School Board Workshop: October 5, 2020

001good afternoon ladies and gentlemen the time is 1pm and we're gathered for the purpose of a board member workshop we're going to have the rsm statement of work and investigation process which is scheduled for two hours and welcome to jennifer and clara and is matt on the line no okay well we welcome both of you back this afternoon thank you for being with us followed by an agenda review for the october 6 2020 regular meeting and at this time i will turn it over to clara ewing everyone good afternoon okay hi so the sow the sow we started circulating a draft early summer we have had again discussions with you all and working with the board attorney we have made modifications to the sow to make sure that we incorporate questions without question but comments

002and any concerns that you all have had regarding the verbiage that's in here so we're just here to answer any questions with this updated sow okay so board members does anyone have any questions regarding the statement of work for fiscal year 2021 of our internal audit plan mrs morgan yeah i just wanted to confirm what you all said about your sort of sidebar today that you're going to try to do a linkage between the payment process and this the in the dashboard that's correct great thank you that's all i need to know and miss patricka so our phone calls included in the estimate for meetings requests and research we're not going to be billed separately for i'll give the example of last week and today this relationship is important to us as well we are

003not billing you for those phone calls so in a previous hourly rate contract we had with the board when i was reviewing their billing they actually included phone calls in there and i was able to call up the contract they entered into and pushed give some pushback and they removed those pieces from the bill so can we update the sow to include that specifically well we kept this in here take for example we've had school boards call us can you research x y and z sales sales tax for us that does say take some time and we need to have the ability to be able to do that if we're called upon that's that's research that research is covered and that's something that we would oh so you're saying the phone calls itself okay please

004thank you also as i look at the hr audit i wonder whether we should be looking at whether we have best practices in place regarding hiring racial and ethnic minorities is that something you can do i think there's i know that when i'm out with groups they're asking what is the percentage of our employee population as it relates to our student population is that the metrics we should be looking at or should we be looking at as compared to the ratio of ethnic and racial minorities as compared to the demographics of the entire community and whether we have best practices in place to ensure that we're getting the most and best qualified candidates to reflect the racial diversity of our student body that makes sense we can include and because that'd be pretty relevant to

005show too in the background how you compare even if we can see how you compare to other school districts as well we'll try to pull that information but whatever we can find from that perspective we'll try to include that in i have a lot of questions about the investigative function but that's kind of later in this part of the for now all right fine and thank you ms patricka on board members miss jordan well i'm not sure i don't know if we're going over every page but i mean my questions are some of them i have quite a few so the understanding of documents documentation of the process was one when we're looking at all this there's nowhere in here where the probation period is even considered in that document that's page five assuming we

006have a probation period that we need to place here so when we developed this scope of work we were taking it from like the recruitment to once they get on so once they've been onboarded is where we were stopping the process so we're i'm sorry say that again please so if you go to page five you know we're talking about the recruiting the selection and then the onboarding so we need to stop we need to start in a stop point for our process we can expand it well i guess then what is the and i apologize i can't remember what was the inherent risk when it came to hr if we're doing it from the recruiting to when they get here and stop because where where is that risk factor at that we have in

007hr well hr is inherently risky because that is more than half of your budget so is it the payroll part portion of it so hr can be broken down into various aspects you can have we can come in and do an outboarding process performance reviews so this is just one aspect of hr that we're coming in that we suggest that we come in to review but inherently hr is risky just inherently because of the volume and that is the largest part of your budget so looking at various aspects of that is very is prudent for an internal audit function right so that would be the part of once they're on board it then would be the inherent risk not the before part right it's the yes the before making sure that you're getting the right

008people that's inherently risky if you're not hiring the right people you're not qualified etc okay and then can i can i just ask how many i know this is off jordan can you go a little closer sorry can you could you just say as far as your the company is concerned because i know this is a lot of questions that i've been receiving so i figured i need to ask this question how many folks how many staff are trained in gatsby in your office your particular office and that was one question that they okay a lot of people are asking me and then how many yellow book audits have you done have you issued in a year so we found a particular office sorry so we function as a north florida team so jennifer and

009i are from an office matthew is from a different office so we function as the north florida consulting team so i am yellowbook i take my 12 to 24 hours a year you know it's 24 every two years but i make sure i get 24 every year jennifer all the leaders make sure that we're getting our yellow book requirements but as far as issuing yellow book audits this is consulting so we're not doing a test services we have an attest group where they go in and they do financial statement audits of various numerous school districts and the single audit that goes with it with yellow book so then you would all be coming from different you're not none of you are in the same offices so you would be coming from a different office is

010that a different travel expense if you're coming from no we don't bill you for travel expenses okay that's it for right now mary thank you can i hang it back on one of her questions can i pick it up jordan you asked the question about hr and risk and i guess what i didn't the answer i didn't hear was when you conducted your risk assessment of lee county i get that hr you know organization of our size is inherently risky but i didn't hear what specifically about your risk assessment of lee county public schools helped you to identify this specific era of hr as being the number three most risky process that we have in lee county that should be audited third on the list right so during our discussions that we were having with

011you all various leadership recruitment came up a lot and being able to hire timely hire those kinds of things so they came up through a lot of the conversations and we're seeing this inherently throughout numerous school districts not just you all as well but yes it did come up during numerous conversations and that's what brought it to the top 10 list as well can i yes thank you thank you because i was gonna thank you okay so it came up but what did you find here within our own when you were doing your investigation because you had come here to do your risk assessment ahead of time and during that risk assessment did you see something that i mean because that's why we have you here we don't know so was there something that you

012found or that you've seen that brought that to that the top level in hr so the risk assessment process as we went through last year is very high level and it's purposely high level we're not looking at processes we're not digging deep into processes walkthroughs looking at documentation so it's based on the conversations conversations about risk what keeps people up at night what we're seeing in the paper what we're seeing elsewhere so we have not invested not investigated we have not audited anything within lee county schools per se right now but that's why it came to the top 10 on the risk assessment and this is a high risk process that you all should probably look at or have your function look at i should say can i just ask one more question can you

013explain what high i guess i'm confused because when i hear a high level to me that's something that you're like taking a deep dive into because it's a high level as opposed to another level so can you explain what that means the high level that so instead we were looking at the talking about processes from a 30 000 level foot and not digging deep ten thousand getting documentation talking to control owners talking to process owners all discussions were at the your level senior leadership directors and managers okay thank you miss kittens yes i just wanted to weigh in with that as well with this conversation in that if we're looking at an organization that's as large as ours and tell me if i'm wrong when you're looking at the highest risk you would look at

014where you're spending the most money and say okay so what can is there anything that can be done in this area where we're spending so much money that could possibly be improved on or tweaked not that there's something that's wrong but let's look at where we're spending our money and see if we can do something to make that better and that's what i see is you guys is your function am i correct or not yeah and if you recall from the risk assessment we talk about the risk factors financial public perception governance there's a variety of risk factors that we're taking into account when we're looking at this anything you guys do is transparent public perception is huge this is a huge financial part of your budget so all those factors were taken into consideration

015from that perspective as well great is that it miss kittens i think so i mean i think this whole thing with the whistleblower policy and all of the things that are going along with it are going to help us to be better and to help the public per you know persona of what we're doing with all the money and since that's our biggest chunk of our budget so i just think it's something that's very necessary to today miss jordan did you have something more yeah i'm still a little i guess because i look at this is this is speaking about onboarding and everything pre-employment whereas the actual concern or money or anything dealing with the financial situation would be after the fact and the pay the payroll or anything after versus before so that's why

016and as ms getting said you know we have to be concerned about the financial to me that is like are we using the best are we using you for the best possible way in hr can i add one little thing to what i was saying and yes it's after the person's hired but it's also before we spend money recruiting and looking for employees and all of that's a part of it so if we ask them to come in and look at that process and say is there a way we can do this better is there some way we can save money on our recruiting that's before the person's hired so that means all of it from the time when we talk hr from the time there's the inception of the of the job description and

017you know is it is it the right thing to say to get the right person so it's it covers the whole gamut no and i get that and i'm sorry but does that constitute spending 125 000 oh that's my question it's all a part of the process i think and anyway no thank you i think miss jim and ellie had her hand up yes miss juvenile so i'll make sure he can hear me so no i so i understand because i think it's about efficiency and then and then transparency so i appreciate everything you're doing because it's really for the public to understand and make sure that we understand and the public understands that's so important from especially for me so i we want to be efficient in our hr processes and so if they

018can help us that will save money i assure you that the 125 will save money in the long run so i think that just being efficient and you looking at our processes and it's always about how we can do better and the only way to do that is have a different perspective look at something to be able to accomplish that so thank you and maybe i could clarify something miss jordan if i could i think that part of the risk factors that we that we looked at when we came up with the top 10 list one of them is process the other one is control environment we look at revenue source or materiality the dollars going through that we look at compliance the compliance in nature of the process the rules the statutes is there

019change within the function so we look at a lot of those things and i think the reason why that kind of bubbled to the top and not once an employee is hired and moves through the process because that at that point in time it may be too late so if you've ever tried to fire an employee it's very challenging if you don't get the right person there to begin with or if you start school and you have vacancies that puts you in a very bad position right you're you're in the wrong side of the bargaining chip so the recruiting function getting the employees getting the right employees as well as bringing them on board we have heard stories about making offers but it takes two to three weeks to onboard due to red tape xyz

020and you lose that employee so we have teacher shortage this is even before pandemic right and now we have substitute issues so that hr team needs to be rocket and rolling to be able to fill the positions appropriately so that the district can operate and that's where the risk comes in does that help well as as having businesses i definitely understand the purpose of hiring people and making sure you're hiring the right people and the cost that is related to that because there is always a cost when you hire people in training alone right so i do understand that and yes firing as well so that concept i mean i have that i was just trying to figure out where you know all the rest of the putting everything else together i mean i think

021that we could probably sit here and have a really good discussion about what should be next and everybody might come to a different conclusion i mean transportation is so challenging procurement and contracting is always high risk i don't care what district you go to there's insurance costs that are you know rising but when we did the risk assessment based on you know here where we were who we were talking to and the different change factors and staffing and positioning and board member concerns that's what kind of came up to the top i'm sure we could do an equally as effective audit on you know once they get here and then that process of how to do the 90 days and the evaluation process and the recontracting etc but that's the one that bubbled up to

022the top thank you great thank you miss kittens i would just draw everyone's attention to you know the fact that their three main jobs are waste fraud and abuse and it's on the screen there c is waste and it means intentional or unintentional and i think that word unintentional is paramount because it's not a gotcha thing it's a did you realize you know with this extra set of eyes that if you put this over here you could save this amount or you could be more efficient so it's not i think some people look at oh you know we're paying this amount and hiring these people that gotcha these departments and i don't think that's the goal of it but when you read intentional or unintentional of consumption mismanagement squandering whatever but let's just take a

023look how can we do better right and you're only as good as your the improvements that you make yes okay any other comments so i just want to mention that one of the things i've noticed with comments from the superintendent and dr pruitt is that we go through this whole process of of advertising recruiting hiring and onboarding people and then we have many of our teachers who do not stay with us for a long period of time so we probably could make that process more efficient in providing maybe more information to some of those potential employees ahead of time and because i know that we dr atkins maybe you could weigh in here but i know that there i've heard dr pruitt say that you know we spend x amount of money with every new

024hire that we process and then if they're not with us for any length of time we're starting all over again and i know she said the other day that they're still trying to hire teachers and other employees and constantly playing catch-up so my interpretation of this documentation of the process and the way that the testing of compliance and internal controls was going to be a way to maybe refine the process that we're using now and identify ways to make that more efficient but if you could dr adkins well i you know i don't know exactly what you're you're aiming at but i'll try to just to speak to the turnover issue as you know you know it's very very costly for us to deal with turnover i mean you know the conservative estimate is 20

025if you look at the true estimate in terms of loss instructional time and those you know with when you are replacing that person with someone who's not as experienced it goes up from there you know i've seen estimates anywhere from 38 to 45 000 dollars when you when you continue to look at cost of training costs of experience florida is another unique animal in that we have a lot of mobility in the state that makes it even more challenging because it's you know it's there's a lot of growth in certain regions and just keeping up with the growth is a challenge and then keeping people and the last piece i think that's particular to lee county is that where our teachers by and large choose to live versus where our student population resides makes it

026again a unique challenge for certain regions of our community particularly east zone i think that is slowly slowly changing but it's it's it's very very slow to change and let me just throw in the last piece the other thing i think that's that's rather unique to lee county is that if you look at as lee county lee canyons age so if you the older we get the less diverse we are the younger we are the more diverse we are in really all areas and i think that people look at you know well you should reflect your student population in terms of your the way your workforce looks but it totally divorces from the reality of what lee county looks like in terms of the availability of workforce in terms of the age of available workers

027to to serve our students thank you board members any other questions or comments mrs morgan yeah i'm sorry i forgot to ask this question earlier miss lecter we had a conversation earlier about the difficulty with respect to payments on the contract because it wasn't clear in terms of process is that all squared away in your mind i still have a little bit of concern when i read the contract they talk about three to four phases phase one being twenty percent of payment phase 2 being 30 but they really don't in their contract specify what the phases are for us to identify that they've completed those phases in order to make the payments accordingly they talk about a month the first month is you know 20 but we really need to be paying on phases completed

028not monthly based on what the work is being done so i do have a concern about that still thank you i didn't if i may talk about that i made i made a comment earlier to the attorney that we are fine to bill you when we are completed with the audit if that is more digestible for all of you we will hold our bill for the estimated four months that it takes to complete the audit when we issue the draft report to management that is you know that is we are substantially complete and then it should be completed within two to three weeks after that if that is the wishes of the board we are we are fine with that okay did you have something else miss morgan no okay that was my question thank

029you thank you miss patricka so you are fine with payment upon substantial completion or two to three weeks after that when we get the report like for example we issued this report for construction on july 30th that's when i would like to issue the bill how about we do 80 20. you come when you come in front of us with your oral report you get the remaining 20. okay i'm just throwing that out there i have no ability to do that on behalf of the board but it's not complete complete when we issue the report to you it is final and it's public record and so we issued it on july 30th august september two two plus months to get in front of you very challenging but again i am if that makes you all

030more comfortable with how you want to pay us that is fine with us oh mr vanelli well if we have an audit committee you wouldn't have to go before that probably before evening comes back to the board so that's even more delayed time correct however when we when we issue the report and the attorney can correct me if i'm wrong when the report goes to you all it is public record yeah and it as as far as we are concerned it's final has it been accepted by you i don't believe so but that is our final product i think that's fair i think that's fair as well thank you and i agree i think that once the their job that they're hired to do is completed it's the other part is whether or not we

031accept it or we decide yes that's something we want to look into doing or not that's kind of up to us i agree okay and if you are the comments board members or questions do you have anything else that you want to review with us no okay and miss jordan does that work for this lecture is that okay bye thank you well then i think it looks like we are come finished with the review of the statement of work attorney bruno do you have anything to contribute no i don't have anything with regards to the statement of work i know that we'll go ahead and revise it with these last few terms and bring it back to the board for final approval thank you very much thank you for for being here and thank you

032attorney bruno for all of you oh i'm sorry okay miss patricka has a couple more questions well investigations was also on the on the agenda for today and so i was kind of dealing with statement of work first and then i wanted to talk about investigations as it relates to the policy that's on the overhead right now so miss fisher yes miss vaughn is on the line at this time i just want you to know that miss vaughn is on the line yes his father hi mom do you have comments i don't i need thank you very much and with regards to the investigation part i believe that dealing with the voice fraud and abuse in the hotline i do believe that's what ms patrick is referring to okay and it does have a little

033bit to do with the statement of work as well so i've got i've got some concerns a bunch of different sir and i don't even know where to start the most concerning part for me i guess let's start on line 27 of the policy where it says that the internal auditor will work with legal services to receive complaints and determine whether an investigation should take place what is legal services like we don't really know what legal services is i'd like the board attorney to to be mentioned in there specifically what what standard are we using to determine at what point we decide an investigation should take place i think legal sufficiency would would be something that i could live with because i know what that means but right now we have no standard in place

034whatsoever and then i also and i did discuss these concerns with rsm i have concerns about rsm being involved in the process of determining whether an outside investigation has take place it has to take place and then them actually conducting the investigation it seems like they're referring work to themselves which and again i ask this question if if they have their internal auditor hat on and they're auditing this process i would think that would that would be inherently risky to have a vendor refer work to itself essentially and then there's patrick rsm is not our vendor they are i understand but it's essential it's essentially the same thing they're making a decision about additional work they're going to do it's an additional per hour work that they will be doing right yes attorney i just

035want to make sure we're talking about the proposed board policy 1.30 race fraud and abuse it is on your board docs because it's set for public hearing so if you want to review what ms patrick is talking about and she was referencing line 27 and the rest of that section too and then i think we as a board need to have a conversation before we adopt this as to at what point is an outside audit even necessary to me when i read this i see confusion between internal auditor and inspector general i think an internal auditor does audits and an inspector general does investigations and to me the two should be separate i mean sometimes an investigation requires the expertise of an auditor but to me an audit is a separate function from an inspector

036general and as i looked at other districts across the state we're we're not really big enough here in lee county yet to justify creating an ig department or hiring an ig we have professional services and that is essentially our ig department so to speak but as i read this i get no sense as a member of the board when an investigation will be handled internally by a staff that we've already hired and we're already paying and when it will be referred outside which is an additional expense and seems very inefficient to me to do that on sort of a willy-nilly basis so i'd like to know when when is that going to happen what's the process for that taking place and the process as it's i'm sorry the policy as it stands right now answers

037none of those questions for me so just for the board's clarification the policy states that for anything regarding waste fraud and abuse a call is made to the hotline or somehow we get information that there's a claim for waste fraud and abuse they will then go to rsm and as ms patricka had indicated the policy says legal services but we can define that further for determination as to what's to do next and that's what i also need board clarification on that in terms of that process and i don't know if you guys can i ask you a question yes please dr akins can you offer guidance as to at what point a wastewater abuse allegation could come in and you believe it would be on the scope of what existing staff is capable of handling

038i can just look at what we have what we have done in the past typically if you have a situation where there's fraud of a staff member that's involved been involved where you have a substantial amount of money and there's not a number attached to that in terms of this much would be this but a substantial amount of money that typically does get referred to law enforcement in addition to that though if there's an employee conduct issue that portion of the investigation does go back to professional standards there are cases however like in the in the case of the superintendent in the case of a board attorney that would almost always have you know an outside investigator that the board would assign to do something like that and in addition to that if we have

039a situation where there's a potential conflict of interest like i recall a few times where you know there might have been staff that might be involved in in actually doing the investigation that where there was a conflict where we referred that to an external investigator for example when on literally my first day in the job the board attorney came to my office and we had to open up an investigation because of you know conflict of interest that involved an outside attorney investigating district staff so that would be an example where we it would be referred to the outside and i think from what i understand through attorney dupree bruno the instance where we would have to hire an outside investigator and those instances are rare they're few and far between and so i would feel

040more comfortable you know removing the internal auditor language from there and then on a case-by-case determination because it's so rare the board boy can decide who and when right does that make sense just to refresh your recollection this is definitely something we need board guidance on we need to figure out what process the board is comfortable with when you have a case that is waste fraud and abuse where is it going and what's triggering it for an investigation and who will be conducting the investigation that's what we need guidance on miss jordan then miss kittens sorry i have so many questions today on page six it's kind of what mr patrick was speaking about with the fraud waste and abuse hotline monitor and this is my concern it always has been my concern about due

041to the unknown factors and these fees where such services will be on an hourly basis what are those needs what which is it the 200 an hour or which 250 an hour and then if through coordination with the board attorney is determined that rsm should con conduct an investigation in response to the hotline then they'll be sending us a different statement of work detailing the scope so we have no idea and then of course we have to prove that first but still this could go it could go endlessly the money i'm just we have no idea what that what that looks like how much money that entails and i just think we i just have to put that out there miss kittens i think one thing we have to continue to remind ourselves is that

042the presence of an internal auditor is a legislative requirement that we must do sure and i don't know if it's the company that you have issue with or or what the issue is this is something that we have to do it's legislated that we have to do this and the way i see it kind of big picture if if our internal auditor whoever that is comes in and does their assessment and comes back with a report to us as well as to the audit committee then the next step for that is still with the board we still determine what we do next it's not that they determine however it is their job to understand and recognize fraud waste and abuse so they have they are the experts in it and i'm sure that if it

043was something that's a conflict of interest that they would say so in their professional means but we still have control once the report is done it you know it goes through the audit committee it goes through us and we make the determination so i don't i don't see where they could just sit and just write bills and submit them and continue to do that it's all laid out as to what they do and when you're which one was it line 27 you were talking about the board internal audit or legal services and we're in a we were talking about that not long ago about what that means and what that looks like so we do have to ask that question we'll receive complaints reported to the hotline generally and generally respond to the complaints in

044conducting an invitation and investigation so a general overview but remember that the board still has say so after the report is received do we go forward with them do we hire someone else to do it because you feel there's a conflict of interest we still have control jordan i'm not sure if she was referring to me or not but i just wanted to make something perfectly clear i have no issues with anyone i don't care who it is that would be sitting here i would still be asking the same questions about the money because when they when they do go to an investigation what what does that look like we have we understand what we're looking at the amount of money for the hr the audit for that we have no idea what this is

045going to turn out to be and how much money we're going to wind up spending when it comes to these the hotline and yes we are going to have to come back every time and yes the board will decide whether or not we will do that but still we have to put that in the back of our mind that will be money that we are that we need to to understand that we will be spending with this that's that's the only reason i am saying because i am concerned on what that money will look like at the end of the day what is determined to be you know worth investigating what will not be investigated and where that money will be at but can i can i just say this if if we find it

046necessary to go ahead and investigate something that could be waste fraud or abuse in the long run we are saving i get all that money because otherwise if we turn a dark eye to it then it goes on and on and never no one ever looks at it and we could you know money could be trickling out through the back door and we don't know it so the process to me is more you know cost-effective and oversight than than not doing it so mrs morgan so listening to everybody i think we've got a problem with the policy paragraph too and it's got to be the paragraph needs to be pulled and it needs to be rewritten in conjunction with the procedure that's been described i mean at the very least i would take out the

047last two the last two lines line 31 and 32. the board internal auditor will insist assist in fact finding a proposal of recommendations for further action in fact we can refer it to the clerk of courts they do investigations so you know now i'm wondering as we talk about this we've written a policy but we don't understand what the procedure is and the policy is going to lock us into something that is subject to questions so my recommendation would be that we pull the policy and we go back and we re-look at two paragraph two so miss giovanelli okay so i have to ask you because you are the ones that have assisted us in this so typically what do other districts do what is in this in this part of it like because this

048is all about processes and i don't think we have anything in place presently so i don't know that we eliminate something that we don't have yet but and we may have to work through some of the processes so what typically do other districts do in this in such a situation instance or whatever in our in our experience as the internal audit function for other school districts the decision will be made by board attorney working with the board whether or not they want to execute an investigation they'll call us this is what we want to do can you put together a scope of work of what this will cost us we put together a scope of work and we present a cost and they decide whether or not to have us execute did they answer your

049questions yes okay so thank you and mr trump so then you're not involved in the front end in other districts determining whether wastewater abuse allegations should be investigated you're only involved on the back end and some we are involved in the front end but the volume has been low does that i mean that helps me understand because i think this is just all about processes and that we need to have in place and it's just accountability and transparency with a third part third set of eyes that would come to us and say yes you need to do this or you know this is our recommendation and then as a board we make that determination i don't i don't really see anything wrong with that so and then i think that's part of why we're going

050to have the audit committee right exactly yeah you know it's another it's just you know it's just a step of transparency throughout the process right and as i read this it was clear to me that if the school board chooses once a notification has been received and logged through the established hotline by an independent services an independent service as the eternal internal auditors rsm can monitor and respond accordingly response will be determined through the board approved policies and protocols so we're in the process of approving our policy on ethics in education fraud waste and abuse and we need to create the process right and i think attorney bruno said that they are working on that and that they will continue to work together then it says the protocols and processes for coordination of efforts including

051with the board attorney where applicable investigation and reporting of valid notifications so if through coordination with the board attorney it is determined that rsm should cont conduct an investigation rsm will propose a separate statement of work detailing scope and anticipated fees for board approval so i feel like that's our safety net and fail-safe right there and it all comes before the board before any next step is taken for approval so miss kittens well line 31 and 32 i believe answers that question it says the board internal auditor will assist in fact-finding and proposal of recommendations for further action not that they will take further action but again it comes back to the board so i really don't see what the issue is even with this piece of you know it culminates in that last line

052yes whoever is involved after their report or whatever they do it still comes down to a proposal of recommendation for further action that we can either accept or reject one thing to keep in the back of your mind the reason why you have us as your internal auditors is to have an independent third party if there is something that this document is going to state that clouds that for you all then you should take us out of the document because that is who we are to you we are at the pleasure of the board we work and report to you and we are your independent third party to your point you have people on staff that are very capable of doing investigations there are certain times when you are going to want an independent third

053party that knows you that works for you that you can call on and that's what role we should play thank you so if the words give you concern or conf create some type of a conflict you should alleviate that because that's our value to you thank you jennifer thank you mr petrinka you just hit the nail on the head for me because to me objectivity is lost when you're making you're part of the process of making the determination as to whether we should pay more money for an investigation and then you're conducting that investigation the objectivity is completely lost in that process so if i had a standard in place where i knew that you were working with the board attorney to determine whether legal sufficiency exists to make a referral for an investigation i'm

054good with that and then the board attorney and the board or the audit committee could determine the scope of that investigation but my concern there too and i've discussed this with attorney dupree bruno is when we have allegations coming in front of us those are confidential and how do you have an audit committee meet and discuss confidential information out of the sunshine so how are these how are these determinations to be made while protecting employee rights i would hope that when you got to a certain situation or found circumstances that you wanted input from auditors that you would call us as your internal auditors but it apparent it probably should be more of a one-off than a baked into the process to give you more peace thank you miss kittens and that's thank you that's

055what i was going to say as well we very often talk about on this board that this is policy and then there's procedure as to how that goes so what we are looking at here is the policy and how you know all the rest of the procedures if we want to change that but i really as i continue to read through it don't see anything wrong even with paragraph two because it does culminate in saying they will make recommendations attorney de priebunna can you speak to the difference in that policy and procedure part of this so i think it's really important that we have the process outlined that's what i need to walk away with today in terms of the policy you know this is completely up to the board's discretion there is a difference

056between the policy which gives us an overarching type of direction but the process in terms of what happens when this call comes in where does it go what do we do with it who makes the decisions that's that's the guideline that i need and if we need to tweak anything to in the policy itself to reflect that we can do that as well but i need the process and this since this is the boards because this is your employee the internal auditor this is your process right and that's where i think this madden chairman yes please this is that's where this is a little bit different miss gittins says this is our process this isn't we're telling the superintendent what to do and he decides how to do it this is where deciding what to

057do and how to do it and the how to do it to me is essential in making sure the wording of what is also essential and right now regardless of everything else that's been said there is no standard in this policy there is no standard for the internal auditor and the board attorney to use to determine when an allegation should result in an investigation there is no standard or metric in there to determine and this is part of the process but i don't i don't know at what point will our professional standards department be handling the investigation and what would trigger an outside investigation does that go in front of the audit committee can we protect confidentiality if it goes in front of the audit committee or should it come in front of the board

058in a shade session like i there's too much about this that i don't know and i think it would be irresponsible to not wrap my arms around it better before moving forward and musicians can i respond and i hear what you're saying i think that the policy part is fine and the you know the policy part is fine the process is what we need to put down on paper and if you know that's well it will go from a to b to c then we can do that i don't really see us changing this policy document i see us adding the process part of it miss morgan i have to agree with ms patricka i think the internal auditor has to come out as as you suggested at the at the at least at the

059very least we need to take the internal auditor out of the policy and i do think we need to look at the process and then we need to make certain that the policy is consistent with the process and doesn't bind us in a way or open a door whatever i'm i'm for pulling the policy looking at the process and bringing it back and having confidence that everybody on this board is comfortable with their policy and process thank you miss morgan mrs giovannelli i thought we were and this is for attorney borneo i thought we had an org chart that drilled down on exactly how things went and they were in that org chart and that's been now months ago so i don't understand now all of a sudden the changes that was part of the

060process and because i like the fact that it's not it's going to a different set of eyes an objective view before it even comes back to us because maybe it will never even get here to the board and that's i don't see anything wrong with it so i maybe i'm misunderstanding something but i like the fact that it's a third party recommendation and they they see this way more often in different circumstances and scenarios than we do so explain to me why they would be taken out i don't understand well this is completely to the board's discretion this policy and what has been brought up to the board from the very beginning has pretty much been the same where it would go to the internal auditor but again it's up to the board in terms

061of how they want to proceed at this point i'm just getting can i ask one of you to address in other districts what is the norm for this process i mean let me just add this while we were working on this process we had multiple conversations mr williams was part of those conversations with miss ewing and mr blondel when we were hashing out how to draft this document and that was this is based on the conversations that we had this is the document that was created that was drafted and this is the process that was created and drafted now we are now looking at adding an audit committee so i will throw this out there and see if the board would be interested if there is concern about the internal auditor can we substitute that

062for the audit committee and have it go to the audit committee instead of the internal auditor how do you maintain confidentiality with an audit committee well i think the audit committee i mean you're right in terms of the audit committee having the confidentiality issue and it's going to have to be sunshine yes but in terms of the statement of work that comes out or or the labor cost that comes out without specifically going into names dates exactly everything that will identify who the employee is and just pretty much give an outline but this is how much it would cost i think that will be acceptable without going into the specifics the identifying specifics miss kittens so if we had someone sitting in an office back there that's our internal auditor and an audit was done

063by whom whomever at that point that a report was done would we not want our internal auditor involved in that process or exactly what's the point of having an internal auditor whether it be an individual or a group of people where do they get involved in internal audit i don't i really don't understand where the question is and we've discussed it and gone through this whole plan and now we're here talking about not doing it new doing the policy and is that going to mean that we don't start the whistleblower procedure and it's already been a year so now we're going to take it out another several months i don't understand that and we have i really think we need to move ahead especially with the whistleblower piece and i don't understand the angst from

064individuals as to why we shouldn't move to move forward with that go ahead so i believe i can hear your frustration ms gittins and i apologize i was having conversations with the board attorney and with rsm last week and i these these issues were raised with for me at that time i think this is part of the rule-making process i think that policy-making is the most important thing that we do as a board so regardless of whether we've been working on it for a year or a week i want to get it right and the example that you just used is i'm going to turn that around a little bit if we have an internal auditor sitting back there in the board offices that internal auditor works for us that internal auditor determines that an

065outside investigation needs to take place and every time they determine that they get a bonus they get a pay bonus every time that internal investigator determines that the wastewater abuse allegation that came in is sufficient to warrant an outside investigation they get a bonus and that's kind of i know i'm not accusing rsm of doing anything wrong but there's a lack of objectivity associated with any recommendation that they would make for an outside investigation when they're receiving payment for doing that investigation i have zero issues with our internal auditor being involved in the process of determining when an outside investigation needs to take place looking through those facts monitoring that hotline determining when an issue needs to be brought to the attention of the audit committee and or the board it's making that determination and

066then doing the investigation themselves that's where i have an issue and i'm sorry but i mean okay that came to my attention last week when i was discussing these issues with the attorney okay and so can i turn that a little bit so you can see where i'm coming from with it as well your issue is the objectivity of who will do that investigation after we have determined an investigation needs to happen okay if we have someone sitting in an office back there that is an employee of ours an internal auditor the objectivity could also be said because they always choose the same organization to do it every time i mean there's still there's always going to be this objectivity and who does it i think i think you're you're missing the point of of

067if the internal auditor in the back receives a bonus that person receives personal financial gain a company receives financial gain from a recommendation that they're making that's where the objectivity is lost but we still as the board have an opportunity to say station is tainted but let me just it's not objective but let me just say once we receive their report and we all decide yes it needs to be investigated then if it's extra on top of their their current contract we can decide to choose someone else to do that instead of them okay so let's get out of the but where does it say rsm in this policy it does say rsa will be doing investigations in the policy it says generally respond to the complaints by conducting an investigation or referring the complaint

068to the appropriate department for investigation or so it's there and we hear the ore we make that decision so like i'd like the i'd like that part of it taken out because i don't feel comfortable it's just part of the rulemaking process nothing personal just and i'll ask again are there other districts that this is the way it's done with the other districts in other words do you make her the recommendation then they say yes let's go ahead and do it and then you guys go ahead and do the investigation does that happen you know typically we'll get a call from a district this is the scenario this is what we're thinking what do you think and we're talking and walking through things with them from that perspective now whether or not they decide to

069execute an investigation that's again that's up to them and what what they want to have done and then we execute based on that discussion and is it ever that they say yes we're going to do it but we want so and so to do it instead of instead of you sometimes they do select others depending on what it is right depending on what it is and is your soo i mean sow with those that same district is it stated this same way that with the or you know that you can do it or you can request i mean suggest someone else right the way this intended is it's ore it doesn't does not have to be your independent internal auditor whether they're in-house or outhouse but again it all goes back to the board or

070working through board attorney legal counsel and i will stand on the fact that i think the or is us we make that determination no employee of ours can make that determination and we follow what they say the or is us and if we feel there's a conflict there or if we feel that we need someone with a different expertise we can decide to do that i'm just afraid we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater here i really am so i'm just going to weigh in briefly so according to chapter 1 1001 section 42 of the florida statutes the in the school boards of a certain income in state and federal and local funds shall employ an internal auditor the scope of the internal auditor shall not be restricted and shall include every functional and

071program area of the school system on our org chart or on the state org chart the school board attorney and the and the school board auditor are on the same line okay and the school board attorney and the school board auditor are our employees as opposed to being district employees this is you know this is a mandated move that we have made i heard you say the word consultant but are you considering yourself our consultant or our school board auditor that's how we refer to ourselves in our practice we have a test services consulting services tax services we're part of consulting services performing internal audit services okay and you have worked closely with our school board attorney not only on the policy but on your statement of work correct okay and so if line 30

072were changed where it says the board internal auditor legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline and generally respond to the complaints so if we took out by conducting an investigation and left in by referring the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation would that be because we're going to public hearing right attorney bruno and on the next the next board for final approval of this policy so if if we want to make changes we need to be doing that so it depends on what kind of change that you're making if you're making a grammatical change that's one thing if we're making substantive changes we will have to re-notice this so the public has an opportunity to review and then bring it back for a public hearing okay so is everybody clear on that

073part yeah okay so it still says or in line 30. yes miss vaughn please do i'm in agreement with basically what ms said that you know there's ore that's number one number two if we're talking about objectivity i think that rsm can be trusted until they show they can't be trusted but i trust them right now to be objective if they want an objective firm i doubt that they'd be in business for very long that's my number two and number three is that if memory serves me correctly right from the very beginning when we first started discussing this mrs petrucco was not participating in favor of this and i think quite frankly this is kind of a stalling it's stalling because i can't see that after we've discussed it for this long and yes there

074is the length of this and i think we've been pretty painful with it that we're going to change one minor thing and have to notice it again i support it the way it is right now and there's money on it do you have another comment can we call for a consensus on this or i'm not sure the process mr trika has a comment first if we're voting on this tomorrow night i can't i can't vote yes in the state that it's in right now i'm trying i'm trying to express my concerns and perhaps get everybody on board to reward it in a way that we can all accept it ms fisher you just talked about line 30 30 i think it was yes generally determine so complaints reported to the hotline and generally determine whether

075legal sufficiency exists to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation or to the audit committee to determine whether an outsider investigation should take place something along those lines would i would be very much more comfortable with that and i am not stalling i am trying to get the best policy in place for the district right so i think we're looking at two different things here now we're looking at the policy and i'll defer to attorney bruno to determine whether such a change would be wording or whether it would be a substantive change and the other thing we're looking at is the statement of work including the contract by rsm so i think we just kind of had put those two together and maybe got a little bit off track so i'll ask attorney

076bruno to weigh in miss patricka can you please go back and advise of your proposal again so i can take a look at it line 31. it again please legal services will receive complaints so the board internal auditor legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline and generally determine whether legal sufficiency exists to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation or to the audit committee for determination of whether an outside investigation is necessary i think that's fine because of the fact that you're talking about legal sufficiency which to me is implied through paragraph one which defines the fraud waste and abuse so i think it's just a clarification rather than a substantive change with with the exception of the audit committee which is a new component but the rest of it i

077think is more procedural than substantive yes miss kittens i thought this morning when we discussed the audit committee committee that you all are working on the process and everything and the charter and all that for the audit committee and i it was my understanding and maybe i'm wrong that the audit committee is kind of an oversight not as nitpicky as looking at each individual possible investigation but looking at when you finish a project that the audit committee then would be because of their financial background and expertise would look and say yay or nay this looks good this looks like you've covered everything boom i really don't see the audit committee getting involved with we got something in from the hotline and we need to do an investigation that's not their expertise their expertise is finance

078and overseeing what you have done to see if we have any waste fraud and abuse and your suggestions to fix that so i really don't believe the audit committee and maybe others have done that i don't know but i don't believe the audit committee needs to be involved in things that where we're worrying about confidentiality their theirs is at a higher level of oversight and basically financial i would think which is why you're saying we need finance people and people with this type of background they don't have hr background they don't have you know whether or not this person should be investigated that's not within the purview in my opinion of the audit committee thank you and the board doc's definition of audit committee the audit committee serves on behalf of the school board as

079its oversight of the school board's internal audit and investigation functions so that does fit the description yep as an oversight right but not as a performer or a determiner of of investigations they do the same and not including the auditors i agree with what you just said and what ms didn't just said obviously mr crypto feels differently but i'm interested in hearing how the other board thank you miss jordan i was just going to say i do have to agree with miss kittens regarding the oversight of the committee only because they could really be inundated with issues i mean we have no idea how many may come across and for us to ask them to engage in all of that when we've when we spoke about it was going to be quarterly and that they

080would over overview all of it everything that has come through but to ask them to be a part of each and every one of them to decide am i understanding that correct or no that would be too much that's not all what i'm saying the board internal auditor legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline and generally determine whether legal sufficiency exists to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation or to the audit committee so it would only be that rare one-off big investigation big allegation of wastewater abuse that would go in front of the audit committee the regular everyday you know the custodian stole paper towels thing would be handled internally that's why it's the appropriate department for investigation or but then and can i just say an answer to that

081if we do that then you know we're gonna have a document this long if it's over this or if it's under this or first regards to that i just don't i anyway i've made my statement thank you okay any other statements board members attorney bruno anything more from you no ma'am okay so looking at the statement of work have we come to consensus that we're ex accepting the statement of work from rsm are you asking for i'm asking for a consensus madam chair i think there are a few corrections that need to be made in the statement of work could you could you would you mind outlining that first so it would be contingent on those corrections okay contingent on corrections to recap we're going to take out the phone call reference and then we're

082going to update the billing reference to talk about the 80 20. okay so can i ask on that 80 20. so you're saying 80 i don't recall us saying that we didn't set the date up okay we're going to build 100 the date of the report sorry that's what i thought okay thank you and that's when the draft report draft reported the final report final report goes out to you all whether or not we've had the workshop yet okay all right okay so then do we have consensus ms vaughn are you accepting the statement of work yes okay thank you miss kittens yes miss morgan with the corrections with the corrections miss jordan i will live with it okay i will accept it miss miss patricka still not clear on what their function is with

083regard to the ways frog abuse hotline monitoring so i can't i can't accept it i don't know what their function is okay so we have five yeses one can live with it and one no and then miss bruno do we need to do something about the policy or will that be so i just need direction from the board whether or not we want to move forward with it or what you would like to do it is scheduled for public hearing today so i need some direction all right and i have one question when we're looking at paragraph two starting with line 28 the board internal auditor comma legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline and generally respond i'm not sure and i think miss patrick brought this up earlier in the meeting what

084exactly is legal services is that their legal services so that's our internal legal services we can change legal services yeah we can change that if the board wants to put school board attorney which is the same as reflected in the contract in the sow miss kittens i suggest that we change it to board attorney to make it clean and simple i agree i can support that okay miss spawn i support that okay miss morgan that's fine okay and ms patricka yes okay that's unanimous and then will you repeat the other proposed change in wording ms patricka if you could state that once more please and is this a change to policy to the policy yes this is paragraph two looking between lines 27 and 32. there's a proposed change to the policy and i need

085to know if the board wants to move with that particular change or if the board wants to leave it as is or tweak that particular change the one part of the change i don't believe is a substantive change which will require us to pull the policy because it's just including the word legal sufficiency and i think that inclusive in that especially as defined in section one above the remainder of it and i don't think the audit committee will that could be viewed as a substantive change but i think it's arguable both ways so i would ask ms patricka to reread her proposed change please okay board internal auditor legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline and generally determine whether legal sufficiency exists to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation or

086to the audit committee for determination of whether an investigation is necessary and he could add or to directly to the board to determine whether an investigation is necessary and miss patrick may i ask you to read that again a little bit slower sorry thank you the board internal auditor legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline and generally determine whether legal sufficiency exists to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation comma to the audit committee for determination of whether an investigation is necessary comma or to the school board to determine whether an outside investigation is necessary so miss patricka i think that sentence with the removal of audit committee and putting the board i think that's that goes in line with what's already there in the policy and does not make it

087a substantive change and it also goes along with the sow so i think that will be acceptable and we could move forward with the public hearing and the change also from legal services to school board attorneys i need to see it okay can i ask you vanelli first miss kittens and then i would like to hear what she was going to ask though okay well i just i'm a little confused i will admit it so i would just like to see that in writing so that i know what change was made where and so you're basically saying that you're adding the audit committee to this no so the two the two changes was to define a little bit in terms of what will be done by adding legal sufficiency so only complaints that are legally

088sufficient will be able to move forward and then stating that it will be referred to the appropriate department or the school board so board i'm just going to say the one thing about the change that you're proposing and you're the board you do what you want it's the board auditor the whole legal services thing was supposed to be the collaboration between mr williams and mr pree bruno so staff was perfectly fine with that if you're changing that you know that part of it was something that i don't know if we have buy-in not that matters but it is an important point that you need to be aware of and that reflects a conversation that i had earlier today where i you know we need to identify the board attorney and an attorney on the staff

089side as well so you're right removing legal services does remove the staff legal from it but i don't know how to i don't know i wanted the board attorney specifically i identified in there but but what you're saying is in line with my comments from earlier today thank you and okay and i would agree with that based on my tenure on the board and my experience with the school board attorney and the staff attorney being the legal services of the district of the school board so i you know i tend to view them as one entity and that is consistent with the way it is across the state in most districts whether they employ a firm or an independent an in-house school board attorney and a staff attorney we typically have the legal services under

090one umbrella which i think that we are planning on meeting to clarify that for this district so i would support that yes yeah another proposal the board internal auditor board and staff legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline then it encompasses everybody right sounds good to me and then generally determine whether legal sufficiency exists to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation or to the board to determine whether an outside investigation is necessary thank you if i may when you refer to legal sufficiency so would you not want an investigation done if someone broke a policy would you only want to put someone in jail or do you want to terminate them for not following the policy i mean that is that is the law of the district we are policy

091governors so yes that would definitely be that would fall under that was my only concern with that term yes thank you and it's also defined actually in one section one of the policy it defines what abuse is it defines what fraud is it defines what waste is so legally sufficient would be if you are violating these specific definitions then it's legally sufficient to move forward with the next steps thank you miss morgan did you have something oh okay all right so then we're going to get consensus to move on with the change in paragraph two okay so and okay what needs to be expedited to do this because i really would like to see it i mean we've gone back and forth with changes and i don't i'm not really clear on the actual changes

092on here yeah i will have a draft for you by tonight for you to review for tomorrow's meeting it shouldn't it's not going to be a major it's just adding the legal legally sufficient as well as changing i believe it was board and staff attorney i think was the language and then adding the school board so there's three things that will be changed and i think what i will do because i think legal services is referenced so i'll just put the parentheses legal services for the rest of the document so you're saying then that this is not a huge change i don't have your legalese so we can still continue on with the process more of a procedural and a clarifying change rather than a substantive change so we're changing legal services to board and

093staff attorney you're adding legal sufficiency which is already kind of part of the policy just not specified because section one already provides a definition so you're just clarifying that and then because it says and or i'm sorry because it says or you're just clarifying that another or of course is the board those are the three things that you're changing so it's not substantive it's more a clarifying and a procedural process okay thank you thank you and then ms patricka said if we take a break she can email that to us okay let's is the last sentence miss patricka i didn't just to get it done all right are you okay miss kittens or would you like to take a break and have her email it to us well miss bruno said that she can get

094it to us before vote tomorrow so that's okay with me i'd bring that okay okay then at this time i'll ask for consensus and i'll start with you miss vaughn i can't give concern okay miss morgan she can live with it okay miss kittens i can't live with that okay miss jordan yes ma'am i'm good okay i'm gonna see the language before i can agree to it i'm sorry if we just take a five-minute break and everybody look at the language and then we can go back on my consensus vote and i can give consensus for the contract as well so miss madam chair yes this would be my recommendation to the board just to make sure that we actually have a consensus today versus bringing it up at the action meeting where there may

095be an issue and it gets pulled i would recommend taking that five-minute break so we can just look at that sentence that has been changed and then make sure all of the board members are in agreement that will save maybe some confusion and some issues tomorrow and madame chair can you please ask ms patrick to work with miss bruno to get that wording done i just emailed it to her yes okay and so at this time 2 30 we'll take a five minute break and reconvene at 2 35. okay all right we'll resume our meeting at this time and i'll turn it over to attorney dupree bruno so board members should have a copy of the revised language it's also on your screen the sentence that was added reads the board internal auditor board and

096staff legal services will receive complaints reported to the hotline and generally determine whether legal sufficiency exists to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation or to the board to determine whether an outside investigation is necessary hey miss miss vaughn did you hear that she should have gotten the email as well miss vaughn are you with us all right then at this time we'll go ahead and ask for consensus in agreement with this change to the proposed policy miss miss morgan okay miss kittens yes i the one question i have to determine where the legal sufficiency exists to refer to the appropriate department so we're still only saying that if a complaint comes in the only place it can go is to a department for investigation well the board internal auditor and board and

097staff legal services yeah but they are determining whether it goes to whether a legal sufficiency exists and then they'll refer it either or well there's not an or that's why i was asking yes there is ma'am it exists to the to refer the complaint to the appropriate department for investigation or to the board to determine whether an all right thank you and miss and miss giovannelli i'm live with it you can live with it okay we have two can live with it and one absent and four yeses it's getting to where i can live with it right no i wasn't a yes oh okay sorry okay five yeses i'll go with it i'll go with consensus there you go now it's six to one yes thank you so then we will proceed then with the

098public hearing on this rule for tomorrow okay great thank you thank you okay any other comments or questions for our board auditors thank you for being here yes thank you very much for being for your patience and helping us through this process we appreciate it thank you travels okay so nick oh she's gone we told her safe troubles no i don't next on the agenda is the review of the october 6 2020 regular meeting agenda dr adkins thank you madam chair so we'll go ahead and start the first item is that and we were talking about the end of or earlier this morning which was the consent executive services approval resolution for proclaiming october and there was actually two questions that you see but i would also say there was also other concerns that were

099raised by board members and then the issue that i was going to raise that i think we need some direction on is that in terms of the resolution there is no process so to speak for resolutions in terms of what ones that we select or not select this is not really something i've been involved in but as as we dove into looking and seeing whether or not we have a procedure we do have a procedure that was drafted way back in 2008 but again it doesn't speak anything to how these are selected i think you know what we've seen is it's created a little bit of concern by a number of members in terms of what's on here and what's not so i think that rather than staff being caught in the middle of this

100if we had a protocol or procedure for what would land on a board agenda if any that would be very helpful the questions that came up one was why we're not reading all cultural resolutions and then another one that was referring to national italian american heritage and then approval of the resolution proclaiming october 1st through the 31st lgbt there was a question about that discuss the details of this resolution parents want to see the curriculum that's reflected and another thing just as a as a comment i would have to say that back to the selection piece today is like world teacher day it is also october is national principles month these are things that are not that you know if we're going to do something these would be things that you would think would be

101included they are not so i just believe that we need some direction on this yes thank you okay so we'll begin with miss kittens my suggestion is that there are so many different things i did not realize it was world teacher day that we be you know as a board look at a list and prioritize you know it's it's our decision whether to read it or to put it out there or whatever and i think we should as a as a government's team make that decision and you know is there a way to determine how we would get a list and you know of the different days or months or weeks and is there a clearing house for such things so we don't leave anybody out so i was just going to comment that since

1022008 we have had so many more occasions for resolutions come on the list and it would probably be longer than we even anticipate as a matter of fact the county commission in honor of mrs morgan and i read a resolution that october is national falls month for people over 65 who fall a lot so you know i think that we have to really have this conversation and decide how we're going to do this are we going to list those things that are pertinent to us in the school district are we going to include everything i mean you know it could be national chewing gum day or pencil sharpening day and i think that might be a little bit beyond what we want to recognize but i think that we have our major major holidays and

103groups that need you know deserve to be recognized and are done so nationally so maybe we can look about that and prioritize i did speak with attorney bruno and i will involve miss mcclung and i think perhaps it will be wise for us to review the list and and then again review it frequently to put it in our protocols exactly how we're going to handle those are we going to list them are we going to read certain resolutions are we going to invite groups when we get back to that point like we had done before so i think we have those questions to answer and that's something that we will we'll certainly work on together at a workshop when we are addressing our protocols and i'll have them on the list for miss schaefer and

104miss mcclung so board number comments miss miss kittens well my question then is the ones that are on there now and basically the questions that i listed here if we're doing cultural then we need to do italian as well as hispanic and there has been a lot of push and pull for the lgbtq from the community and parents and all of that and i just i think we need to discuss it and the main thing that i heard from parents that were ringing the phone off the hook for the last several days is the word educate in line six because their concern is it's not that they are not what's the word in agreement with anyone's lifestyle but that the education of their children and unquoting of their children regarding such issues they feel that

105they should have a say-so in that and therefore is there questions where is there a curriculum or how is that going to be presented and that type of thing and since it was the first time i saw it on there so if i may just respond i am i have been invited and accepted an invitation to be a member of equality florida school board advisory group for lgbtq and plus resilience so this is the first year that you'll see this resolution because of some recent legal precedents that were set across the country i just want to say that some of the things that we have done in our committee in our in our in our district the school board updated and approved the non-discrimination policy language to include gender expression and gender identity around the

106district best practices and action step one pager which i have a copy of somewhere here to include the statement of nondiscrimination policy just addresses the idea of gender equity gsa google classroom has been created to provide resources and supports to gsa advisors at many of our middle and high schools and our diversity department has provided the following trainings creating safe and inclusive classroom strategies and pedagogy to support lgbt youth all principals were trained lgbt students and a roadmap for their safety and well-being in lee county schools training for school psychologists social workers and equity leads and then also gsa advisor collaborative learning sessions the district repeats receive support and guidance from equality florida's institute safety safe and healthy school project to foster a culture of inclusion while countering bullying harassment social isolation and bigotry that

107dramatically increased the risk factors for lgb students the safe and healthy school project provides support to 63 of 67 school districts throughout the state of florida including lee charlie collett charlotte collier etc sarasota equality flores safe schools director provides professional opportunities for district and school-based administrators equity coordinators counselors social workers psychologists nurses and student support staff additionally the district receives resources and support from the trevor project suicide prevention hotline and the glbt national help center the school district of lee county joins with six out of the top 10 districts throughout the state of florida to support and affirm students and staff by offering a resolution during lgbt history month florida's next generation sunshine state standards serves as the adopted standards and benchmark for instruction in accordance with the stu student progression plan and state adopted

108and vetted textbook materials the district continues curriculum and instruction as provided in the state adopted standards adoption of the proposed resolution does not create or modify adopted curriculum but rather expresses willingness to work together to promote equal protection of all lee county students and staff regardless of sexual orientation gender identity or gender expression so those are the talking points and that's my contribution to the discussion so i'll entertain other thoughts ms morgan well and looking through the list we have we're recognizing some things that have been recognized by congress we're recognizing some things that been recognized by the state of florida we're recognizing them things that have been recognized by nobody except that there's a commission or someone who's asked us to do it we have cultural we have political things on here i think

109we should pull all the resolutions i think we should come up with a protocol because if we if we pass a group of res well let me back up a minute there's a difference also between recognitions and resolutions a recognition is simply an acknowledgement of something that exists a resolution is a is a statement of action it's an action statement we intend to and i think miss kittens raises a very good question with respect to the resolution and what we mean with respect to education i am concerned that if we go into a process whereby we approve recognitions and resolutions without any as chris calls them rails that we create we have no precedence and so we are not in a position to turn anybody down for any recognition or resolution for any reason and

110i think it's it's simply a mistake to move forward on any of this without a statement of what is acceptable to this school board in terms of resolutions and recognitions so that's those are my comments thank you mr evanelli actually would support everything she just said because i mean she was said very eloquently i mean i think that it's important that it's it is national bullying a month but we're no tolerance to bullying it doesn't matter who they are so i think that's really important to that we already practiced that so i mean i agree i think i'd like to see the list because i think we need to to decide on what is a priority in our education system and and acknowledge that and what exactly what action are we going to take because

111i've had several teachers contact me and they're like well you know how do we how do we educate how you know we've not been trained on how to say this correctly and we don't want to find you could have been one side you can fit another on some things and we have to be very careful we don't want to offend anyone because i think everyone is entitled to the education so i you know i would agree with mrs miss morgan thank you okay is vaughn are you with us comments regarding the resolutions and and i guess in particular we have had more feedback about the lgbt a resolution of both both pro and con and i'm sure you've seen the emails oh yeah definitely i think in general we've gone way overboard with the number

112of resolutions and with no end in sight i'm a little concerned about at this point i don't know if miss morgan intended it for tomorrow night already that we pull i think it's something we should consider i'm not big on pulling the lgbtq at this point i think it'll send a message a negative message although there may be school board members that wouldn't accept it i don't know but i think that one word educate is what really threw people off because most of what i saw focused on that and what's the curriculum and talking about first graders and that sort of thing don't i don't know how to speak that legally so those are my comments so and that part of the resolution that has the word educate in it right yeah i'm just going

113to read that again so that people hear it clearly whereas community-based organizations and community leaders have partnered with the school district of lee county to educate support and provide resources to promote a safe learning environment for all students and families and it mentions nothing about curriculum beyond i know that but i think probably all of us got to see that of people's misunderstanding on on that one word and bringing in curriculum and i mean i had one that talked about indoctrination yes so there's been a huge misunderstanding on that one i don't know how to smoothly fix it anyway okay well i thank you for your comments and miss morgan has i forgot to ask you're on this equity florida commission i am on the equality florida school board's advisory board for the state of

114florida so that's under the auspices of the florida school boards association or who's no they're they're a school board advisory group with equality florida who handles gender and diversity issues and they have presented trainings here in our district as well across the state and they work with 63 of the 67 districts in florida and i'm on their their board advisory board i think i was invited by virtue of being the chair but i did accept because i believe in safety and security and equal opportunity for all groups i think mr patrick had her hand up sorry miss patricka that's okay i had to do this to attorney dupree bruno but i think we need to dump this in your lap part of what we need to rely on you for is the drafting and or

115reviewing of board policies and resolutions and i think we as a board need to have a discussion about what kinds of resolutions we're going to be reading adopting and the language that will be in them i agree i got a lot of concerns about the word educate and to me the word educate in there is simply a matter of educating against bullying harassment and what's the other word intimidation yes inclusion with with the bullying thing it was inclusion and so and the other thing that i heard is we only adopt resolutions that have been adopted by presidents of both parties i'm not clear on why that would enter into as a decision-making factor at all so i think we need to look at the entire thing as a board and determine how to move forward

116and this is not this has nothing to do with any of the ones in front of us today i was actually the reason why i brought it up is because we were slated to read one that is not in accordance with the agreement that we as the board made last year last year on october 3rd 2019 we agreed that we would read aloud only those resolutions that had something to do with ethnicity or race and federal as well we said it had to be that was not what i proposed i said based on ethnicity or race alone that was what the board agreed to and i mean i just went back and watched the tape and then there was a resolution to be read aloud on this week's agenda and i was like how did

117that get there that's not what the board agreed to so i think we just need to our action meetings have to be action meetings where we actually conduct the business of the district and if we're going to be reading 12 resolutions we're never going to get the business of the district done and how do we pick favorites you do have that in the october third minutes it said the board reached consensus to change the board protocols to allow the reading of resolutions with regard to recognition of specific racial and ethnic groups i mean that's that's what's in the minutes miss jordan yes thank you i was in the same and i was looking at all this too because i'm italian heritage so i was what about me happy men but so when you're looking at

118you know choosing certain ones over others i think that is we need to be very very careful with that because we do not want to ever offend anyone in our actions in reading or not reading we had that incident last year with that and i just think that we need to be very careful but and as far as like the lgbtq i know everybody's emphasizing on that we have to make sure that our staff and students do feel like they're safe and that you know they can come to school in a safe environment so i definitely want that to be put out there because we a lot of times you know things get pulled up and now we're backtracking again on you know what are we going to do with with this because this is

119happening tomorrow but i like i know also october is chilly month there's there's like 150 different things for this month i was looking i was up all night checking those out to see you know which ones did we miss or who are we going to offend but we really have to be cautious when we're coming up with these these choices and we have to look at that i think beforehand before it reaches this point where we're sitting here now having this whole conversation about who who we may hurt or who we may not hurt and that really that weighs really heavy on me because i do not want to ever offend anyone regardless of who they are just to clarify one point the national italian american heritage month was scheduled to be read at the

120next action meeting so i think in the past you have had a bunch of resolutions on your consent agenda then you vote on it and then the next meeting you would read whichever ones you decided so i just want to make sure you know italian heritage mode was going to be read i was just using that as an example and just real quick i mean so i'm scottish too where i don't see that on the wall so i mean this could go on and on so i mean so who determined the schedule for this because we as a board did not so i think that's important to note that i think we need to as a board make a determination look at the list and pick out what we're going to do for the next

12112 months and then it's set that way instead of having it put on an agenda and get surprised by emails before you actually get a chance to read the agenda even so i think that because you couldn't even answer the questions before seeing the agenda even so you know we received emails like i said at the like the agenda went out emails with boom you know so i think we have to i would agree with miss morgan i would i would say let's pull pull it's presently there and look at all the resolutions and set our calendars for that on the next actually would be each in the next 24 meetings you know if there's two a month or whatever so the schedule meetings mrs giovannelli you know this is a sample of what we

122have on the agenda for october right i we definitely have to moving forward have a protocol or a process for which we're going to recognize and which we're going to read if we are going to read them in fact or just list them i mean we definitely need to do that because the number has grown so much that it would be impossible to accommodate everyone so we do need to have that conversation and i think it probably is going to take a workshop i think that some of these on here are for like national school lunch week national safe school bus safety week which is definitely pertinent to us national red ribbon week and it's also substance abuse prevention month so that kind of encompasses that and we were scheduled to read number three four

123five and six for tomorrow night oh and seven really so if we are going to pull just for clarification there are two on the agenda to actually be read tomorrow one of them was the hispanic heritage month which the board actually had mentioned at the last meeting that you voted on it and you were going to read it and the other one was the disability awareness month which i believe has been pulled from reading but will still be on the consent agenda for acknowledgement okay thank you i wasn't aware that was pulled for okay so then we have had some feedback again both pro and con about the lgbtq issue and so i think that you know if we pull one we have to pull them all i mean we can't in this day and

124age do that we are our non-discrimination policy says that we respect and honor all different groups and so miss kittens please okay i have a suggestion that because in october we already did say it would we would just recognize cultures and heritage we have already said that hispanic heritage that was announced at the last meeting i really believe considering the makeup of our district demographically that we should go ahead and read that one because we have said it and because of you know it is cultural my suggestion the bullying month or whatever is kind of all-encompassing it encompasses all of these areas that we're talking about you know we have on here that we were going to read disability well that's a part of bullying as well and so is lgbtq and all of those

125you know are kind of under that bullying month and plus there was i can't remember what you call it but there's something out there about the bullying month and the schools are going to recognize it on the 21st of the month and everyone's going to wear orange and the kids are going to do pictures and all that type of thing and it's already out there with the schools so i'm just thinking that if we do anti-bullying month it covers all of that now the third part of it is with the lgbtq it's it's out there and it's going to create issues taking it off or leaving it on but my suggestion is to remove paragraph six which is about education and leave the rest as generic and have it under the auspices of bullying month

126anti-bullying month so that's my suggestion because it's a lot more encompassing of all the things that are bullied board members i think that is kind of what we need to do in a workshop what you just said we need to have this discussion and come to agreements surrounding what we do and what we don't adopt instead of picking favorites here right now and deciding what to be read or what to be passed tomorrow night i need to take a comprehensive look at all of it and figure out what's appropriate what's not appropriate what is our role as school board members and i agree with that when that's what i was saying that comes after but right now what is in front of us an expedient that is going to affect massive numbers of our community

127is to make some decision about tomorrow night and to just say if we say well we're going to have a workshop and then we have to wait till that comes up we're going to pass all of these things that are already out there that we have said we're going to recognize and especially hispanic heritage month so my suggestion is that because this is an advertised agenda and we have gotten some feedback from some small portion of the community both pro and con and this is an advertised agenda and we want to be equitable we want to be respectful of all diversity my suggestion is that we need to proceed with the agenda as as advertised for tomorrow for tomorrow i'm sorry miss fisher i can't support that no and i also think i mean we

128worked really hard for like policy 1.27 which encompasses all of the stuff regarding to lgbtq and that edac committee worked months and months and months to try to make sure that we had the right verbiage to make sure that everyone was covered and so to me it has nothing we're not it's not about educating it's about the right of the person it is about the person so i don't know how i don't know how you pull one without the other you cannot do you cannot do that miss jim vanello and my point is everyone rights are the same there's no there's no there's nothing you know so i don't know how my thought is what happens next month if we don't address this now what happens next month for the next resolutions like in so

129i mean my concern is when will this be a workshop i think you have to address it asap i don't think you wait until because it's already you've already you've our it's a win it's a lose-lose no one wins in this situation right now we just need to get our act together and i don't think we have so that's what that's my opinion and make a determination of what we're going to have each month and well second and we can with our workshop we can establish a protocol for that we just currently do not have that beforehand our office staff really basically handled that but it has grown to the point now where the public is commenting on it and so we do have to have that workshop but the fact is that this is

130an advertised agenda it's been out there and i would not support pulling anything from this agenda for tomorrow night but okay so is the main thing that i've heard everyone say from the comments and the phone calls and all that they've received that we have received is the part about educating children so to me a win-win is to leave it in but remove that because we don't have a definition to tell parents or what do you what are you going to educate my child with and i am in no way against anyone's rights and i believe everyone should be treated fairly but i think if we remove the part about educating just removing that one paragraph then we could go ahead with that as that was the main issue the recognition still remains but of

131the fact that it's it's an issue and the other hand in october the board decided this is what we're going to do and that didn't happen somewhere that fell through the cracks but it's still out there that the board's ruling is this is we recognize it wasn't a ruling it wasn't a vote it was a consensus first of all and next of all we've had an unusual year because we have been meeting virtually and we haven't even been doing recognitions and resolutions for part of the time because of our unusual circumstances this year also just to clarify the october 3rd workshop in the minutes indicates this is with regards to what you're going to read not necessarily what resolution you're going to vote on but just what you're going to read exactly okay well mrs

132morgan well i just want to revert back to what dr adkins said when he started that we're not we're not talking to our people with these resolutions we're not talking about the principles we're not talking about the staff i just don't think it's appropriate for us to move forward with with a set of recognitions or resolutions that we as a board have not agreed are what we as a board want to recognize and resolve well then i guess we did the should we take i'm sorry go ahead how did each of these items land on the agenda that's like i remember i asked that i'm on the wrong part of the agenda i remember national bullying i remember italian american i remember hispanic i don't necessarily remember disability history i don't remember lgbt i don't

133remember i remember national bus safety i don't remember red ribbon like how did these get here so there was a list to my understanding there's a list that this office staff had and this has been going on for years it's never become an issue before as i explained earlier when i read my information from equality florida this is the first year for the lgbt resolution so that was are you the one that put it on the agenda no i'm not the one that put well i'm not the one that put it on the agenda but i did submit it because i was requested to by the people at the state level and honestly i didn't give it a thought that there would be a problem with it because we have such a high lgbt population

134here in lee county and across the country and i hear what ms gittins is saying about the education piece because i had somebody specifically say to me why are we recognizing national bus safety week shouldn't we be teaching bus safety in our schools all day every day isn't that something that should be an integral part of what we're doing so why are we recognizing it and then when you use education in the context of lgbt that raises questions in the public's mind as to what what are you educating what is the curriculum how are teachers trained what's going on and it raises a flab that i don't think is reflected in reality it's not like we're teaching kids about lgbt as much as we are about anti-bullying anti-harassment anti-intimidation but but you can see how

135adopting national school safety we're educating our kids on that all the time and then you talk about education in the con in the context of lgbt are we educating our kids all the time what does that education look like i can understand the confusion in the community ms fisher yes can you if everyone would take a second to pull up the anti-bullying month resolution and let's just take a look at that and then you'll understand too what we're seeing in fact what miss patricka just said as you're reading through there there's nothing in there about educating kids about it and yet we as a district are doing activities in the classroom to do with anti-bullying the next to the last whereas reads whereas bullying is a community problem requiring students teachers parents and other adults

136to work together to create a climate that does not tolerate bullying that still is as overarching as bullying is the word educate is not here that's the difference and in in the minutia of the lgbtq as as a form of bullying we mention education so i think that's what the difference is and that's what parents are saying i mean parents are saying to me i don't want you telling my seven-year-old what what lgbtq means and with us having the word educate in there that they are assuming that's what we are doing so anyway thank you yes miss giovanelli dr atkins and i had this conversation are teachers even properly trained in how to educate that and they're not i mean he clearly told me no and and teachers are not comfortable with that until they

137know how to handle that appropriately so i just don't think we're there yet i you know and because we we have to be we have to have proper training so i think that's that's one issue in itself but isn't that part of that's part of their sensitive sensitivity training right how to be sensitive towards that's what i thought everyone right so i think that's part of their kind is how he should be always no matter what correct so thank you mrs giovannelli miss morgan so there's another issue here and that is that something ended up on the agenda because one board member put it on for recognition and that means that any board member can put one on and then we would end up with this conversation because there are no parameters for recognition so

138i think we really we need to walk back and think and admittedly and i think we already determined that we do need to have a workshop and establish some protocols and processes for recognitions in the future and whatever the board decides to do with this i've given my opinion miss kittens well what if miss fisher would you feel comfortable then in your comments mentioning it and having it as a part of you know what you have to say at the board meeting tomorrow depending on what the board decides that would be fine and can could we see if since it's already out there if we took out the education piece what kind of consensus we'd have to go ahead and mention it not necessarily read it but to leave it on there can i can

139i have something for you yes please miss vaughn i was just going to ask you thank you yes the word education was the word that really brought out a lot of the comments that i received however i say very honestly as soon as that resolution is brought up nobody's going to hear nobody in the audience is going to hear whether or not the word education is missing they're only going to hear you know oh no they're reading that terrible or yeah i really think and i think it's it's there i agree with miss fisher that it would it would send that assuming that the rest of the board is okay with it personally i am but it will send a really bad message if we pull the whole thing and i don't think it's going

140to solve anything if we just omit the word education for educate i agree with miss morgan that we need to take a very very close look at what we're doing with all of these because i mean i'm italian-american but when i saw it on there i'm like okay why i think we if we're looking at categories by the way it struck me some of these have to do with people in particular people that are in our district and people that are often marginalized and i think that's what makes a difference you know when we have national the one that always gets to me is something like sleep week when our high school kids get schooled so early there's there's some that it's you know not going to raise anybody's tackles one way or the other

141but that just happens to be a hot button issue but what are we really saying if i think moving forward we need to re-examine the whole thing absolutely thank you miss vaughn the reason the reason that the issue is raised i think you know you've got you have had the retiring of a of a staff member that was like the keeper of this process this was something that in my role i really just didn't pay that close attention to it was just kind of something historical and i also kind of consider these are board resolutions not superintendent resolutions so i wasn't really concerned about the process but what happened here was this jumped on the agenda people started asking me questions about you know how how did this get here how did that get here

142and it was not just one it was it was multiple ones that came up and i can't answer the question and then when i go back and look at do we have protocols in place the answer is no we did have an old prop process document that i wasn't aware of either which really doesn't address the issue at all and one conversation that occurred last year beyond that there is no direction with how certain items are on the on the resolution list and certain ones are not and i really think in this case again i you know we are trying to do the will of the board here and it's very difficult when there's not a consensus relative to how that happens this isn't something that staff put on there it just this is historically

143what was what what has been going on for a long time and but i think moving forward we have to do something so that it's clear for us so we can do what you want us to do so in august on the 20th and 21st after i had had a meeting with equality florida in my one of my one-on-ones with you dr atkins i did talk about this and explained what was going on we talked about the diversity and inclusion the new policy the non-discrimination policy gender identity etc and we talked about the mental health support to include those issues and i told you about equality florida and the gsa advisors trainings and i you know honestly i submitted it and like i said i didn't think it would be an issue in this day

144and age and i'm disappointed that it is and so like i said whatever the board wants to do i think that's it and we will definitely make sure that we have board approved approval on yet one other thing before it comes to the board and as a member of the governance team i would like to know what your final recommendation would be for us at this point i think you need to have a process in place before moving forward that's what i think you should do so then are you saying that we just take off this particular resolution for tomorrow night for me it wasn't about a particular resolution it would and this wasn't the only one that was questioned there were there were questions on at least two others that i'm aware of okay

145so i heard something about the disability history and awareness weeks which we have done before and i'm of italian-american descent too but i never saw that one on before and wondered why it was there but hey you know we're a melting pot country so i think we need to come to some final decision and move on about what are we doing for tomorrow night miss jay vanelli so one of the other things too a lot of these should i feel should go through eat act so and get their recommendation and opinion on it on things too because i think edac should weigh in on some on some of it as well so that's the other that's part of the conversation we need to have as a workshop and you know what do we right and

146those are all things that we can put on our agenda for the workshop and when we can do that which is not going to be now because we have the rest of the agenda to go through and we're already at 3 34. so i think we need to just move on make a decision about what we're doing with tomorrow night's agenda are we removing one resolution are we removing them all i wouldn't recommend removing singling out anything i think we remove them all and until we have our list and that we that we can go by and then that could be something that's on a calendar and every school would have it i mean and then it wouldn't there's it would be noticed and everything at that point in advance so i don't see i

147see because i think we need to decide what is our role as a board member and what resolutions we should be adopting and promoting so that would be nice so you re your recommendation is that we remove all for tomorrow night okay all in favor of mrs giovanelli's recommendation please let us know by giving us an affirmative sign miss jordan and i'm a no okay so we have two yeses one can live with it and four no's so can i make another recommendation yes ma'am so okay so that one did not did not passed you had two yeses one i can live with and four no's so the so it did not pass oh the consensus sorry i'm sorry but but miss fischer if i could just advise the board in terms of robert's rules

148and just a reminder in terms of what a resolution actually is because a resolution is actually a formal motion that's basically what he is so you are moving whatever that resolution is and you are taking a board decision altogether with regards to whatever that particular resolution is it's just a formal motion yes thank you all right so we're not removing all for tomorrow night miss getting to have another recommendation so my recommendation is to go back to our original decision to only read cultural and therefore we would only read the hispanic heritage month and the second part would be if you're going to list the others to please just remove the paragraph that says educate and it can be explained to the public as to why only read hispanic heritage because it's the only cultural

149one that's there and that's what we had already decided to do attorney bruno did on on that october 3rd was that cultural only or was that cultural and ethnicity well i mean so the consensus was to read specific racial and ethnic groups resolutions with regards to racial and ethnic groups so then that would include italian-american but they're not till next month i thought right that was supposed to be read at the end of the next october meeting next meeting i apologize but i was not informed of that okay thank you so then we're only going to read well that's my hispanic heritage month that's mrs kitten's recommendation board members in agreement with that and we'll leave the rest on the list as it is now i the other part of it was to remove educate

150from that lgbtq part and let me just say really quickly if we don't remove that piece and i know that's miss vaughn mentioned that you know people are gonna see it one way or the other but if we have it even on there just like it is it's going to create more of a tempest than a teapot and not just be able to say no we're recognizing this is part of bullying but we're not educating your children that is the key factor and i think if we take that out and have that explanation and talk about anti-bullying month and you know that all of this is a part of it miss patrice miss vaughn can you i have miss patricka first and then okay thank you i've got issues with equality florida as well i

151just googled them and it appears as if they're a political organization it talks about 2020 election center justice they have a political action committee i'm not at all clear why we would resolve as a school board to do anything with a political action committee or with a political group so you have issues with education i have issues with that word as well but i also have issues with who are we partnering with what are we doing what are we declaring here like that doesn't make sense to me but to me that's the deeper conversation that we're going to have in the future and the immediacy right now is who are we going to open the most but that's kind of the issue without having had a board discussion one board member put a resolution on

152an agenda putting us each in a position where we have to say yes we agree with educating children on lgbt or no we don't yes we agree with supporting equality or no we don't and this is not a position any of us should be in and i'm i'm disappointed that we're here i'm disappointed that we're having this conversation but we are where we are and i'm gonna go back to the conversation that we had surrounding policy let's get it right let's not be fast let's not be quick let's get it right before we move forward and approve something that half of us are uncomfortable with approving and the other half of us are uncomfortable with not approving because we're afraid of how the public's going to look at it let's get it right that but

153that's not my concern as to how we're going to look it's it's the equity rights ladies we just need to make a decision to move forward we need to make a majority decision on what we're going to do with tomorrow night's agenda the rest of it we will deal with at our to be scheduled workshop so then i'll leave my the first part of mine was only read hispanic heritage camp as i did board members everybody in agreement with miss kittens proposal that we only read oh i'm sorry miss vaughn you wanted to weigh in i apologize oh and i actually commented you just said i know i can live with just reading that one i cannot live with taking out that echoes right now because agreement is taking out the word xp because we

154don't formally educate but as educators teachers we do educate for instance if there's a case of bullying mocking somebody because they think you know even using the word oh that's so gay it's up to us but we just don't do it formally unless it's within the scope of our healthcare self-education so that's that's how i feel i can i can live with just reading that one and just keeping everything but i don't think any of this can be changed madam chair thank you yes ma'am she may request a two-minute recess so i can look something up really fast i need to take a look at something all right let's take a two-minute recess please seriously okay let's let's resume the meeting and hopefully i want to apologize first to staff who have been sitting here

155very patiently to answer questions that we might have regarding the rest of the agenda and we appreciate your patience okay so board members we're going to make a decision now miss vaughn are you with us yes great thank you so i'm going to make a final proposal that we leave the agenda listed as it is and not read anything tomorrow night that's my recommendation okay i hate to be a pain but that violates our protocols our agreed upon protocols are that we read the ethnic and racial you knew i was going to say that attorney you had to have known i was going to say that those are our rules our roles that we have agreed upon as a board is that we read them aloud that is not the issue the reading aloud is

156not the issue the issue is how do these things get onto our agenda why did one board member put something on in gender without the rest of us agreeing what is the process how do they get there those are the underlying issues that's it i won't say anything else okay this board member will respond about that this school district has been working with equality florida safe and healthy schools project for several years when i was invited to become a member of the school board advisory for them because of the fact that i had met many of the people and attended some of the trainings that have been provided in this district i honestly did not think about it i know that they do have a political action committee as does the naacp as is bupac

157where you guys attend every week so i don't know that's an issue but this is in regard to their safe and healthy schools project that is why i submitted it got i had knocked in of the practice in my tenure and 10 years on the board the board office staff took care of creating that part of the agenda so now this is a learned opportunity and we will certainly workshop it and move forward with with a protocol which we do not have at this point so i'm ready to take a vote and move on miss bruno do you have a recommendation for the board so i believe that you made a recommendation let's see if the board would like to move forward with that which is to not read anything and leave everything as is

158if we can get a consensus okay anyone in agreement with that to not read anything right sorry i can't okay mr giovanelli i can't support that at this time okay this one miss vaughn no okay no mr prebrunner as our attorney would you provide another recommendation for us seems like we're at a stalemate here another recommendation given that all of the resolutions are to support unity and support anti-bullying and harassment may make a recommendation to the board that we keep and read the anti-bullying policy i do understand that is something that was not on the october 3rd minutes but with the board's consensus you can move forward with that i think that encompasses everything that the board stands for as well as hispanic heritage month which you advise the public that you would read last

159month with regards to everything else my recommendation would be to withdraw them withdraw them yes okay miss patricka can we can you add to that we put no other resolutions until the board makes a decision regarding process visit future meetings i my recommendation would be that at one point the board all gets together and comes up with their process and picks all of their resolutions for the year what i mean but for future meetings we don't sit here and do this because we won't have resolutions on our agendas going forward until that conversation takes place and that process is in place and let me just clarify why i'm recommending the withdrawal just because i think these resolutions are motions that are significant motions that the board is making and all of the board needs to

160be on the same page to be able to move forward with these types of action items if the board is not in on the same page and not in consensus with regards to these particular resolutions then you really should not move forward with them and the only other option that you would have is to do a consensus per resolution if there are others that you would like to keep on so that would be my recommendation thank you attorney bruno okay all those in favor of attorney bruno's recommendation that we read the anti-bullying and hispanic heritage month resolutions and withdraw all the others for the time being please with explanation to the public that we had yes for the time being yeah conversation no miss morgan yes miss gettings with explanation yes miss jordan i just

161think no we've already put it out there i just i have a problem with that okay miss patricka yes and miss giovanelli yes one two three four and three no's okay so we will read anti-bullying and hispanic heritage and we will withdraw all others temporarily yes thank you and i apologize dr adkins do you want to continue with the agenda review thank you next question approval of title iv student support and academic enrichment grant question is if i recall correctly the department of education approved the grant two years in a row but we do not we have not hired a director as at this point what are the plans to fill this position and so i'm going to ask dr spyro to respond good afternoon dr spyro currently lee hughes who's our coordinator for science

162is the one who also works with our title four grant in conjunction with the directors of curriculum instruction and director of grants as well they do it they do it together we have not advertised that position at this point because as ms kennedy came on we began to look at restructuring a little bit of the grants department and she and i are exploring the possibility of perhaps moving title four under the grants department where there could be additional oversight with that title four grant and if we choose to do that then we wouldn't need a director for that particular position so we may re-look at that one particular position and so that's where we are currently right now so they were just literally in conversations about that possibility moving forward miss patricka so how does

163that work from like an auditing perspective if the grant says that they're funding us 0.8 for a director and we don't have a director do we just not use that money does that money stay on the table we can reclap we can reclassify that money put an amendment in and that would have to come before us for an approval correct so i'm not i'm not clear on whether the to me this is a lot of money is it 2.7 million i'd have to look at the exact amount i believe roughly roughly yes 2.7 million this is the second year in a row that we're approving it we approved the job description why did we approve the job description at the beginning of the year and then we're having we're changing our minds now about whether

164we're going to fill the position we're not changing our minds we've been in conversation about this very particular position the title for the title for director i think with title four for and stem programs is what it is so we have been continuing to have those conversations as well because we're looking at precedent being set set also so you know once you write in a director for a particular grant you know moving forward also that sets a precedent so budget's been part of this conversations with us also and so we're just being very mindful of how we're using that money to make sure that what we're doing now is something that being replicated moving forward so we're looking at what some of the other grants already have been in place and who oversees those particular

165grants and what supports they have to see if this mirrors that as well i mean again that was part of the transition when terry came on she and i had those conversations after she got herself settled in so are you essentially asking to approve something tomorrow night that you have no intention of doing no no ma'am i said the option the option leaves us there as well i mean so once this is approved if it's we decide that this grant warrants to have a director based around our further conversations then that is already approved then we're able to move forward with it if we need to do an amendment for the title four then certainly we would then make that amendment after that decision is made with a number of key people all right going

166forward i'd like more clarity as to what it is that i'm approving because i'm i see director position to me that means we're hiring a director and again this is two years in a row that we're not hiring a director i don't know why that's in there this i'm finding myself saying this a lot today but this doesn't make any sense to me i don't know why i'm approving a director position when you're telling me we're in the point of where we're at we're reevaluating whether we even need a director so why am i approving it if you don't think you're going to need it i'm not i'm not comfortable with that anything else no i understand okay i'm sorry dr spyro but i had a question too so where is title four currently title

167four right now currently is with mr hughes lee who also does science okay and did you say someone else was working with him he works with you know his supervisors the directors of curriculum and instruction and then he also worked with miss kennedy the director of grants when they were looking at the grants middle who was he working with before ms kennedy came on with the directors of curriculum and instruction so i believe it was laurie houghton and so the reporting for the past two years has been included the explanation or the waiver that there wasn't a director position but that lee would have to answer that question i don't know how we reported it okay all right thank you thank you so can i explain i guess i'm confused now as to what are

168we approving that you're not going to fill it or well terry come out and talk to us i'm sorry that's okay it's your fault that's exactly why any idea when i'm approving the majority of the grants are submitted prior to coming here we there are a few grants like the magnet grant where we had to come to the board before submitting it so title iv grant has actually been submitted it's not uncommon to make amendments for example in title 1 we had a coordinator position we had two coordinator positions in title 1 that were approved and were part of the plan but we have not filled the one position so we'll just do an amendment to make that change so it is not uncommon to do an amendment we have i was just looking at

169the report with entitlements and grants we're over 100 million dollars with all of those and what we're trying to do is try to have some consistency with the various grants and every grant has to have a director or it's a director administrator a program manager someone that oversees the grant many of those are positions where it's a coordinator we have title title one with 0.25 which is that i'm under but title title four title two they're all there's a varied amount of work with each of them and so we're just trying to have some conversation and some consistency on on what that program director manager administrator is because we use different terms on each of them so are we trying to approve we've approved the grant yes if yeah and i was going to say

170if you prefer i mean we the grant has already been submitted we could actually pull it if that's the preference and come back with it with whatever the decision is on because it's been submitted to doe what we after we submit we bring them forward to you just like the esser and the other grant that's here today the gears grant so has this grant that we're talking about been submitted to us yes it has and it has been approved by us it has been approved by doe right okay so but not by the board but not by the board not yet okay so you can understand the confusion then why are we doing a portion of this changing it at this point correct we submitted what what was submitted to you is what was submitted

171to doe and we haven't made just like with our other grants we're having to make some changes for example the other grant that's listed today for gears it's 750 000 or thereabouts that is the district portion we have something that was submitted to doe on there for ppe that's not been approved the student stations it's not approved so we're going back and rewriting the grant we're actually rewriting multiple grants because of the equitable services which means the private school allocation that we've been given the law changed and now it doesn't allow us to give it to the schools the way we did so we have to go back and recalculate all of those so there will be amendments coming from that for those as well so i hear what you're saying that sometimes we get

172into a grant and we have to make changes and we have to submit amendments and that's fine but you're coming in front of me asking for my approval on something you're telling me you're going to change like you have absolutely no intention of filling this position and you want me to approve it anyways like i don't i'm not i'm trying i know i should be directing these comments at greg but you guys are the one dr adkins but you guys are the ones answering the questions so it just feels inappropriate for me to approve something when you're basically standing here saying you're not you're not gonna you're not gonna fill that position and i don't know that decision has been made but what would if you're not comfortable with it i don't see any reason

173why you couldn't pull it because we've submitted to doe and then we could it you know in the next week that could be determined and we could resubmit i d i just had a side conversation with dr spyro and just so you all know what the conversation was about you know my i wanted to make sure that we were able to pull this agenda item because i want to also be comfortable with it myself i actually dr spyro and i had i usually go through these items you know and we had it on our agenda to go through and i was going to specifically talk about this one and we actually got onto other stuff on our agenda never got back to that so if the board is all right what i'd like to do

174is go ahead and pull this and then bring it back to you when when this is done i'd appreciate that thank you're welcome so in in looking at the grant budget narrative are all the other positions in here filled earlier and no there's a point five of them there's a 0.5 resource teacher that's listed as new under staffing summary that is not currently filled that's being paired with an upcoming mou with ding darling wildlife society so that's why 0.5 is from the grant and 0.5 would be an mou with ding darling wildlife but the other positions are currently filled and partially funded by title iv okay and are there plans for the travel parts which i see in and out of county are quite correct and doe had similar concerns with travel because so much

175is going to a digital or virtual format so what would happen there is there'd be a future budget amendment to transfer unused travel funds to a program such as eos which is equal opportunity schools and that's an implementation that we're starting this school year in our high schools that's also being funded through title iv awesome thank you very much you're welcome thank you okay next item is approval to remove items from the official property record this has to do with explain an obsolete smart board mr alton's going to come up but as the board you know i'm sure you're aware that we're in the process of refreshing all of them with the promethean boards across the district and just something that i want to say positive i think most of you were briefed by mr

176davis regarding how he's moving this expense and expenditure up in advance so we can actually you know get some of these things ordered not only the chromebooks that we talked about but he's moving the five-year project on promethean boards really trying to to condense that down to three years so i think that's that's a very positive thing and allow us to get this new technology into our teachers hands sooner rather than later so mr alton you answered it exactly how i would have we are you know just replacing the smart boards with the next generation of technology which are interactive panels and of course as we pull the smart boards out we write those off and we resell them where we can and if we cannot resell them we dispose them as we do any

177other electronic item yeah that was it was my question so i yeah i was just wondering i saw the value was only like a thousand and something and how successful are we at selling it maybe to even some charter schools or something that don't have the next generation that we have we're actually not very successful with sales and even with some of our charters with donations unfortunately you know the boards are considered older technology and a lot of the organizations have moved on to either the next generation board or to some sort of panel okay all right and this of course is not one of those things where you can trade in the old and get some money towards the new no unfortunately not we really wish we could but some of these things are

178as you saw the remaining value is very very low because the majority of these boards you know they live a long time and so even though we probably we probably depreciate them over five years a lot of the boards that we have out there have been there six seven eight years that have stayed in service so they don't really have a lot of trade-in value so that would be an excellent project for one of our dunbar one of our schools engineering to take one of those and figure out what can you glean from this to make money off of it when it's obsolete but anyway i digress so let's finally have a question you have oh miss giovanelli sorry actually so i know a non-profit that i inquired about buying a smart board so i

179can have them contact you directly to purchase the one one of those for a thousand bucks i can't name the price we have to auction it okay but my guess is they will get it much below a thousand dollars oh yeah because so i'll i'll send the email to you dr atkins and i've got to find it's an older one but i know that they're still looking and it's it's one of those non-profits some basket basketball i can't remember the name of the non-profit but i know it's a group of yeah group of basketball players that they wanted that for some educational purposes ted tatong or something he that it's his group and i can't get the name off top of my head at the moment but i'll look for that email thank you thank

180you all right board members next question is relative to let's see approval of the expenditure furniture classroom office and specialty this is this furniture for schools and i have susan susan is going to answer that for us thank you can sit there and just say yeah your name good afternoon yes schools and departments can you both use this and has specialty equipment too such as the risers on the stage and things like that and is this in replacing older obsolete furniture so we issued a bid this is the third year the base year contract and so we have about 15 vendors awarded it's a very wide variety of furniture and equipment and as each school needs new equipment and furniture they use that to check what's available emerging you know so yes as equipment ages

181furniture ages this is the intent for the bid and is it similar to the maintenance type thing where it you know eventually ages out type thing or is it up to the school to say we need some new furniture it's my understanding that each year schools are given a small amount of funds to replace for example student desks and chairs or teachers desks as they wear out and then periodically we have three to five schools each year that get a refresh if it's been i think it's about 15 to 20 years since they've had new furniture so it's a variety sometimes it's a full replacement of a school that hasn't had new furniture in 15 to 20 years and probably most heavily it's for you know on an as needed basis to replace aged and

182damaged furniture okay thank you okay next next question is approval the personnel recommendations the question is are there no administrative positions dr pruitt is in bargaining so i'll answer the answer that question is no not this particular agenda item next one is consent for operations this is approval to pursue the purchase of a 2.2 acre parcel on taylor lane and lehigh acres for the purposes of expansion of g weaver hips please update on the property between the bank and g weaver hips is this on the list of properties in the cip and then please explain why we're purchasing seeing this acreage so dr savage good afternoon those two questions kind of roll together so the property is part of a district initiative to expand our pre-k offerings in lehigh acres it's part of a federal

183grant that the district has applied for as outlined in the cip the grant is targeting to pay for the planning design and construction of this facility you can find the description on page 60 of the cip and that this is that property designed for the peak the pre-k center the property is currently in its due diligence phase and the current estimated timeline to ratify the property purchase would be around the start of the new year and the building would be done for 21 22. i'm not 100 sure what the actual start date would be okay thank you and different enrollments so pre-k is a little different they enroll at different time periods than the regular school they don't necessarily have to start in august so it would depend on some other challenges and the other

184part was just about that parcel behind the bank between the bank and g weaver that was the property that's the piece that we were just talking about that's this one the second one was for the buckingham road riverdale high one that this that question was for the bucking that was specifically for the g weaver i thought there were two pieces though by g weaver in other words as you're coming in from on the bus ramp side that there was a piece on the left and a piece on the right as you go into the bus ramp my understanding is this is behind i'm trying to get the configuration in my mind just because i've seen the aerials it's kind of set off just back it kind of is adjacent to the school property and it

185kind of connects back behind right that area and then there is another piece that's if you know where they're where they're building their athletic building where they you know the covered area just to the side of that on taylor lane is another piece of property that they used as a field and all that so i didn't know if that was up for sale i mean this is just specific to this particular piece i'd be happy to have our staff you know look through it and point out any particular areas with you if there's anything more specific on that thank you my pleasure sir since there's like about 20 i'm usually go through quickly to keep the approval to purchase the 2.2 acre parcel on buckingham road in fort myers for the purposes of renovation expansion

186at riverdale high school the question was please give an update on schedule and priority of riverdale updates our public community meetings advertised to include the whole community the rfq for the riverdale project is being advised is being advertised and the goal is for us to hire a design and construction team by spring of 2021 the community involvement will take place once a design team has been hired so that the design team could be involved in that community process and what was that date again spring of 2021 is when we're trying to have that design and construction team online through the finishing that rfq process okay thank you my pleasure the second question on that item was please explain why we are purchasing this acreage so as outlined in the cip this campus is approved for

187a major campus master plan and refresh project as part of this project this acreage is needed to one provide additional space for expanded bus capacity and two space for a new building to house capacity currently being provided by portables now some questions within that same item were a why is trinity only pr involved in one purchase and not the other and as part of their contract to provide our property assistance trinity works with staff on both of these efforts as well as the question was who is paying trinity for this transaction the buyer the seller and for both of the g weaver and the river riverdale properties the seller is paying tcg thank you my pleasure the next item is the i14 the approval of the 2020 to 2025 capital improvement plan question was does

188a vote for approval of this item on tuesday in agreement with all items in perpetuity what happens when changes are made are those changes brought back before the board before before execution all items are responsive here is that all items in the cip align with the approved budget any changes would be brought back to the board as discussed throughout the development of the cip only year one projects are funded in the fiscal year 2021 20 20 20 21 budget all any projects or budget allocations in years two three four and five are proposed and would have to be approved in future annual capital budgets you as a board only approve an annual expenditure you don't approve multi-year expenditures so on the cip though everything that's listed on there okay so only the things that are

189for 20 up to 21. that's right there's approved right so if there are changes to that after we've approved the 21 2021 budget does that is that where the change order and all that comes in or what as if there are adjustments to that i would say it depends but yes by and large we do bring back if there's changes in expenditures for the to the that require board approval we certainly do come back for those so it's not just a blanket we did the budget and everything that goes with it is done and that's that it's kind of separate pieces here like this is the document that's trying to give you both a clear picture of what we're trying to do in year one that's in the capital budget to kind of flesh that

190out via pictures and descriptions and the second part of that is really that year two through five view of what are we planning to do so sometimes when people ask for a question that isn't funded in year one at least you know it's coming in years two through five as it pertains to the normal business of the operation this is just to try to give you as a as a and all of us really not just the board but everyone and kind of an opportunity of what's the five-year glance of what we're trying to do but then even within the cip you have individual projects that come to the board for approval as individual projects like so there may be facilities listed in the cip but then each separate piece of that you know like

191if we're building school k you know that's something that's going to come to the board and the expenditure for 4k would come to you as an annual expenditure now that expenditure that construction project may go over more than one year but but those expenditures get approved for that annually for that year okay yeah i don't want you to anticipate that just because you're approving this plan that every individual expenditure estimate that's within that plan is somehow tethered to your approval of this time and effort it's just to try to take that capital plan that you have approved for the year and make that come alive more this is just a document to try to give you a little bit more detail and photos and things like that so it's basically just saying we are approving

192this document that everyone will be working on for the next five years more hard and fast the first year yes that's correct yeah and years two and three are usually a little bit more there there there may be multi-year construction projects when you start to get to years fours and five that's when things can change but even years two and three can change and you have that discretion it does not bind you in any way that these projects are all that you've given your consent it can't be undone and that's i think that's what you're getting with the financial side of this as well that you're not this is just a document a public-facing document okay if you will thank you my pleasure now there were specific questions within this item as well one was

193location map should be labeled incorporated areas we did thank you for for catching the scrivener's error that's already been adjusted and before i was walking up here i was told that it's already been changed within the plan to address that clerical error the second question here was please update on the tech center in east zone the property is currently being evaluated for potential east zone tech center there is no funding for the construction of the project presently in that current five-year plan because as i mentioned earlier those things can change can be fluid page 20 why is babcock ranch on the plan this just to answer that the babcock ranch development extends into the northeast portion of lee county so that's that's a part of that to be addressed page 47 please update why we

194are purchasing property versus using existing or selling existing property first to answer that in accordance with the proximity project we are seeking to ensure that new schools in additional capacity is constructed based on the location of current student enrollment needs and expected student growth now we're in the projects of evaluating the best i'm sorry the process of evaluating the best locations for future school growth as part of this evaluation we look to purchase new properties in proximity to needed capacity and be looking to sell other property to help fund those purchases of land in areas where students currently live and continue to show growth potential property sales purchases will be presented at our november board briefing as well to get more specific detail on that update on purchase and use of existing facilities in the

195example provided milwaukee and homestead so as a function of the property evaluation that i just described above for example the one that was cited the milwaukee homestead decided our planning team has assessed this building is not best suited to our needs based on factors such as the size of the facility industrial versus commercial use demands associated with the industrial use i.e like carport bays and things like that transportation impacts and price among other considerations but that's the type of evaluation that's going on and we'll be happy to provide more information at our november briefing on the specific land in consideration question page 66 are we still in discussions on separate k-8 so regarding the old lambs facility and the expansion of veterans park we are currently looking at two options to either reopen the facility

196as one expansive k-8 campus or two separate campuses this will also be prevented the november briefing as to where we are currently that process page 75 i would like to see this data only with public schools not including charters the answer to that one i think that was miss juvenelli we can certainly have our staff provide that data that was that was michael was yours okay yes that we can certainly have staff go back and take that table and just remove the charges out of there so and you can just send it to me thank you also i think both of you noted that page 78 was missing in and it's that was actually just based on the board docs the way that the pdf flows up in the board docks it made it look

197like a blank page if you actually download it like using the adobe like it will be accessible it actually shows up correctly so i'm not sure what to attribute that to i did it myself to see what that looked like and others looked at it and because they were opening up an adobe it came out correctly it's just through the viewer it just for some reason made it look blank is it possible just to send me i think it's 78 79 with those numbers on it's actually correct in the if you could see it in adobe in the adobe application it's correct it just for whatever reason in the viewer and the board docs it didn't it shows blank but it's so i have to download it yeah if you click on it if you

198double click on it and it or it'll say like open with adobe it'll show up as it will show up when people are able to access it from our website and so forth once it's approved okay so i just want to make sure you all know that it is it actually is correct thank you my pleasure next and let me just ask one thing absolutely on that the data that's on those two pages 70 i think in 17 17 and 78 or whatever how up-to-date are those all right have they been adjusted since the initial presentation of the cmp i would have to check and get back to you to find out when the specific date time stamp for that was i think i just i just couldn't tell you each of those tables i'd

199rather give you a 100 accurate answer you can get back to me absolutely thank you the next question was where is the schedule as to prioritize how are you prioritizing so as discussed in the cip the projects were prioritized according to the board's goals strategic priorities and the superintendent's big five as well as available resources projected by the finance department the final plan is to find the cip as a result of all that prioritization work gateway high school new school 48 42 925 on page 40 column one is this the balance from what was already funded or what is still to be funded the answer that is this is the budgeted final amount for the project so that's what's remaining in that project and it has already been budgeted from previous plans and the last

200question i have is the veterans park k-8 expansion what is the current enrollment and with new school expansion what is the projected enrollment well the capacity for veterans park is i'm sorry 1 708 students as a k-8 now if you were to make that entire facility in elementary for example just as it changes the ratios and whatnot it would actually go up to an a 1 898 elementary school the capacity without portables at the old lam's middle facility is 1060 for a total of 2768 students current enrollment at the two campuses is 3041 and that's utilizing this the current portables that are present if the school became two separate campuses the total capacity would be students so that would be our target enrollment but again this will be provided in better detail with opportunity for

201you to ask questions and such in november to talk about these options and so forth those are all the questions that i had sir what kind of deadlines are there to make those decisions like that well there there are some of them are coming up relatively soon there there are some things that are pretty that are just pretty time they're key dependencies specifically as it pertains to like student enrollment so our batch process in terms of student assignment is pretty significant that creates some from a construction standpoint we have a little bit more latitude but in terms of that enrollment piece there are some decisions that have to be made relatively soon so that is it's coming up that's why we're bringing these things to the november meeting and one last thing that didn't have

202it on here and the update on the additions at the new lambs i know we had talked about that it was you guys are supposed to be meeting on it or whatever and if you need to talk to me offline that's fine sure yeah that would probably probably be for the best we're continuing to look at all the options we just presented a comprehensive presentation relating to all the different ways that we over the next 10 years would like to address the capacity needs that we have really in the entire district but specifically the east zone is an area of considerable concern to us as we evaluate based on the davis demographics data you know while we're still heavily involved in the in boundary scenarios and things along those lines it's very clear to see

203that there's a lot of need out in the east zone and we just want to maximize over the next 10 years to do the very best possible job we can of making sure we have schools where we have kids and just to provide that that type of capacity so thank you for that question miss patricka just stephen this is one of the things i'm most excited to approve in a long time just say no i'm really excited with the thought and the time that went into this and the removal of any perception of favoritism or any of that i feel like we asked you to do something and you gave us exactly what we asked for so thank you i appreciate you working on this i really appreciate you saying that it's been one of

204the hardest parts of my job honestly is that there's so many needs out there folks want everything fixed in all their buildings people want all the new schools everywhere tech centers even superintendents they want they want those tech centers yesterday but there's only so many dollars and it becomes very hard when you have to make those tough decisions and so having a transparent process that really takes into consideration the strategic plan the big five your board priorities hopefully you know the first year is a big lift to get this off the ground but hopefully future years will show that this will pay dividends as we make edits and tweaks and so forth so i really appreciate your support as a board on this effort thank you yeah and you know i'd like that tech center

205tomorrow as well but dr atkins and i had this conversation last week didn't we can we expand or convert existing high school classrooms to accommodate more tech career in tech ed and the answer that i got from him was yes so you're right we need to prioritize how can we make the most of what we haven't anyways i'm i just i'm appreciative oh absolutely thank you vote yes on this i wish it wasn't part of the consent agenda so we could do it separately and be like yay celebrate thank you that's it okay thank you very much thank you so much dr savage my pleasure thank you okay and finished with the agenda review we'll move on for good of the order ms vaughn i'm sorry i couldn't hear you cheers messi i have nothing

206at this point thank you very much miss kittens no no i guess she really didn't have anything mr benelli i have none thank you and i have none our next meetings will be tomorrow we have a school board workshop something i need to share with the board and i don't know i'm sorry doctor i don't know if you have anything yes attorney bruno i don't think i have anything thank you i know i don't have anything thank you dr atkins i just want to make the board aware we will be bringing a good calls item forward tomorrow evening approval of memorandum and understanding with the united way of lee henry glades and okeechobee counties adam molloy's up i'm going to bring him up to just to give you a brief synopsis on why we're doing

207this at this time good afternoon and thank you for your time i'll try to keep it brief so we're entering in this partnership with the united way to provide cares funding to eligible child care providers identifying tier 2 and tier 3 schools with before and after school programs the funding will be awarded with a cap of 2 500 so any student family that's had a negative impact from covid can apply and we met with the principals last week to go over the process with the united way and what will it be used for before and after care programs and this was something that came to us just came to us and they moved as quickly as they can we wanted to make sure that it was on the as soon as we could get it

208to the board this is why it's good calls thank you and mr malloy thank you for your work with the community you're doing a great job thank you okay our next meetings are tomorrow we have a an attorney client session at 11am a workshop at 1pm and our school board action meeting at 6 00 pm seeing no other business to come before this board this meeting is adjourned everyone get home safe and thank you for your patience thank you