School Board Workshop: May 6, 2025

001Good afternoon everyone. It's Tuesday, May 6, 2025. This is a schoolboard workshop and the time is 100 p.m. Sergeant-at-Arms. Has the front lobby been attended to? Yes. Thank you. Dr. Carlin is unavailable today. In her steed, please. In her seat, please welcome Deputy Superintendent Dr. Ken Savage. there are 10 items on the agenda today. Federal legislative update, job descriptions, recruitment and retention, budget overview, construction change order report for March 2025, construction projects by monthly update for May 2025, policy review briefing, first reading, value adjustment board, public comment, and good of the order or other business. Per board protocol, each board member should strive for four minutes for initial comment and two minutes for followup with a total of 10 minutes during today's discussions. To begin today, we will start with our federal legislative update. Presenting

002is Chrissy Hulahan, Riley Kemp, and David Nuland, Tracy Poe, and Dan McFoul from Ballard Partners. We will they will be joining us virtually. Thank you for being here. Good afternoon, Deputy Superintendent Dr. Savage and board members. We are excited to share with you for the first time our federal community project funding requests. As mentioned, joining us today are Tracy Poe, Dan McFall with Ballard, and Chief Nulan to help answer any questions you may have. Before today's meeting, everyone was provided with the two one-pagers shown on the screen detailing our federal community project funding requests. These will also be made available for the public on our website following today's meeting. Today we will be providing detailed information about our community funding project requests which present a vital component of our federal engagement strategy. These requests will

003allow us to secure direct federal investments for specific district needs. Next, I will go ahead go ahead and ask Tracy and Dan to explain high level what the federal community project funding request process is. Dan and Tracy, are you available? Might be muted. Yes. Perfect. We can hear you on our end. If you would like to go ahead and give a high overview of that process, please. good afternoon to the board and Christy. good afternoon. But I know my colleague Dan McFoul is on and has a limited amount of time. So I'm happy to be here with you all. And first of all I'd like to bring greetings on behalf of Valor Partners in Washington DC. then if you would like to go first, I know you have a limited amount of time and then

004I'd be happy to talk about the community project request from Lee County Public Schools. Yeah, Tracy, why don't you talk about the community funded project requests first and then I'll get into atmospherics in Washington and you know the legislative outlook. So the legislative appropriations process in Washington usually begins with the president submitting his budget. We are in a new administration is as all of you know the Trump administration came in January 21st. So anytime we start with a new administration things are a little bit slower than they normally would be. But begins with the president submitting his budget to Congress and once that budget is submitted the process formally begins and the president's budget is submitted to Congress. The appropriations committee then has an opportunity to set budget limits for each of the 12 appropriations

005bills. we have mandatory spending. That's predetermined spending that does not require annual appropriations. Those are entitlement programs like social security, Medicare, etc. that's about 72 73% of the federal spending. and then there's discretionary spending and the 12 appropriations bills make up the discretionary spending. That's about 23 to 24% of the federal budget. And that is where the community project funding falls. Those 12 bills include agriculture, commerce, justice, defense, energy and water, financial services and general government, homeland security, interior, environment and related agencies, labor, health and human services, legislative branch appropriations, military construction and veteran affairs, National Security, Department of State and related agencies, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. so once the appropriations committee sets the funding numbers for those 12 bills, the process begins. This year we are fortunate to be able to have what

006we call community project funding. Many of you may know that as what's called earmarks in the past there are guidelines that are set by the appropriations committee and each member has an opportunity to file in in the house and the senate has an opportunity to put in request. each house member has a 15 request limit. And in the case for the two members that we submitted for Lee County Public Schools, it was Representative Byron Donald's and Representative Stwie. we submitted two requests and Chrissy, I don't know if you have the slide or everyone has the packet. Riley and I were going to get into that next. So if you want to switch over to Dan, we could do that if that works for you. Okay. Would you? Yes, ma'am. Okay. We can talk about the

007two requests in more in more detail in in a moment, but we did submit two requests. One was for the vestibules and the school the school hardening. and the other request was the other request Chrissy was for the systems the entry the entryway request and we can talk about those further. Thanks Tracy. I'm going to talk just more generally legislative outlooks in Washington and in Congress and try to give you guys a better sense of timing of when the House and Senate will get together and pass their appropriations bills for discretionary spending for fiscal year 2026. I'm sure a lot of you have heard a lot of the focus right now in Washington is on the budget reconciliation process. The budget reconciliation process is an authorizing process as opposed to an appropriations process. So, this

008is just Congress setting a budget for itself and then adjusting that budget. It's basically a blueprint for the appropriators to follow as they're funding the federal agencies throughout the through these different appropriations bills. the main reason the House and Senate are working on the budget reconciliation process is to extend the expiring Trump tax cuts that expire on September 30th 2025, the end of fiscal year 25. So the House is going first. They're they're working through the process. the House is paying for the tax cuts. So, it's a $4.5 trillion 10-year value that they have to trim from the budget or or add u you know, revenue streams into the federal government to offset that. So, there's a lot of cuts in in the House process. The Senate has a slightly different set of rules and

009they don't have to pay for the additional cuts, sorry, the additional tax credits. So, it's it's less of a fiscal impact on the agencies and therefore fewer cuts through the process. The House has set a target of Memorial Day to get the budget reconciliation process finished. there are committees that are marking up their portion of the bill this week and then next week the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which are two very critical pieces of the budget reconciliation process, they're going to mark up their bill, which means they amend it and send it to the full house for you know consideration. I would not be surprised if that deadline doesn't push into June. there was just a lot of work to be done and there's a very narrow

010majority in the House, a four- seat majority for the Republicans. So, it's it's a very tedious process, and tenuous process moving forward. So, I would not be surprised if that pushed into June. The Senate's a little bit behind the House. they're going to really get into their process in June. So, we could see movement in July, but I wouldn't be surprised if they if they pushed until after the August recess into the month of se September, sometime shortly after Labor Day. U I go into all this detail when I talk about this because this takes up valuable floor time in in the House and Senate. And it's going to affect and probably slow down the appropriations process. Even though the committees in the House and the committees the Senate are beginning to put together their

011pieces of the appropriations bills, the time on the floor to to actually pass the bills is getting limited. I would anticipate that the Congress ends up passing a continuing resolution to keep the federal government open and funded at 2025 levels rather than moving to fiscal year 2026. I would expect that they would do that for probably a three-month period of time or to the end of a calendar year. And I would anticipate you know best guess right now is looking at a December timeline for the full appropriations package passing the House and Senate. So that would be the timeline for final notification as far as the congressional project funding process and when we would know exactly that the monies would be coming. We will have you know some indications along the way as the House

012and Senate pass their individual bills. We'll be able to identify our projects that made it into the appropriations process, but until it's signed by the president, it's it's not law. It's it's not the case. And I anticipate it's going to be end of this calendar year before that process is completed by by Congress. And I will pass it back with that and happy to answer any questions about the process. Thanks, Dan. And one of the things I want to just add is that we will, as Dan mentioned, we will be tracking and working with Chrissy and Riley throughout this process. We'll be tracking the community project funding throughout the intercom systems as well as the best of you projects. and letting you all know along the way where they are each step of the way

013through the markup process. as well as once the bills hit the floor and as they go through conference and are reconciled between the House and the Senate and making sure that we work with our House members as well as our senators so that we can keep the projects in the bill and hopefully maintain them as we get towards the end of the year. Thank you, Tracy and Dan. Next, we will give a high level overview of the school district's requests. Our first federal community project funding request is to assist the district in replacing outdated intercom systems that will strengthen the district's safety and security. Some of the details we will go over with you include who we submitted the requests with, why it's important, and how much the total project will cost, the amount of

014our request, and how much the district has invested in this far. We submitted this project with Congressman Byron Byron Donald as mentioned previously due to his district covering the majority of the Lee County School District. The project funding requests require us to take into consideration the amount of constituents impacted within the congressional district. Now, why is this project important? Safety is our district's number one priority. With increasing threats and incidents nationwide, we must be proactive rather than reactive in protecting our schools. Currently with this ask, we're addressing technical challenges with intercom systems at 57 schools that require modernization to ensure reliable emergency communications. These upgrades will enhance our ability to quick and alert and inform during all situations, strengthening our existing safety measures for approximately 57,000 students and 11,400 staff members. This upgrade will modernize

015four legacy systems, integrate with sentic panic alerts, panic alerts for Alyssa's law compliance, and address technological vulnerabilities. We've already seen how effective alert systems have helped save students lives through rapid AED deployment. In today's environment, consistent and reliable communication is essential. This investment ensures dependable district-wide alerts and comprehensive emergency coverage throughout all school areas, demonstrating our proactive commitment to the safety of everyone in our schools. Our total project costs include including projects we have already invested in as a district is $50,21,861. And for the federal community project funding, we are requesting $7 million towards this, which will help us finalize modernizing our intercom systems at all of our school locations. This far, the district has spent and committed with grants included a total of $43,21,861, which means out of the 50,21,861, the district will have

016an 86% matching. This demonstrates our commitment to local funding participation, which strengthens our request, showing we are investing not only our own resources, but also not just seeking external financial support as well. Our second funding request alo also focuses on school safety and hardening our schools with the installation of vestibules at the remaining schools that do not yet have them. Before we get too far into this one, you may be wondering what is a vestibial? A vestibial is an enclosed space or small room that creates a buffer zone between exterior and interior doorways, serving as a security checkpoint where visitors can be verified before gaining access to the main building pictured on the screen above. We also submitted this project with Congressman Byron Donald's for the same reason for the first request that this project

017will cover the majority of his district and the constituents he serves. This project is important to increase safety measures with the addition of 65 secure vestibules that create a crucial secondary barrier once going through our open gate security systems. This enclosed space between exterior and interior doorways significantly improves our security posture. These enhancements provide both immediate protection and valuable buffer zones during emergencies. By implementing systems that meet national safety standards recommended by experts and law enforcement will strengthen our security protocols while maintaining a positive learning environment. This project represents a necessary and responsible step forward in protecting our students and our staff. The total projected cost for all phases is $23.4 million. We are asking for $10,50,000 to cover phase one. The community project funding of $10,50,000 complemented by $4,384,000 and district funds represents a

01843% 43.6% match, which again represents our district's financial commitment and shared investment approach. And with that, we want to say thank you for your time. I would also like to take a moment to thank the county commissioners, specifically Commissioner Hammond, the Lee County Sheriff's Office, the Cape Coral Police Department, the Fort Myers Police Department, and the Santaelf Police Department for their letters of support for both of these requests. And at this time, are there any comments, questions, or items for discussion? And I believe we will still have Tracy as well connected if you have, federal questions. Thank you. Dr. Savage, do you have anything? No, I don't. I stand ready to answer any questions that we can and just to thank the government relations team as well as our federal lobbyist and Mr. Nuland for

019their assistance on this work. All right. Thank you, Mr. Fischer. We'll start with you. Thank you, Chair. thank you for the presentation. I appreciate it. this question is more for Miss Pow and u Mr. McFall. appreciate the projects we're going forward with. looks excellent. But with all the changes in DC, especially the Department of Education, right now, we're looking as a future as a school district. How are you as a company going to engage federal stakeholders? Essentially, what I'm asking you is what is your value to us as a school district and the taxpayers of Lee County? Well, thank thank you for that question. I do want to just compliment your team first of all and let you know that you have really strong projects and let me just say that these projects are actually

020Department of Homeland Security projects. they're not Department of Education projects. But with that said, I think that we are in a time when having federal representation, it could not be more critical because of all of the very changes that are taking place with this administration. It's really important to have access to people who have their finger on the pulse of all the change and influence. And I believe that the team here at Ballot Partners does have its finger on the pulse of the change and influence knowing how and when to make the connections and making sure that you understand the workings of government. who to call, knowing when to push and when to pull. when to when when to make sure that you're you know need to legislate or you know when to regulate and

021how to navigate the agencies that are involved. how to access information about grants and opportunities and the changing nature of of all of of the grants that are that are taking place and and changing with Doge and all of those things. It's really important to make sure that your federal representatives can help you navigate that. And I know Dan may want to chime in here, but I think that now more than ever as administrations change and the federal government and the face of the federal government changes, having federal representation is critical. Thank you Tracy and thank you Fisher for the question. Appreciate that. So as Tracy noted the there is a lot of delta happening right now within the new administration. We're seeing some restructuring across a variety of agencies including Department of Education, Noah,

022HUD, Small Business Administration, you know, some areas that we depend on for for grant monies. so, you know, Tracy's expertise again allowed us to make our through the Department of Homeland Security rather than Department of Education where where funding is more secured and more predictable moving forward. But, you know, Tracy also hit the nail on the head. Being able to navigate and keep up with these changes is critically important at this juncture. Some of these things are literally changing hour to hour and dayto day. So, you know, our team is our full team is committed to tracking those changes and adjusting where funding requests, grant applications, and other places you know, might go in into the federal government. You know, the two biggest things I think that we bring to the table is number one,

023our knowhow. Tracy spent nearly 20 years on the Hill working for appropriators. There's no finer expert on the appropriations process, how it actually works inside the committee rooms and how the discussions happen within the specific members office. Tracy knows that very well. I also spent 20 years on Capitol Hill on the authorizing side, you know, working for a variety of Florida member members of Congress and understand the authorizing process as well as the appropriations process. But, you know, the other aspect that we brings is our our relationships, the folks that we know within the Florida delegation, within the House and Senate, Republican and Democrat leadership, and within this new Trump administration. That's where we can bring relationship building into the process. And again, thank you for the question. Thank you. That answers my question. I

024appreciate your work. Yes, sir. Mr. Ribble. Yeah. Can you give us an idea what the timeline is on a project like this? Yes, sir. Again, we're we're we're we're basing this on on recent history in Congress and also taking into consideration the budget reconciliation process that's moving the spring, taking up a lot of valuable floor time. I think we're Tracy and I are both anticipating a calendar end of calendar year end omnibus appropriation bill or multibus appropriations bill where they combine several of the 12 individual appropriations bills into little packages of of bills moving forward. the last couple of years, Congress has not met met its statutory deadline of September 30th to pass all 12 appropriations bills that have them on the president's desk. They've been typically in December and sometimes as late as March.

025So right now we're forecasting a December deadline for when we should know when our projects are finally going to look like and be presented to the president for signature. Right. And so you would be drawing down funds in the, you know, first quarter of 20 26 26. Okay, Miss Gioanelli, I'll be quick. first of all, I just want to thank you. This is the and thank the government team because this is the first time in my tenure and I've been on the board now for two terms and going into my third term and this has never been this robust. First of all, we've never had a lobbyist in the time that I've u been on the board. So, I'm excited of the monies that I know we've missed out on monies because this is a

026conversation that I've had with two prior superintendent for the last couple years finding these things out. We're miss there's earmarks that we're missing and so I'm excited about what the Ballard team is going to bring to Lee County. So, and I just want to thank you for your efforts. Yes, ma'am. Thank you for your kind comments. We certainly appreciate that and as you noted, this process of the community project funding is not is a zero- sum game. There are winners and losers in this. So, every edge that we could give the county school board and, you know, being with the right members, having conversations with the right chairman on the on the appropriations committees and giving us the best chance for funding is what Tracy and I are here to do. And again, we appreciate

027your kind comments and we look forward to working hard for the team. Board members, any other comments? Okay, thank you. Thank you, Tracy and Dan. Thank you, Tracy and Dan. Next, on the agenda are job descriptions. Presenting to us this afternoon is Dr. Shannana Johnston and Susette Rivera. Good afternoon. Am I on? All right. Good afternoon, Madame Chair, board members, deputy super deputy superintendent Savage and board chair board attorney Duprio. It is a pleasure to be here today to present to you many job descriptions. we have five revisions and then several that are part of the reorganization. And so we're just going to open up this time for discussion and any questions that you have. Thank you. Board members, any comments or questions? Mr. Fiser. Thank you. Dr. Johnson, can you give me a just

028a quick overview of the human resources representative and kind of what their role is or will be? Yes, sir. currently we have several positions within human resources that cover our front desk area. So this person would be like a clerk typist type of position that would be a representative as people come into our area. the first really representative of human resources to greet people and to direct people where they need to go within our human resources division. Thank you. And I'm kind of glad to hear that especially as that you know the first person as you come to human resources having that the kind of the spectacular customer service. I'm looking forward to that. That's all I have. Thank you. Any other questions or comments, board members, on job descriptions, Mr. Ribble? Yeah, I just

029have one. as far as the assistant director for capital maintenance, do we have somebody in mind already for that or no? I don't believe so. I can take that. so this is one of the positions that we open up to the field to apply. so if the board were to approve this position, our intention would be to advertise that position tomorrow. Thank you, Miss Jordan. So thank you, Mr. Ribble. So with that saying that most of these positions though that we are approving there are human capital already tied into to these positions with the exception of that one. Yeah, great great question. So, these these positions and only the and I'm only referring to the ones that are a direct result of the reorganization work. you know, those are all with an intention of a

030July one start for all of those positions. Every single one of them is part of our budgeted agreement which we mentioned to the board and brief the board on showing kind of the different movement of the different positions. this one, the specific director over capital planning maintenance would again supervise two specific areas. That would be the planning department and the maintenance department. Each one of those is led by an assistant director position as well. Any other questions? Okay, that's all I have. Oh, Miss Juvenelli, so out of these positions, how many are going to start to advertise? You're going to advertise starting tomorrow. Like, can you because there's a lot here. so I'm curious. Yeah. Are every one of these going to be advertised or No, ma'am. We have 11 positions that will be advertised

031tomorrow from this list. Yes. Thank you, Miss Jordan. Thank you, M. Vanilla. You made me think again. So, out of 31 new positions, because five are revised, so there's 31. And out of the 31, there's 11 that will have to be advertised. All the other ones are being people are already being placed in those other positions and they're just waiting for us to approve this so that they can be placed there. Does that make sense what I'm saying? I just want to be precise as we try to answer that. So obviously number of job descriptions here and I really appreciate just want to give a moment to just really recognize the tremendous work that the HR division has done to kind of organize this work because they're having to simultaneously balance job descriptions but also

032the implications it has on our employees. And so I just want to give a nod to a tremendous amount of work the HR division has done in that respect. So to answer your question directly, we do have a number of employees within this area that would be transferred pending board approval of course. and again we've given the employees the front and notice to understand how this would impact their particular area. We've communicated with those employees so they're aware of what we would be bringing forward as a to the board as a recommendation. and then of course if the board were to accept that recommendation then we would move forward with what we've communicated to those employees and that we have organized in that in that list of of different folks. So then if I may

033so once this is approved then those people other than the 11 would then be notified and then in July when they would come before us to approve all the employees again. Is that correct? So, as the reappointments that come in June, all of the subsequent moves with existing employees that are being transferred or any of those different actions would all be coming in front of the board with a July 1 start date. That's correct. Miss Ganelli. So, the 11 new positions, they're they're technically new and right or they're not they're not they're open, I should say. Right. So, are those all within the budget have been budgeted? Are these going to be in theuh 20 26 budget? I'm happy to to jump on that as well. So, the yes, when we proposed the reorganization, that

034part of that was demonstrating the the budget. We're supporting all those units for a July one start date. that is that is absolutely how it is was all designed to be funded. Pleasure. Seeing no other questions, thank you so much. Thank you. Moving on, next is the recruitment and retention presentation by Dr. Shannon Johnston, Cheryl Neely, and Shereice Trent. All right. Well, hello again. All right. Good afternoon. We are here today to share with you a recruitment and retention update. I would like to begin by reviewing the agenda for today's presentation. First, we will be sharing the results of the four-month recruitment initiative and what we learned from this initiative. Then we will share a transparent view into the current state of our retention efforts and strategically where we will focus on our next steps.

035Finally, we will have time for board feedback and discussion. We realize within the envision 2030, one of our strategic priorities that align to our vision and mission is recruiting and developing and retaining highly effective staff. However, for this presentation, we are going to hone in on recruiting and retaining exceptional teachers and aligning this to our which is aligned to our most recent priorities. So, to begin, we will give you an update on the four-month recruitment initiative that began in January of this year. At the start of the four-month initiative, we re we reported 211 instructional vacancies. After completing an audit of the original 211 vacancies, we now have 31 that remain open and advertised. This is a decrease of 179 vacancy advertisements with an 85% decrease. We have 17 of these that are core instructional.

036So I'm going to share with you the difference between total and core instructional self-contained classrooms are student self-contained classrooms teachers that have students in their classroom and ESC are considered our core classrooms teachers like coaches speech and language pathologists so on and so forth would be and considered within the total if that makes sense. We learned many things from this process of the fourmonth recruitment initiative. We have many audiences with bachelor's degrees that we tapped. Guest teachers, instructional support, district personnel and the community. The pathway, what we learned is the pathway to certification is complex and it takes a while, takes longer than we acknowledged in many cases. Every pathway is personal and unique, requiring custom support. Anyone who came or showed up to one of the events that we held was reached out to

037individually and walked through their own process and pathway to certification. Barriers were voiced in these conversations and we began to develop patterns and we began to mitigate these patterns through partnerships within our community. testing was one of them. We kept hearing patterns of I am having a hard time passing the subject area test. So, we partnered with learning liaison within our community and used some title funding and was able to provide test prep for some of our people trying to prepare for their certification test, subject area test. We had 49 who accessed that once finished. We also heard another barrier that over and over a pattern it's costly to take the subject area test which is $150 a pop. And we partnered with future makers which we're very grateful for who if these candidates reached

038out to they offered to pay for them to take the test. And we had some people take up take that offer up. Language was another barrier. So Mary Hamner and talent manager management partnered with Brian Mangan and they created and set up a course that our people could access to help with easing the language barrier. So, you can see that these this is this became more of a long-term initiative and not just a four-month initiative. What we learned is that what I just said is really becoming a long-term initiative, but our pipeline for having more certified teachers is becoming stronger, right, in the in the process. Priority Marketing was another partner that we used to reach out to our community in general with bachelor's degrees so that we could access our community as well. So,

039beginning at the end of March, we began calling the schools that still had openings from the original 211 and we talked through their master scheduling. We had conversations about current staff and certifications. Basically, we helped brainstorm to get creative so more of our students could have a certified teacher in front of them. We also began a cadence of meetings with our ESC district staff to begin brainstorming solutions. You can see here on the right that 11 of the 31 openings are speech and language pathologists. Through these conversations with our ESC district staff, we are now centralizing the hiring of our speech language pathologist, we are and we are entertaining the thought of using a virtual model for our speech speech language pathologist and we are moving and this is a national movement actually and we

040learned this from having some of our staff go to a conference moving from a case load to workload. This shift allows us to recognize not just how many students are served, but understanding the depth of the services they need and then aligning our resources accordingly. One more piece of data that's very interesting that we started tracking through this four-month initiative is how many teachers we have hired since August and how many have separated from our district. We have hired 197 teachers since August 28th of 2024. 197, however, 253 have separated from us. So, we are losing teachers faster than we can hire them. We know recruitment is important, of course, and our recruitment team, I want to give them kudos, is doing a phenomenal job recruiting teachers for our district, but we have to focus

041on retention, which is a large part of the why in regards to a part of the reorganization in human resources. We will now have a new department called organizational development and retention. We have three houses or we will have three houses beginning July 1st. And the first one you can see is human capital operations and the light orange that house basically focuses in on retention. I mean recruitment I'm sorry the middle house employee relations those departments basically focus on retention. However, the organizational development and retention department, all of the areas in in light blue are gaps. Transparently, we do not do a really great job at focusing on retention in our district. So, if you look at the areas of all division development, we do a great job at at developing our teachers, but what

042about our custodians and our cafeteria and all the other divisions? That has not been developed. career pathways, succession planning, our career pathways. We're just starting that work now by this reorganization. It is going to allow us to have career pathways for our employees, which in corporate America and our top quartortile school districts in the nation according to the greater city schools is one of the number one strategies that does not exist in Lee County and we're going to build it out. employee engagement, rewards and recognition, culture and job satisfaction, leadership development. We are just beginning to really get a handle on our leadership development, but still have a ways to go to build that out as well. So within our new organizational structure, we will establish metrics to measure our progress, retention rates, culture and

043engagement survey through handover, which is happening, I believe, within the next week or so. stay and exit surveys and interviews and then implementing high impact strategies that affect large percentages of our employees. We are too big to be dealing with one teacher, one person at a time. Our strategies have to affect a lot of people at a time to make the needle move and make sure that we are benchmarking against the best in class. We are taking a deliberate approach to retain staff and are positioning the department to respond to the need. So starting at the top of the circle with culture and engagement. This is the foundation of every school department, school and division. I'm sorry, every department, school and division. And it is all about leadership, which is why a robust leadership development

044program is critical and we will continue to build this out. Career pathways and succession planning. It's one of the top effects STRA size effect STRA sorry one of the top high effect size strategies from for employee retentions and the reorganization which I've already said has positioned us for this strategy compensation as you all know our bargaining teams right now are hard at work and we have to get competitive with our neighboring districts and focus on differentiation Rewards and recognition we have started but need to drastically expand this to touch a larger percentage of our staff not just teachers and retention programs. I want to highlight our sta the staff daycare that we started today or this year at Gwaver hips. The staff this staff daycare is an initiative that we are very excited about. last

045year I brought forward this idea to Angela Nater who was then the director of the early learning center to have a staff daycare for our school district staff ages six weeks old to four years old. When I was an assistant principal and principal, I used to have this program at the schools that I worked at and it was a huge staff retention piece and it kind of went by the wayside over the years and I thought we need to bring this back. So we piloted it at Gwaver HIPS and partnered with the child care of Southwest Florida and it has been a great success. So much so that we are bringing forward anou tonight to expand it to five more schools with a possible impact of over 360 staff members. And we just hope that

046it will continue to grow and we can keep on expanding it for years to come. So please take a look at this recruitment and retention program. Well, hopefully it'll work. In its first year, the Early Learning Center at G. Weaver Hips Elementary School is already making a meaningful impact. It provides teachers with the opportunity to work while their children receive quality care and early childhood education just steps away right next door. Knowing that he is being cared for by professionals who know what they're doing is very it's heartwarming. I drop her off in her building and then I walk right over to line. I don't have to make another stop in the morning. This program was designed with teachers in mind. The prek program is free for district employees. And the child care of Southwest

047Florida operates two additional classrooms within the center offering discounted rates for their services. You walk in and you can feel the love that's taking place in the building. You can see the happiness everywhere around you. There's every sense that you can use tells you that this is a good place to be. Like it's like at home. It's a very homey feeling here. Everyone welcomes you with open arms. This is my first year here and as well as in the district. I think that's like every parent teacher's dream to be able to have their kid at the school with them. They know that it's the best place their child can be and their child knows that mom or dad is very close. At GW Weaver Hips Elementary School, they believe in investing in their teachers as

048much as they invest in their students. They've created a space where families can thrive and educators can focus on what they do best. Riley Sper, Lee Schools TV. So today I would like to ask Tammy Aronson and Kim Malloy of Childcare of Southwest Florida and Marissa Velasquez and Vicaria Hallback teachers at GW Weaver Hips to please stand. They're here in the audience. they have worked very hard for the pilot at GW Weaver Hips and we would just like to recognize them today and we're very grateful for the partnership with Childcare of Southwest Florida. you're truly impacting and helping our recruitment and retention efforts. So, thank you. At this time, Miss Neie and Miss Trent will continue our presentation. regarding retention. Thank you, Dr. Johnston. And as Dr. Johnson has stated, we are committed not only

049to recruiting highquality educators, but also to retaining them. To do so, we need to look closely and examine our data and compare our retention trends with those of neighboring districts. In 2023 24, the national average teacher retention rate was 87%. And our current data shows that we have room for improvement. Neighboring districts are reporting higher retention rates, underscoring the urgency for us to strengthen our efforts. It's critical that we understand why teachers are leaving and implement evidence-based strategies that support and retain our staff. Teacher retention is vital and we recognize the challenge ahead and are fully committed to making meaningful progress. Continuing with retention data, the data presented here pertains to the district's key performance indicators, KPI 6.1, which focuses on increasing employee retention. This is monitored through the turnover rates for each employee segment

050that's outlined. Let's look at the column titled baseline. This official baseline began in October of 2023. The baseline here is explained as follows. Teacher retention was 83.8% which indicates the baseline turnover rate was 16.2%. In other words, 83.8% of teachers continued their employment with the district, which translate to 16.2% 2% leaving the district. Now, let's look at the column titled 2324 actual results. Last year, we increased our teacher retention to 84.4%. Which means our turnover rate in this segment reduced to 15.6%. Next, our staff retention increased to 85% which translates into a reduction of turnover in this segment to 15%. And for administrators retention, it remained relatively the same. As you can see, the district strategic plan sets a target of reducing employee turnover by 1% each year over the next four years. You may

051be curious about how we compare to national standards. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average turnover rate across all sectors ranges from 12% to 16%. Next, we will discuss our retention efforts and initiatives. Retention is definitely something that we all are accountable for and we can all help to impact. And as our cross-divisional team works together, we have some retainment efforts that we're going to be doing to ensure that we are retaining our staff. The first is to improve compensation and benefits. Competitive pay is definitely a baseline for retention. When salaries are lower than neighboring districts, it's difficult to retain talent. So we have in place our evergreen study which we have completed phase one and we are currently in phase two where differentiation is being considered. Another area that we know

052will impact retention is professional learning and focusing primarily on our leadership. So currently leadership development is a primary factor in retention and effective leadership plays a pivotal role in reducing turnover. Strong school leadership is often cited as one of the top reasons teachers choose to stay in a school or leave. Investing in leadership development is therefore one of the most strategic moves districts can make to improve teacher retention. So some things that we currently have in place, we have our AP development program which prepares strong teacher leaders or current assistant principles for school leadership roles. We have level two principal certification program which ensures principles are wellprepared and certified for long-term success. We have a leadership mentor program which supports newer emerging leaders through intentional coaching relationships and our leadership pipeline project. This is identifying

053and developing future leaders at all levels, teachers, APS and instructional coaches. The leadership pipeline identifies and supports potential teacher leaders early providing coaching, mentorship and formal leadership training and helps retain teachers by giving clear local pathways for growth. We also have princip principal leadership development which is ongoing growth for our sitting principles and this focuses on the real work. So leading change, building culture and managing our talent. And coming this summer, we have training for all of our leaders on the four essential roles of leadership, which is CVY. And the purpose of this is a framework for aligned leadership practices. The CVY model focuses on modeling, pathf finding, aligning, and empowering. It emphasizes the importance of principle- centered leadership. It outlines a framework for personal and interpersonal effectiveness, focusing on building strong relationships and achieving

054goals and leading with integrity. Continuing our cross-disciplinary retainment efforts, the next area of focus is collecting and acting on feedback. Gathering data on school culture, safety, and turnover rates at the district and school levels is essential for understanding employees perceptions. In January, we began distributing employee surveys in these areas to establish a baseline for how employees feel valued by our organization. This collection of perception data will continue through May. The results will be provided to the regional associate superintendent and principles to review the data and create plans to improve teacher retention. The final area of focus for our cross-divisional efforts is advocating for policy change. You heard about this a little bit earlier. By working with our government relations team, we can identify barriers that make recruitment and retention more challenging. This will enable us

055to advocate for changes in those areas identified as barriers. Additionally, it is important to maintain a positive partnership with our employee union in order to negotiate better terms and conditions for our employees. These efforts represent our overarching district-wide strategies. Miss Trent will now discuss the initiatives at our school sites. So, at our school sites, one of the things that's very critical is that we foster a positive school culture. And one, we have four ways that we can do that. There are probably many, but we're going to focus on four. And one is supportive leadership. And this is training school leaders to be able to provide constructive feedback, emotional support, and workload distribution for staff. Also to recognize and appreciate. So we want to celebrate teachers, their achievements, and their milestones. also open communication where teachers

056have a voice and they can participate in decision-making and finally to support new teachers which is pairing them with a mentor having regular check-ins and providing coaching as needed. Another area is to address workload stress, workload stress and work life balance. So, one of the ways we can do that is by having having adequate staffing and alleviating any non-eing responsibilities from our staff, providing planning time, allocating time during the school day for lesson preparation and collaboration, having reasonable expectations and avoiding excessive demands. Allowing time off for personal days without any stigma. and providing boundaries, encouraging students or sorry, encouraging teachers to disconnect from work hours to prevent burnout. And finally, but very important to invest in student behavior support. And there are some ways that we can do this within our school setting. One is

057classroom management training by equipping all teachers to with the skills that they need to handle behavioral challenges effectively. counseling and mental health services to increase access to these services for students and staff to have a clear discipline action ensuring consistency and fairness in handling disciplinary issues and then our resiliency standards providing students with the tools to make positive decisions. We have discussed with you how we are going to have an intentional focus on recruitment and retention. There are three key goals that the school district aims to achieve. One, decrease instructional vacancies annually to zero by the first day of school. This indicates a strong commitment to ensuring that all classrooms are staffed with qualified instructors from the beginning of the school year, avoiding disruptions to student learning. Two, increase retentions from 84% in 2324 to

05890% in 28 in the school year 2829. this 5-year period in I'm sorry, this goal sets a target for improving employee retention over a 5-year period. It aims to increase stability within the workforce, reducing turnover and its associated costs and negative impacts. And lastly, increase the employees perception of being valued by the organization. This outcome focuses on the importance of employee morale and job satisfaction. This is a baseline year, so no specific values are provided. Thank you for your time. We now look forward to superintendent comments and board discussion. Dr. Savage, do you have any comments? Well, I just first off, there's so many different areas. Thank you for the team, and I understand it's crossdivisional. but just thank you for the team for sharing a substantial update really both on the superintendent's challenge of

059reducing the 211 to zero. I know that was the May 1st deadline. So, thank you for giving us an update on that as well as for going a bit deeper and talking about the retention aspect because we can talk about recruitment all we want, but if we don't retain the people we have and I appreciate your comments about development as well, but that said, there was a lot of material covered there. So, I'm more interested in hearing really where the different board member questions and I'll try to support the best I can with that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Ribble. Yeah. First of all, I want to I want to say congratulations on the great job of recruiting. You folks really hit a home run in a short amount of time, closing the gap from

060211 down to 31. However, there are some areas we still need to work on. And you hit the nail right on the head when it comes to retention. And moving the needle 1% a year is not going to get this thing fixed. We got to we got to really start thinking a little differently how we're going to do this. I still you heard me say the word secession plan. That's the key. I think the district being around visiting the different schools, you do an excellent job of secession planning when it comes to vice principles and principles, but outside the box in the other jobs, I'm not seeing that happening. And these new job descriptions we have, I would have hoped, I don't want to drill you folks in every job description, but I would have

061hoped that you would, as you looked at at a job description, say, "You know what? and I have three or four folks that work here in a district that are qualified to step into those shoes. Until we can do that, forget having a culture. You're not going to have a culture, a loyal culture unless you can do that. So, those are my comments, but I think you got a good plan here. Hopefully, we can get this thing executed and but we need to step up the heat on this retention a little bit because the 1% is not going to make make a home run for you. But, thank you, Mr. Persons. I agree retention's important, but how much of our loss of that more or less 15% that we lose every year are for retirements?

062Do we have a number for that? Just an approximate number that because that's not going to change. I mean if it's 5% every year or 10% every year also what is our total number of teachers right now? Not exactly but just approximately approximately 5800 1500 5800 5800 okay so that means you're going to have to have 580 plus almost 700 and something new teachers next year just from the ones leaving that 15%. Mhm. So, I just want the public to realize that we're down to 31, but right now we're really looking at 500 and something plus 31, right? Because I assume you are ready to start advertising for those new ones. Mhm. And that's important. So, that's a tough job and it's going to be every year, but I would love to have the number

063of average retirements and that would help a lot. Thank you. I'll get that to you, Dr. Savage. Yeah, it's it's less than 100, but to total teachers in terms of retirement, we actually track that one of the annually we'll put out, you know, the amount of ones that we've retained, recruited, as well as retirements as a subgroup of that. And it varies, of course, as you imagine, year by year, and it actually diminished once they extended the drop to the 8-year period that allowed folks to not just retire, but to work an additional few years before they had it. But it was just around a hundred or a little bit less. And if I may to comment on Mr. Ribble's comment on the 1% I agree with you it's not going to cut it and

064we actually had that conversation and wanted to change that slide because but we didn't because it is part of our strategic plan in Envision 2030. but we really truly do need to revise it. we have in our capital plan four or five schools that are going to be built within the next four or five years, which we're going to need 300 more teachers approximately on top of what we already need, right? And so I agree with you, the 1% a year is not going to cut it. So we really have our work cut out for us, which is why we need those high impact. We really have to focus on the high impact recruitment and retention strategies. Miss Neely, did you want to comment also? Yeah. Additionally, really this is about controlling the parts that

065we can control. Every year you're going to have employees go for personal reasons that are beyond the school district's control. So the idea of having 100% is not something that's realistic, right? Because every year you're going to have those personal items that take over. And so really looking at from the lens of what are the pieces that as a school district and as a school specific that we can control. Those are the items that we want to maintain focus on so that we can control them. Thank you Mr. Fiser. Thank you. thank you for that presentation. glad to hear again about teacher retention culture. I mean, I know many of us have been up here for quite a while and it's kind of something it's been a lot of talk before and, with some of

066the things I've seen lately, I'm I'm seeing us beyond the talk. So, I really appreciate that. I'm glad to hear about that. I mean, again, the focus on culture, leadership, school leadership, I think again that was another thing with our regional associate superintendents, I think really helps identify and strengthen our school-based cultures and leadership. I think that's a that's a big part of that element and I've seen that. So, the other thing I think is amazing and I hope we continue to focus on it. You talked about succession, planning, career pathways. I mean, you hear from from teachers even mentorship like how, you know, it's kind of mysterious to some of how did they come in AP? How do they, you know, come into different positions? So, I know that will help strengthen that. I

067actually do have a question. It might be for the deputy superintendent as well, and it came up in one of the slides about the Evergreen study. Maybe I want to clean up a little bit of misnomer. Is the evergreen study is it a solution or is it a tool? That sounds like you got me into a binary choice there. So an either or true or false, right? So I would say it's it's both really. So part of what you offer through Evergreen is elevating the conversation to make sure you're talking about more of the factors that you need to be kind of thinking about as you approach this very complex work. the second thing though is they do build very specific tools that can be utilized to help you. And so we actually ironically at

06811:00 today we are meeting with Evergreen. I'm actually meeting with Evergreen tomorrow morning as well. So they are a partner in this work and we consulted them to to really help us. But the reality is Evergreen will will have an end and we will still have a great deal of challenge left to go. In fact, I would argue we'll we'll probably never be done with this work because the reality is both compensation while they're assisting us in the compensation. Really, some of the most important work in our district right now is this human resources work. It's it's really compensation is just one piece of it and they provide, I think, some real value in certain components of that conversation, but there's so much more to do. and we're just excited to do that work. so,

069so I'm not trying to evade your question. I would just say it isn't really that simple. They are providing solutions files. They're providing expertise. They're providing guidance on some of the parameters that we utilize. but they're also good thought partners in the sense of what they're trying to to offer us. But they are they're just one component of this process for us. And that answers my question. I appreciate that. Actually, I just wanted to make sure because some of the school-based and public looks at as the total solution for everything. And Dr. Savage, thank you for explaining that. It's exactly what I wanted to hear. So, thank you everyone. Anybody else? Miss Jordan, thank you. I have a couple questions. there was a lot in here. So, thank you very much for this. But I

070guess my one biggest thing is so right now we have 31 vacancies. The school year is ending. So, now when we start school again, we are not looking at hopefully we're only still looking at that 31 because we have no idea what that's going to look like for us. I know we're looking at zero vacancies and we're going to start the school year with everyone in there. But then also you have on the investment in student behavior support and that was to give them more support in counseling and mental health services. How does that happen when when we don't have enough people to do that as well? So I and I know this is on teachers, but are we also really pushing that to make sure that we have our psychologists, our mental health experts

071and all of those people put into these positions as well. So that way when we start the schools, we are ready for for it to take place. I actually would love to just kind of respond that. So first off, thank you. Great question. Really good points on this. So just as anything else, right, we talked about teacher vacancies and we talked about leadership and the role that has every single aspect of our school district operation is designed to support the teaching and learning process either directly or indirectly. Among those services, all the things you mentioned, all the mental health supports, the behavioral supports, all school bus driver, if we don't have sufficient drivers, we can't get the kids to school. If we don't have cafeteria, if we can't feed them properly. So every there are

072no small roles in this district. if we don't have custodians, you know, we won't have a clean, safe learning environ for our students, right? So, there are no small parts. And so, that's part of the challenge that this board always has to face is that, you know, on our superintendent, we have to find a way to optimize those services and fund all of those various competing needs. And so, I want to highlight a couple of things that were mentioned in that presentation. I think really address that piece. One thing is looking at the challenges by thinking differently, you know. So, one of the things I got to talk to some recently some federal government employees who really they help support federal agencies with this type of work. One of the things they told me right

073out of the gate was if there's one big strategy we could highlight for you, Dr. Savage, it's remember about virtual virtual opportunities when you can open your talent pool to the entire country, even in some cases the entire world. You open yourself up to substantial increase of talent into your into your work your local workforce. It doesn't then restrict your ability to only hire for those boots in the ground because some of our jobs like our teachers and folks to supervise our kids if they physically have to be present. There's really no way to make that virtual. But there are so many other services. So you heard some of those services of specialized professional services where you have different areas in our country that right now they aren't growing like we are. So you have

074educational systems not just in Florida but really all around our country that actually are having to fire people. They're having to let go of staff because their schools are closing. they're having to consolidate schools. That opens up people who maybe don't want to relocate to our area, but our specialized folks, whether they're school counselors, whether there's speech language pathologists. So, part of what I heard in the presentation I really wanted to highlight for everyone is, you know, this opportunity to think differently of the way we even set up our staffing model. So, instead of saying this school gets three SLPs, that school gets one SLP, that school gets two SLPs. Instead, if we look at it from a workload management standpoint, actually, you might have an SLP that goes to multiple sites to support those

075students and those specialists or you might have a virtual. Again, they're entertaining. They're looking at these ideas, you know, and that's that's why I'll credit just thinking differently. We have to provide those services. It doesn't always look the same from place to place. I think that's what I applaud the team and our regionals as well to highlight from best practices you're finding all around the country to find out how are people providing exceptional student education services and some of the many specialized services that we've talked about today in the most effective and efficient way possible. So again I want to credit and highlight the question. Thank you for raising that important point but I also want to highlight the work of the team to illuminate some of those answers for the board members. Thank you.

076And then I wanted to say I really appreciate the daycarees because when I'm out there and I'm speaking to teachers and they said if I could take if I could only take my child there and I saw the principal came in, Debbiey's out there from Gw Weaver. But I just I think that is really and just watching that and knowing that I can drop my child here and go right here because Chico did that a long time ago because they want to make sure that their people are there working and I think that is a definitely a plus. So, thank you for for doing that and I wish we could do that all throughout the district so that we could give that to them. And then the survey, how many people are we getting on

077that survey? Hasn't started yet. Oh, I'm so sorry. I thought I Sorry, I believe it's starting next week. So, it's it's getting ready to be disseminated. Okay. And then I think I had one more survey increased counseling and then oh my last question was priority marketing reached out to people who had bachelor degrees. How did that happen? I mean what how did they it was through social media, radio ads, things like that. basically the message was if you have a bachelor's degree and it sent and you were interested loved kids please reach out to us and it sent them to a specific website that was routed directly to our talent acquisition team and then they individually reached out to those people. Mr. versus I do have one one concern when we have these vacancies in

078the core or just teachers generally from what I've seen is some schools have many more vacancies than other schools and I think we need to come up with some kind of a plan that is more equal whether we have to move teachers you know if school is 100% maybe they have to lose one teacher to go there even if it's on a rotating basis or something. We need to do that because it's not fair to the any particular zone or any particular school to have multiple openings and I don't know how the principal even deals with that too. Dr. Savage. Yes. I just you know because we're in bargaining I really can't get too deep into it but you know when we were preparing our management approach you know we certainly looked at the way

079the vacancies are deployed across the system and we really tried to think about it from a student perspective of if a student has to go to a classroom and they have no teacher. We know unfortunately what that data says for those students and it's not a good one. And so when you have particular schools that we're noticing that are geographically located that have a higher incidence of those vacancies and that there are particular subject areas where we have higher incidence of those vacancies, we as a management side tried to be very responsive in addressing that piece so that we don't find all of our vacancies continuing to show up in very high proportions in particular schools and in particular teaching assignments. so that's certainly one way we're attempting among many others to address that issue.

080Miss Yanelli, first of all, thank you for this. and I applaud your work and the work that's ahead of you. So but something that Dr. Savage just said that I think it's really important is the you said look for talent virtually basically. But my question is, how do we compete competitively with salary-wise? Because you're because we can't even comp we're not even competing with our local districts. So now you're telling me to now we're going to compete nationally. maybe even larger than that because you have people that are all over the world that could to could teach our children if you're if you want to look at it at that perspective. But I think we need to focus on how to how to pay people now and pay people competitively against our own district for

081us to be able to even hire and retain something nationally. like I just I that's alarming because I don't think that we're gonna we're in a place to do that. That's that's my concern. second of all, I do love the child care opportunity at GW Weaver HIPS. It's a great program and I got to see that, you know, the groundbreaking of that or and everything and that was awesome and I'm excited to see it go in more schools. So, I just want to thank you for that initiative because I didn't know that where that came from, but it's excellent. And I it was a joke that when I would take my child to daycare, that was my new car because that's how much child care costs was. And now it's even more expensive than that.

082you know, so that was always a joke that I my new car was getting dropped off at Bobby Nan. So, I just think that's a great opportunity for our teachers and I'd like to see that really advertised and focused because I think you'll have way more participation just and it is a definitely a retention piece that would be that is key and I'll let you I'll throw that back into you. the money. I know you can't really talk about that, but I think that focusing on the hard work, hard-earned dollars that the teachers earn every day and the staff earns is really it could be huge. Thank you. Yeah. Again, I have to be very cautious in what I say only because we are in bargaining. So, I want to be very clear that we're

083we're not doing any type of bargaining outside that, but it's really more just to to address the point in terms of bring raising awareness of of the complexity of that piece. So, you know, one of the big strides that Florida has done as a state is they made really a major work to try to raise the starting teacher salary in our state comparative to other states in the country. And because they made that effort and such a huge focal point, that has raised Florida's competitiveness. Whereas in the past we were far less competitive, we are now far more competitive at the beginning teacher salary level. that said, we aren't as competitive nationally in terms of the average teacher salary level. but that let's stay with where Florida has an advantage, right? We have moved up

084in those rankings on the starting teacher salary. So again, as I mentioned, if a teacher is starting in other parts of the country and let's say there are fewer jobs, for example, there are some states in the Midwest there their teaching areas in certain districts which are many smaller than ours where no teacher coming out of a college of education can even get a job. They have to substitute for multiple years in order to get a permanent teaching job. you know and you have the ability to potentially work virtually in some capacity whether that's some of the piece all of a sudden we're an opportunity for something like that if we have that so yeah there's no doubt you want to continue to be as competitive and obviously that's a bargaining effort that's the work

085that's a lot of opportunity there but I did want to mention that and again it wasn't just instructional the opportunity the folks who I spoke to they said really it's about creating a better value proposition for your employees of any type of employment that it makes sense that could work virtually that you should be looking at that as an option because it just opens your talent pipeline. Something we didn't talk about though with the team that we are also looking about is also about our student pipeline. we recognize that students in our own systems in our own community that want to metriculate and go to college and get those degrees. They become an an opportunity as well. So, we didn't mention it today, but our teaching academy is looking at expanding those things because quite

086frankly, a lot of our students are about to graduate. they're about to walk across a graduation and some of them aren't going right to college. Maybe they'd be willing to substitute in our classroom. So, again, that's the opportunity to get more of our local workforce here that just happen to be graduates to look and maybe maybe they want to become paraprofessionals. Maybe they want to become guest teachers and get into our pipeline of the adult pipeline. But, we want to do more on the student pipeline as well. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that too. And thank you for the questions, Mr. Juvenelli, Mr. Ribble, and then I'll give my comments. Okay. Just I hate to belver this thing, but turnover really drives everything here in the district. I mean, we we can't get

087this fixed. We're going to be in trouble down the line. but I did want to I did want to mention something that happened in my lifetime that I learned and it's a slogan from a consultant. What gets measured gets results. what gets measured gets results. And at my previous employment, we had a real problem with workman's compensation. This went on for year after year after year. Finally, we got a new CEO. It says we need to stop these on job injuries. And we came up with a program called Project Zero. And I don't care if we talk about auto accidents, workman's comp, turnover, sales, or whatever you want to do. What gets measured gets results. And the program we put in place, every time there was someone injured, we had a conference call at 1:00

088and it went it was driven bottom up. It started amongst the division managers, went to the next level all the way up to the CEO by 4:00 in the afternoon on who got injured, how did the injured injury happen, and what are we going to do so it doesn't happen again. And when you come up with that kind of accountability, so today I show up and I'm a principal and I have one of my employees, one of my teachers leave. So now I got to call in to Miss Neie or whoever the case may be and say, "Hey, listen. You know, we had Melissa resign this morning. This is what this is what I think happened. She says she's got to move to be with her sister, but that's not really what happened." and we

089get to the root cause of that person leaving the leaving the organization. When you have that kind of accountability, watch what's going to happen to your numbers. What gets measured gets results. So, take a look at it. It might work. All right. this is what happens when you go last. Everything's already been talked about, but since I was a teacher, I'll give you my mindset going through this. So, this almost could have been broken up into two workshops. it was packed full of information and all good things. So, I agree with Mr. Ribble's first comment about I think one person is setting the bar too low and I knew that you felt that way also because you are all former educators and still are in the classroom but 1% probably won't move the needle much.

090However, I'm confident that you're going to supersede that goal. Dr. Johnson, you said at the very beginning you used the word custom walking walking our employees like giving them that like a customized experience. that you need I think you need to hold on to that term. especially our new teachers giving them that customized almost handholding experience so that when they go to call their friends that are graduating from FGCU the following year, they can say this is the easiest district to start fresh off. They are so incredibly supportive of you right out of the gate. And I think when you hold on to that piece, that's going to be really changing, especially those newer people to our district. We want we want the gossip to be this is the easiest transition to get into this

091school system, right? I am looking at slide 15 and while I think all of these initiatives are awesome, I go back to reasons I became an educator. I knew I was never going to be a millionaire when I went into teaching. but I chose that degree anyway because I loved kids. I wanted to make an impact. Those were my motivators. and I wanted to have like a family life balance eventually. So when you go and you look at these things that you're doing like for example on this slide to me one of the most important things is addressing workload stress life work life balance and I always tell everyone you know family first whatever that looks like to you but it but those boundaries have been crossed over the years and we have asked staff

092to do things that are outside of their job scope and it's not okay and I know know that we all agree here. So, I just need to put that out there. I was able to go and tour Little Waves at Fort Meyers High School and I'm telling you right now, if you're having a bad day, staff, you need to pop into one of these like into I told Doc, Mr. Engelhart, if I was having a bad day, I'd write down the little waves. They'd cheer me right up. But, to see those places throughout the district, I think would be life-changing for our teachers. And that's brings me back to one of the reasons I wanted to teach. I wanted to be able to have the freedom to be a mom and to impact kids on

093a daily basis. So I would love to see that being pursued throughout the district. Such a great thing that's happening at Gw Weaver and hopefully we can continue that across the board. as far as and then I have one last thing. It was about rewards and recognitions. Everyone wants to have recognition for what they're doing. even if it's a principal that puts a post-it note in someone's mailbox and says, "I'm, "Hey, I see what you're doing. Thank you so much." You know, it's it's all the way from little things like that to these recognitions we have up here on the deis, everything in between. Little tiny things count. I know that we have these signing days for our athletes. I'm like, let's have signing days for teachers that, you know, like, let's bring in the

094news at their own school, in their own community, having a signing day, getting to go from one step to the next, whether it be getting a going from a teacher to a to to something else like an IB coordinator. I mean, that's a that's a big deal to me. these steps and you know, I always say, and I'm Dr. Savage. I've said it in our one-on- ones previously. Don't underestimate the person that has a bachelor's and not a masters. There's a lot of talent there. I do appreciate those people who go above and beyond with their education, but just don't don't let it fall short there for those those people. And then I you know I say to my athletes today you guys were good but I'm going to push you to be great tomorrow.

095And I think that's what we just we just can't settle for good. So that's all I have. Miss Giovanelli, would you like to add something? Yeah, you reminded me of how we're coming. I think it's this Friday we're going to the to the letters read the letters from the seniors. That's one of your to your point. Yeah. I for what we call that but yeah the letters that so just for the public this Friday is one of the days that seniors are writing letters to teachers who made an impact on them anytime in their educational career here in Lee County. So it won't be just high school teachers. Elementary school teachers will receive letters. Things like that. And I as a former teacher when a kid comes up to me and says, "Oh my gosh,

096Miss Fleming, you were the best." I mean, they could have given me a million dollars and it would have felt the same way. So, I completely I love seeing these programs. So, I believe that is all. Thank you so much for this and I look forward to hearing an update. I'm sure the board does as well. Thank you. we're going to completely shift gears here to budget overview to Dr. Dr. Amy Desimmore and Kelly Lectar. They'll be presenting this afternoon. Madam Chair, while they're walking up, because obviously we do great things, we have to be able to fund those things and so you're going to hear a little bit more about I think our capital as well today. But just to answer the board question about the initiative on Friday, it's called project appreciation. Okay,

097let's see. All right. Good afternoon, Dr. Savage and members of the board. Kelly and I are here today to give some additional budget information related to all the work that we've been doing thus far and all the things that we have yet to go. you did get a little information a little bit earlier today in the briefing related to the legislative process. we'll just add a little bit more and let you know kind of individually here at this at inside of the budget department, business services and across our district what's been happening and what we will continue to do. So I'll turn it over to Mrs. Lecher who will take us through the overview. Thank you. so I'm going to start with a little update. the last time we met we talked about the FTE

098projections and at that time our FTE for next year was projected at 111,917 unweighted FTE which was a growth of 3,374. Since that time the enrollment conference held their meeting on April 11th and statewide they were seeing some drop offs in the Esau population. So they made some adjustments to Lee County as well and brought our FTE down to 111,725 with a projected growth of 3,182. And while that's a reduction of 192 FTE they actually reduced our Esau population by about 670 in total which I and only have us growing like 200 in the Esau area. This year we grew 2400 even with the declines that were going on. So I don't think that's realistic and I had a conversation with them about that, but they made their decision. So we're going to move forward

099with their decision. I did want to update you on some legislative stuff. I know as you know now know the budget has not been finalized. So, they are going into special session, but I did want to go over the comparisons of the budgets that we have seen from them just to give you an idea of what they look like for Lee County. What I've done here when the Senate gave us theirs, they left FES out of it, right? So, family empowerment scholarships were not part of their total numbers. So, I did the House and the third calculation for Lee County the same way so that we're looking at apples to apples. So in that the base student allocation the house increased theirs by $50.51 while the senate was increasing theirs by $66.77. When you take

100the dollars the weighted FTE times the BSA times the comp CFW or comparable wage factor that for the house would generate 602.5 million. For the senate it was 604.4 million. It is a decline for us in the House by 696,247. In the Senate, it's an increase of 1.1. So, you're probably asking like, how does that happen when you're seeing an increase in the BSA? That's because the comparable wage factor declined. If we took the comparable wage factor that they're going to apply to us for next year and you applied it this year, we would have lost 900 over $900,000. So, part of that has to do with the comparable wage factor. The other part has to do with a change that they've made in the weighted FTE, the add-on FTE, which I'll get to in

101a little bit. But when they made that change, that decreased our weighted FTE amount, which made that decrease happen. When you look at the educational enrichment portion, the House is proposing an increase to about 40.7 million. So a $1.1 million increase for Lee County, while the Senate is proposing a decrease of 36.9 or about 37. It was about $2.6 million decrease in educational enrichment. When you look at the ESSE guarantee, again, the House was looking at a $1.6 million increase while the Senate's looking at about a 5.6. $.6 million decrease. Overall, when you put all of the pieces together, the House budget was an increase of about $10.7 million for Lee County, while the Senates was only about a $1.6 million. When you look at the dollars per unweighted FTE, it's a $1325 increase on

102the House and a $76.31 decrease in the Senate proposal. So, big differences between the two. the two pieces of it. So, I want to talk about that add-on FTE. So, the add-on FTE is funds that we receive for students who pass some advanced t test who receive advanced diplomas who are enrolled in the dual enrollment programs and our early graduations. So when the house reduced the reduced the added add-on FTE, they reduced it all programs across the board by half. that's costing Lee County about $7.7 million. When you look at the Senate, they reduced all of the programs with the exception of industry certification or as you may know it as CAPE. That one they left at 100%. So the loss for the Senate one is about 6.3 million to Lee County. So that's what

103happens with Lee counties and what happens with family empowerment in Lee County. So the house is proposing an $18.6 million increase for family empowerment scholarships and their cost per student increased $10.52. For the Senate, they're proposing a $19.3 million increase in the amount for fees. That's just for Lee County's FES program and they're proposing an increase of $8546 per student per unweighted FTE. So you can see a big difference between what Lee County is looking at and what the family empowerment scholarship program is looking at. Some other things that have changed as we're going through here sorry lost my place for a second. the Senate Bill 7022 is proposing an increase in the FRS, Florida Retirement System. and they're going looking at taking it from 13.63 to 14.03, which is a $2.4 million increase in

104our expenses for next year just with our current staffing. So as staffing goes up, that will also increase. So as you can see from that, if we go with the Senate, who was proposing only a 1.6 $6 million increase. We're not even covering our F FRS increase that we're going to have come hit us next year. Now, some other things that are going on is that House Bill 301 and Senate Bill is increasing the amount that agencies are liable for for sovereign immunity. It's taking there was a cap of 200 thousand for like a single claim or single event and now that's going to go up to a million dollars for I'm sorry proposed proposed to go up to a million dollars effective October 1st and then it goes up again the following October. they

105are proposing a study on the elimination of property taxes. So the office of economic and demographic research needs to conduct a study by October 1st. Senate bill 2510 this one is helping us in some areas. So currently Florida virtual school are the only virtual program who can rep report and earn FTE over the summer. This bill will allow school districts virtual programs to do the same thing. So that will provide some extra funding for our students that continue the virtual programs over the summer. It is removing the middle school CAPE digital tool certifications from the CAPE funding list. So our middle schools will no longer be eligible for that CAPE certification in the digital tool. It is changing the school recognition incentives so that if a school receives that school recognition funds, the incentives can

106only be used for instructional personnel. It's no longer proposing that it won't be able to be used for all dist all personnel at the school. and then it's also changing the distribution of funds to school districts. currently they pay us twice a month and this is changing that to only once a month to pay the school districts. Some other areas that are in there in Senate Bill 166 are some administrative efficiencies. Some good things in this bill to help us as well take some workload off of people. it no longer requires that school boards employ an internal auditor. So that is an area where some cost savings could happen in school districts. It changes the some requirements for reporting of financial information to parents. Currently it says that we have to report to all of

107the parents the per student expenditures for their schools and this changes it to the department of education has to do that and we just have to provide a link to the website. currently, we have to update every 12 weeks, our school capacities where there's capacity at our schools on our websites and this is changing that to only twice annually. It re removes the requirement for districts to submit a plan when we have schools that are out of class size compliance. It removes certain formats for information on the budget that are to be provided. So currently the law provides that we have to do some graphical representation representations and things like that and that takes all of that out of the statute. it removes the requirement for cape bonuses that the teachers must be employed in

108the year in which the funds are included in the calculation. The cape bonuses were the only one that if you were a teacher and you earned it last year and then you retired this year, you were not eligible to receive that. Every other of those programs could and they've now changed that to be so the cape aligns with the other programs and the teachers are still eligible to receive the bonuses that they earned from the students in the previous year. It changed the requirement and timing that districts have to submit their tenative facilities plan. In the past, we had the 510 year 5 10 20 year plan that had to be submitted. It was by October 1st. We never the state didn't have the plan done in time for us to get it completed in

109that time. It was a lot of extra work. And now they're just saying that our tenative budget approval of the tenative capital plan is sufficient for the five-year plan and then we just need to submit it to them after that. it removes the requirement of the per student station cost for construction and then it requires OPA to review that per student station levels by September 1st. So those are some things that are in the legislative thing that affect the budget. and so I just wanted to kind of go over those different pieces with you. the next thing I want to do is talk about our capital revenue since we know we don't have the cost per student station anymore, but we still have some estimates that we have to do, some buildings we have to

110build. So, I wanted to talk to you about our estimates for next year and what we're looking at. So, I'm going to start with the capital outlay millage. Those are the 1.5 mills that you all levy for capital outlay funding. We are looking at a slowdown as you can see in this in the bottom is the anticipated taxable growth that we had from the state moving you know year to year to year. Above that is the percent over the previous year that we actually collected. So as you can see all except for in 24 we were well we were under the anticipated collection amount. and in 24 we were a little bit we were higher, but I think that had to do with the hurricane and the people paying their taxes in the following year

111for the hurricane as well. But this year we are looking at like we're going to be well below where we and should be by the end of this year. So because we are not seeing the collections at the rates that we had anticipated, we're taking an approach of next year we're only going to increase that amount by 3% for the next two years and then 4% for the three years after that. and we'll keep watching that and if things change, we'll be making adjustments as we go. The next one is the impact fees. we have over the last couple of years undercollected on our projections for impact fees. we've seen a slowing in that. So based on that we are looking at going to zero for next year of 0% increase. So we're looking at

112budgeting that at 30 million hoping that we can stay right there and then doing slight increases after that of 1 and a.5% and then 2% for the last three years of the five-year plan. we are currently collecting at 55% of the rate impact fees right now. And then sales tax sales tax has actually been going down our collections for that. You remember when we first got the sales tax, it was blowing all of our projections out of the water. Well, we're going the opposite way right now. So, our collections, right now we're projecting that in this year alone, we're going to be under our projection by about 6%. So, next year we're going to stand at a 0% increase at 117.6 million just because we don't know what's going on with everything right now. So,

113we're going to stand with the 0%. We're looking at 1% in 27 and then 2% in 28 and 29. And the 29 number is smaller because that's the year that we only collect a half a year. That will be the last year of our sales tax. In our current five-year capital plan, the schools that we have slotted that we are going to be building in the east zone, we have three elementary schools, two middle schools, a K to8, two M two middle schools, a high school, and then we have some preliminary work for another high school. And I apologize on your initial slideshow that showed as high zero or o and that was my mistake. It's QQQ and I apologize for that. In the south zone, we're doing a Cypress Lake middle rebuild and Bonita

114Elementary remodel. And in the west zone, we're continuing and finalizing our beayhore edition, the Hector Kada 8 rebuild, and the Cape Coral Tech edition. So, we are going to need to go out for debt to cover these costs. And so, in the current year, we're going out for a refunding of our current 2014 AMV cops issue. We're also going to get the same issue for Cypress Lake Middle Rebuild, Hector Coparata, and High School NN. And then next year we're looking at another certificates of participation for elementary L, middle O, and our K to8. And then in 27 we're looking at it for elementary M. I again apologize. I had repeated middle school O and the K to8 on there before and I've corrected that. I apologize for that as well. And then our certificates of

115participation in 28 will be for elementary N. So, what do we what's going on next with the budget? well, of course, the legislative session is not going to end. We're going to special session. we are hoping to see a first calculation sometime in May. I'm not sure after the discussions I heard this morning, I'm really going to see that, but fingers still crossed that I will see it in May. in June, we will provide a preliminary budget to you based on whatever information that we have. and we will, be, sorry about that, reviewing enrollments for schools d throughout the summer. And that's something I always keep telling you. We're going to keep watching those enrollments and making sure schools have the resources they need. In July, we're hoping to receive the second calculation after the

116final millage amounts are settled on. And then we will be advertising the tenative budget based on trim or truth and millage requirements. We'll be providing a budget to you and to the public for the tenative budget hearing. And again, keep watching those enrollments. And then in August, we welcome our students back to our schools. We'll be doing adjustments on the 10th day after those students come into school based on the actual kids that are showing up in our schools. And we'll be finalizing our budget during the month of August. And in September, we will be bringing the final budget to you at a final public hearing. And then we'll be of course providing the Department of Revenue and the Department of Education with all of the required documentation. And with that, I will turn it

117over to Do you want to Yes, sure. Just some additional information. As you have heard the legislative process is still ongoing. regardless of when that ends, we still are obligated to present to you as a board a balanced budget for next year. tentatively in July and then finally in September. And so we are just giving you updates on where we are in that process including a preliminary information we have to build our new capital plan for the year. the budget is a living breathing document. So it will be updated as we go along. but the information that we have, we are trying to put it together, still moving forward with our process and ultimately to end up to with a final budget for you to approve in September. And so with that, I will turn

118it over to Dr. Savage and board members for any questions andor comments. Well, I will just keep it very short. You know, I know you all have had a chance to get briefed every month by our folks in our business services division, and I just have to credit this leadership. you know, these folks definitely know, they understand the dollars and cents, but I think one of the things that often goes unknown about them is they care so deeply about our students and all of our staff people that every decision they make and you know, some of them participate in bargaining, they do the work, they really deeply review because they understand the impact that every dollar has in this organization. So, whenever they're bringing this information, they're very clear to highlight good news or bad

119news. They're willing to do it because they really deeply care about our people. And I think it's one of my favorite qualities about those individuals. So I just want to highlight that as well. Thank you for what you do and putting this information together. It looks like dollars, but you know, this actually impacts kids and people. And so I really appreciate that as well. Any comments, Mr. Ribble? Yeah, I don't really have a comment. Well, a comment. Great presentation. Of course, we're all a little nervous on what's going to be happen in Tallahassee. That's the unknown at this point. But one thing I'm not too clear on. On slide eight, you have in there impact fees are currently at 55% collection rate. Can you expand on that? How's that work? And do we have a

120shortfall there or? So, when at the 55% rate is the there's a rate which when they do some testing, they say that the district school district should be getting from impact fees. The county then makes the determination how much we will actually get. The rate that we receive is 55% of what the survey has shown that we really should be receiving from impact fees. So our collection rate is 55% of what we should be receiving and it's going to be set like that for a while. Okay. Thank you. Uhhuh. Mr. Fischer. Thank you for the presentation. It was really good. I have a question through the chair to the deputy superintendent. maybe I think some of these of our calls, some of the legislative proposals I don't think are currently I think they may have

121died if we may have government relations follow up with this week on this. Yes, I'll be happy to have our GR staff they track every single one of the bills and so forth provide an update. Thank you. Thank you. like everybody else has a great presentation. I know student enrollment is just really a hard number to come up with exactly right now. So, the more y'all can keep us up to date on that rather than wait till like the next month or something like that, I mean, I would really love to see figures as often as as y'all compute them. Okay. Gives us a good idea of what's actually going on out there in student enrollment. Thank you. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Next is going to be an overview

122of our construction change order report March 2025. Scott Rickenbacher and Melissa Rivera will be presenting this afternoon. Madam Chair, while they're making their way up, would it be fair to the board if I asked our student enrollment tracking to put something in the board weekly, every week, so you have just kind of an update on our current enrollment, so forth? Okay, great. Thank you. My pleasure. Good afternoon board members, Dr. Savage, Esquire Deb Bruno Scott Rickenbacker, director of construction. I'm here with Melissa Rivera, my coordinator and the brains behind the organization. today we have a double report for you. It is the change order report for March of 2025 required by statute. On the front cover sheet, you'll notice that we executed in direct material purchases 957,66.68 in change orders with the return of tax

123savings to the district of $54,33868. nondirect contract change orders, we executed $51,73.18. The amount returned of 51,7318 cents was project savings and return for unused funds. Contingency adjustments, we had $469,962.90 in contingency adjustments and no return and contingencies in this reporting. The secondary sheet, you'll notice, is the backup information for the cover sheet. We had two DMP change orders, E Edgewood Academy HBAC, Spring Creek Elementary School HBAC. We had four contract change orders for Riverdale High School, Gateway Elementary traffic improvements, Veterans Park Academy of the Arts, and Riverdale High School again. And we had one construction contingency adjustment and it's for Riverdale High School. Are there any questions? Any questions, board members? Miss Jordan, when is Riverdale going to be finished? and not ever come back. It's on the slide. We'll get there. But it's

124it's next August. Further down. This August. August. Pardon me. Is that this August? Yeah, it's August. Mr. Rianbucker, why don't you go ahead to the construction by monthly update? Yes, ma'am. Thank you. ready. First up, Bayore K8 expansion. I won't go through every slide. Your time is valuable. the information I'll give you the latest information from when it was reported. Currently, Bay show, we're expecting 100% design drawings to be completed and issued to the district on June 9th. the total project cost. We're estimating to bring it to the board for that project in September 9th of this year, 2025. Any questions on that slide? Good. Okay. Next up is PreK8BB, formerly known as the Innovation School. Currently on schedule, we are at 90% drawings will be delivered to the district and we'll have a little

125bit better understanding as to where the dollars are going on that project around June 13th of this year. No board action required at this time. Any questions? Bonita Springs Elementary School rebuild project. Currently we started some a portion of the phase one demo. We took some trees down out there. We are getting ready to do the demolition approximately around June 8th of this year. Right now we are waiting awaiting on the development order collaboration between the district and the city of Bonita Springs. A special assembly plan is part of the DO and we're working through that, our staff and their staff and we're hoping to get that thing kicked off and in and crunch a munch starting June 8th plus or minus. Any questions? Next, K Coral Technical College the expansion. We're currently on board.

126Notice the proceed have been issued. The contractor has mobilized. the site surveying is going on. We've demoed the old Hector Cafaretta building, so we're on schedule and that's moving forward. No action required at this time. Any questions on that? Okay. Cypress Lake Middle School, obviously, demolition is nearing completion on that campus. We've been out there for better part of two months. school seems to be going well. We've got, no complaints from staff at this point. I got to find some wood. and that project is on schedule as well. I don't know if you any of you had a chance to go out to Cypress Lake, but just real quick, we're just completing the ROC tower out there. It's pretty amazing. There'll be another one at Asterero and another one at Riverdale High School. So, if

127you get a chance, take a look at it. It's pretty massive. So, any questions? Hector Caperetta Jr. K8 rebuild. we're on schedule. We've been out there about 90% of all of the footings have been poured, placed, anchor bolts being set. there's a groundbreaking I think you guys are all aware. It'll be next Tuesday the 13th. So I hope to see you there. We're on schedule. We're moving forward and no issues on that particular project. Any questions? Elementary School L. right now we have just received 100% drawings on April 21st. the architect and the CM's numbers from the 90% are still holding. Now understand the L and O are the drawings are on the shelf. We're not putting it out to bid until the Army Corps releases us with our permitting in there. So we're still

128standing at about architect 74 million cm at about 68 million for that school in in today's dollars. So that can change depending on when the Army Corps releases. Any questions? Elementary School M East zone. Right now the architect we're at 90% drawings and the estimate is 70,958109 currently and the CM we're expecting their estimate usually about 2 weeks later around May 21st. So we'll be able to to show you how those two compare in our next discussion. Any questions? High school NN good news. We're putting it forward two years. So, we've revised the opening date because we got our Army Corps no notice required and we're moving forward with our water management. So, we're going to get this thing kicked off and have it open for you June of 2027, which helps the program across

129the board because we won't be opening three or four schools in one year in 28 with the teachers and so forth. And it also is going to help with the massive amount of high school students in that zone. Any questions? middle school o that's a sister middle school on the site with L 100 100% drawings the prices have not changed in terms of the value of that project since the 90% reporting above and again that's on the shelf with Army Corps and when we get those permits we'll be working towards getting that moving forward as well any questions high school on schedule right now August 31st of 2025 All right. Thank you. August this one. Any questions? Okay. BPAA renovation, blackbox, steer, lal currently on spec. The entire program for all of those buildings is

130to be substantially complete by November 10th of 2025. currently ordering furniture and everything through the Lemile Teal administration to outfit the theater and so forth. But so far the compliments have been coming in left and right about that space and that's exactly what my comment would be. I was able to tour the blackbox and wow wow. I mean it's a good thing they're going to be done before Christmas because I think every community member is going to ask can we borrow this to do a play. So I hope they're ready. I'll be gonna It's awesome. It's great. Yeah. let's see. And I don't know if you had seen, we used the same product we used on the Leap building here to refinish and waterproof the outside of that school. And I've gotten some pretty real

131positive responses if the place looks great. So hopefully, and last but not least, the construction services report. And I'm sorry, I'm old, so I need to break it up big into an 11 by 17. But I'll read you the numbers of what we have. we have 48 projects currently. 27 are on schedule, five are ahead of schedule, one is behind schedule, two are on hold, two are in closeout, and seven are in auditing. And did you all have any questions on the monthly update? No, I just have one question. I keep hearing about the black box. I was out that at that location, but I we couldn't get a tour that night. We were doing a town hall meeting. What are there? We're going to put seat theater seating in there. Is that the deal?

132There's classrooms in there for the arts programs, but it's typically a performance center, but they'll have their music in there and their drama courses and those things that you would have in an art school. What's the capacity that I can get you that information? I don't know what off the top. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Always the North Myers Academy. I have to advocate for this because I know it's a traffic study, but with this was a real safety issue with those children having to walk in that area and around all the way around to the school. So, are we moving forward with this conversation still? Do you know? I haven't really had a chance to get with the superintendent and her staff to discuss that. There were no traffic improvements that the district

133could do on our particular site ourselves. The it's not an ingress ingress and stacking going into the school site, which is typically where we had the problem. It's actually an intersection up the road where we'll have to go to the county and ask if they'd be willing to participate. they would have to take some of their rightaway easement area and create a right turn lane, possibly put a traffic signal at that intersection road right by the VFW hall there. so we do meet with the county, their traffic division every month and we are having those conversations. Whether or not they will move forward with it, if it's in their capital budget or their planning, we can find out and get back to you on that. Well, I appreciate it because it says close and I

134know that this when this was brought up, it was not about the traffic study. wasn't about we know there's like 679 vehicles that come in and out of there and they do that stacking within the within the school property, but it's the back passage through going across that little creek or whatever they want to call that. That's what we were trying to do there. We looked at the pedestrian bridge. right now we put cameras out there. There were no no students walking in that general area. Now that could be because those people that live in that area drive their children and sit in the line and drop them off for class. that's a Lampstead widespreader canal. So in that particular one to do to build a pedestrian bridge over that canal to put a back

135access. It can be done. our estimates are probably somewhere around $4 million. there would probably be Army Corps permitting and definitely it's not South Florida Water Management. I believe it's a Lambstead Canal. There would be permitting required for that as well. Right now, the reason it says closed is we've done everything we can do with a traffic study. We will constantly advocate to try and get the county to do pay and perform that right turn lane at that intersection for the egress. But in terms of a pedestrian bridge, I would need further direction from upper management. Yeah. And if I if I may, through the chair to Dr. Savage, when we first spoke about this and I know David Mr. Nolan was part of this. It was about the safety of the kids. It was

136had nothing to do with driving or cars coming down the road because I know I even met with the commissioner Hammond regarding this as well and he had his DOT or his gentleman was there as well when we had the conversation with a little drawing that we drew ourselves. because of the fact of the that there are kids and I did go there and walk that because of the fact that you know we had removed the buses from that area. So when the kids were walking and the concern of them were that they have to go all the way around Laurel and come back in. So that's like a whole another probably a good mile that they have to walk around that area and the safety of the children walking. I and I go there

137and I see that I count those kids like every day. There's like a 75 kids that walk out of that school and walk all the way around. So, I know they exist because I I count them. So, I know they're literally there. It was a dual traffic study. We looked at the pedestrian traffic all the way around the corner, all the way around the canal in conjunction with the traffic study as well. So, it was a dual traffic study. It wasn't just our standard stacking inside of a site. And from what we saw, the numbers were about 40 and 60, but 70 is close enough. And it just didn't warrant. There are sidewalks out there for them to get around. As you get around the back side of that site on the other side of

138the Lancet Canal, the conversations of kids walking through the canals when it's in low water mode and some gravel, the fences had 4 ft of grass and the locks so rusted you couldn't even open it. So, it hasn't been opened in a long, long time. So, I don't think there's any transitioning across the waterway there. but again, that doesn't mean I'm saying there aren't children living in the homes in that back area. If there are, then most likely their parents for the bulk of them are driving them and dropping them off. And there might be maybe 40 kids that are walking. Yeah, that's not happening. But I appreciate what you're I mean because I literally witness and I go there and I count almost daily. So, I just Thank you. And I'm just very concerned

139about the kids and their walking through that area. And when they give you a sheet of paper that shows you what what they're walking through, that's and I get that we are responsible for them when they get to school, but I want to make sure they get to the school. Okay. Dr. Savage, if I may. Thank you, though. I appreciate my department would be happy to bring in the traffic engineer and the civil engineer and meet with with the board members if they'd like to know more or how to better maybe possibly understand or see what the survey the announcers we're more than willing to do that with you folks. Yeah, if I may. what we'll do is we'll get we'll take it offline. we'll get with you, we'll get with Dave, we'll get with

140the someone the regional who's over that particular area and we'll just have a kind of debrief on the findings of the study. I'll take additional information. and we'll try to have the best plan that we can to support our students and so forth. so I appreciate the conversation. Cool. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good day. Next is our policy review briefing first reading. Kathy Dupe Bruno and U. Benny Brahie will be presenting this afternoon. Good afternoon, Madame Chair. Board members, you have had an opportunity to review the policies. We've gone through it in our one-on- ones. Are there any questions or concerns about the policies? Board members, any questions or concerns about the policies for the first reading? Mr. Fischer. thank you. can you on policy 9701, Attorney Rebruno, can you talk

141about the interface between that and student NIL? certainly, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Fischer. We currently have a name, image, and likeness policy is 2431.06. this policy 9701 is specifically with regards to trademark, licensing, and protection for the school board. There's not really an interplay between those two policies. The NIL is specifically for students and whoever their vendor or whoever they're contracting with, but this will allow some additional protections for our logos and other things that we want to have intellectually protected through copyright trademark law. Thank you. I'd like to piggy back off that. would you mind going a little further into cuz I get a lot of questions from the public whose students go to private school. Could you address the fact that these are our policies but the private schools in our county may have

142different policies. Do you mind just talking about that just for a moment? Absolutely. These policies really apply to the school board. This is our way to govern and to advise the administration as to the board's expectations. So they are not equivalent to anything that any private school and to be quite honest even charter schools may have their own governance documents as well. Any other questions? Miss Chaviano for policy 5460 for the graduation requirements on page six. I know we made adjustments for accords and other regalia earned through academic achievements or participation in school approved organizations in accordance with district guidelines. Specifically for district guidelines, I know a couple of emails come through since graduation is coming up. and academics is great, but when it comes to sports and the other things that our children are

143participating in, even with the military, we just did a whole event last week. in those district guidelines are the military cords or anything obviously outside of JOTC because there are students that do enroll and they're not in JOTC, right? Does it fall in those guidelines? So the district guidelines once the board approves this policy the district guidelines will be worked on and that's going to be a collaborative effort with legal and academic services and our principles and we do know what the board's intention is to make sure that military academic student clubs etc that if there are cords that are being awarded for those that students are allowed to wear them at graduation. Now the specifics on how in which ones specifically are going to be incorporated is going to be something that will be

144discussed when we start looking at the actual process. I will say that the JOTC uniform and anything related to that is able to be worn at graduation per the policy. Okay, that's all I have. Miss Giovanelli, then Mr. Fiser. And thank you for bringing that one up. also I'd like to add, because there's been some misinformation out in the community regarding graduation and students being allowed to be that they participate at one school and they can go back. Now, it's in the policy that they can that student and I'm going to just going to read it. Students who meet graduation requirements shall be permitted to graduate at their zone or enrolled home school receive their official diploma from that school and wear any academic regalia such as honor cords or distinctions they have earned in

145accordance with district guidelines. I think it's important to note that because we have students that are at one one school for a short period of time and then go back to their original home school and that they are permitted to graduate at the home school or back at the prior at the other school if that's what they chose to do. no one's making them graduate at one school over another. And the policy is going to is I think clear on that and I think it's really important because like I said there was some misinformation going around in the community that students will be made to to to graduate at one school and not their home school. So it is totally the option of the family and the parent and the student not staff or the

146administration or board members for that matter. But I just wanted to bring that up and thank you for changing adding the chords and so forth in this. There was some verbiage that was changed in this past week and I appreciate the efforts of the staff and the district and as well as your legal staff solidifying that in the policy. Thank you, Mr. Fischer. Thank you. first off in this I would advocate and attorney debruno we've had this discussion perhaps defining what regalia is and I don't know if we do that on a policy level or if we do that possibly on the administrative level just so we can have some clarification on that as there's multiple definitions of it. the second part again whether this is based on the process for administration or not I

147just want us to be careful and clear because it we say school approved organizations so that opens up a a lot of organizations just so we're aware of that. So and I hope that you know obviously it's important to our students but I want to make sure that our principles are helping are really part of this process and helping drive this process. So definitely Mr. efficient and that's exactly why we have a I would call it a little subcommittee with academic services and legal and we will be reaching out to the principles to get their input as the district guidelines are actually developed. Thank you. Miss Jordan, were they not going to do a leadership court which would encompass any club that is part of leadership and that would be JRTC that would be everybody

148then. So you're not distinguishing or worrying about clubs, organizations, it's all one. I will say that's part of the discussion, but until such time as the guidelines are complete, I don't want to make a promise that's what it's going to be, but that is definitely something that's being considered. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And I'll stay up here for the next one. Okay. Absolutely. next is the value adjustment board. Kathy Dup Dupe Bruno will also be presenting on this topic. Thank you, Madam Chair. So, as the board, and we've discussed this in our one-on- ones, there's an obligation pursuant to Florida statute 194.015, to have an appointment of a citizen to the Lee County Valley Adjustment Board, we call it VAB, VAB. to be eligible pursuant to the statute, the person must not be a

149member or an employee of any taxing authority. must not represent any property owners in any administrative or judicial review of property taxes and they must own a business that actually has a storefront occupies commercial space located within the school district boundaries. the value adjustment board will reorganize by July one sometime in July is going to have their first meeting and the board needs to have somebody to represent you from the citizen standpoint at that meeting at that time. Currently the board has a somebody serving in this capacity. Her name is Marian Briggs. she was appointed by the board last year. Miss Briggs has expressed some interest in continuing in the role. she meets all of the statutory qualifications. She submitted her application for reimpointment and has demonstrated reliability in attending and participating in the in

150the meetings. We have to have somebody by the June meeting so that person can start in July. At this time, what I would like to know from the board is would you like us to bring forward Miss Briggs again for the June meeting or would you like us to move forward and secure applications to bring in some other candidates for you your consideration in June? Mr. Fischer, thank you. I just want to add in as I'm your representative on the value adjustment board. I am confident in Miss Briggs and her ability to to operate in that capacity in the board and I would support continuing with her. Thank you board members. Any other comments on this? Miss Jordan, I agree with Mr. Fischer and I know that in the past years the one gentleman who

151was our leaison was on there forever and so I appreciate that she came forward again. So thank you Mr. Persons. Yeah, I agree with keeping her. I think it'd be excellent idea. I've met her and she's doing a great job. I'll agree as well. Consistency. Mr. Ribble. I'm fine with that. Miss Shaviano, we're good. You have your direction? Yes, I do. Thank you, Madam Chair. No. Thank you. All right. We're going to allow Miss Dupe Bruno to exit so that she can start public comment. Madam chair, the school board policy provides the opportunity at this point in the meeting to address the board concerning any matter on this meeting's agenda. If you completed a public comment card, please provide it to staff. Public comment will be held at the podium in the center aisle and

152in front. Please be advised that the board will not respond during public comment to remarks made by speakers. Abuse of language defined as swearing, use of profanity, or name calling is prohibited. Speakers who fail to follow proper decorum in the chambers will be ruled out of order. Any speaker continuing with such remarks will be required to relinquish the microphone per board policy 0169.1 and may be removed from the chambers. There will be one warning. Per board policy 0169.1. The time per speaker is 3 minutes if there are 20 speakers or less. You will find a countdown on the big screens in the front of the room. Once your time has elapsed, the microphone will automatically shut off. Please state your name when you approach the microphone. and please follow staff's direction when lining up. U

153Madam Chair, there are three speakers that wish to address the board. Proceed. Thank you. Will the following individuals please line up? Marge Cox, Paula Porter, and Michael Andosia. And I just want to remind the speakers that you are limited to only the items that were discussed during the workshop. Hello, I'm Marge Cox. I'm glad to be here today. As we've talked about budget and personnel, I have additional information that I hope will be helpful to you. Last month, I get gave you paperwork and an email that showed the importance of library media specialists in the schools and the data that shows clearly and over time the difference that they make for student scores. I want to help that to happen. And so this month I have paperwork that you'll get after the meeting and I've

154also sent an email so you can just click on the links easily that show the strategies of getting media specialists here what they have to go through what are the universities that have programs that they can do online. it's a one side though that's certainly not everywhere where they could go to get that certification, but I chose to include in the paperwork only the ones that were included in the Florida Department of Education website that those were the ones that would be most likely to be helpful to the staff. I would suggest principles talk to their best teachers to see if they would be willing to make that crossover. A library media specialist really is just a classroom teacher with a little larger classroom than most classrooms are. But they are teachers, certified teachers making

155a difference collaborating with classroom teachers. Data shows again and again they will improve student scores and not only student scores but students learning as as they are going through the learning process. So, I hope this will be a helpful tool to you as you are looking to encourage teachers or other members of the community to become school library media specialists. Thank you for your time today. Dr. Paula Porter, Lehi Acres. As we celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week this week, it's the perfect time to reflect not just on the dedication of our educators, but on what more we can truly do to value and retain them as we've been discussing today. However, we must also recognize the extraordinary work of these educators who power our classrooms, guide our children's, and anchor our community in Lee County. Starting

156teacher salaries approved last year at $50,000 do reflect progress. But as the cost of living in Southwest Florida rises and teacher shortages continue to grow, we must ask, is that enough? The NEA recent as of April 29th sent out a report of teacher salaries and indications across the country. Florida the average teacher s starting salary is 48,639. That makes us 17th in the nation. However, the most depressing thing that I see here is average teacher salary is 54,875 in the state of Florida, which is number 50. Teacher pay ga minimum living wage in Florida is indicated at $61,02. So those are very depressing numbers for us in Southwest Florida because our teachers are not just instructional staff. their mentors, counselors, and lifelines for students facing personal and academic challenges. Many go above and beyond every

157single day, buying supplies with their own money, tutoring after hours, and supporting students emotionally in ways that far exceed their job descriptions. And yet, as we have seen many struggles to afford rent, home ownership, child care, and even meeting daily living expenses in our increasingly expensive communities. When we talk to teachers in our districts, most are passionate about teaching, but they're exhausted, financially stressed, and questioning whether they can afford to be in this pos profession that they love. As you know, we're facing the concern of teacher retention. Neighboring districts offer more competitive conversations and initiatives. We risk losing our best educators to better paying opportunities elsewhere. This is a talent drain for our students. Raising teacher pay is not a luxury. It's a strategic necessity. It's a direct investment in student achievement, school performance, community

158well-being, and is a necessary return on investments for our students. Let's show our teachers that Lee County not only appreciates them, but we are ready to lead the way in valuing them. Thank you. oh, pardon me. Michael Andosha of Fort Myers, Florida, former teacher. And, that was a great report. That report on, teacher retention was a really, really great report. And it, it kind of discombobulated me because I had some more prepared words, and now I'm I'm rather improving, but that's okay. because I'm one of the teachers that you guys failed to retain, which quite frankly is a shame because I was also a teacher who loved being in the classroom. I loved teaching. I did not want to I had no desire to be an administrator. I had no desire to be a pencil

159pusher at the district level. I loved being in my class geeking out with my kids every day. That's what I wanted to do. and I would have been perfectly happy doing that until you guys wheeled me out on a gurnie. but instead I decided to end my career last year. And for me it was academic freedom, the loss of academic freedom that teachers at the secondary level were experiencing. some of that is outside of the control of the board, but still as our community leaders, it's your responsible. It's your responsibility to mitigate those as much as possible. But I can guarantee you that every there are a lot of teachers like me, former teachers like me, who've moved on. and all of us have their own story. So, I think the change that I want

160to I want to make to what I was planning on saying in my prepared remarks is the board should probably find a way to to reach out to us and talk to us and figure out why you lost us because there's for me it was academic freedom. So, that's why every time you see my smiling face I'm talking about academic freedom. But for other teachers it was pay. I mean, it's great that we that we're starting kids, you know, kids are coming out of college and they're getting that job and they're making $50,000 a year and they're they're happy about that. That's great. I applaud the district for doing that, but it doesn't do that kid any good. What happens when that you know when that teacher you know they create a $50,000 a year

161lifestyle for themselves which is their right and then five years down the road after their pay raises haven't increased and haven't increased with the cost of living they're starting to hurt and they're looking at all their friends in other professions who are doing much better than them because here's the reality I mean we talk about how we as a district are competing with other districts that are paying better. But that's part of the story. You're competing with every other profession out there who would be really delighted to have people working for them who bring to the table what teachers bring to the table. You're also competing with all of them and you're losing teachers as a result of it because you're losing that competition. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. That concludes public comment. Thank

162you. We are going to now move to good of the order or other business. I will start with Mr. Fischer. Thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to give a brief update on the U board auditor discussion. I've I've sent some emails over. I want to applaud our human resources for really helping expedite that and really get some more movement and some applications out there. there are some notes if you haven't had a chance on the emails I sent to review the rubric. I think I believe the job posting lasts until the 9th if I recall. So I'm getting a nod on that. So we're getting better. but kind of wanted to get a little bit of the board's feedback. I personally would like to see maybe a few more applications, but before we kind

163of start moving forward a little bit more, again, I don't we don't want to kick the can down the road. I just want to make sure we're getting the right people. Just want to see if there's any board feedback and you know, in a little bit, you know, once we figure that out, then I can set up another special meeting. So, Madam Chair, I know for for me I would I mean the 9th is this week, so I would I would like to wait until that's completely closed just to make sure there aren't any last minute any anybody last minute putting their hat in. So, that's my own two cents. Anybody else? Miss Ginelli, I noticed that a couple they were not able to get back in touch with them or contact them. do we

164know if it was just basically phone calls or was it an email or anything written communication or even a letter? I would like to see those. There was, I believe, some notes in the rubric at some point. I know some, you know, I know they've tried emails. I know they've tried call some. I know one listed, you know, voicemail box full. I can follow up on the extent of those communications. I will talk with Miss Rivera on that and see the full extent, but I know they did try. I don't I don't recall if there's a letter, but I'm happy to follow up with you on that shortly. Yeah, thank you. I I agree with Miss Fleming that I mean the ninth and hopefully we'll get a couple more applicants. I'd agree with you. I'd

165like to see a little more, but you know, we're getting down to the wire. I so I understand that too. So, thank you. Thank for the work that you're putting into it as well as HR. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. You're welcome. Mr. Persons, time to open the can of worms here. if the bill passes where we do not have to have an internal auditor, would we want to have that discussion as a board whether to proceed with this or not? I personally still want to proceed, but I think should we hold off a little bit before we actually make the final decision or is there can we take a consensus of whether to move forward? I don't know what to do at this point. Mr. Fiser, do you know what you have a followup on

166that? I don't have a current status. I know we It's current status. Sorry about that. I know I had asked Dr. Savage through the government relations team to to follow up on some of those bills. I don't know if that efficiency bill is dead. I think that I'm not sure on that. But regarding that I mean I would be in for you know favor of no matter what moving forward I think for the size district and making sure that somebody's looking our processes procedures. So but that's just my own personal opinion. Miss Giovanelli and I would agree as well. mainly because the size of the district is one thing but I think it's just part of accountability and cuz this year if it pops up who knows next year come could come back up back

167then. So I would rather just be proactive and stay stay that way instead of being reactive. Although we're actually reactive at this point, but but you know because I hindsight I think that it could come back around anyways and I'm hopeful that it may not see the finish line on that one anyways. Thank you. Yeah, I agree. I think we possibly wait till the 9th concludes, see if any more applicants are in, and then perhaps through communication, Mr. Fischer if you want to email and then we can set up a special meeting when we get to that process. Do I have a thumbs up board? Okay. Is that clear Mr. Fischer? Yes, madam chair. Thank you board. following up just getting into my stuff for good of the order committees Horizon Council. I attended recently

168and Dr. Carlin gave a great overview of our CT programs and what's going on in our community. So I thank her for that. FSBA recently we had the nominating committee meet and they have tenally selected new executive officers that will to lead the organization in the future. that will be up for vote then in June by FSBA members. So additionally foundation was able to attend many of us the take stock and children both the new scholars which is amazing program as well as the take stock graduation. It's amazing to see some of those kids that were able to get through that. one one had a student had had a 5.9 something and really had a a tough childhood I guess is the best way to say it and really persevere for that. So that was

169really amazing. So outside of that, I just kind of wanted to put this on the board's radar and as well as for the deputy superintendent, superintendent, once we kind of figure out things with our board auditor, I'd like to continue exploring we talked about possibly waste, fraud, and abuse through some kind of partnership with the county clerk. So just kind of wanted to follow up on that. We discussed that I believe before this board was formally seated. So, that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Giovanelli. I'll be real quick. last night most of us attended the, the excellence in education awards and that was actually really nice honoring teachers as well as students. So, I think that was very nice, especially on the heels of or actually it's not really the heel actually,

170but the beginning of teacher appreciation week. and I really want to acknowledge that our teachers are really so very important and valuable and I hope that parents and as well as students recognize that and remember that. I mean there's always we always have a favorite teacher of the that we as a child that we remember. I have a couple actually. so I just hope that everyone else shares in those same thoughts today and or this week as well as we had the project appreciation on Friday which that's become one of my new favorite things to do every year is appreciate teachers and reading the story from a student of their favorite teacher and I think that's a wonderful way of acknowledging our teachers and the works that they do. graduations are up and coming right

171now or coming up, I should say, and I'm excited about that. I know that we're all going to be pretty busy with that in the next weekend, not this Mother's Day weekend, but the following weekend, although I think some graduations have already may have h even happened at some of the schools. And Golden Apple Awards, we attended that a couple weeks ago, a couple weekends ago. And that was a really beautiful event. as always, they do a wonderful job at the foundation for public schools and so I appreciate everything that Marshall and his staff does. and they give out quite some scholarships in sending students to college and it's that's really exciting that comes out of our district. Lee County does that for our students. So, thank you and see you in a little bit,

172Mr. Ribble. Okay, real quickly, I just want to report on my two last positions. The first one being, FGCU, moving right along with working with Dr. Diana Shazar over there on the, Department of Education, really focusing in on this, the science of reading, which is the program we use here in the district. And this month, joining me on the reading process or the reading train is going to be Dr. Dr. Cuba McCoy, Mr. Jared Ad, and myself. We're having a conference call with the reading specialist for FGCU. her name is Dr. Michelle Brian. She's the assistant professor of reading for the reading department at the school. And we're going to be focusing in on how we can get involved with some of the parents that are having problems or that had voiced a concern at

173some town hall meetings about reading problems some of their children are having. We're going to try to zero in on some phonics and some other things we can use to help shore up our reading program. So, I'm looking forward to that. we'll probably be doing using some live after five type program so folks can if they're working they can mingle with us after work and have a reading session with a parent and their student or we'll do like a lunch and learn in the in mid-after afternoon type of situation. So that's what we have going with FGCU. As you know I'm on the ITF which is our insurance and benefit committee. This is not good news. Last month I said we were trending almost a million dollars over last year. Well, this past month we

174went from the same month last year 8.9 in expense to 11 million. So that's $2.1 million above and beyond where we were. we are going to have a special carrier review hopefully next week. This will be the first time that we do that. will really actually focus in on where our dollars are going for benefits and what can we do to address some of our bills from some of our insurance carriers. Why this one person one location charge X for an MRI and another location charges twice that. We're going to try to drill down on some of these issues and try to get some fixes in place. I am pleased to report though that we have more and more of our employees getting involved in their annual physical. We went from 18% in a health

175awareness to 43%. So, we are moving the needle and as you know, health prevention is going to save us some dollars in the long run where we're not having people being treated. So, that's pretty much all I have for the ITF. Thank you, Miss Jordan. Thank you. save some for later. I would just like to if I may ask through the chair superintendent about I would love to see an organizational chart with the bottom down from the pier that you or the mushroom and how that will look from all the assistants that we've just they're in these job descriptions. So that way when we're looking at because when you look at the other districts in Florida, they have those like broke out where they have the top then they have the others. And that would

176be great to be able to have that as a visual. Yeah. So if I may, when we when we presented the original the top one page, which again in our district, we've had the one page and some districts only have the top one page. We did mention as part of our timeline that we will be by the end of the summer, we our intention is to have all of the departments. And so you'll if you go to other districts for example and you see the department they're often like a hundred pages. So it does take time for us to build that out but that is our full intention so that when the board has their full adopted budget which you do in September but we'll hope our goal is obviously have it sooner than that

177you'd have a corresponding comprehensive organizational chart and for us it's not just for your ask it's so that employees know when they're get taking a job they kind of understand where it is in the organization. We would even like it hyperl so people can quickly drill down. Oh, I want to just see how the business services division works. Click on it. Takes you right to that section. Click on that. Right to my area. It just makes the organization less it makes it more accessible to people, to the public, to the workers, to everyone. So, thank you for allowing me that opportunity to talk about that. Thank you. And then my other ask would be to Mr. Depri Bruno is and they have this conversation up here about a policy with regarding communication because I feel

178that with what just what just took place a little over a week ago and the miscommunications and the way that staff was feeling, families were feeling. I know I was feeling. I just feel that we need to to have something in writing on what does that look like and that way we know if there's an incident that takes place, this is the protocol and this is what is going to take place. I don't know if that's in a policy or what that looks like, but I think that we really need to have something in writing so that way the next time we're not waiting 3 days before we find out that something has taken place. Yeah. And just if I may, so just to highlight, you know, a lot of the policym typically, you know,

179really starts with a need and then administration working, with you all. And so I think what what we would reflect on and I know we had some of these conversations in the 101 ones anytime you know I mean first off just broadly communication just in general is one of the biggest challenges for almost all large organizations but I think particularly for us when you have communications that are of a safety nature or a critical incident those become very very serious for us and so we just want you to know that anytime we engage in a particular incident that we want to rewind the tape and better understand where an incident, you know, we want to understand the beginning, the middle, the end, how it got where we are. That's something that we're doing. we've had

180a couple incidents lately, some more noteworthy than others where, you know, we just are trying to understand what that sequence was, how things were communicated, which audiences, what was a method, means of communication because I think there is a need always for continuous improvement. And just want to make sure that we're kind of highlighting for our board, for our public, who may have specific instances in mind that's something that we are working on. I know Dr. Carlin, she were here today. I know she'd be highlighting just I had some notes from her basically that we have we have some teams working on on this to try to better map this out. And so once we have a really strong procedure that we think we can visualize for you all, we'd give that to the board.

181so you all have an opportunity to see administratively how we're trying to respond to that. So that if that's meeting board member needs, that would be and we'd love to participate in whatever development you want to do on policy to try to lean on best practice. what do you know the very best districts in the country do related to incident communications or just in communications in general? We're always open to try and improve our response and just effectiveness of our communication and timeliness of our communication. Well, I appreciate it because I know I was looking back because I had thought and I know I told Miss Chev now that Vanessa that I thought we had something in writing and I went through every single book trying to find that to see how that you know

182how that affects us, how it affects the community, the parents, everybody. So, I just want to make sure that I and I promised the parents that I would bring this up and I am that's why I'm bringing it up because there was great great concern. So, we have to do a little bit better for that. Just saying. And we can always there's always room for improvement for everything. And then I just want to say congratulations to the communication department the for receiving three awards from the Sunshine State School of Public Relations Association. So bravo to them. And also I really want to say a special thank you to Adam Wright. He did a phenomenal the Lee County Student Film Festival that just took place. It was amazing. We had kids from all over elementary, middle,

183high school that participated and he just did an amazing job with that. I just really want to thank him for that because I know it took a lot of work and all of them that participated in that. And again, it's teachers appreciation week. Really appreciate all the teachers out there and I know we just had our administrative professional day. So, thank you to to all of you and our principal day. We have everybody's day is this month. So, I just want to say thank you very much for everything that you all do for the district and to the families and the children. And then I wanted to there's been so many activities that have been taken place. Some have already been mentioned here, but we also had the graduation of this the JRTC award ceremony

184and signing which was really a nice thing to see. It's always a beautiful event and film festival and our CTE showcase which was amazing. It allowed people from the community to come in and see what we do here at the district and we can be running every day like from morning till night at all these events and making sure because there's so many good things that are going on out there and I think that we have to always make sure that we're telling our story because the negative is always much easier but we have so many positive things that are going on in the in the district. I just want to thank everybody for that. That's it. Thank you Miss Jada. Mr. persons. Well, we got good news today with the NN being moved up

185two years. I'm very interested, as most of the board knows, into AI and technology and in the new school, we want to have an a program that's going to encompass this a lot. Dr. Badier when he originally we brought this up the bank said we're going to have very great a program there and we've continued that thought. I met with the secretary of agriculture with Wilton Simpson and I asked him I said what can we do at this new school to make it the best a program he says of course you want 4 and you know but you also need to have AI and technology and like the brilliant guy said how do we do that and he said go to your extension agent who's works for the University of Florida, which is the leader

186in this area. So, I went there and met with them and they're all excited because they had not really done this in a high school yet. So, they're working on some curriculum and program there. So, that's looking really good. And then I was invited by them to go observe at US Sugar how they're using AI and it opened my eyes a lot. They're like they were at particular time they were harvesting all the sugarcane with these big combines going you know and there's a guy in them but they said he's not driving them it's all AI all GPS and he says not only that but they do that 24 hours a day they don't stop at night because they don't need to they don't need daylight because the satellites up there working so it was

187it was very very interesting there and then I met as the liaison to FSW W I went and met with the president there, President Albrittain, and I mentioned to him what we were doing, and he says, "Oh, we're starting the same thing at at an extension of F FSW in Henry County." So, they want to work with us also. So, this is really starting to come together and it's a really exciting thing. Not just getting the school open earlier, but all the parts are coming together and reaching out with our district people here because obviously I do not do curriculum. So, Dr. Shaker will keep you in the loop there. He's he's leading the charge there. So, I'm just excited about that and I want everybody to know. Thank you, Miss Shaviano. I think everyone

188hit all of the things. but yeah, for teacher appreciation week, thank you. I think my daughter's most excited to like give the gifts and do the things this week to show that she's excited. but did a lot of school visits, of course, Golden Apple. so no, just thank thank you for everything everyone does because without you, we really couldn't do anything. So, I think I'll hold everything else to the action meeting, but that's it. I'm going to hold my comments for this evening. Attorney Dupe Bruno, do you have any? You don't have anything for the workshop. Thank you, Deputy Dr. Superintendent Savage. I have nothing either, Madam Chair. Thank you. Thank you. Future meetings will be something a little different tonight. So, please note our longevity award ceremony starting at 5:00 p.m. where we will

189honor dedicated services and contributions. Following that ceremony will be the board action meeting and that begins promptly at 6 p.m. At this point, having no other business to come before this body and seeing no objection, this meeting is adjourned and the time is 3:51