy living collaboration team so to do the work that reed has just been sharing oh that's great and if i also want to say congratulations to miss davis because the fort myers city of fort myers had given you a proclamation for cte so it's january right is the month for cte february is cte month and that's the second year in a row that mayor anderson has welcomed us to present an actual proclamation from the city of fort myers to recognize the value of cte well congratulations thank you for being there yeah outside yes and ms davis thank you very much just also to highlight we were at the greater the chamber of commerce in fort myers and again ms davis every

114every single community partner in business they all were so complementary of of just other work that we're doing in the district and ms davis is a huge leader in a lot of that work so thank you so much miss ken if you could stay on for one last question i'm going to skip down if you'll allow me to l1 which is in operations and it's the approval for the short-term incentives to address critical bus operator attendant need the expenditure to transportation services the question is what would be the effect and possibility of taking the funding for this item from s or funds so if you wouldn't mind responding to that piece well there currently are incentives and i guess have been for many years with with bus drivers related to hiring paying their fees for

115physical fingerprinting tb tests and cdl license as far as esser it's an allowable expense and so any of the incentives and these kinds of things esser can pay for it we have a committee as we've mentioned before a committee that looked at the needs of the district priorities of the district and then made decisions based on that and that's an ongoing process to some degree as you know with amendments and i know we have a i believe some scheduled meetings next week to talk about sr3 does that answer that was that miss kittens any other questions regarding that thank you okay thank you ms kenny that was all of your questions as well all right so i will drop back to the next area which is under business services under the i3 approval of the

1162122 school class size compliance plan the question was please explain the correlation between class size compliance and the larger class sizes based on the teacher shortage and we have ms kelly lecher hey thank you so there's a correlation because when you we're trying to make sure we have a qualified teacher in the classroom not just a body in the classroom so we're doing all kinds of things to try and make that occur we're at our secondary levels we're doing teaching through their planning and providing that resource but we don't really have that option at the elementary level it's a little bit harder and the students keep coming we have grown sixteen hundred students since october of last year october of this year and they're still showing up at our door we can't get the teachers

117so what we're having to do is just keep putting kids into classrooms some of our teachers and in certain grade levels have been very good about they just want to make sure the kids are educated well and so they're taking on bigger classes in order to make sure that the teachers have those students have a qualified teacher in there and that does affect our class size the question i had because i remember two years ago there was issues about class size and when they changed it to the 25 and all that whether we just went ahead and paid and had the larger classes and all that so that's why i was asking this question has legislation or legislators thought about the fact that class size amendment in this time where staffing is very difficult to

118get teachers to keep it under class size where do we stand with that statute right now considering that everybody across the nation is going through this shortage so unless they're talking about it right now which i have not seen anything personally they're still standing to the 18 22 and 25 on the class size i haven't really seen anything saying that they're looking at proposing making a change so as far we're still trying to meet it doing our best but in some areas in some schools we really are having difficulty so do we have to to pay the you know when you're out of compliance there is a an assessment so there's a process with that so first you file an appeal and i filed that appeal about a month ago i filed the appeal with

119the state for our schools that were out of compliance since then some of our i think three or four of our schools that were out of compliance are now back into compliance they've been able to hire teachers and put themselves back in in the appeal i explain our growth because lee county is still growing faster than even our surrounding counties we are just busting at the seams so i explained our growth i talked about our difficulty in recruiting and retaining teachers what we were doing to do that and some of the processes that we've been doing to try and keep our class sizes down this is a class size compliance plan that is going before the state which basically is the reasons that i applied i had told them and what the things we're doing

120to try and get back into compliance with recruiting teachers and trying to do what we can and finally because i know others have questions but is this something that we need to look at asking the legislators to to look at because it's going to affect us it seems for a little while yes i would think that around the state they have to be seeing this same thing happening in places i think we are we're getting the double-edged sword because of our growth so we're probably filling it harder than most of the other surrounding counties are filling it so but any growth county is probably feeling the same thing we are miss morgan yeah i think the problem is that was a constitutional amendment so there's this is basically all the department of education can do

121is try to enforce compliance with a constitutional amendment so approaching the legislature at this point that we can't change a statute so i don't yeah i don't know where we go yes it would have to go back out to a vote for all of the voters of florida and this has taken place all over we are not the only ones we are not the only ones that are out of compliance that is correct is there a dollar amount or whatever that if your appeal does not work is there an equivalent dollar amount that we're looking at because we are out of compliance there is the state has not calculated that but basically there's a per student in the class size reduction dollars that will be calculated and will come through and i do think i

122seen something the other day and i can look at that and get to you on what the if the appeal wasn't to go what it would look like and i can send that to you all so you have that thank you thank you dr savage yes ma'am chair the next one the next question that we have and thank you miss lecher the next question i believe mr dota did answer during the presentation but the question was about how long is the hiring process how many days i believe he stated it's basically between three and five days for the fingerprinting references and during fiscal year 21 was actually 2.95 days and they're still working on the original request regarding a form or something that could allow the information manipulated did you need any you need him

123to come back up and answer any follow-up from that particular question or was that sufficient no that's that's sufficient however i am hearing though out in the schools that it is taking longer so he doesn't need to come back up you can get to us later about it but there's a disconnect somewhere as to how long that's taking so i can certainly say anecdotally during the summer i heard it was weeks and a very very long period of time but that would have been when they were inundated with oh you know huge hiring levels and so well we can put together so anything to speak to that discrepancy if you'd want we could put it in the board weekly if you don't want to dialogue about it now i just want to clarify the question

124i was answering is once the employee has provided all of their information how long the processing takes in human resources that's not taking into consideration someone that may have been hired by a principal but they haven't submitted their references or something else that would be on the applicant side so that may be and it may be that administrators are thinking once they give it to you and say this person has said yes from that point so maybe that's sometimes there's certification issues the person has to provide us those so but from the time the statistic that dr savage read 2.95 days is from when hr has everything to how soon we can get that person into a classroom or into a job it's 2.95 days you're welcome but i think it's a fair ask that

125and we may want to characterize some of these typical pieces because i think that is you know from a school-based standpoint what were the things that they thought were clear pieces that the school believes they had submitted but you know that back and forth correct i think it's probably good to get the life cycle of what these typical things are just so that there is an awareness because certainly i heard the same thing i met with all the principals every single one of them over the summer and that was the number one issue they said was people they'd hired back in april they still couldn't get cleared to work for the start of the school year and they were losing employees to other districts things along those lines so definitely some information there we'd be

126happy to provide as well and that might affect some of the data that you were presenting to us earlier about job satisfaction on their end and this also has something to do with something i've talked to dr savage about extensively relative to our processes and human resources and something that has stood out to me in the four or five months i've been here and they're processes that were here when i was here 17 years ago so automation and things like that are certainly certainly something we have to access and use more efficiently well and just to piggyback centralized hiring practices such as when you have schools individually doing reference checks on the same applicants or interviewing the same applicants at multiple different locations that's all being carried out by school-based staff that presents an opportunity

127for organizational waste that we could improve upon so there's there's always opportunities but thank you for asking the question and i know mr dodig and his staff are well underway on a lot of this work thank you thank you miss vaughn since dr savage brought brought that up has this district always avoided the central the centralized applications well the you know the and i have to be careful using that terminology the centralized hiring because it can mean different things to different people i did use the term centralized hiring the idea is a balancing act of what what is the school-based role in the school-based staff and what is the central office role what is the opportunity to try to realize some economy of scale by just it's just a basic optimization piece i mean rob

128you've been actually in the hr area for quite some time did you care yeah i mean i came in 2005 and that was how the process we currently use is the process we use then so as far as i know centralized hiring has never been used here that's more cost effective to do it that way cost effective i haven't obviously priced that out but i think there's efficiencies that could certainly come into play i know academic services are at least their chief support centralized hiring and i think their principals probably would too when they know more about it and so that's something we're talking about let's put it that way just as a quick experience that i had when i came to this district is i was used to in my texas district centralized and

129i was pretty shocked at you know trying to do my relocation from texas here and i was trying to get in front of it because i knew the year i was coming south fort myers was about to open and you know i made in inquiries on it well we don't have the principle there yet well we don't this and it really i'm wondering if other applicants coming in from even other states where you have to deal with you know certification issues and all of the rest of that it seems to me that might be something that we need to look at money not just cost savings which is extremely important but it may just be kind of frustrating to some people who are not local and as i said it was very frustrating to me

130in trying to relocate to the school district and of course in those days you didn't have the you know the problems that we're having today well and that's precisely why i brought up that in the context of the question that was asked because the question was asked was the full length of the hiring process right the hiring process statistic that was shared of course is an internal metric what you'd be interested is the totality from the time a person is theoretically offered a job till the time that they're actually able to go because the hr is not just carried out in hr right now it's a shared responsibility across the organization and all the variety of tasks that have to be done whether on the part of the individual applicant i think it would be

131helpful for this governing body to have a really nuanced understanding of exactly what that looks like from soup to nuts all the way through so we understand some of those challenges and certainly there are the opportunities to create efficiencies in some types of centralized practices that does not mean it's an all or nothing it very much can be what makes sense to do so anywho that was that was why i wanted to bring up that specific example and that might segue into future workshop topics on on on this because i don't know that much in terms of i mean it sounds like it would be more efficient and you know cost savings and all of that but i was just looking at it from the point of view of people who are not who are

132only familiar with the centralized and especially trying to relocate from another state and there are districts in florida that do it so and just you know when you're relocating from another state you're navigating all kinds of issues with certifications and all of that so you know who knows that might be a frustration as well for some of the applicants thank you absolutely the last i have sorry i'm sorry i have one no the other the other part of that was about getting data to about some of the basic information such as vacancies and things like that is readily available on the website under the employees and administrative piece the reason i added it on there is that many times questions that we may have we can answer ourselves by just looking at the data and

133since it basically is public record i don't understand why we wouldn't have access to be able to look that up do you understand what the question is yeah and i asked and i've had a change in the hris position in hr so but kevin calfi and christine christensen who are my hris bro kevin's now assistant director of staffing are aware of this request and this i think was made in december so we're endeavoring to try to figure out what to give you access to and how to do that in a way that there's significant not issues but there's significant ways to provide information because principles have certain information hr has certain information principals occasionally have vacancies they don't post i mean so there's a lot of information that may not be how do i say

134consistent so we would want to provide you the most accurate information and unfortunately one of the only ways to get a true accurate account of true vacancies is to call every single principal right and see what positions they may have that they're not advertising so that's a huge labor task that miss rivera does occasionally but that we currently don't necessarily do all the time what's that i'm not asking to do that okay my request at looking some of the information when you look at that site there's things like attendance and that uploads to that site and just general information that we could you know they has like what nine different boxes of things and we're not i'm not saying give us access to everything there but some of the generic information what i'll do is

135i'm gonna have a conversation with you offline so i can pin that maybe with the people that would be providing that so i can pin you down on exactly what you're looking for i'm just curious because if anybody us or anybody in the public wants to see what is open we have that so the job opportunities sure opportunities yes absolutely well we get into the weeds it is not the weeds there is information on that site that i believe would be helpful to us to see and then we wouldn't have to ask the questions so in my opinion it is not the weeds he unders mr dodic understands what i am saying and he has said that we will discuss it the specifics of it if you go to the site that's listed there you

136will see the nine items and i'm not asking for all of them i'm not asking for extensive work generic and thank you miss vaughn i apologize i just said something that was very concerning to me some principals don't post what i'll tell you what my vision was somebody has a friend in another school that's a great teacher they need one there and they say hey miss durham is so and so no i don't think i don't think i would not can't be done i would not offer that as an explanation why a principal may not be doing that how can there be openings and they're not posted because at the time there's not a necessity for them to necessarily fill that position i highly doubt that's happening in a significant way right now because we

137need staff so critically okay okay well it just was like whoa what is he saying that because i know a lot of principals do when they're new to a school import people from their prior school they do we also have positions that are posted as anticipated and sometimes that position is not needed to be filled for one reason or another okay just that one statement just i understand big red flag for me okay you good that's fine you finished no i just i wanted that one statement clarified thank you all right dr savage yes madam chair the last question we have is l4 approval of revised phase one pre-construction budget estimate for the g weaver hips elementary school pre-k edition and the question was please provide a visual map of the location i believe that

138map has been provided thank you i'm satisfied with that answer i appreciate it those are all of our board member questions madam chair anyone else have any questions i just want to make sure that to give everybody else an opportunity to speak no thank you okay dr savage was that it that was it thank you manager okay next on the agenda is miss sunima and prioritizing workshop topics good afternoon good afternoon hope everyone's doing well today nice to be back with you for today we do not have any items on our list right now that have not been approved through consensus but i still wanted to to come today see if you had anything you wanted to add to it thank you okay ladies we miss mcclung is here to you hear what she said

139is there any thing that we believe should go on our list miss morgan well i don't have the list in front of me but i want to bring up the fact that our graduation rate has dropped we haven't discussed it in the workshop we have one semester of progress reports when are we going to see the outcome of those progress reports i don't want to get to the end of the school year and see and be surprised i have a feeling that we need to be looking at more data now to have a better understanding of particularly in the budget process as we move forward what our priorities are going to be so i think it's essential that we ask the superintendent and staff to provide more information sooner rather than later about where we

140are academically so that we can proceed with some of our other the other decisions we're going to have to make with with some foundational information dr savage i wholly support that request that's something that we've been doing data chats with the various school principals and really hearing kind of the the story behind some of what we're seeing in terms of the data analysis that we're doing and i think it's it's absolutely i'd like to really fill up our plate with how the students are doing and how the schools are doing because that really is very important for this board to be able to speak in a very informed way and i couldn't agree more with the budget analysis piece that as we look to the future how how does our budget really support the very

141important work that must occur this has been a pretty long ago with the covid as well and the loss of learning and i think the data will showcase some of that as well as we're in the midst of a big shift on the state in terms of our assessment system our new standards there's a lot going on a lot of opportunity for us to discuss that with at this level looking at the i'm not sure looking at the workshops and briefings that are happening i'm i'm thinking we probably could fit into one of those we already have a couple of items scheduled on february yes february 22nd we have an update on lvs and then on march 7th we have a strategic plan update which would include that data as well so i think we

142need to bring it up with one of the you know by march 7th and i think we extend this get workshop schedule if we need to make you know take more time if need be or add a workshop if need be so that we can get that address because i just feel like we are so far into this and we know so little at least i know so little sitting up here about where we are as opposed to where we need to be thank you and that actually was an item that i was going to bring before the board when we were scheduling these workshops we run into a real time squeeze on those days because by the time we have agenda review which takes quite a bit of time and then when we have

143comments particularly on the briefing meetings we have more comments three hours seems to really be tight and i know you know that you are here for a lot longer than that many days so i wondered if you wanted to have a discussion about extending at least the workshops and no briefings is difficult since you do run up into your board meeting unless you want to start it earlier but during our reorganization we had briefly touched on either changing the days or changing the times for those and then it kind of got put on a hold while we considered possibly going to one board meeting a month which is still on hold and i have heard that some people may want to wait until we have dr bernier in place before we make that decision but

144i don't think that we would need to wait until then to either extend the time on the current meetings or add a day if you needed to i would prefer adding a day because i have frequently have hard stops on mondays and my colleagues across the state have that on their calendars and i can't ask them to change their calendar to accommodate me so i can't be here past four o'clock on mondays what about beginning earlier on mondays yeah that's fine yeah i because my thought process is we have staff here all the time and to take another day of their life to me is too much to be asking because they have to get their work done so i would rather come earlier and then really like today we had an hour we usually

145have an hour for the agenda review today we didn't have depending upon what is on that agenda is how long that conversation is going to be like today it was 30 minutes we took up 30 minutes of that versus the hour but we had scheduled an hour so today's time has been like we've kind of like got the stuff done the days have gone well but i just i just would hate to see another meeting added on not for myself but for those who would have to be here for that is there an appetite to begin at noon maybe rather than one would you all be agreeable to that starting it earlier is miss miss morgan and then miss kittens so i'm looking at the schedule here so it's an hour and a half two

146hours three hours you already have three and a half hours for the workshop on the 22nd we're gonna need i would be i would like to think a couple of hours to talk about where we are academically i mean if we're going to go over data and talk about how it relates to programs that we've put funds that we've used from esser to invest in our kids and going forward where where our budget priorities are i think we're going to need more than 30 minutes or an hour i'm i'm suggesting that i'm looking at the seven yeah march 7th and strategic plan wow well march 7th we take away the this part of it the prioritizing workshop and just put that in for that would be an hour so an hour and a half 90

147minutes i'm just i honestly i'm thinking we need another workshop but just that's just for that particular just for that by itself but i want to hear what others think thank you this one special workshop just dedicated just for that it would work for me dr savage what's your thought on that we will accommodate whatever the board would like we just i think it's to make the clear linkage what i'm hearing is the student performance school performance but there's got to be a specific connection to the esser funding aspect of it as well well i think that's part of it i mean i you know we're we seem to be approving things in segments and not seeing the relationship between the pieces we're approving now i'm not saying that this discussion which is really the

148strategic plan and how our students are doing needs to be that the sr really needs to be a part of it but i think as we move forward and we talk about some of these different programs we need to understand the context in which we're making those decisions that's really what i'm trying to say okay i don't know if that makes any more sense no it does that's that's it does thank you so in saying that then dr savage you would believe that it would be better to just have that one singular meeting just for that workshop well what i'd like to do with the board's blessing is get with dr spyro and find out in quick what order they can they can do this to put some information together we've been going through a

149lot of it on the operational side this is the nature of the work we've been doing is analyzing that performance school by school and so forth and so i think aggregating this together we've we've had conversation about the graduation rate a lot of this work that you're just that you have an interest in i think it's putting it together in a governance level presentation and i very much would want to make sure that it is a strategic plan focused presentation i think i could see it being either at a briefing or a workshop and i think we would need probably no less than 90 minutes to do it right and to have the level of questioning that i think the board would probably expect as well but i'd love the chance to sit down with

150dr speier and the team at our next academic cabinet and then talk through that piece i think they've heard this need articulated but i'd love the chance to get the group to provide their insight as well so that way if we'd want to focus on a couple particular areas i think the graduation is a natural place to start but i hope that helps does that explain kind of what i'd like his next steps so if if we were looking at say a two hours a two hour span for that and if you could sooner than later find that because then we can get look on everybody's calendar the girls can look on the calendars to make sure that everybody's time would be you know they'd have that a lot of time to do so and

151then we could just come into just to do that for those two hours miss kittens yeah i honestly of course i agree with you the superintendent can look into it rather than having another day i am seriously of the opinion if we need to start earlier or something and scheduling is one of the issues that we have i mean we our first responsibility i see is that we be here for the business of the district and but adding an additional day is is difficult for everyone so if you're thinking that it takes an hour and a half or two hours then perhaps you know tacking it on to another day or something you know i understand that some of my colleagues have other things but we all do and it should be a group decision

152as to you know an hour here or two hours there or going an extra for 30 minutes or whatever we need to do it should be a group decision not based on one person right we're not trying to nothing is it's going to be a group decision it's not going to be based on one person so if we're looking at march 7th say march 7th if we start at noon we could go noon to 4 that would take we would have the 60 minutes get rid of the workshop topics which is right now what we're doing and put give that two hours there and then you have the other hour there and that takes care of everything is that is that good for everyone because we're already scheduled to be here so does that work

153as far as because we're going to be here so it's a month away it's a month away for us so i believe we would have ample time to plan it already lines up with the strategic plan and we're already scheduled to be here okay so can i have a con census i'm sorry i understand what you're saying we're just going to start no no no we will be here on march 7th we have the agenda review we'll get through that in the hour that we are allotted then we do not have the prioritized workshop topic we remove that because that is part of this what we're asking for and then the strategic plan update will be 60 minutes so between the agenda review and the strategic plan which is that's two hours right there we

154add the two hours in between there so that's twelve to four and we're done the day's done so i have a consensus on doing that and asking dr savage to take care of it thank you thank you dr savage very good thank you and can i clarify is this a one-time start at noon or is there a decision so we're going to run into this problem on lots of days in terms of you have a lot of things on your list and we have very short time to to do them so is there any interest in beginning workshops regularly at noon and providing a four hour window miss miss morgan yeah i support it okay miss fisher you said you would support it yes you support it miss vaughn live with that she'll live with

155it i'm fine with it and miss kittens instead of having another day and everybody's schedule is already there so and that way if we finish early you get to leave early but if you have that extra hour if it's needed so that would be wonderful so optimistic it's the name of the game yes thank you so you'll take thank you care of that mr mcclellan thank you for just putting that on there and dr savage you'll make sure that we have all the information that's needed and was that clear of what what everybody was asking for i believe so okay i just want to make sure okay thank you okay in seeing that is there any other miss vaughn please how and when are we going to make up the steps in the transition process

156i know i sent a question about it miss morgan has sent her recollection of how it was and then some additional things what i had asked about is i would like to see steps spelled out ahead of time so that you know honest honestly during the process with ray and associates i was very unhappy with the way communication was rolled out and things because lots of times we had things that weren't in a rush and then this person that person who has what who's on first that kind of thing i don't want to see a repeat of this so i would like to see this is the first thing we're going to do and this person or this department is tasked with doing this is the next thing we're going to do i asked mr

157dodig i had a very brief just happened to run into him and we talked for a few minutes and i had actually even emailed him asking him what does hr have from when we onboarded dr burke and dr graham and i don't know if he's had a chance to look yet but he seemed to think that there wasn't very much that there know and i see ms fisher kind of know that there are no written protocols on any of this and we and rightly so have been very focused on protocols and looking for areas where where there are gaps and obviously there's a huge gap here so what's the answer to this in terms of how and when are we going to put these steps in motion so are you requesting a workshop to to

158develop that superintendent transition process i'm requesting a workshop or briefing or what i mean it needs to be done and it's not being done very efficiently with you know recollections from other board members again i would like to see if there's anything in in hr they're they're legal things that right miss dupree bruno there are legal aspects of this and i know there was a question on on that on who exactly would be doing negotiations i would like to see some kind of a timeline on on this i don't want to see it slip shot and i don't want to see the huge communication breakdown that we had during at least the initial process with ray and associates well if i may i'm going to have it miss morgan and then i can respond to

159that because it's in-house now so first of all i would say with burke nothing happened and i would say with graham nothing was needed because she was internal so for all intents and purposes we're starting from scratch and that's why i wrote the memo that i did that we need to start now by directing staff and i think what we need to do is decide who's doing what and then they need to come back to us so that we are make and and not necessarily approve but just concur with you know events as they're unfolding nothing was done no no you elaborate i mean what do you mean nothing was done well burke it was a slipshod process that brought him in i don't think the board did much i wasn't on the board but

160from from sitting in the in the audience i would say not much transpired in terms of it was larry tien handing off the board to or handing off the district to burke he was a florida superintendent nancy graham had been in the district for 20 years she didn't need and she knew the community as far as i know there was no process at all i mean she was picked in one day and she sat in one day and that was that so and then just saying you know when you talk about not having protocols and stuff we do not so let's not you know we're starting from scratch we have to write the protocol now which is why i'm concerned about delegating it to people who should can and should be responsible for it i

161agree that's why i wrote the email and then miss dapri bruno i know you've already started having communications and i did speak with andrea messina as well and how that we did not have to make sure as far as because they have done this numerous times so i asked her the question because you're gonna have two superintendents and how they get how they do that is that one becomes the consultant and that's how you bring them in where they work alongside with the superintendent until that handoff is made because then you're you're being legal but miss dapri bruno has had conversations with some of them and then i believe dr bernier is communicating with dr savage as we as at this moment miss kittens well i recall part of the discussion even with ray and

162associates in talking about the whole process that there would be after the negotiation of the contract that there would be an overlap time to work with the current superintendent i recall them saying that so i don't know i mean have we just said okay we have a superintendent and they're done now what did they mean as a part of that process what do they do is not their job including until we have a new superintendent sitting in here to help coordinate i don't know but i do agree with ms vaughn that we need to have some way of doing it because face it guys if we're looking at the legislation if things go one way or a different way we're going to be doing this again so you know it's a possibility so i agree

163with my colleagues we need something in place well if if the legislation did go the other way we wouldn't be doing it because it wouldn't matter it's just they're here and we do whatever they say but no they would still have to they would still have to somehow or another overlap with the existing superintendent even if someone is elected not if well put it like this if there's a policy in place of onboarding a new superintendent regardless whether they're appointed or elected there's a policy of how to do it and we might be saving ourselves a lot of angst and issues going forward if we have that in place true and if go ahead i think we're looking at a policy i think we're looking at our protocol right and if i may through the

164chair ask ms vaughn and ms morgan specifically what are you looking for i got your email and i read it actually several times and i got yours as well ms vaughn and i agree with both of you entirely so we sit here today we need to direct staff and then have them come back to us what are we directing staff to do and what are you looking at consensus surrounding please well i think we need to have a plan for introducing dr bernier to the community so i think we should be directing lauren stillwell and her group to put together a plan i think that i was not aware of the consulting situation but clearly we need to get moving on the contract and i think what i'm looking for from hr is and i

165don't know about the rest of you but i'm looking for some sort of parameters in terms of a total compensation package i think we need to know what the comps are in the state for a district our size for a superintendent who's who's a new superintendent so i think we need that i think we need these i think we need that probably by our next meeting so that we can make a decision yeah i stop you and ask you if we could seek consensus on each item sure because i think we work better in chunks but but if if i may though i would like to miss depre bruno because she has already started doing something so i think that we have to hear what she has already started and dr savage as well yeah

166but i think our job is to direct them not to have them tell us what they're going to do i'm i understand i just want to i just want everybody to know what has already been done if if anything has been done i think that we need to know what has been done and then that way we can know where we need to go from there dr savage well i just wanted before we get too deep into directing staff to do components of this i just wanted to kind of just make sure i relayed to you that though the very first conversation i had with dr bernier he's been working on an entry plan and he is trying to get input he's trying he's really working on that piece as well so i think just

167knowing that i'd hate for staff to be working on something that may conflict with what he envisions and so i just want to make sure that through his process he's being given an opportunity to allow what he would want to weigh in on this knowing that he is very respectful of the boundaries of the contractual process and does not in any way want to move that forward so i just think it's i wanted to make sure i shared that because that was part of that conversation before we went into directing our staff to be doing things that may when we see his plan they impact that so i'm just i'm just trying to keep the lanes clear on what what we would be doing in terms of staff and whatnot but i don't want to

168jump ahead of our attorney so what i heard ms morgan say was a plan to help dr bernier transition in terms of meeting the community and things like that so that is something that from a legal standpoint i certainly do not have any thoughts or ideas on that or it's not within my purview the only thing that i'm looking at is the contract and i did speak to one individual who will be negotiating on behalf of dr bernier his contract who has sent some some thoughts that he would like to have in his contract but then i have stopped i have not had any further conversations with this individual pending board's direction as to how to move forward okay so we have heard now we've had the opportunity to hear what has transpired thus far

169ms bond and see what's being said here is exactly why we need the steps because you brought up something with andrea messina and then dr savage mentioned another piece of information i think we've heard from miss dapri bruno it's it's showing us that right now we're off on the jumble of oh this person knows this and that person knows that and not everybody on the board knows the same thing so let's figure out a way to say we would like let's say we would like an introduction to the community who's in charge communication we want to know what our new superintendent has in mind okay he's working out a plan when is he going to have the plan done you know we still need negotiations with with dr savage what's going to be his his

170role how is that i was a little confused who would be the consultant okay the reason i asked that and i brought that up it's not that i'm out there on whatever i brought that up because i wanted to make sure that we did not you cannot have two superintendents so i wanted to know how does that work where we can bring in we can have two of them in the same building and speak so what i was told by andrea and many others that i spoke to who have gone through this that what they've done is the incoming would become the consultant in their contract at the moment because then they can come in here and sit with our dr savage they can communicate they can learn whatever you put in a contract with

171them that they maybe come in i don't know twice once a month two times a month whatever that looks like for us to get themselves acclimated to the district and to everything else but that avoids having two and then when the transition when dr savage would go into whatever his role here then the other one would then become so it would be a smooth transition and that's what and sharing with me and what i'm saying is that's a possibility i'm sure there are other ways that that can be done but we need to have it spelled out we need to so that all of us on the board have the same knowledge because that wasn't happening with reign associates it was very slip shot and that's and i think miss morgan was saying is saying

172something like that we need something written down we so let's my question let's write it down when are we gonna do it okay miss fisher yes so we can't have two superintendents and dr bernier mentioned that he had some work to finish up in clark county so we don't specifically know his timeline yet we'll have to communicate with him and find that out find out what his timeline is typically the superintendent will the incoming superintendent will have an attorney who will be negotiating on his behalf with our board attorney so i think the steps in essence are there and then until until dr savage moves on and dr bernier is sworn in then dr bernier would be the consultant and he'd get to learn yeah so all right so going by steps the first step

173is do we understand that attorney dupuis bruno will in in as part of the negotiation process include dr bernier bernair as a consultant i mean do we all agree that we think he should come in in a consultant capacity and let's just say yes so that we all have that understanding that's going to be part of the contract negotiation or a separate contract for that matter who knows right and then once the swearing-in date is established which will need input from dr bernier that will be the case then as far as introduction to the community and that can be handled by our communications department for us but you're right we need to write it all down all the steps so we need to have a salary discussion and that and that'll be something that's going

174to be negotiated with dr bernier and his attorney from from my past experience i mean we have a basic amount that we offered but what is it we approved it we approved it before that what was the selection what the existing salary no we approved i think before the job decisions yeah when we when they went for when they went for advertising that was there was a shame on me a base for that shame on me i apologize everybody wasn't the true figure but it was a base right we had a basement because you had to advertise with that is that right ms vaughn you had advertisement yes ms fisher well so then who's going to write it all down i volunteer because she's really interested in writing it down thank you so much thank

175you ms morgan miss kittens thank you i understand where everyone is coming from and i'm sitting here listening at this person will speak with the incoming superintendent and all i think at this point that we need to either agree that to have the attorney since she's working with the contract and all of that to speak with him about some of these issues however i think the main thing is throughout this whole process there have been things that we all didn't know there have been things that happened and moving right along and we were told after the fact so the issue in what i'm hearing is vaughn i'm not speaking for her i'm speaking for me i would like to be abreast of what's going on in real time as opposed to well when we have

176a meeting i'll let you know and i just i really think we should narrow it down if the attorney is going to be working on the contract the attorney should be communicating with dr vernier and reporting on a regular basis as to where we are what's going on when it gets to a point we have to make a decision on something then it comes to us as the board i just i did not feel that we were really kept abreast of everything that was going on things just happened and they appeared and suddenly we're doing this and suddenly we're doing that and i just think we need to tighten this up with input from the incoming superintendent so if i could summarize i believe we have had a request for for a workshop or a

177briefing around the transition process and things that would be included in that would be updates from the board attorney related to negotiations which actually would probably occur on an ongoing basis and then dr bernier has begun a draft of a plan that he would like coming in so i would guess that he would be working with miss stilwell and her team along with that plan to make sure that that his idea of how he would like to be introduced to the community and to the district they would be able to to work from that so that would come as part of that workshop briefing is there anything else from hr that you would need i see misfonomous i don't know the legality of this but through the magic of zoom or yep through why can't

178we have him here live and have him the way dr savage sits there i'm seeing already mr free bruno's hand up but see just saying okay let's have him talk to miss stilwell and her department there we go it's off to another whole department this is our employee and i feel like as board members we need to have our hands on every single thing and after we talk with him and get an idea of what would work then we direct communication isn't that how it works that would be there almost four years i think that's how it works not to just say here's the privilege you take care of it no yes ma'am we need to say this is what we would like to see done so it sounds like you would need a meeting

179sooner rather than later in order to get that moving what is the legality on having him actually talk to us live still eating so what i will say is i know i would just i guess piggybacking what dr savage said dr bernier is working on a transition plan he has indicated that he has some thoughts he's indicated that the way that he would like to for example start going to cabinet via zoom he would like to start meeting some of the other staff via zoom so he does have a plan that he's you know putting together and that i'm sure he wants to present to the board so that the board is aware and the board can you know put in their two cents in terms of i agree with this perhaps do this or

180perhaps do that so perhaps the best thing would be to have a conference or a conversation with dr dr bernier at the at another workshop so that the board is fully aware in terms of what his plan is what his proposal is and then the board can give input and then from there everybody knows what they're doing and if other departments need to be involved at that point those departments can be directed to be involved so that would need to be i'm sorry go ahead dr savage i just wanted to reiterate one of the things that i really appreciated in my conversation with dr bernier was a clear observance of the contractual side of this you know he reminded me he does not have a negotiated contract at this point right so he was very

181respectful of all the boundaries what were in play and so i think that's something that i think is also a part of this in my mind he just kind of put it on my radar that i needed to be very cautious in terms of having him engage directly with staff and we all have to just there is a sequence to these things and it's done for protection of all parties involved including him he's not here to speak on his own behalf but he's a very extremely competent candidate and i think he's somebody who now that he's the selection moving forward i just want to make sure we're respecting his boundaries as well in this the role that he will be serving and we're saying the there's no jeopardy and anybody doing anything right in addition

182to that i can also tell you that his time frame is not immediate i mean he has things that he has to wrap up in his current district he has things that he has to wrap up from a personal point of view as well so dr bernier is not going to be here tomorrow it's going to take some time so i just want the board to know that it's going to it's going to take a couple of months before he really can completely get involved miss patricka and in in terms of contract negotiations i that's where i think hr needs to come in i think that if we could direct attorney dupree bruno to work with hr to find out what competitive compensation packages are and i'm not talking salary because that was pretty well

183advertised but i know that there are some creative clauses in superintendent contracts across the state that could be utilized i would hate to be in the same position we found ourselves in when we were negotiating dr savage's contract which you came back and said well you only told me to negotiate this i want to see the full full body of negotiating tools brought to the table for this contract and rely to a certain extent on your expertise which would require input and data from hr am i making sense so i will say that the contract that will be the base for this contract is not a contract that we have used before i have reached out to some of my colleagues who are also going through superintendent changes for a new base contract in addition

184what is important in terms of dr bernier's point of view in terms of what he would like has already been sent to me i already know exactly what he's looking for so i'm comfortable with with the exception of if the board wants to take a look at salary again and look at cop race i think brain associates did that before but if the board is inclined to do that's definitely an hr function but in terms of terms i'm very comfortable based on what i have already received from dr bernier's representative and my conversations and some other information that i have with regards to superintendent contracts so do we want to see about him sharing with us his entry plan then i mean that's something i think that would be imperative for us to to know

185what that looks like yes yeah miss skins but what i keep hearing though is that the contractual piece has to be in place before we can talk about all of that i mean legally we need to get to the point where there is at least some semblance of a contract before we ask so what are you going to do i mean the transition piece and the contract piece are two separate issues that need to be dealt with separately the contract needs to be done in order to move ahead we can still move ahead in our shell or template of what we think a transition should look like and then when it is contractually okay look at what he has to add to it as well okay so are we looking i just wanted to clarify

186when i use the word transition for me i'm looking at it from a legal lens and i'm thinking of the contractual terms for dr bernier as well as the contractual terms for dr savage which also needs to be wrapped up so that's what i'm looking at when i'm talking about transition are those two contracts well and that's what i'm saying it is too you know right so what miss getting is if i'm understanding and maybe without a contract with him at this moment whether it's consultant or whatever that looks like we do not have the right to be asking him for for anything well i mean if i may yes what and god forbid anything happened with the contractual peace and it fell through and then we have built our whole transition on something that

187is has to start all over again that's awesome it sounds like we're discussing two different things a transit a contract and an onboarding process yes that's what i'm saying so we have the transition in terms of the contractual obligations and whether and then the consultant piece might actually be a separate contract in and of itself and then we have an on-boarding process for once the contract is in place how do we go about the introduction and the actual onboarding of dr bernier implementing miss morgan yes so i think that board attorney and chair should come back to us within seven days seven calendar days with an answer to the question of how will we provide an opportunity for dr bernier to engage with us on a formal basis and that can be and the recommendation

188can be as part of the overall contract for that far along or as a separate contract but at least give us something substantive to respond to so let's start with the piece how are we going to interact with dr bernier and that needs to be done in in a legal way and then you know as as ms patrick has said bite by bite we eat this elephant but i think that's the first bite and then after that work on the onboarding as a whole and the other protocols for what that looks like with everybody so just seven okay seven days miss gittins yeah i mean i just i think dr savage has spoken with him and the attorney has spoken with them dr savage is the one that directs staff to do whatever so i

189would say that the two of them should work together with him to find out what the potential is moving forward i mean i i'm having a little bit of angst that every time anything comes up it's being given to the chair to do this and the chair to do that i think that's why we have staff and that reports to us to get that done and then come back to us as a whole group dr savage would not be speaking to dr brunier about his contract that is something that the attorney will be doing and that is what was asked to bring that back how do we how do we make that work where he can come in which is per contract it would have to be some sort of contract or agreement with legal

190for him to be able for us to be able to have this conversation with him and then begin in the onboarding and having that soup the nuts making sure everything is you know in order with everybody again i will say that there are two separate pieces to this the first piece is legal and the attorney should take care of that piece then we move on to anything else afterwards any other comments i think we need consensus on what ms morgan just suggested do we not miss morgan can you please restate what you are asking so as a preface seven days you have information that you have gotten from fsba and attorney dupuis bruno has gotten information from colleagues i think the two of you need to work together to come back to the board by

191a week from today and say okay this is this is what we have learned and this is what we are proposing for the board and so that next week this time we can have this conversation right i mean does that make sense the only the only thing i would change there is this is not what we're proposing but these are your options yeah yeah okay well whatever yeah thank you the chair to come up with proposals just information gathering and these are your options perfect thank you so that's by the 14th yes the so this recommendation is that the board chair and the board attorney return with options for next steps a week from today so that the board can give direction with respect to next steps i have a question because okay so what

192i mean i've spoken to people as well can we all bring back information on the 14th sure maybe send it i'm sorry send it or send it to the board and we incorporate it into the discussion right a week from we're going to be sending out to everybody yeah yeah okay so can i get consent mr preet bernice for clarification are we going to have a meeting to discuss this on the 14th we can forward the information out to everybody by the 14th just florida yep that way that's the seven days and they all have it to digest i know when's our next meeting i was thinking we meet week from today what are we doing is hopefully we'll tell you i don't want to wait two weeks and i don't think we should miss

193roman do you know what the next meeting is tomorrow other than tomorrow next week is there a deadline for the contract information with the attorney can anyone answer that i'm sorry i didn't hear the question is there any deadline or time certain for the attorney that is working with dr vernier's attorney to for the contract for at least a draft of the contract do we have a date for that well our next our next meeting is the 22nd i just looked at that miss dupree bruno can you do you have an answer to that so my recommendation to the board was that by march that a final contract be presented at a briefing and then be presented in an action meeting and in between that time that the drafts are forwarded to the board for

194feedback and comment individually so that all of that can be incorporated even prior to that if there are any feedback or concerns or comments or things that the board would like to have included in the contract that be sent as well individually that was my original recommendation so are you saying then if i may that yes there would not be a time that we would discuss as a whole just individually no no no no no no no it would be a time to discuss as a whole i think we could have a briefing to discuss it as a whole okay so can we put down some time certains you said sometime in march can we just look at dates and say backing into it this is the date we want to have a final contract

195on an action meeting for a vote and then to back ourselves into that when will we brief with a draft and when will we workshop with the draft that time okay so the 29th is sorry miss fisher go ahead please yeah through the chair attorney bruno do you have an idea a ballpark figure of a start date for dr bernier i know he indicated he needed some time to relocate it will be each on there yes it probably i would say sometime in the spring april or may one of those two months so we do have a meeting march the briefing on march the 29th so can we have if that gives us if we're looking at going backwards to have the final but back into that what other days are we going to set

196a workshop to discuss the draft the briefing on the final i mean on on the 29th prior to an action meeting to approve it we should have had some workshop before and all i'm asking is to put that down as to a date so madam chair yes please march 7th and i'm not sure what's on the agenda for march 7th but march 7th is a workshop yes that could be a day where a draft of the contract can be presented we just we just pointed that out we just put our yeah we will not have time for that oh okay did you plan update that day i'm a little concerned i don't recall having briefings or workshops on contracts typically contract negotiations take place back there right and then the approval takes place at the

197table so i'm not sure that we should be briefing a contract well there could be right before the action vote if there's anything else that the board as a whole wants to discuss right before the action vote we could do that and then have the action vote that night that's what i was you know referencing but miss kittens was saying that she wanted something in addition to i was just asking but miss dupree bruno you had state so you had stated once we get the first whatever it's going to everyone and then individually they'll be sending you the information to you if there's any changes or if there's any additions or anything like that so that they have that no but we don't get involved in the semantics of the of the contract that's between

198dr bernier and his attorney and the school board attorney and hr we don't we don't approve it and change things we approve it if we want to once it comes to us but we don't work on it that's not our job right no we don't are you saying we don't get to say anything about just a second just like a policeman's kittens but we're gonna work on it but if he's insisting that we all wear red at the table every night we can push back you know what i mean like i agree we're not writing the contract but if there is something in the contract that i have a significant issue with i'm going to go to the board attorney and say i can't live with this i'm going to have to vote no against

199that contract right right yes so is everyone else in agreement with that yes okay so gosh i like this i just like clear direction from the board okay so i know what i'm doing so are we looking at bringing it back to your final at the final by march the 29th 29th that's great does everybody agree with that well i think that's mrs fisher yeah i think that attorney dupree bruno needs dr bernier's input about his timeline i think she kind of knows that sense of his timeline i think if it comes to the board by march 29th that will work for him okay okay so can can we agree upon march 29th as being coming back to us by mr miss morgan well so now okay so i don't understand now so we're going

200to hold off any interaction between staff and dr bernair until the 29th i'm look that's to me the contract is different than where i started with my recommendation which my ask which was that the chair and the board attorney simply bring to us a means by which we can formally engage dr berner to work with us between now and whenever so i don't know where we are so let's go back to the first one you're right miss morgan so the very first one was for us to work together to come back to the board in one week by the 14th to say this is how we can work with with dr bernier and the board does that make sense to you attorney dapi bruno yes okay so can i get consensus on that one please

201may i please ask a question so i still don't understand how can we negotiate how can we negotiate and work and plan with someone who does not have a contract with us that's my only concern this is why we're going to come back with options to you all to say these are the options that we have to make that happen where we can have that come competition the 29th is where we would have the final contract what i don't understand bottom line is how can we do this work with someone that we do not have a contractual agreement with that is my question understood and that's why in seven days we're going to come up with options on how we can make that happen so that we can move forward to the contract the full

202contract if i so do we have any other questions regarding that attorney general i'm sorry mr prieber so my understanding just to make sure that i'm clear is by next week for miss jordan and i to speak to dr bernier to find out what can be done in terms of him serving as a consultant until such time as the final contract can be approved by the board and he actually becomes superintendent that's what my understanding is from the request am i correct we agree options for the transfer that's what we're doing right now we're asking for the consensus on that on that item right there so do we have consensus on that item is he going to be paid as a consultant we don't know where we're looking for options and those are gonna come

203back in front of the board that's that's what we're seeking consensus on right now is to get those options in front of the board so i'm gonna ask one more time can i get consensus on that miss this morgan okay and miss kittens i can live with it okay mr pre-bruno you understand what we're doing now so my first first step is to work with madam chair in talking with dr bernier on options for him to serve as a consultant until such time as the contract is finalizing he becomes superintendent that's the first step by the by the 14th why the 14. okay madam chair is there are you planning to schedule a meeting next week or is this just going to be done through memo it'll be done through memo we were going to

204send it out thank you and so the next one would be once we figure out that then we will be able to have more communications and looking at the dates possibly march 29th but that's after we have we're able to communicate with him is that yeah am i understanding that tonight okay i just want to make sure that's where we're at though so everybody's on the same page so is there still a request for a workshop to go over this process are you going to wait until you receive the information next week before you move forward with that i think that makes the most sense yeah free bruno in the interim do i have the board's instruction i just want to make sure that i'm clear with what i'm supposed to be doing am i

205entering into negotiations with dr bernier as well for his final contract i want to make sure that i'm clear as to what i'm supposed to be doing yes she's working on negotiations on his final contract as well yes that's your job miss fisher i can't live with it skittens whatever the board decides okay i need you to whatever the board decides i will go with the will of the board thank you so i think madam chair i would ask that you with the board members who had them sideways to find out what can be done to bring them on board because what i don't want is confusion in terms of what i'm supposed to be doing and who's responsible for what and then i so i really want to make sure that the board is

206on board as to my responsibilities thank you mr fisher well i think we need to take it a step at a time if he's going to be a consultant and he's going to fisher can you speak can you see something yeah i think we need to take it a step at a time if dr bernier is going to be a consultant in order to communicate freely and confidentially with dr savage and us then i mean we do consultant contracts all the time as far as his final contract i mean if he's not going to be here for a couple of months i think and he's working on an entry plan i think we need to give him the opportunity to present that first and then work through his representative with attorney bruno to to complete

207the final contract i believe he would she would be working with both of them am i correct you would be working with dr b as well as his attorney or whoever his person is what i can say is that the onboarding process i think this is what the board is really concerned about and that's what we're trying to figure out what's the way for the board to be able to speak to dr bernier in terms of the onboarding and being able to talk to dr savage and all of that in terms of the actual permanent contract he's already submitted some of his requests for his permanent contract i mean they yeah they're they're they are interested in starting to work on that and get that going just so the board knows and miss kittens yeah

208i'm not trying to be difficult i agree with miss fisher it can get muddled if we are have him as a consultant at the same time we're working on a permanent contract it just sounds a little bit scary to me i understand what you're saying but we would have to be very very very careful to separate the two as a consultant what are we working on as a you know a contract what are we working on so i understand what mrs fisher was saying about you know taking it a bite at a time i'm just my concern is overlapping that and i know you're saying yes and we understand and all but it can get kind of muddled up there if he's making decisions as a consultant while his contract is being done i think

209bless you i think there's some confusion he's not making decisions as a consultant it's given him the ability to have conversations with us that's what that consultant does and this happens more more than less where they do this so that gives them the ability to come in to start familiarizing themselves with their staff chiefs us whoever it gives them that ability but in saying that as mr dupree bruno just stated they already have started sending information to her and she has to she can't just sit on that information so that's why i believe she's asking does she continue to move forward with that information and start working on putting that together which i to me it's like why would she not do that well if i may i'm not saying that she shouldn't the main

210thing right now to me is that we get a contract to solidify the fact that we have a new superintendent this is when he will start this is what he will do that is the main issue for us to get done the other part of the onboarding and having him have you know have a say so in in all of that part i just and i would like for you to check with the the people that you've spoken with at what point is this consultant do the is that after they have done a contract because my understanding from people that i have spoken with you know after the contract is done but there's this period of time before they start but they know that they will start that there is an agreement and from march

211something until april something when they start is when they do they let me finish is when they would do that consultant piece so that during that period of time we don't have two superintendents but they are able to overlap that's when the onboarding happens that's when all of the rest of the stuff starts and that will be the options that we will be bringing back to you so mr burno do you need any other so just to make sure that did you take a the last comment we took the consensus with two on the side but then we said that we were going to talk to the two board members so can we take another consensus what can can i from what i just said are you in agreement with what i just said as

212an attorney do you understand what i'm trying to say i do understand what you're trying to say misskins i think there's a little bit of confusion in terms of onboarding consultants roles permanent superintendent when that contract comes in i have it clear in my mind but what it is that there's one piece for the board which is to figure out how you're going to onboard the superintendent that is the board's responsibility you work with dr bernier to make that happen he's working on his plan he needs to present it to the board so that everybody can be on the same page in order for him to do that what's the going to be that legal connection that allows him to speak to staff allows them to speak doc savage come to the board that's the

213piece that miss morgan requested be reviewed and provided options by next week in the interim you have already agreed that this is going to be your superintendent so we need to stop working on that permanent contract for it to be in place in time because time is on our side so we can do a really good contract and negotiate well so that we can have that in place for when he starts and you can have a smooth transition between your current superintendent and your permanent superintendent so three aspects i completely understand what you're saying for me it doesn't muddle just because i can i can see it but i do understand how it can be confusing what's this consultant going to do in the interim the interim position he's not really working as a consultant

214per se he's looking for a legal standing to be able to talk to staff talk to the superintendent work on this transition plan in between time that's my understanding of what is vnx and that's my understanding what you're saying miss kittens does that make sense i it does i do i still have angst about the final contact of making sure that we have a contract i mean what if he gets in here and he does talking to staff and he does this and that and suddenly decides you know i really don't want to do this okay so we don't have any binding contract or anything that's what i'm saying and i know it's moot because everyone else disagrees so i just am concerned about that and you're you're correct he can always until you know

215sign sealed and delivered change his mind he can always do that and even when the permanent contract is in place he can always say i don't want to work you know here anymore so you're absolutely correct that does and can happen i'm sorry miss vaughn okay so dr our bernier dr savage is our superintendent until dr bernier is sworn in if i'm remembering dr savage's contract if something happens and dr bernier is like oh i don't want to be here we still have a superintendent and we say to ray and associates back to the drawing board so i don't see that it's a problem and anyway i just wanted to clarify it for anybody out there listening we're not going to have two superintendents at any time and we're not going to have zero superintendents

216at any time thank you for that clarification if i could madam chair miss vaughn is absolutely correct so even in the permanent contract the date of the swearing in would be the start date the effective date so dr savage remained superintendent until such time as that swearing-in occurs which will be dr bernie your's start date can i can i make my joke wait let me make sure before you make a joke mr preet bruno are you are you good now or do you need anything else from us because of all the conversations i want to make sure that i'm clear and i get very direct instruction from the board the board wants me to continue on with the negotiations of dr bernier's permanent contract if i may see if we can have a consensus madam

217chair just to make sure that i am clear thank you thank you so the joke was your joke kane's look on dr savage's face right now i'm not entirely sure we'll always have a superintendent that was the joke i'm so glad you made the joke because i was gonna make the joke don't not so fast but no no in truth truly it's this is the work i know this is not it doesn't happen very often thankfully that you all have to go through it i'm also happy to reach out to some of the more experienced superintendents that i know across the state and say do you have any recommendations on how that works so while we look fsba certainly i think they're probably the best resource in terms of our state in terms of this

218type of work but i would say i'm happy to reach out to them some of them have been superintendents in other states as well so i'm happy to share in writing any best practices that i hear from any of my colleagues and no i'm i'm here until dr bernier so don't worry all right that was really was a joke i swear i was thinking it too though that's the ironic part so miss mcclung yes ma'am are there any other requests for workshops before i close out all right thank you much y'all have a great afternoon thank you and we come to our closure does anyone have anything for the good of the order miss morgan no i'm going to bring some good of the order tomorrow thank you thank you not right now thank you

219thank you miss kittens i'll go to the order for today yes i'm going to i'm requesting that tomorrow i have a picture that i've sent in and the student will be here tomorrow so i'm requesting the opportunity to present that student and what they did earlier in the meeting rather than waiting until my comments at the end if i may you talking about the student rep the student one no this is a student that did something at one of the high schools and i just wanted to recognize them and in order to do that if they have to wait until the end of the meeting with school the next day i don't know if they could i'm sorry to be a jerk but we have a process for board recognitions of students and student achievement

220so in other words i'll just tell them not to come then because they cannot stay until the end of the meeting i'm just requesting just to and the chair can do it i have the picture and a short statement as to what the student did and i'm just asking you guys to give me the opportunity to recognize earlier rather than later comment miss morgan i agree that we have a process a way of recognizing i am i am loath to step off that path so okay let me know then when so it would just have to wait until my comments at the end yeah that make yeah and show the picture i just think that we have to be kept very and i appreciate any child that whatever they do i just think that we

221have to make sure that we're not setting precedence for certain kids certain groups because even when we had one group that come in and spoke i can't recall what it was but then somebody else had come out and said oh well because you just said a precedence now you're going to have to let us do that they haven't asked us for that yet and i can't recall what it was but it would be in that respect so i would be real leery with that as well miss vaughn i don't know with you what's your thought process on that well i i think we do have we do have a process and i think the time would be for during board member comments and show the picture and say what the child did thank you miss

222did you have anything else to bring to go to the order the skittens no i did not thank you no thank you oh you're gonna ask me i have nothing dr savage i have no comments mr pre-bruno i have no comments thank you thank you miss roman no thank you very much so yeah no other business to come before this board this meeting is adjourned thank you