001Good afternoon everyone. It's Tuesday, October 7th, 2025. This is a schoolboard workshop and the time is 100 p.m. Sergeant-at-Arms, has the front lobby been attended to? Yes. Thank you. The superintendent is unavailable and in her seat, please give a warm welcome to Deputy Superintendent Dr. Savage. There are 13 items on the agenda. K9 crisis response safety update Florida safe schools assessment tool safety update Florida safe schools quarterly report construction change order report August 2025 school name change regarding Hector A Cafarata Junior Elementary School and James Stevens Elementary School Job descriptions policy review briefing first reading district strategic priorities sustainable system audit process district strategic priorities career tech opportunities ities safe start initiative maintenance update rel related to the RSM audit public comment go to the order and other business per board protocol each board member
002should strive for four minutes for initial comment two minutes for followup with a total of 10 minutes for today's discussion we do have a lengthy workshop with 13 items we will begin with the K9 crisis response presenting this afternoon is Dave Nulan Lisa Barnes DJ Bedell and ship, community health in partnership program ambassador. Thank you so much for being here. Well, good afternoon board members, Deputy Superintendent Ken Savage, and our board of Attorney Kathy Depri Bruno. We have a large group here. I think a majority may be to see Chip here today. Yep. while I explain a little bit about CHIP, I know we gave a Q&A fact sheet prior to the meeting to kind of explain the program, talk about CHIP and so CHIP really stands for community health and partnership. CHIP CHIP is
003a crisis response program. That's that's why CHIP was brought forward. In fact, I'm discussing if DJ wants to bring pit bring Chip into the pit, but just so everybody can see Chip, but Chip was a rescue. DJ, who has over 25 years experience in K9 training, also as a K9 district administrator, found Chip in a back of a garbage truck actually and rescue Chip. Chip, again, Chip is a crisis response K-9, and we want to bring Chip as a as a as part of our school district, as one of our of our family, as you know. Chip has been through he's been veterary sponsored. He's got sponsors that supports Chip. So really the only thing we have now Chip is also a certified a AKC K9 good citizen sponsored by the Bvard County Sheriff's Office
004and the Paw and Stripes program and eventually he will continue his training and certification with that program later in the year. But again this is the K9 CHIP has been sponsored u by local veterinarian other support staff as well. So the idea of of CHIP really is to respond to schools in a crisis. some of the questions you may ask or be wondering is there's anything out of pocket expense for us. There's not. Again, this is a sponsored by again other different organizations and veterinarian as well. But also as you all know DJ, she's our assistant director in safety and security and in a crisis we respond to these locations anyway. So now working with our health our mental health team we will respond to the these sites and DJ will now have Chip with
005her as her partner to visit staff and students. So I just want to give you a little bit of introductory and as well as you know there's been it'll be second reading of the policy today as well. So anyway just want everybody to meet Chip and welcome Chip to the family. I want I want to quickly say we have a lot of community health sponsors already. We have Alen Park Elementary School who has sponsored I don't know if you can see on Chip's furnace here they've made the patch and I love you in sign language. I don't know if you noticed, but Chip has learned sign language help is creating a book about Chip cuz he came out of a truck full of garbage at 7 and 7 lb. And boy, he had no idea
006what he got into. And we have other community health sponsors. Bradington Police Department, Detective Moyet is here. They've helped sponsor as well. We have fireworks. We have train there. We have sunshine obedience train. They have a lot of programified department watching us, as well. You had any questions for the board? Board members, do you have any questions or comments? Miss Giovanelli, so can we have Chip at the Stastics like the event and meet and greet the kids that come that day? Is that is that too much overload for him or is that possibility? that's a February 14th. All the overload he's handled fire alarms at the high schoolation. He's he's been in training specifically to handle its like that. We walked into a gymnasium full of students. fire incident I responded to and they swarmed
007him on girls. I couldn't find him for a few minutes. He absolutely wants it. So yeah. Oh, please. It's February 14th, Valentine's Day. But thank you. just send me an email. We'll put it on the calendar. Okay. On his calendar. His calendar. any other comments? Miss Jordan, I just want to say how amazing it is for for the community to come out and support and sponsor this. I mean, this and I know you've been dreaming about this for a long time. So, thank you all. Thank you. tolerating him from 8 weeks of age. So, I really thank Safety and Security who has put up with all the training, all the crazy stuff I have to help me do with that. They've been fantastic. And Dave and Lisa, everybody, and I'm very grateful. This program is
008going to be awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. That might be the happiest workshop item we've ever had. All right. Oh, Mr. Nuland's already up there, so he's going to go right into our safety update for Florida Safe Schools assessment tool. We'll wait for the We'll just wait for them to clear out. Thank you all. We know who has to draw. All right. I've got chip steak. Good afternoon again. Again, this is a Florida safe schools assessment tool, FSAT. And as you know, we had discussion about this that every year we do this. Just for the public's view, this is something that's been operating since 2014. Every school does this assessment tool every year. It has must be completed by October 1st which I'm happy to say that all the schools are completed well
009before that time beginning of September that includes all the charter schools as well. this was reported to the state that let them know we have completed this task as well and then of course this must go to a board meeting by November 1st. We've made all so we made all the required deadlines required by the state. So want to make sure that's clear as well. And really the idea is to look at the vulnerabilities, things that we're currently doing and things we're looking for in the future to help harden our schools as well. So, one of the things too I want to bring up too that we've done over the last couple years have been in compliance with House Bill 1473 and Senate Bill 1470. Those are two major bills that came forward that had
010a lot of different requirements to harden our schools on the inside and outside the perimeter. So, we've been working very hard with the schools. The principles done a great job maintaining compliance all these requirements as we as you know we have the state that comes out does inspections as well as our zone managers and they've done a very good job to make sure we're in compliance with our school all of our school sites. just some of our best practices I'll go over really briefly here. we have a really robust security camera system that we have interior and exterior of the building that the IT department maintains and keeps up and we always are looking to add those areas. as we identify as needed areas. access control is ongoing but that's a completed project but always
011always once in a while we may add other devices based on school sites or things we look at just as we always do for vulnerabilities. Of course we have our Bosch security alarm system which is that's a completed project but there are things that we have in place. of course I mentioned our school cameras and access control. our open gate system. We have as you know all of our school sites, every entry point as well and those also will be included in any any new school builds as part of the what's included. We also build a new school as well. our inter intercom system upgrades. We are still looking and always working on the intercoms. And then of course our secure vestial methodology which we always look to have a secure vest in all of
012our school sites or added to it with different readin readout systems. all of our law enforcement, as you know, has has access to all of our school sites for under emergency situations. And then, of course, our interior key boxes we supply with our or our school sites that also help out with our law enforcement as well. All of our schools have mapping that are included with CRG and strategics. They are also supplied with our law enforcement agencies. and of course our standard response protocol updates and programs and emergency operation plans that every school site must have as well as the district itself. Every year we do enhanced training as you know the active tabletop for active shooter or active asalent. Also this summer, as you know, we did a reunification full scale exercise with all
013of our schools and our external partners from public safety, hospital, all over FGCU emergency operations center. So that was a very good train exercise we did in July. And of course with Cintiix, we're always updating that system. We're adding new equipment to that system to maintain that as part of our panic alarm system. And of course our visitor visitor management system which is also at every school site even here when visitors come to the building. I just certain highlights we've always again I always say we're very fortunate here in Lee County. We have a great partnership with Lee County Sheriff's Office, Fort Myers Police Department, Cape Coral Police Department, and Santael on there's other rural areas in Florida, as youware, that aren't don't have aren't capable of putting police officers or deputies in every school
014site. So, we are very fortunate here to have we have some some schools or high schools or middle schools have up to three SRO's based on the size, the capacity of the school, population, activity. Again, ongoing is our secure vestibules. This year we went to the Florida threat assessment model software program required by the state. That's for all districts in Florida. again ongoing maintain our open gate weapon systems and our continuous upgrades with exterior and security campus fencing, LED lighting training and also we're in our third year of our guardian program. And again, as I mentioned before, making sure we meet all our requirements for House Bill 1473 and Senate Bill 1470 are very important. We will continue our current ongoing projects always will be continue to add secure vestibules at our school site. we're
015looking always look at different card access control we call readin, readout, different ways we can to again harden certain areas. We're always looking any vulnerability that's ongoing. We have some major projects right now with finishing up some fencing projects this year on several school sites. That's the exterior fencing mostly, but also that's also enclosing our parking lots and even your ornamental fencing on some of your walkways and some of your outside schools to be included. We will continue with our high liability training. We have further plans to do more active asalent training and even reunification as well. And of course, our open gate project is complete. However, we continue to add to newer schools opening up in the future. And just a little little quick review again, part E F E F E F E
016F E F E F E F E F E F E FSAT just so everybody know understands when schools complete these they also put in some of the needs they see for their school sites that we look at that goes towards a hardening grant possibly. So, some are existing or additional handheld radios, additional cameras for campus coverage. some ex exterior door replacements. any upgrades for door closures, additional fencing or gates. some of the issues with the privacy windows or or or treatments as well. And then also additional security specialist staffing requirements or needs or asks. And of course, exterior lighting to include canopies and our parking lots that I mentioned before. We do focus as well in our exterior location of our pro school property, not only our stadiums, but also our parking lots at
017nighttime. And I'll stand by for any questions. The school board board members, any questions? Mr. Ribble. Yeah, I don't have a question. I just want to make a real positive comment. the more I go around the district at the different schools, I am just totally impressed with the relationship we have between the staff, the principles, and the SRO's. There's no doubt in my mind they play a major rig role in helping reinforce the code of conduct. And I know a couple schools I went to on opening day, I was impressed where they actually knew each and every student that went through the gateway system and made a comment, "Welcome back." And they said a little something about them. So, so you knew they knew their name and they knew the personality. So, that's my hats
018off to your leadership for making this happen. It's really something I'm sure the sheriff's office is as proud as those folks as we are. Thank you, Miss Evanelli, then to Miss Jordan. And I'll be quick. Mine's just a statement. we went to a conference in Gainesville recently and I sat at a table with Hillsboro County and I'm trying to remember the other the lady that sat next to me, but they were all asking about open gate and they do not have it and do not have anything in place at all and that kind of safety and Hillsboro County is a very big county. So, I was really surprised by that and they had a lot of questions for for me. and so I actually they were supposed to email me and ask to get in
019touch with you and so I'm I'll have to probably remind them, but of that, but they do not have anything remotely like open gate. and and the guardian program, they were asking about that as well. So, I thought it was interesting to hear perspectives from other districts that, you know, because safety is number one for us. We certainly, are doing that. So, thank you. Thank you, Miss Jordan. just to add on to what the other my other two colleagues have said. really appreciate everything you've done and especially with the training because I felt like we actually seen it in action this past last week where you know something came up and we had done the training for our bus drivers and to me I felt like we got it right. So thank you so much
020for that. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you Mr. Persons. Yeah, I'm on the Florida State School Board safety committees, safety mental health committee, and I got on there just to see what else we could do that other districts are doing. We're doing more than any other district, period. I'm end up telling them what to do rather than learning from them. So, hats off. We're really are the leader in the state, and I commend you for that. Thank you. All right. Do you want to go on to the quarterly report? Yeah, I just want to say too if I go to the next one that you know it's I got to say u we have a great team here not just our own staff at safe security but everybody all the schools it takes everybody to
021make a secure environment and the fact that we all work together makes it successful. So I want to thank everybody for their cooperation and working together makes a big difference. So thank you. I was going to say something about the bus driver. Well, good afternoon again. this is our first quarter inspection report. Again, this is required by the state that we do this in a public meeting. this will be very short because actually this first quarter there was no inspections done by the state. So, normally I have a list. I will I will promise you there'll be definitely a larger list second quarter. talking to our two state inspectors, they just were very busy, but I know they started working these things this week. So, we'll definitely have it more on the second quarter. But
022I just want to elaborate the fact that again this has to be done in a public meeting and the fact there was no inspections. So, you'll see you're probably you know asking that's why there's nothing reported. but again is required and I know I can already say and feel very confident that the ones you've heard of so already so far have been very positive. So we'll have more more schools for you second quarter. I'll stand by for any questions. All right, seeing none. Thank you so much for all you do, Mr. Nolan. Thank you. Next presenting this afternoon is Scott Rickenbacher. is going to go over the construction change order report for August 2025. Oh, and Melissa Rivera, my apologies. Good afternoon, board. Deputy Superintendent Savage, Espired Dep Bruno. This is required by statute. It
023is your change order report for August of 2025. On the front sheet, you'll notice this is just a encapsulation of Mr. Rigenbar, can you check your microphone better? I'll speak loud. Okay. this is your August of 2025 change order report is required by statute. You'll notice the front tabulation sheet. We had $4.2 million in direct material purchases realizing a return in tax savings to the district of $243,000. We had a non-direct material purchases standard change orders for $547,000 with a return of the full amount $547,000 and contingency adjustments in the amount of 333,000 and no return to the district. If you go to to the backup page that represents all of the schools where this had occurred. We have seven direct material purchase orders to the Cypress Middle School project, the Cypress High School C
024project, Bonita Springs Elementary product project, and the Hector Cafaretta K8 project. We also have five pure change orders. Four of them are returns to the district of unused project funds and one was a DMP rec reconciliation at the end of the project. Contingency adjustments. We had three. One was at Riverdale High School project, one at the LA Teal middle school project, and one at Edgewood Elementary. Are there any questions on the reporting? Any questions on the reporting of the change order report? There are none. 700,000 back of y'all. we'd love to hear that. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, sir. May I just for a minute? while we have Mr. Rickenbacher here. I took liberty to hand out. We had a board member question come in today and while we have Mr. Rickenbacher here. I've given
025you some emails. We had a a member question related to an item this evening. U so I wanted to make sure while you had Mr. Rickenbacher present the opportunity to answer any questions that he may have. We did give you some written recommendations as well emails. But just wanted to have an opportunity if Mr. Rick Mer could give some clarity to the specific question that was raised related to Southwest Florida water management and the fish and wildlife please. Absolutely. Miss Jordan, do you want me to ask the question? Is that what this is? Yeah, just wanted to make sure we had an opportunity for the entire board. Thank you. So my question was I had spoken to Mr. Guzman. Okay. with the Southwest Water management and he had said to me that the reason that
026the time let me make sure cuz I wasn't prepared for this. the reason it was taken off the clock was because the fact that they sent a letter back in August for some other information. We didn't get it, but then you had the conversation to stop the clock because we had not received the biological opinion as of yet. And so that's what my concern was if we and that report is from the fish and wildlife that we're waiting for and it's the potential impact with the wildlife opinion. Correct. So that is that's my question. We and what they stated to me is that they have no I it's coming before us tonight. However, they have no idea when that would even be finished or completed. As he said, dot the eyes, dot every eye, which
027we don't have all the eyes dotted, and that we would until such paperwork is done, we would not be able to move on. So, what does that look like for us? And if it's being prolonged and we're approving the next phase and money, what does that look like? Because of course, as it goes on, money becomes difference. Correct? So everything in that statement is true. However, it needs to be explained to have better clarity as to how it impacts the school district. Normally if we have an army corps permit floor US fish and wildlife falls underneath as a checkbox as does southwest Florida water management. One of the checkbox since this school did not require an army corps permit NPR no permit required was issued. Hence that makes us fish and wildlife on their own.
028We have to deal directly with them not going through the army corp and the checklist process. We have to work with southwest Florida management on all of our projects. As of today, we have already had sight walks with US Fish and Wildlife to do site surveys. We've already engaged to have three tortoises removed, $15,000 purchase order we issued for a turtle farm in Arcadia. We've already had our bonneted bat survey and acoustical survey. They've already engaged in a panther mitigation. Even though there's not panthers there, whenever you do a large scale development like this that impact their range zone, you have to buy mitigation credits. So, where we are right now is US Fish and Wildlife. We have addressed all of their concerns. It literally is about the reviewer literally sending an email to the
029South Florida South Florida Water Management District reviewer who is engaged right now. And that completes that completes the compliance with the US Fish and Wildlife. We have already done all of our submissions and checklist for South Florida Water Management. The and the RAIS is a request for additional information that has already occurred back and forth between our engineers for the district and South Florida Water Management. The only last remaining piece of the pie is that release, that email from US Fish and Wildlife. Now, what that does is you they'll say, I heard the conversation. Oh, they pulled the permit. That's strategic. If we put the permit in today, all of our paperwork for Southwest Florida, all of the RAI, that's the information the water flows, it starts a 30-day clock. Obviously, we're going to go
03030 days before they have to officially provide us with either a permit or a rejection reason why. Well, if we don't have that letter for you, US Fish and Wildlife, that email, I'm going to fail. Starts another 30-day clock. So, we're hopeful that any day now, US Fish and Wildlife will send that email closing all of the required submitts and we can officially submit to Fish and Wildlife and within 30 days get a permit. Now, there is there any guarantee? No, I can't give you a guarantee. That's standard on every job we've built here. Compounded with that with the email. Unfortunately, the furlow US Fish and Wildlife, our reviewer, was kind enough to send an email, but I wanted to just show that person, that reviewer biologist, is already engaged with us reviewing and said,
031"I'm sorry, I'm probably going to be furoughed and not knowing how long this is going to occur or take." That may provide a delay to the job. We've already anticipated this. your project team, our experts on the outside. Assuming you approve tonight, the NN&N project, we will mobilize a trailer. We will start all of our front-end work, which is engineering, shop drawing, review, submission, purchasing, purchase orders, long lead buyout. Some of these items take over over 60 weeks to get fire pumps, switch gear, and so forth. So, the time won't be lost. And it's in our opinion that yes, hopefully by the first of the year, all of these permit issues and the furlow and everything else will have come full circle and be done. We will have our permits and we will be able
032to go right into a vegetation ground clearing. And once once we do get that, we're hopeful we can get even some alleviation once we submit it officially and start the clock into Southwest Florida Water Management. maybe while they are reviewing the permit, maybe we can request a special dis dispensation to do a scrape and fill of the site while they complete the application. So, it's kind of hard, but the it was a strategic move that is used very often by civil engineering firms in our county to save about 30 days of lost time. If you submit and it's incomplete, you're going to get rejected. You got to go another 30 days possibly to get a receipt. So, that was intentionally done by our team. Okay. I just when when I spoke with the gentleman and
033he said that because I had that conversation with you and I had a conversation and our Johnson I believe it was engineer so we were all on the phone together and so I thought everything at that time was done. So when I and they had all their we dotted all our eyes and everything was there. So when I did speak to Mr. Kuzman and he said no and we don't we don't have all our eyes dotted and we were waiting. So that is where I had the issue. It's like, okay, we're waiting. So what is that going to cost us more? And I hear you saying that, you know, we're going to hope that they'll give us some special provisions to move it move forward even before that permit is there. I don't that's my
034job. That's my job to push that. I'm not saying they will, but that's my job to push it. So the reason that gentleman does not have the entire package is because it has not been formally submitted. so we don't start the time clock and lose 30 days. So that's a strategic move, right? I'm just concerned that money, you know, if we approve this and then at the end of the year we're going to come back and it's going to be more money and more money and more money and I just really don't want to go down that road, you know, because we were saying we have this amount of money that we're allocating and I'm hoping that we can stay in into that. have confidence in knowing that you know I can't control acts of
035nature. Sure. if we have some delays then I have to be your as your director of construction creative in in what I do similar like I did at Island Coast High School. I did a partial substantially completion some completion. There may be portions of the building that I let focus my emphasis on the construction of the administration the classroom areas the bus loop areas drop off areas and so forth. Maybe the gymnasium and the football fields are to come later depending on if you know whatever potential loss size that was. Similarly done in Cer County and their high school. They weren't going to be open for the school year and they did phased substantial completions in that school. So it's part of our normal business. I can tell you the longer you wait to engage
036and get this ball moving, the more money you're going to spend, right? Potentially tens of millions of dollars. Right now, we have a GMP that's coming to you that has been put out on the street and bid by our subcontractor vendors and it's typically a 30 to 45day guarantee of the pricing. If we don't engage now and for whatever reason you choose to delay, which of course is your option, then I have to go back out and pay them to bid it again, compile it, bring it forward, and those prices are going to change. I can't tell you what those prices will be, but with all the tariffs and everything that has been recently occurring, there there could definitely be an impact. So, my best recommendation to you would be we're right where we are
037on normal projects. Continue to move forward. and we'll get it done and it's a federal agency that I have to deal with. We've been getting a lot of help from Chrissy Hulahan, who's the legislative person that was hired in the front office. Been a huge help. We've already had Senator Donald's his staff, Senator Scott, his staff making calls to on all of our projects. So, we have the right people in the right places making the right calls to get expedition to our requests and our permits. That's Thank you. I don't know what else more we can do for you. I appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you, Dr. Savage. Thank you. You'll have Mr. Persons has a question. Just for the record, you there are no red flags that you're really worried about other than
038just the bureaucracy getting a an email sent in. No, I'm I mean my worst case is the last furlow government shutdown was 30 days. So worst case scenario I already know I might be pushed past 30 days but it literally is an email. The there are no open issues with fish and wildlife on the project through their conversations over months now of talking. So, thank you, Miss Gioanelli. Question, actually. I know in the past Gateway had a huge sign when on the property prior to the construction of the school. I think I don't think there's a sign out at NNN. And I think that I know that this is something that Chris Patrika has brought up in the past and I'll give her credit cuz this was important to her is that in the construction
039of the of our new schools, if we could have a sign, usually the con the contractor is one that puts the sign up, but saying where the money comes from, it's you know, a half cent sales tax is what's building the school, not you know, the homeowners in the neighborhood and that kind of thing that they think that they're the ones that it that's you know paying for that. and of course everyone's paying when when you have pay school taxes but our half cent sales tax has been totally directed to well not completely totally but you know what I mean building new schools. So I just think that communication if we could and I brought this up to Dr. Savage recently in in an email to to Miss Matthews about it, but I think it's
040important to get the message out there what that's going to be if that's and I'll shut up. Nope, you're absolutely correct. And as soon as we engage with them following an assumed approval, I'll immediately direct them to create both. There's two signs, a project sign, a school district sign with all the board members and the people involved in our vendors. And then there's another one for the half penny sales tax. So, we'll make sure that they get up post taste upon approval. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, Miss Ganelli, for bringing that up. I have my Isoc report and that was an item that was discussed. So, thank you for bringing that up. Thank you. Have a great day. Next, we have the school name change. This will be for Hector A. Cafferada Junior Elementary
041School and James Stevens Elementary School. Please welcome Chuck Valardi, Sherice Trent, Dr. Jason Kurtz, and Jackie Fantasia, who will be speaking with us this afternoon. Good afternoon board members. My name is Jason Curts. I'm proud principal of Hector Cafr Elementary School. Good afternoon to Dr. Savage and also Miss Kathy Depre Bruno. I'll let my compadres here introduce themselves. Good afternoon. I'm Jackie Fantasia, proud principal of James Stevens Elementary. Today, we come before you for some name changes. and this is school board policy 7250, the commemoration of school facilities. Just a little bit of history on Hector Cafar Elementary School. is named after Hector A. Caffa Jr. who was a Medal of Honor recipient. as most of you are aware, we had a little run in with Hurricane Ian in 2022 and we lost our roof
042and had water intrusion throughout our whole building. So, our old building has been torn down. and our new building is in the process of being constructed and we are planning opening as a K to8 school in August of 2026. this is sort of the process that we followed and sort of where we're at with that. and I know that we're bringing this to you now and then you'll be taking action on it at a another meeting. we did put together a name change committee and you can see the makeup of of that committee parents teachers, administrators and support staff. And we had our first meeting in the beginning of September. we did release a survey to our constituents and I'll show you some of those results here in a second. that survey was open a
043little bit more than a week. We compiled the results. We presented the results to our sack on September 30th and here we are today, October 7th. We're giving you the results as well. so we ended up with 211 responses in our survey and the top two name choices were Hector A. Cafro Jr. K to8 and the Hector A. Caprada Junior School. We had a lot of other creative suggestions, I'll say. Although I think I'm going to add Chip to it next time because he had a much bigger following than we have right now. but our top name choice by parents, students, and staff members is Hector A. Caffron Jr. K to8 school. And that's what we'd like to bring forward to for your consideration. So at this time, I'll entertain any questions and discussion. Board
044members, any questions? Miss Giovanelli? Actually, this is actually to the deputy superintendent regarding just the policy in itself. I noticed and I don't think this is I'm not going to point any fingers, but the policy that was listed was policy 9.110 that was repealed in 2023. And the policy should be 7250. And I think it's important that for the community and the transparency of that to have that information. Our policies guide what we do and govern what we do. I'm both of the presentations actually quoted the old policy and you know people would go to read and try to find that policy. It's very difficult to find and then finding the new policy. So I think it's really important that information is out there and is correct for the community's perspective and understanding. Second of
045all, regarding the our policy, it mentions that you know what the committee consists of and no offense to but I looked at both of the ad hoc committee and they were all mostly they were staff and I think that's great. yes, I see one is a parent. but I think that we should be we should have community members in an ad hoc committee. Otherwise, this is really just staff. I mean really didn't even need to bother all these people and just one person could have picked the names if you looked at it that way my opinion. So I just think that we need to have a little more diversity and have the public included because if you look at the policy that's what it says is that you should have the people and you know
046community members involved in that part that process and that's all I have. Thanks presentation. Any other comments or suggestions? Yes, Mr. Fisher. Thank you. it's a district I represent over there. I mean, obviously the biggest thing to us is making sure we get that school rebuilt and making sure still Hector A Caparetta. I know our community takes a lot of pride in that name and that school. So, I appreciate that. So, and I know the community is excited. I know that's where I live to support that school. and I do want to recognize this. I know the board members know this and the superintendent, but I want to continue to give my hats off to Principal Curts and his staff who've done an amazing job. And by the time this school is built, they have
047been in portables for 4 years. Wow. We hear a lot about other hurricane issues throughout this district and that one I will continue to beat that drum is not recognized. And the amount they've been able to achieve is nothing short of incredible over there. And I want to make sure the rest of the community and the rest of the staff in this building knows that. So, thank you Dr. Kur. Thank you to your staff. Thank you for everyone that have done. Thank you. That's all I have. Any other questions? Dr. Savage, just want to make sure I can answer I think Miss Juvenelli, member Juvenelli said, you know, one of those aspects were for me. Just want to be clear. I believe they have updated in the presentation. It does at least the version that
048I'm looking at does properly reference the schoolboard policy. So, it may have must have been an earlier version. so credit to our team members who who caught that because that's we do find in our migration to you know the prior policies they do get those references we do try to catch them but thank you for bringing that up for us. so that was one piece. The other piece that I just want to make sure I was being clear on and maybe the committee could talk a little bit about this if if they would like to expand upon it. the notion of the survey results trying to be more inclusive of getting more broader whether it's community members, teachers, parents, students and so forth and then the ad hoc really is kind of reacting and organizing
049that work but I want to give an opportunity for clarify obviously because you all are living that right now. do you want to give any additional clarification based on that try the attempt to try to be inclusive? I would just add that yeah, we did have two parents that were on our on our ad hoc committee and over six almost 61% of our responses to our survey were from parents andor guardians. and then we had a very lively discussion at our sack meeting too. So, they also had an opportunity for input there as well. Thank you for giving a little more clarity on that piece as well. but I hope that answered some of the questions, Miss Juvenelli. the rest will just take as opportunities for improvement. Yeah. No, no, thank you. I just the
050what I when I reviewed it, which was like two days ago, it had the wrong policy on there and so then I and that and when I recognized that and I was a little concerned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Jordan. And I'm not sure to Thank you for what you said, Mr. Fischer. That's that was right on point with the school. But is it not different when I know when we go out and we are build a new school, brand new school, then we go out and every single thing is what you just said, Mr. Janelli is done. They bring the community in, they do all of that for all the brand new schools. But I didn't think that when we were doing just a rename of a an existing school and just
051a name change of that just being my new and same when we just did Fort Myers Middle and you know took the academy and went back to Fort Myers Middle and the same with Beayshore. I don't think that we did all of what Miss Juvenelli just said, but I know when we do our new brand new schools then we go fullblown out there bring everybody in. So that might be where some of this is a little bit because it's just maybe taken off or adding one word or removing. So I just wanted to but thank you for what you what you do. All right. So if we're ready to get started for James Stevens Elementary name change, I'd like to present our cause for proposal. and it is school board policy 7250. the our school
052was originally named James Stevens International Academy. In 2009 it was named after James Stevens who was a renowned educator and a community leader to demonstrate civic pride in the Dunar community. We renamed not not too long ago as James Stevens Elementary in 2021. We were seeking to remove academy as that really spoke to more secondary curriculums. So we went through that name change in 2021. We are now operating as a pre-K through 6th grade with the intention to be preK through 8th by 2728. So following the same name change process as we transitioned we formed our committee sent out those surveys to our different stakeholder groups ranked the names prevent presented at SAC and now we're here with you today. So very similar to what Dr. Curts had presented our ad hoc committee had parents
053but also to Miss Giovanelli's point parents who are also staff members at the school. I'm also a parent. I'm just listed as the principal but my children attend James Stevens as men as well. so that was our committee. This is our timeline. We tried to get started right away in in August. We were very busy. You see in the month of September and now we're in front of you here in October. So, just some implications I wanted the board to consider as we're looking at the two name options. the first option was very similar to what Dr. Curtz just presented, very similar to the schools you just mentioned. just using school like Beayshore or Alva. we had some debates that the Alva school and the Santael school flow kind of better than the James Steven
054School, but that was part of our conversation at SAC. our second option is James Stevens Community School. So, this honors our community partnerships that we currently have at the school. we are one of only two sites that has Boys and Girls Club for our after school. we just recently partnered with Sunost to open a studentled branch and I'm hoping in the in the future we could be considered a community partnership school much like Franklin Park, Fort Myers, and Colonial. they would b we would benefit the same way because we serve the same demographics. other considerations because we just went through that name change that name change did require signage changes throughout the school. We were able to fund that through the magnet school assistance program dollars but unfortunately this is the last year of that
055grant and those funds have been dispersed and spent. So just considering changing the community school just replacing elementary with community will be a slight slightly lesser monetary amount when we consider the signage around the school. So I just wanted you to have that information. Sorry, go ahead. The data is right here and we did put this out as a staff survey and also on all of our social media sites so that our parents were able to you know make suggestions and have commentary around this. So ultimately the staff and the stakeholders went 51% for James Stevens Community School, 43% for James Stevens school and then 7% wanted to revert back to academy. so just so you have that the survey data there and at this time if you have any questions for me Dr. Savage.
056I would be remiss if I didn't first acknowledge, you know, while I'm very happy to talk about the Hector Caparata K8. I am particularly partial always to James Stevens. this was a school that I was able to be a principal at and I actually was desperately not wanting them to close the K8 when they originally did, but that decision had been made before I was given an opportunity to influence that. It was already done. They had already that ship had been sailed essentially. So, it is great brings me great joy to see them reintegrate. I was a K8 principal as well prior to going to James Stevens and it's when done right these schools can be incredible aspects within our community. They're able to support the entire family. They're just fantastic things. So great naming
057options, different options that are there. but just also real credit to these principles and their leadership because it is not easy to supervise over nine grade levels of curriculum to do that then to do it well. and the stability of those schools that they can offer when there isn't a lot of mobility going in and out of those schools is all the difference. So, just a big credit to them, the naming and I couldn't let James Stevens come up here and not take a moment of pride for what Miss Fantasia does every single day and and also Dr. Curts. Grateful to you both, Miss Jordan. And I love the community part only because we they wanted that middle school so bad and you created that. So we were able to create and give them the
058community that the community wanted. So I think that is just that's brilliant. Thank you Miss Gmanelli. And I have to say something because I went there when it was Lee Middle. So I just have to so it has had some transformation I'm sure over the years. And just thank you for both for what you do. I'm excited about K8 for both of them. We I know that was something that we changed with Hector Cavaretta to go to K8 and when the everything was started cha new school and everything and I think it was great cuz I think parents love the K8 concept so it's just you it's just a family longer you're just you know so I just think it's great. Thank you. Yes, attorney pay Bruno has something. Thank you Madam Chair. Just a
059point of clarification, 7250 applies to both naming and renaming. So all of the criterias have to be applied. Thank you. And I just want to applaud you for bringing up because that was going to be the one question I asked was what does it actually cost for signage and you know all of the things that go underneath that umbrella. So thank you for your transparency and communication in that part. But thank you both and your team. We look forward to the future for both of these locations. Thank you so much. Next, we have job descriptions. Presenting this afternoon is Dr. Shana Johnson. Good afternoon, Madame Chair, school board members, Deputy Superintendent Savage, and Attorney Dupe Bruno. I'm here to present job descriptions as part of phase 2 review of the casual employees as we have
060previously discussed. Are there any questions or discussion? Board members, any questions? Miss Ganelli. So this is this is not on the lines of actually job descriptions per se, but I know that some some positions has vehicles or allotted a vehicle is that I don't see that in any job description. So how is that determined like who gets a car and who doesn't? That's a good question. I would have to look into that. Okay. Thank you. And and I just was thinking about it because I think that's that's something we had an audit recently regarding our fleet, our white fleet. And that came up is why who gets a car, who doesn't get a car, and and I would have to I would like to look at that more. And this is to the superintendent because
061I don't understand that, you know, like I said, who gets a car and who doesn't. and it's not in the job description, but that's quite a perk in a position and it's quite an expense that we weren't doing well in maintaining the cars and the maintenance and everything else that which was costing more money in the long run is what the audit pretty much determined. so I would like to see how that I don't know if it should be a policy, but I think that we have to have some that's a little more control. And that's some of I think I believe it's is our job as oversight to look at that really, you know, look at that really well and see is it worth having this white fleet and who should and who should
062be having that because it is quite a perk that's not in the job description. Thank you, Dr. Savage. Yeah, just as a quick response and we'll provide more information on this. Yeah, there there is no people don't just get a car essentially assigned to them for that piece. It's always dictated by the work specifically and there are some specific guidelines on that. However, what I'd like to do is provide to the entire board by this Friday weekly if we could in your in your weekly communication that we send as much substantive to this to this particular topic, give you some substantive information related to how we currently operate that, how we determine which employees under what conditions are allowed to use their vehicles. So, we can kind of demonstrate under what circumstances folks are assigned
063vehicles and how that essentially works, which ones are pulled vehicles. Just give you a little bit more background information on that. And then certainly we can put together some potential recommendations to bring your next board member onetoone on clarifications to those things because obviously anytime you have a fleet audit. that is definitely something we're we take very seriously as well and want to make sure that the fleet and the management of that fleet and the utilization of that fleet recommend I'm sorry are inherent to best practice. So thank you for raising the issue and we'll certainly give you more information on that. Miss you and Ellie followup just real can you add to that as well like who what departments have like how many fleet vehicles and then and then if you could also tell
064me like or tell us like you know who drives them home and who just drives to work you know wherever their work is and then then uses the vehicle. I think that there's a difference in that versus the ones that the cars that go home back and forth and that kind of thing. That's right. That's right. Absolutely. We'll take care of that. Mr. Ro. Yeah, I know this isn't part of your topic. Sorry, Dr. Johnson, but you opened up the can of worms, so I got to speak up. I was pleased to see that we addressed retiring a whole ton of vehicles. However, you guys missed one. I saw a vehicle on Friday at the ribbon cutting and there were two folks in the from the district there that were given the car. This car
065was absolutely horrible. It had a horrible paint job on it was beat up. The logo on it was terrible. And that just does not represent our brand going up and down the highway. We really need to take a look at some of these vehicles that we have. And number two is been my experience running a big corporation that particularly our sale when you have thousands of salespeople with big corporations, they don't get cars, they get mileage. and we need to take a look at that because I don't think we have the right formula here to save the district money when we're providing vehicles. So that's my comments, Mr. Fiser. Getting back to the topic, just to confirm, threat management specialist 3 is separate to phase two, but it's a new position. That's correct. Just descriptive.
066That's correct. Thank you, Mr. Persons. I know we're getting different pieces put into place. I mean, like we now have a teacher in every certified teacher in every classroom and now we also have substitute teachers through the Kelly. It's running 95% fill rate. So, that's excellent. But on the bus drivers, I see we have a is that a brand new description? It is for substitute bus drivers because that's the piece we're really missing and need to That's correct. Get working on. Okay. I just want to make sure I had not seen that before. Thank you, Miss Jordan. Thank you. I asked the question already, but I didn't really get an answer for it. And I and thank you for putting what were new items and what were revised, but what constitutes a revision? Because when
067I'm looking at the one particular one that I had questioned earlier, it's the adult career education and it's red, blue, and black. So, there's all these different colors that we're looking at on these job descriptions. and one line or two are black and everything else is red. So, it's a revision of the entire job description. So, would that not constitute a new job description versus a revision? No. A new job description is a totally new position that does not exist. A revised job description is it could be a change of one word up to many words. I would have to look into why the different colors. I'm not sure. but yeah, the revision is just a change of a current job description. Okay. Because it was originally was instructor education instructor adult I'm sorry, maybe
068I should put my glasses back on. instructor adult and career education instructor. So now it is adult and career education instructor. And then everything else is colorful. So it's and I like I said the one there's like one line ability to hide quality customer service. So I'm sorry there's four lines that are black which were the original ones. So that's the only thing that is in there and that's your job that's your knowledge, skills and abilities. everything else about it, your qualifications, your job summary, everything else is new or has it's just different. So that's why it was a little bit confusing when I seen that and I was like, well, is this not actually a new one? But it's not because it was you're just changing every single word. I would have to look
069closely at it. If you if you would just take a look, I'd appreciate and let me know cuz that to me just to me it's like brand new. We'll do. Thank you. I appreciate you. All right, seeing no other comments. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, we are going to move on to policy review briefing first reading with our attorney Kathy Dupe Bruno and Benny Brophy presenting this afternoon. board members, you've had an opportunity to review the policies. Are there any questions? Any questions for attorney Miss Jordan? I'm sorry. My question is it norm is it the norm for like the remote work and instead of being approved by the superintendent, it's everything is approved by the chief human resource. Yeah. So, normally in our policies when it designates superintendent, that's anybody that the
070superintendent actually designates. this is making it a little bit more specific because staff has also created some standard operating procedures now for remote work, some processes, and it will all go and be funneled through HR. So, this is why they've changed it to the CHRO. So if I'm working within a department, I would contact my lead in that department, which then would contact HR to say that I'm going to have that permission to do so or not. Yes, there's going to be more specifications as to when and how you can remote work and it's all being funneled through HR. That's something that they've been working on. Any other questions, comments? Mr. persons. Bill, open up a can of worm. No. but actually it's directed toward the deputy superintendent. How many because we have a I
071mean the policy for admission of foreign exchange students. I just wonder how many foreign exchange students do we have or if you could get that get that information to us sometime. I'd be happy to try to get that in there for this weekly if we can. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Seeing none. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And this will go to second reading. Thank you. Next, we have the district strategic priorities. Dr. Jennifer Cupid McCoy and Dr. Lisa Beige will be enter will be presenting to us this afternoon. Madam Chair, while they're taking their place, do you mind if I just kind of kick them off? Please go ahead. My pleasure. Thank you. Just want to use our time efficiently here. So, one of the things that the board is often, you know,
072asking is, you know, we've had audits through RSM, we've had audits through the auditor general, we've had audits come in a number of different areas and directions. and at the same time, you know, how do we ensure that we're closing those findings and ensuring that we don't have them reopened at a later time. So, this is an opportunity today as part of our strategic sustainable systems to try to ensure that we are not just doing it when an audit comes up, but to really make the organization more proactive and more responsive across the entire organization. not individual divisions having individual responses but more of a unified organizational response to audit just in general building up a better muscle to be responsive to those things. it's to help give you as a governance team more confidence
073that when issues are found that they are being organized and worked and then timelines are being adhered to. so with that said opportunity to turn it over to our chief strategy officer and our director for strategic planning and portfolio management. Good afternoon board. I think that concludes our presentation. Thank you Dr. Savage. Chair Langford Flemen board deputy superintendent Savage and attorney Bruno. Thank you for allowing us to just give you a glimpse of where we'd like to go with the work of the audit districtwide audit. my co-presenter this afternoon is Lisa Beige and as Dr. Savage mentioned earlier this is an opportunity for us to transform our way of work. It's an opportunity for us to start to view audits from a different perspective and for us to become more disciplined with our internal controls
074and become more effective with the work across the organization. today's agenda will run you through a background and that will take us all the way through what we propose to be a sustainable process. Keep it in mind because the work is transformational. This is the first iteration which means as we learn, as we put practices into place, we will evolve and we will adjust and make the necessary changes. From a background perspective, it's it's important to understand that as a school district that we are governed by Florida statutes and there are many, but we wanted to just highlight this as an example from a credibility standpoint, right? It's part of the reason why we examine what we do. And it's important to note that there are numerous audits that occur across this organization. And some
075examples we wanted to share with you are highlighted on this page. But I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out that on an annual basis, our financials are also audited by Forvis Mazar LLP who conducts the district financial audits. And on this slide, you can see some additional examples of audits that are that occur across the district, such as those from RSM, which is currently functioning as the board auditor, the Florida Auditor General, as well as some internal housekeeping that is done by the internal compliance offices where we take a really in-depth look into our internal funds as we engage engage with the audit findings. there are commonalities and in this case the commonalities we term them as challenges because it means that we are going to embrace them and we are going to
076put practices into place that will help us overcome these challenges. As we examine the audits that we've gone through, three items emerge as challenges. One is there is definitely a need for stronger internal controls. it is it is a step that is necessary and it is a step that has to be embraced by everyone within the organization because more often than not our chiefs may be responsible for the audit from a division standpoint but they aren't the actual people doing the work. So the actual people responsible for the work, we need to have the appropriate measures in place to help them understand what should be done, how it should be done, and how do we test to ensure that it's being done. Another challenge that emerged was timely resolutions. So when we receive a recommendation
077from an auditor, it's important that we have a process in place that allows us to correct that deficiency in a timely manner and to move forward with the best practices that we're putting in place. And the third challenge that emerged from the audits we took a look at was ownership. One of the things that we must own is that we've had frequent tone turnover within our respective departments and as such there was an absence of ownership of particular bodies of work. So as we revise our processes, it's important for us to identify specific owners. So if and when those individuals move on, we're then able to transfer that ownership to someone else and the work doesn't fall by the wayside. So the first steps we took were purely corrective measures. We identified everything that was
078open, whether it was an RSM audit or an internal audit or an something from the auditor general. we assigned and verified single owners. So again, instead of the chief or the functional area, RSM especially does a really great job identifying the functional area that's going to be responsible for the work. But we wanted names. We wanted to be able to say this person owns this right now and if they leave it goes up the chain all the way to the chief if it has to. One person has to own that issue to make it move forward. We're tracking next steps by date. A lot of these audits find internal controls that we need to resolve over the course of months, if not years. But rather than waiting until that final due date, we're asking for
079that set of steps with dates that are going to lead us to be done by the time we said we'd be done. And then we've got regular monthly reporting that's being reviewed in cabinet so that we can remove obstacles and make things move a little faster just to make sure that we're still on track and anything that's happening can get out of the way so that we remain solid on those findings. After we get all of that done, what ultimately should happen is strategy is tracking now all new audits. So when an audit comes in, no matter what the audit is, we're tracking that so that we know we've got a process in place to get it resolved. Ongoing audits and completed audits are still owned by the group that is responsible for that audit,
080but strategies there to kind of back them up and help with some of the crossf functional issues. Post audit, we're also monitoring the resolutions so that once we make a fix, we know it sticks. That we can go back in in six months and check it. Even if RSM doesn't or another auditor doesn't come back in, we want to know that we've actually resolved the problem. We don't do audits because we think there are problems. We do audits to find problems. So, one of the conversations we're starting to have a lot is we actually want the auditors to come in. It's good to have an audit finding because that means that you've magnified that issue. An audit is just a magnifying glass and it magnifies the potential problem in your internal controls. And we're required
081by statute to have controls that help us prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse. We want to make sure we're being as fiscally responsible as possible. And those internal controls help us do that. What you're going to see come out of a lot of these audits are it's basically four things. We're going to automate the processes that we can. That may not resolve all the errors. Automation has errors, too, but it's so much easier to audit going forward if you have an automated process that's very consistent. So, we'll automate what we can. Also makes us more efficient. If we can't automate it, if there's still going to be a human involved at some point, we'll have an SOP that is that set of step-by-step instructions that helps us get it done consistently. We've got to
082make sure trainings are held and held consistently, especially on some of these internal controls are really critical. It doesn't help to have an SOP and a good process if nobody knows it's there. So, we've got to make sure that training is being held consistently. And a lot of these you'll have new metrics implemented too. So it's usually an internal control often is a metric that you're looking to see if something is outside of a control range. So that should help us really resolve these things and it's really there to strengthen our internal controls and having clear outcomes helps us drive long-term solutions. So the goal is not to have the same findings again. With that said, with that said, it is understandable that whenever we engage in audits, we could have audit findings, but as
083Lisa stated, our goal is to avoid repeated findings of the same errors. Right? If that is still occurring, it is a clear indicator to us that the internal controls are ineffective or they're not functioning correctly. So that really is a barometer for us as well. As a division, a part of our support is outlined on on this slide. We want to engage with process owners to help identify some of the common challenges. It is important for us to pay attention to the remaining open items as well as tracking the progress towards completion. An important part of what we've been reinforcing is yes, in RSM's case, they're going to come back and do their testing in a couple of months, but what are we doing between now and their return? Whatever we've put into place, we
084need to test that internally to ensure that it's working. If it isn't, then adjustments need to be made. You know, it's it's interesting that one of the items that's been repeated has been a single issue, but it's cross divisional and that has been the absence of SOPs. So that is definitely an area of focus for us. But what does that even mean to us as an organization? So there's a lot of work that is running concurrently with this process to help us better understand what that means, how it's applied, and to ensure that it doesn't remain at the cabinet level, but that it actually infiltrates the entire organization to the end user because that's where it really goes into effect. Whether a change in an organization appears to be simple or complex, communication is important.
085this is an area of growth for me as a professional and dare I say it's an area of growth for us as an organization. So while we share monthly at cabinet again the goal is for those of us sitting at cabinet to take that information and have similar discussions with our respective departments. It is important that the information about whether it's SOPs or whatever the new audit process is doesn't remain with the division chief. It doesn't remain with the department head. Right? But those conversations are had with the entire department who own the body of work. That is necessary because when an SOP needs to be modified, adjusted, enhance, we need that communication to come from the enduser up as well. It is not simply a I'm sitting up here, here's an SOP that you'll
086implement. So that two-way communication is really important so that we are paying close attention to the effectiveness of our SOPs. Why is that important? Because we want to ensure that our work is efficient, effective. It is driving the expectations that are embedded within our strategic plan. It is driving the expectations that are embedded within the district priorities. So what could that potentially look like? At the risk of being cliche, it's using a cliche. Rome wasn't built in a day. So we're looking at this from a three-year perspective with year one being foundational and we're currently in this process. We've captured audit findings. We've identified the owners and we have an initial process in place to guide us through but that's insufficient and again this is a large organization. So as we think about how do
087we get the message out where it needs to be we see that the strategy division is going to build on our work and our goal is by year three we are achieving optimization from that lens. We really want to ensure that we have effective internal controls and that those internal controls align with the industry standards of what is expected. They align with the five components that is aligned to the committee of sponsoring organization of the treadway commission. I think it's commonly known as KOSO. Right. There are five very fundamental components that really should guide the body of work around auditing and that's where we optimally want to be at the end of year three. Again, this work is transformational. It takes all of us. The communication is important not just from the cabinet level but
088so that you as board members so that anyone in the organization has a clear understanding of where we are where we're trying to go and that gives us an opportunity to refine processes because you will share input with us and that helps the whole communication process. Thank you. And at this time, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Savage and the board for comments and or discussion. Thank you very much. I really appreciate the presentation today and an opportunity to receive board member questions. but I also forgive my manners. I don't believe Dr. Beige, have you presented to our board before? I have not. So, that is on me and my apologies. Dr. Beige she's been with the organization now since the summertime with us. However, it's her first opportunity to address you directly
089she leads that work specifically for our strategy piece. So, thank you very much. I'm glad you got a chance to open things up today. We stand ready board members for your questions on this presentation. Board members, any questions, Mr. Persons? I hear all the time we need more audits. We need more audits. But this is what we need to follow up on the audits. We have plenty of audits. the one thing you mentioned over and over is the having an SOP, but there may be a lot of people out there don't know what an SOP is. If you want to describe that. An SOP just stands for standard operating procedure. Thanks for asking though. Most people do not know what an SOP is and wouldn't know one if they saw it even. So a lot
090of our foundational work is describing what that is and getting some collective understanding in the organization about what do our SOPs look like and how are we going to monitor and approve them and make sure that they get through the organization. Thank you Mr. Ribble and M. Yeah, I just wanted to comment to Dr. Cub McCoy and Dr. B. I really enjoyed our 101 session and I was really impressed with the followup you had assigning ownership to the different tasks and some we've already seen some of the changes in improvements. I mentioned the fleet already but that's just one of the many but great job and I have the all the confidence in the world that you're going to make all these good things happen for us. Thank you again Mr. Fischer. Thank you sir.
091thank you thank you for the presentation Dr. McCoy and Dr. invasion and Dr. Cubin McCoy, I love your excitement over this. I said that the other day in our meeting. So, this is transformative. I really appreciate this. There's been workshop after workshop over these years. We've talked about follow-up and RSM says, "Well, you still have these issues." For example, we've talked about it, you know, not anymore, but human resources. We had findings, I think, from 2021 at one point for at least three or four years. So, and I love the pact of ownership because before that's what was told to us. Well, that person isn't here anymore. That person isn't here anymore. I love that you guys are figuring out a system that works with that and ensures that there is ownership through this process.
092So kudos to you both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Giovanelli. Action plan. Thank you. There's not ever been one. I mean, I actually wrote down the words because these words were never spoken. Transformational, effective. It's the culture. Thank you. Because But someone's got to lead that culture. So just I just appreciate your leadership in this because as the others have said that's been you know our problem and we've not had any followth through no follow up no ownership you know I think once you and identifying who owns it and making sure that they understand that they do own it and then in rectifying what needs to be corrected right and just thank you for that I want to bring up at the table here just a real quick conversation and I don't know
093how but if we had an our own board auditor that would help with facilitating some of the stuff the information that we don't always get from district level because they're busy working doing the work right so I think that I think we still need to work on that I know you are so I just would love an update on that and then you know it's been brought up where Kevin Kins can do audits and what how would that play into some of this? I would love to have I think we need to have a more conversation about that before it becomes a board vote. I would love to have a workshop and this is to the superintendent a workshop regarding the Kevin Kins and that I've sent the email to the superintendent but I think
094this is something that we should have a further discussion publicly about. and what he his role would be exactly and then you know forensic audits are totally different even from all these other audits that we're doing and I think that needs to be pointed out as well. Thank you Mr. Fischer through the chair may respond. Yes. Thank you and thank you member Duvenelli. I was going to provide an update later on this week. There's been I believe two more applicants. I think we're sitting at two meeting minimum qualifications right now, but I will follow up with HR with that. Obviously, it's a it's a process. It's a very specialized thing and we talked about making sure to to get the right people for that. Second, I was going to bring up I was going to
095do it during the workshop go to the order if the board would allow me to have a little bit of a further discussion regarding Clerk KS and the pilot project. That's all right. Okay. Thank you. Any other comments? All right, terrific work. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next, we have the district strategic priorities. Presenting this afternoon will be Ed Matthews, Clayton Simmons, and Matthew Bredenamp. Welcome. Superintendent Mr. Matthews, is your mic on? Check. There we go. Well, thank you again. My name is Ed Matthews, associate superintendent for career technical education and administration. I'm joined here with Mr. Matt Bredenamp, director, as well as Clayton Simmons, executive director, and we're going to give you a brief overview in regards to career technical education as well as adult education here for the school district of Lee
096County. We have a lot of exciting things to showcase for you. Some of the items that we're going to showcase for you, we could go into great detail, but we just unfortunately do not have the time. I was told that we're only allowed 45 minutes and I want to respect your time, but we do have some powerful highlights to showcase the work of our teachers as well as our staff here at the district office and the partnerships that we have created throughout the community here for the school district of Lee County. So, very quickly going right into the presentation, we represent Dr. Carlin, our elected superintendent, and her vision in expanding technical education opportunities. This is something that was discussed in her campaign throughout the district in regard of allowing technical education to be more
097and more of a focus of our district as well as connecting to our business leaders but as well as making us a worldclass education institution. So we have two goals in order for that to occur. Number one, we have the goal of increasing our CTE community partnerships. CTE again stands for career technical education. And goal number two, to increase our CT opportunities for students. So, very quickly, some of these slides, I believe you probably have seen this information in the past, but I'll quickly go over it. in the community. It is so wanted that we upscale our career education for all of our students because we have so many jobs available throughout Lee County as well as Southwest Florida and they depend on the school district of Lee County for their businesses to continue to
098scale to the size of our growing population. So we want to make sure that we are teaching them the technical skills as well as the soft skills or some people would call it the power skills to where we can make our community the strongest that it can possibly be. Good. So how do we do that? Number one, we have to match what our community needs and we need community partners to allow those that understanding to occur. So on this slide right here, we have three powerful partnerships with three organizations. One is junior achievement, two is train to gain, and three is a tri county apprenticeship academy. We have these three programs here have been very very powerful in allowing our students to connect to the community in regards to the industry needs in regards to
099right now construction as well as building here in Lee County. If you look at the very top with junior achievement, this past year we worked heavily with East Lee County High School. We had a great cohort of students that went through their program going out learning the power skills that are needed for the construction industry as well as the technical skills that are needed to get them into the pipeline of our local businesses. You can see that this year we're going to expand that program to Lehigh Senior High School as well as Gateway Charter High School. I think that's also very very important that we include our charter students as well because they are also members of our community here in Lee County. And then going into 26 27 we're going to be expanding to
100three if not four more schools. And the only thing that's holding us back at this time is that we want to make sure that we scale with quality. We want to make sure that every program that we offer with junior achievement is at its highest highest integrity to make sure that we promise all of our students a quality pathway for success. Train to gain which is that second program for pre-apprenticeship is with the Florida Masonry Association. It's a very robust apprenticeship program where we have mainly at this time Fort Meyers, Dunar, Cypress Lake, South Fort Myers, Eststerero, and they learn pre-apprenticeship schools such as getting their OSHA 10 license so that they can work on the job site. They get forklift training. They learned all of the construction ins and outs before they even make
101it to the job site. And then finally, at the bottom is a huge partnership that we have with Tri County Apprenticeship. they partner with all of our graduates who then go into the workforce and allow those students to learn what it takes to go from being an apprentice in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, welding to becoming a journeyman in one of those those areas right there. Those programs require 144 hours of classroom instruction followed by a minimum of 2,000 hours on the job learning that trade. in every year in the springtime we have a graduation ceremony for those students. It's it's awesome what they're able to achieve. So this slide right here, you're going to see the growth of the number of people getting involved in career technical education from our business partner side. The bar graph
102right there, the bar all the way to the left, is give or take about 40 business partners. And then you can see with the bar all the way to the right, we're at about 110 business partners and we want to see that grow even higher. I believe at our last cab meeting, it was at Asterero. I believe that school members were there to witness that. we had well over 200 members total in regards to our teachers, staff, business members, students that were all participating and we look to be moving that forward with our next was just confirmed in January. We will be meeting at Dunar High School to showcase the Tigers and all the things that they're doing there with the county. And so with this, I'm going to hand the presentation over to Director
103Breenamp as he goes over pathways to success. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to be in front of you for the first time as well as director of the adult career and applied curriculum education. so excited to be part of the district to to really get our vision out there to get all kids career ready. the Pathways to Success Career Conversations is a is a new event that we're putting on starting last spring where we went to Bonita Springs High School and we were just at Fort Myers High School. This is a this is an event where we bring in business partners to to showcase as a panel. They come in and they answer questions for kids. We have about 80 to 100 kids. So, it's a very small a small group of
104students, but those students are picked by their school in terms of, you know, their pathway and what they're looking to do. And maybe they're just that kid that needs that extra little push to to decide on what they want to do when they graduate. and we provide them an opportunity to talk to business leaders. but it gets the business leaders into inside the school, be able to see the schools themselves, meet the administrators, and also meet the students. so they really get a good opportunity to to do that. We are planning to be at a stero high school in in this month, later on this month. that date will be on another slide that we'll be showing you. goal number two, so that was community partnerships, but goal number two is to increase CTE opportunities
105for students. been I've been a part of been a part of the district for for over a decade about 12 13 years as an administrator and I've been over CTE in every school that I've I've been over I've been in and there's been constant growth with CTE every single year. I always am very excited about the opportunities in this district about what's being offered to the to the students in the district and I come from I come from a state that doesn't have these offerings. and I'm I'm super excited about what we do here in in Lee County. But that growth continues to happen and as you can see from these numbers, these are some of the career clusters from the state that we represent and these are the ones that have shown great growth
106over the last two years. I look forward to seeing more growth over the next few years as well with with the different funding initiatives that we have but hospitality and tourism is one of those areas that has grown tremendously over the last few years and super proud of those those programs that are listed here. percentage-wise information technology and manufacturing are the top two in terms of program growth over the last over last year in the year prior. that th those those two areas are areas that have been identified on our comprehensive local needs assessment as being areas that the local economy or the local local businesses are needing employer employee employees for. So, it's really it's a targeting of our of our local economy and really making sure that we have programs that our students
107can get into straight out of high school. every every high school student needs to leave leave the district with credentials. when they graduate, we want to make sure that they have industry certifications, dual enrollment credits, things of that nature. And, in in our department, the industry certifications are what we focus on to get students so that they are career ready. if you look over the last few years in terms of the industry certification pass rate and the amount of industry certifications we've we've been able to get. I'm very proud of these numbers. we did have a little dip in 23 24 but I'm very proud of the bounce back that we had in 2425. but I'm not satisfied. I want I want to see ourmies certify more students and really build their programs up to
108to have more more opportunities for students to leave with credentials. they all need to leave with something to put on a resume and I believe that this is a great opportunity opportunity for them to do so. and then this breaks down that last number for 2425 into industry certifications versus digital tool certifications. I wanted to bring this up because the state has recently changed the way we are to implement digital tool certifications from going from middle schools to now actually elementary schools. the elementary schools will be rolling that out to them at some point this year to to begin next year offering these digital tool certifications for them to start also getting career ready. believe it or not, we want to make sure that they are also starting to create goals for their lives at
109a young age and make sure that they at least at least are thinking about the things that they might want to do as they move through their K12 career. but the pass rates that again the commend the teachers and the and the administrators at the school level they really have done a good job of having good pass rates for these exams and I'm very proud of them. And now I'll hand it over to Mr. Simmons to talk about the new teaching academy pathway. Good afternoon everyone. talk to you a little bit about something that's an exciting endeavor that we're we're undertaking. You know, Dr. Carlin really wanted us to emphasis on grow your own. and what we're going to do, we're working closely with HR. And I will tell you that just right out of
110the gate, all of our remodels and all of our new constructions will have early childhood programs for our families. So, expanding that throughout the community as well. but we are working with HR to have a pathway in every one of our high schools for students to be able to become teachers and they're going to achieve that through industry certifications. We are exploring and we have anou with FGCU right now to do a dual enrollment program where our students can get credit and work towards becoming a teacher. And then we also are continuing the pathway with our early childhood pro staff so that our students can go right out into the workforce and work in our early childhood programs within the district. So I'm also I'm going to transition now to the college and career education.
111And I know we've talked a little bit about it, but I want to share Zello. It's our student career planning and exploration tool. and the data that you're going to see right here is from last year. we had over 56,000 or 53,000 loginins. 60,000 lessons, 20,000 students, and 9,300 colleges. That sounds great, but we are going to hit the ground hard with that this year. And our goal is we're putting processes in place for every single high school student to have a structured way to log on to Zello and start their career or college exploration. So that is ongoing. I do want to share with you on on this page the impact. This is data that's been collected in the state. and you can see that the use of Zello the students are 14% higher.
112They feel like they have 14% higher college preparedness, 21% for career, and of the recent grads, 29% feel like they're career readiness is better than the students that did not use it. So, we're seeing some great results with it. a strategic alignment, it aligns directly with Lee County's vision 2030. workforce-based learning, exploration, digital portfolios and course planning and industry needs like healthcare, IT and skilled trades. Another focus that Dr. Carlin has challenged us with is that she wants to make sure that all of our students leave us with a plan A and a plan B. And we all know that you all have students or you've worked with students that they change their minds a lot. But the goal is in their senior year to have a solid plan A and PL plan B. And
113remember, our goal as a district is to either enroll, enlist, employ, or to have entrepreneurship. I'm going to turn it back over to Mr. Bredenamp and he's going to talk to you a little bit about our CTE funding and college and career acceleration. Thank you, Mr. Simmons. I I really wanted to take the opportunity today to explain how CTE funding works. And I think this is one of those this is one of those areas that the funding comes from all all different sources. and I don't know that everyone understands how everything's connected. So I'm going to try to I'm going to attempt to connect everything connect the dots for everyone in terms of how the funding is obtained and where we go from there. So, we have various sources, one being federal funds, for example,
114Perkins. Perkins is one of our largest, funding sources. that's something we meet about every every, spring to determine where that money, might go in terms of supporting programs. state grants, like for example, the workforce capitalization grant or CAP grant, that you got some information prior to the meeting, I believe, about the, current CAP grant that just got released. but we've been doing this for the last two years prior. I'll get into a little bit more about that on the next slide, but that's another funding source that we that we utilize to help start and support programs. donated funds, it's kind of a random random funding source that may come through occasionally that we've had throughout the years. And then lastly, the Career and Professional Education Act or CAPE Industry certifications that schools schools have their
115students take. and this funding is a very large source of funding especially at the school level and the schools have a lot of a lot more control over this funding source that that they can really push push their students and teachers into success of getting these industry certifications. so as the students pass these certifications the 80% of the funds that are earned through that are go back to the school and then 20% go to the CTE department to be able to support new programs because new programs obviously wouldn't have any certifications earned to be able to support their themselves. So these these careermies were always created to be self- sustainable. So as they're passing certifications, they should be putting that money back into their program. So therefore, their students that they have coming through their
116program are supporting the efforts of the whether it's, you know, whether it's equipment that they need or or or sustaining their their testing procedures, all of that is funded through that the cape funding that they earn. So going back to the workforce capitalization grant in 2324 was our first year participating in that grant and we were awarded $1.52 million hu huge amount of money and those programs that were funded by that are up and running. I believe one of the big highlights from that was Gateway's manufacturing program that they're just now getting up and running this year. then 2425 CAP grant, we were awarded $2 million. we had met with the met CTM schools to review the grant spending procedures. The schools are currently spending those funds out on those programs. and again, one of
117the one of the program highlights out of that would would be that we started our first first program out of the energy cluster. we had all all all but one of the 17 clusters represented in in the district and the energy cluster was the last one to to get on board and we started a solar program at Asterero. so that was we were able to do that through the CAP grant last year. and this year this last week I was just notified that we had gotten we got 1.62 692 million and that was announced on September 30th. keep in mind that the workforce cap grant for 23 and 20 23 24 and 2425 they had budgeted $100 million for the state during those years to to pay out to schools. this last year they cut
118it to $40 million and we still we were still awarded 1.6 1.6 almost $1.7 million. So very excited to have that opportunity to be able to build new programs. And if you look at the sheet that I had given you at the table on it or that I had had given to you can see the various places that this money will be spent that the state has dictated by our application where where we will spend the money. the new programs that are being added would be Bonita Springs High School aviation mainten maintenance and maintenance general the one at Fort Myers High School for applied cyber security and the modeling and simulation program at North Fort Myers High School. Those are all new programs to the district. The other the other programs are existing programs that
119are being supported by this by this grant. this were these were the other these were the other programs that were represented in the application that we had submitted. I would have had the award up on the slide. had I had I been able to to edit it today but but I wasn't able to do that. So that's why you have the sheets in front of you giving you that information. So that was part of the funding portion. I'm going to tie in school grade to this conversation as well. and this is where like I was saying I wanted to try to connect the dots for everyone. in front of you have a very simplistic calculation of school grade in terms of the categories that are involved in in calculating the school and district grade. college
120and career acceleration is near and dear to my heart because it's part of what CTE does and how we contribute to that school grade component. So within college and career acceleration you have various potential for students to earn a point towards that calculation whether it be passing an IB exam, passing an ACE exam, getting a dual enrollment credit with a C or higher or passing an industry certification. So getting an industry certification is one way to get a college and career acceleration point. And it each student only counts one time towards that calculation regardless of which component they get. So with all I've said about cape funding, industry certifications and college and career acceleration, the cape the industry certifications is the key component to getting cape funding and a college and career acceleration point. So
121that is that is the key for for my department in terms of of getting these these contributing to these these numbers. each gradu graduating senior, like I said, that has a CCA point counts one point towards the score. Industry certifications count for a CCA point as well as earn CAE funding. And CAPE funding, the CAPE funds that come in, as I said, they can help with test prep materials for the school, new supplies and equipment, and then the Cape the district Cape side starts new programs. So, I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Matthews to to go a little more into the CCA pathways. Yes, this is very important here because I want to stress to the school board here that we will be an a school district and our pathway to being an
122a school district is that we have to have our CCA points as a district to be about in the mid70s. Currently at this time we're in the high 60s. And so in order for for us as a district to increase our CCA points, Mr. Bredenamp and his team, can you click on the hyperlink there, please? Have created a a sheet there may be hard for you to see, but it's pretty pretty quick for for everybody to understand. He and I'll just do a little multiple exposures here since we talked a little bit about this already. We have a outstanding IB program, ACE program, dual enrollment program throughout the county and we're just looking for the best fits for each school in order to increase their industry certifications. So every student that graduates from the school
123district of Lee County will have a CCA point. That is our mandate to the principles, to the assistant principles, to the teachers. That is the expectation of the school district that we will have a CCA point from all of our students. What that means is either they are certified for an industry to go right into work or that they have taken an advanced academic course where they are ready for college or quite frankly a career field that needs advanced academics. So on there you'll see that and now and we've also looked at best practices across the state as to how we can actually create that opportunity. Can you go back to the So up there you're going to see a certification. it. The title seems a little silly to me, but that's just the way
124it is. And it's called Ducks Unlimited. So, I guess for you to remember this, I could start quacking, but I'm not going to do that. I just wanted to get you to smile a little bit. But basically, a lot of our sister school districts across the state have been using this certification to increase their CCA points. We've invested money from CTE for all of our schools to have this opportunity and they're running with it. So with this certification, this reaches a lot of our students that like to do things outdoors. So this would allow them to be a wildlife technician. things like being a park ranger, water quality, things of that nature. it's a certification that is that has been very well received in Oyola County, Pulk County, Orange County, Palm Beach County, many counties
125throughout the state where they've been able to increase their CCA points. So, not only are they increasing their CCA points, but for every certification that a student earns, that money also comes back to the district as well. So, it's a win-win for everybody. And then below there, you're going to see that we have our FA financial literacy. Now, that's a state requirement. We can also piggyback a certification on that which we are implementing this year, which is the entrepreneurship and small business industry certification. So all of our students that are taking that class also have the opportunity for entrepreneurship and small business. Some of our schools have really even accelerated the process and have created their own even entrepreneurshipmies at the schools where students are creating their own businesses or working with business leaders in
126the community to help scale their business to an even even greater market here in Lee County. So with that, the second to last bullet there, I can't go into great detail yet because we haven't worked out all the kinks on it yet, but please be aware that you will be seeing dual enrollment opportunities that will be taking place at the high schools themselves. So instead of a student having to drive to FMTC or to Cape Coral Tech to receive those dual enrollment opportunities, they'll be able to do that at the high schools. So that will increase our number of adult learners who'll be able to participate as well as increase the number of high school students that are interested in a dual enrollment opportunity. So it's a it's a huge win-win for everybody. Other school
127districts are doing this and we will follow their lead and innovate as well. And so right up here at the beginning of the year with a new team we wanted to go out and to interview our schools and do a survey as to what our best practices are at this time. we also have an outstanding member of the team that it just seemed like it'd be a lot of people up here, but Kristen Stevens has has jumped on board as our graduation coordinator. She has done amazing things at Eastley County High School and she's been able to bring some of her expertise into into the district office here that we can implement across the district. So, Mr. Bredenamp and Miss Stevens went out to all the schools, interviewed them in regards to their best practices.
128And I just want to share a little bit of these because I think well, I know that we get isolated from what happens here at the district, what we hear in the community, and what's actually occurring in the schools. So, I want to break those silos a little bit so everybody understands what's actually occurring out in our schools and how we're trying to build on it. So, with this slide right here, number one, every high school has a graduation team. We have a team of individuals, team of professionals I will say, that are working handinand to make sure that every student is graduating, okay? To that they all have the best opportunity. Some call it a graduation team, some call it a senior professional learning community. It's the same thing. They meet weekly but and
129it's including but not limited to the social worker, counselors, administrators, college and career specialists, any member on the staff that has a vested interest in regards to those students graduating, let's say like senior English, you know, one of credit recovery, something along that line. the school district has gone above and beyond to make sure that we have the best infrastructure in place with our analytics team led by Phil Savage as well as Brian Curls and the rest. They've been able to listen to the opportunities that are available and to create software where we can really look and to see how we can diagnose and analyze what we have in out of all of our schools and how to make increase those numbers to the greatest capacity possible. So with that, we have academic histories that
130are that are being checked continuously by our guidance counselors, administrators. That all goes along with our graduation teams and our senior professional learning communities. And a lot of schools are leveraging their staff. we find that a lot of our schools, some of the best relationships that students have are with a coach, with a custodian, with a sites worker, security guard, whoever it might be. This is a we're it's all in for everybody to make sure that our students graduate. So, every member of the of the school site is involved in this process to make sure that our students are graduating on time. And leadership has a sense of urgency to make sure that this occurs as well. You can go to any school in our district and when you're meeting with them, I know for
131a fact they know when the next test is available for concurrent scores. they know what their current graduation rate is and they know who the students are that they need to help push along the line to to to get the graduation rate as high as possible. with that we have the frequent meetings with all of our atrisisk students and parents. That's very important right there. And I should also include guardians because some of our atrisisk students may or may not be with a parent but they may be with a guardian. So, it's very important that we get everybody on board to make sure that all of our students understand that we have people there that care for them and they're going to help them move along. And so, with that, we have mentorship for all
132of our students. but more specifically for our atrisisk students, making sure that they're moving forward. So, when we're talking about atrisisk students, a lot of that also goes in lines with different subgroups. And the subgroups that we see with the greatest challenges for graduation are ESSE as well as ESOL low socioeconomic groups. You know, students with lower reading levels. And we have targeted ways in which we work with each group to make sure that they have the best opportunity possible to take the step forward on the graduation stage. And then finally right there we there's also a dedicated team at every school to make sure that students have as much time as needed as available for them to get tutoring as well credit recovery during the school day or even after the school day to
133accommodate them if they have to work or other life situations. And I'm going to hand this back to Mr. Bredenamp in regards to CCA best practices. Yeah. So, having the opportunity to go out to the schools and, and talk with the their administration, about, about graduation rate and CCA was was pretty awesome, actually. I mean, you know, cuz I've been at one school my entire time, right? I'm just seeing it from one one school's perspective. So, being able to get out to all of them and talk to the different administrations in regards to what they do, it was really eye opening in terms of, different options that might be out there for for others to take advantage of. and the two the two school grade calculation components that aren't testing is graduation rate and CCA.
134So those two components really can be driven from the administrative level in terms of offering opportunities for students to be able to to get those those points for the school but also leave with a credential themselves. So then that's that's that's the key is that both both the school and the students benefit from these these endeavors. so with CCA the best practices that we came away with were just like graduation in-house tracking making sure that they have the pe the personnel and systems in place to make sure that every student has the opportunity to gain a credential before they leave. And that's that's the key there. designated administrator to oversee the to oversee and direct it. making sure that as you know just as we have an APC for for being over curriculum having a
135an administrator over the CCA process and making sure that the teachers are taking advantage of all the certifications they can be getting or that this you know with with the APC the students being scheduled in the correct courses to be able to either get their dual enrollment credit or or be able to certify by the time they graduate. all of that is important to to make sure that is in place. but celebrations and initi and in initiatives, we haven't really at the school level, at least the places I've been, we haven't really necessarily celebrated the CCA point. I think that's that's where again, we're celebrating kids getting a credential, not just getting on the honor roll, not just getting a dual enrollment credit, not just you know, any all of that. We want to celebrate
136the career endeavors they have as well. And if they get an industry certification, we want to put that out there on social media and celebrate it. We want to make sure that every school is is putting their kids out there to make sure that everyone knows how how amazing these kids are doing with with getting these credentials before they leave. CTE program teachers testing the majority of students in the courses. This is a big push from myself onto these schools and teachers. there's a lot of there's a lot of programs that will have a 100% pass rate for their industry certifications, which is amazing, but sometimes that's 100% out of 10 when they might have had 100 or 150 students in their classroom. so my push to them and my goal for them is to
137push their students to test. And if your if your pass rate drops to 90% while testing 100 kids, I would much rather have 90 kids get a certification than 10. So I really want to provide those opportunities for the students to test and push them push them to get the credential, make it make it incentivize it for them in terms of showing them really what they'll get out of it. I think that's really a lot of times what kids want to know is what what am I going to get out of this? so I think having that credential on their resume when they leave regardless of what they're doing when they leave is important. strategic scheduling this is from an APC perspective scheduling academy students and the program progression longer to ensure that satifica that
138certification attempts are there. I think that's that's really important because a lot of times in the CTE progressions you may not certify until year three. Well, if a student is in a in a in a program for two years and then decides they want to go to P to take PE with their friend, we can't allow that to happen. We want to talk to that student about the importance of finishing out the certification and getting the certification in year three. So, I think having those conversations with the kids and really making sure we're strategically scheduling and not just allowing the student to just to frivolously choose a different elective and make sure they finish it out. allow multiple opportunities for students to attempt over the course of four years. this is really important not only
139in the in the CTE progressions but also in the in the certification attempts that I'm looking to create outside of the CTE progressions. for example with the with the Ducks Unlimited certification that is in environmental science that is in a course outside of the CTE progression which gets kids to certify that aren't in an academy. So, normally they wouldn't have that opportunity to certify in with an industry certification, but now they will being in environmental science. so it provides the school an opportunity to get CCA points, but also provides the students to get a credential that wouldn't normally get one. and then provide early certification opportunities in 9th and 10th grade. If we start early and offer some opportunities in 9th and 10th grade, they might get that credential early and then also be motivated
140to get more credentials. And I think that's also a key feeding feeding that motivation early getting them going and then hopefully they will see that and really want to get more of them as they go through their their career. and then lastly there that last bullet point leverage opportunities given by the district to certify students through core course options. going back to the environmental science example I'm looking for other opportunities in other core areas to be able to offer more certifications for students. So that's that's my work that's being done on my end as well. So I'm going to hand it over to Mr. Simmons to talk about adult general education. All right. Thank you. So I want to talk to you about our adult general education programs. start with spring of last year of
1412025. that was a banner spring. That was the highest enrollment we've had in the spring and in the past five years with over 2,000 students in in our adult education program. You can see the vast majority of those students are Esau students and then GED. We also offer something called IET enrollments. What that means is integrated education and training. And those are opportunities for our adult learners to be given the opportunity to learn some prehealth to take them into the health field, pre-construction if they're interested in going into construction, and pre-education if want to go into education. And we're also hooking the pre-education students up with our HR department to try and keep them in our system. So, it provides opportunities for them. We are proud that we had 83 graduates in the spring of
142last year. We're moving over to the summer. Again, we continued that trend of being being very large. We had a 25% increase in our summer enrollment with over 1,400 students. Again, it was the majority of them were ESAU and then we had a number of students that u were in that IET program as well and continued with that. Moving on to this fall, we were slightly down this fall, but I will tell you that I'm speaking to them that we're continuing to enroll students daily. So, we're seeing that number come back up, which which is encouraging. and we have 69 students again, it's majority Esau and then but we do have 69 students continuing in the IET program as well. Want to transition to lifelong learning? you can see that we have a demand in
143lifelong learning for citizenship, computers, and Spanish speaking and English speaking. So, we're we're continuing to offer that. We also want to be mindful of our district workforce needs. we are offering a CDL program and that will be starting next semester in FMTC and Cape Coral College. You know, we can take those students right out and put them to work in in our bus. and then we have Serve Safe and that's for our food service workers to get certified and move right into that. And then all of a staff in early childhood and all of our coaches and but a lot of our staff need CPR and AED. So, we're expanding that program right there. we also want to be fiscally responsible in this program. So, we're colllocating our courses on our existing campuses. We are
144standardiz standardizing times so that we can that it's easy for the adults to use and then we're having a point of sale. We're using school cash which is the district system which makes it easier to pay and keep track of the funds. Talk a little bit about Dunar Community School. biggest program that we have right now over there by far is Esau. We have 663 current students in there and you can see we have 24 countries represented. I will tell you the majority of them are 53% are from Haiti. And then you can see, you know, the distribution of gender. That's 2425. 2425 GED. we had 110 students. We had more female than male students. And you can see the status right there that students do have the opportunity to work on their GED while
145they're working on their citizenship as well. Then we're going to look at enrollment. This is the enrollment. what I want to pay attention to though is the if you go to the right hand side you look at the weight list. We currently have a tremendous demand for these courses at Dumbar Community School. we do have limited availability there because of the size. but we are we are tackling this on another front where we're adding courses to we're adding programs to our existing facilities. We're adding them to currently to Lehi Middle School is going to get additional adult learning opportunities as well as we're expanding the program at South High School, South Fort Myers High School. We are pleased that we have our currently have our second cohort of the National Adult Education Honor Society. The
146first one was fall semester 24. We had 16 inductees from 1,800 applicants. second cohort. spring 2025, we had another 16 from over 1,800. This is a great way to recognize our adult learners and make sure that we acknowledge, you know, their accomplishments within within our program. I'm going to turn it back over to Mr. Matthews. He's going to talk to you about community involvement. Awesome. So, we're going to go right into our technical colleges and I want to bridge a little bit of from K12 into what we're doing with our technical colleges. So this slide right here represents the number of students from every school that we have at the at the high school level and the number of those students that are currently doing dual enrollment at either Cape Coral Tech or at Fort
147Myers Tech. this is a great great opportunity for all of our students. And the reason why I'm showcasing this number to you is because we're going to increase this number but also allow more adult learners at our technical colleges. So, Cape Coral Technical College is you know, we were all at the groundbreaking. It really is a rising star of the community. we all know that in the past it's been known for more of his white collar, gray collar kind of careers. And you can see that with the 15 programs that really focused on healthcare, technology, culinary arts, you know, things of that nature. And going to our next slide, you'll see that we're going to have a focus on bluecollar industries that are so needed in the Cape Coral community. Cape Coral is one of
148the fastest growing areas of the United States and there's going to be lots and lots of jobs and we're going to make sure that we're going to be able to skill our workforce so that they can fill those jobs. So, we have the expansion that we were at here recently. As a reminder, that was 30,000 square feet, $25 million, and it is projected to be completed for the start of next school year. The next slide shows you what it originally looked like prehurricane Ian before Caparetta. go back a second. Sorry. Before it was all tore up from the winds, you'll see that we had the building that was south of Cape Coral Tech. And then after the hurricane and after the demolition, the site was cleared, Caparetta was moved. And then going to the next
149slide, you can see what it's projected to look like as an annex of Cape Coral Tech, where the old property line was. You can see how it'll extend over the two properties. And then going to the next slide, that's what it's projected to look like when you bring your vehicle there to get it worked on by one of our students that'll offer automotive or as in the case maybe Dr. Savage will bring his boat there for outboard marine and get the motor worked on for the wife and kids. So, and then finally, this is what the most recent aerial photo looks like. I was just informed that walls have been put up. So, that's very very exciting for Cape Coral Technical College. And then we're going to go into Fort Myers Technical College. And I
150was informed we got to speed up a little bit. Okay. All right. So for Fort Myers Tech, they offer a lot of a lot of programs that also serve the local economy. and as you can see as you go through these slides, as I go through them quickly, the workforce needs are based on US national numbers. So but the CNC production specialist is a highlight for the manufacturing and trades. they also have a solar program there just like and we kind of modeled a stero program after FMTC's program have th those two teachers working together. but as you can see there's just a lot of workforce needs by the by 2034 we're going to have quite a few workforce needs there. and then the first of first of its kind in the state, the LPN
151and RN program over at Fort Myers Tech, is a huge highlight over there right now. being able to offer that and again being able to provide the workforce locally for for our hospitals. and then building and constructions as we know the that never stops around here. We're always we're always having openings and jobs for building and construction and being able to provide employees for those those markets as well is exciting. mechanical trades diesel maintenance technicians things like that. Fort Myers Tech is really producing a lot of a lot of amazing employees. Mr. Simmons, if you want to take Southwest Florida Public Service Academy. All right. I do want to put it give a shout out to Mr. Todd Everly and his staff over there at at the service academy. They do an amazing job for
152our community. I just a reminder that our academy over there is the only certified for basic law enforcement in Lee Collier, Charlotte, Henry, and Glades and the only full-time recruit fire service in entire of Southwest Florida. Academy overview. We basically have four recruit training C courses on a 20acre campus and se seven satellite campuses services all 24 law enforcement agencies and all of the firemies as well. Criminal justice academy we basically there are three different programs. It's for one for officers that want to become a police officer, for officers that are transitioning from being a police officer to a correction a correction officer. And then we also add firefighting and advanced services for advanced firefighting as well. And we have,00 participants in that program. Our fire paramedic EMT academy in addition to basic recruits, the
153Southwest Florida Academy also provides advanced and specialized training. We also offer the next one. We also offer fire training at three of our high schools at Ida Baker, Eastley County, and South Fort Meyers. And they produce about 24 students annually. And they could then transition over to the service academy and continue their certification. And then the next slide just as a visual of the programs that I just discussed what they already have over there at the service academy. I'm going to turn it back over to Mr. Matthews and he's going to talk about looking ahead. Awesome. So, thank you for listening to our presentation and thank you for being a part of our success and we really want to make sure that we continue to have you a part of our success. So, as a
154reminder, we're going to make sure that we focus on plan A and plan B for all of our seniors. So, when you're at a graduation and you're shaking the hands, you're hugging the students, you can say, "Bill, what are you going to be doing?" And Bill's going to be able to say, "Well, plan A is this and plan B is that." So, and we're going to have that for every student. So, hold hold us accountable to that because that is our goal for every student to have a plan A and a plan B per the superintendent, Dr. Carlin. And we're going to be celebrating our CTE teachers of the month as well as students of the month. We'd love to have you participate with that as we go out to the schools and celebrate those
155students. And we are working diligently, again, I want to repeat that. We are working diligently to create CTE opportunities in the east zone. We know that we have a large portion of our enrollment at FMTC as well as Cape Coral Tech coming from the east zone. And as history has made it, our only two offerings at this time is either a Fort Myers Tech or a Cape Coral Tech. But we are working very hard to make sure that we are using every angle possible. we've tried we're we're looking at different innovative approaches that other districts have tried. best practices. we recent had a meeting in regards to another idea. we will be having more opportunities for CTE in the east zone. It's just it's not a matter if, it's just a matter of when and
156how we're going to do it. And so it will be occurring. And then I have our three events and there's they're a little bit out of order, but that's on purpose because Miss Debbie Jordan has taken over to be one of our liaison for the culinarymies for the school district of Lee County. And so we have the culinary showcase coming up at the end of the month, October 29th. So, if you have time to come out and eat and judge the food, Miss Jordan's been very involved with all of thosemies and making sure that they provide quality and it'll be at the Shanganger Resort down in Bonita. And then we have Build My Future, which is just an awesome, awesome event, which will be at JetBlue Stadium. I believe we got about 50 business partners,
157big business partners, not small, big, big, that'll be a part of that where all of our students will be able to try heavy equipment, all the different tools of the trade, get to meet one-on-one with the different businesses. And then of course, we have our Pathways to Success event, which will be occurring at South Fort Myers High School. In short, a lot has happened in a short amount of time. It's a newer team, but as you can tell, Mr. Brennenamp is very smart. Mr. Simmons is just very good-looking as well as intelligent. And you know, we're just doing our we're just doing the best we can and we're we're making great great opportunities across the district for all of our students. So, thank you. You have any questions or comments? Thank you. it probably won't
158even get back to me, so we'll go ahead. Mr. Ribble, I'm going to make this real quick, but wow, what is not the lake? I every time I go to one of these events, I'm overwhelmed not only with the students, but the community that shows up for support. So, you folks have really come up with a just a great program and I really applaud all your efforts. Thank you, Mr. Fischer. Thanks. I agree with Mr. Ribble. The AB especially solution with the kids in high school. That's fantastic. I think in the this is the most I've seen career and tech focused since they've been up there with objectives and goals and I appreciate that. So doing amazing work. I love to see the things coming. appreciate Miss Jordan. Thank you for stepping up the culinarymies.
159I'd also recognize one of my fellow board members, Mrs. Javiano, for her work with Zillow. I know she's been really stepping up with that. So appreciate you all. Thank you. Mr. persons. Oh, am I looking forward to that east? Very technical. But, we've had holes in our district and teachers and bus drivers and they're all getting filled up and that's all that I'm looking forward to seeing filled one day. But what impressed me the most besides all of it was that the growth of like 3,000 students this year participating and that's a huge I had to add them up because I saw every one of them was a little bit higher every one. So I added them all up and it was actually 2,999 more students this year. So congratulations Miss Jordan. Thank you for
160the presentation. Love it. Love it. are the schools coming to us for the programs or are we deciding what programs to go into the schools when we said we're going to put programs in in all the schools? I mean, I know we have them in there now, but that was a You go you go ahead. I think you're talking about the tech the tech colleges. Are you talk are you talking about the tech the u you were saying like the differenties that we are like for the cap grant not all that? Yeah, it was right after that you said and I apologize. I should have wrote down the page number, but there's so many pages. I apologize. Any anytime we anytime we add any kind of academy to a school, it's it's a conversation with
161the with the school leaders and the and the school community because you can't you you know, I can't go into Cape Coral. I haven't I haven't been a an administrator, a teacher, a parent in Cape Coral. I' I've only I've only had in the experiences that I've been in. So I can't I can't unilaterally make those decisions in terms of what's best for their kids and their community. So I would never approach it that way. It would it would be it would it's always a go out to the school, talk to the talk to the stakeholders there and get the input because otherw you know what we did for for example for the CAP grant and the application that we did this past year we invited all the schools to come and we basically told
162them the process and we had them go back to their schools decide which programs they wanted to do, which ones they wanted to enhance, which ones they wanted to add and then got back to CTE to to get to get the application ready. And then I just I compiled all the information, got it ready, and sent it to the state. So, it was it was a district-wide decision, not just a district office decision. Perfect. Thank you. And then my other one real quick other question. the adult educ the adult education enrollment for the Esau is which I know is huge, but is that for for them to get their GED or is it just for what what are they what are they attending the classes for? Do we know? Excuse me. I can answer that.
163There there's there's I think it's three different levels of of ESOL speaking classes that they have. They start with ESOL 1, Esau 2, and ESOL 3. That's what the majority of it is when you're looking at the ESOL. That's separate from the GED, which is a separate program. Thank you. Any other questions? Miss Ganelli, I'll be too first of all, thank you. Like I want to say wow. and exciting. I do have a couple questions like the acceleration academy. I know that information wasn't embedded in here at all. can we get some more information in the data on that and the students that are attending that and how we're capturing some of those students and getting a diploma versus GED? I think the GED is great for opportunity for those that have already aged out,
164but if we can give them a diploma from the Lee County School District, I would prefer that. also, I know that I've mentioned this to Mr. Matthews before and I'm going to say it again, and I've been talking about this for I think nine years now. Lineman, I'd love to see a lineman academy. not that we have hurricanes or anything, but I would love to see that partnership. I know I've spoken to people at LC as well as FPNL and they're willing to partner, but what that looks like, I think, is quite an undertaking. So, just u putting that back out there. Well, that's one of the exciting things that we have planned and in the plan for the east zone that we feel is an opportunity. we do know that a large number of
165linemen live in that area and so a lot of their family members would probably be interested in in doing that and that would also be a great gateway to the center of the state which would be Henry County, Glades County, all those other rural counties where we know that we could attract talent that would want to fill that program as well. Well, we certainly know the growth is out that way. So, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. All right, thank you so much. just a couple of things I would add is of course it's a great presentation. It could could have probably taken up one whole entire workshop to dig really deep in here. I was able to and the CAP grant is something that I don't think until you go
166see what all the CAP grant can do, you really don't fully understand it. I was able to go to a sterile high school and Principal Silic went I mean, first of all, she gave a great visit, but the items and the things they were able the tools they were able to buy for the students, they could not have done without without that for for certain. And you know, even my own son going to a school that wasn't necessarily tech had a Yamaha motor course or engine course, excuse me. He would be mad if I just said that. So, and he was able to get a certification. Now he can go work on Yamaha Motors for anybody that he wants. And that's that, you know, I mean, we've got that kind of thing across our district.
167So, yes, I love that you brought that up, Miss Jordan. Like, do we go to them? Do they go to us? And that's a great point like the need in our we have such a diverse county, you know, out in Alba it could be farming and all the way out here it could be nursing, you know. So, I just I really appreciate all the information and I almost feel like it there should be a part two. Yes. So, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. we are going to move on to the safe start initiative. The presentation this afternoon is going to be with our one and only Dave Nulan back to the podium this afternoon. Jared McKinley as Cheryl Neely, Angela Nater, Shereice Trent, and Chuck
168Valardi. Do we have enough chairs? Okay. Okay. Thank you. Good afternoon board members again. We're here today with the start safeart initiative update. I want to introduce our team up here. we have chief academic officer Nathan Shaker. We have our regional associate superintendent Chuck Valardi and we have our executive director of transportation Jared McKenna. So first I want to start off with a little bit is why safe start initiative. why are we here and go back a little bit last year and we started this program. We talked about the conversation what initiated this. We looked at this program. We want to go from a three tier or actually from a four- tier program to a three- tier program to improve on time and pickup time drop off times for students. What we noticed was in
1692024 to 2025, 83% of our students were arriving onto school on time. That meant that over 7,990 students on average were late every day to school. We also noticed that for P PM dismissal, 60% of students were picked up at the school site on time, but that meant that 18,800 students were being picked up late, and that became a safety concern as well. As you can imagine, getting the getting to a bus stop late could be dark at night time. So, there's things that we looked at to improve on that. As also, we want to increase instructional time for our students. So, we started this year, we went through a three- tier program that started beginning this school year. And just to go over some of the successes, our on-time arrival times have increased from
170last year this year by 20%. With the current increase in writership, that means that 2565 students on average are still arriving to school late from last year. Our on-time dismissal times have increased from last year to this year by 19% which means that 9,9 are leaving school late as well. Now, one thing I want to mention as well, we have seen an increase in improvement on schools. There are some schools that have not seen the improvement. So we want to be very transparent by saying that we have seen an increase but we have a lot more work to do as we move forward. We also have increased our consistent instructional time for students. We'll get into that a little bit later in a later slide. But also this is also is not just about us.
171It's about our partnership or collaboration with external partners. So for example working with the sheriff's office helping our buses get to to the to the schools on time there with traffic. Sometimes the buses have a hard time making it to campus. So with working with the sheriff's office, other law enforcement agencies with their traffic units and the volunteer units, they're helping us get to the buses, get the buses on ramp on time as well. As well as working with our DOT, county departments, dealing with certain issues we deal with for traffic infrastructure. A perfect example at Riverdale High School for example the buses would leave campus and they get to the to the light a left turn signal but the light was too short so the buses cannot get on off campus on time. So
172working with DOT they're able to extend the timing of the light so all the buses can leave campus on time which increases our arrival to the next route getting the school getting the kids to to the bus. So, these are just an idea of the collaboration we were working with with all of our partners outside of here to help us to increase the success of our AM arrival and PM pickup times. I do want to say that things are better. Very proud of this team and our school leaders and their schools. Imagine an elementary school of,400 students trying to dismiss at the end of the day and making sure that they get home safely. the teachers, the staff, the principles are all making sure they're tagged, their ID cards are ready to go so they
173can get on that bus on time and home safely. So, with everyone working together, extremely proud of that. We do have some of our directors in our audience today. I want to recognize as well because they are out there in the field on the ramps helping our schools to get those buses off the ramp on time. So, if I'm a high school ramp, I need to get off on time so I can get to those elementary schools and then elementary off to middle school. So, just want to say thank you to that as well. So, going over some of our challenges this year as well that we're dealing with. it's about community traffic. At one point, we would say we have seasonal traffic, but I'd say right now it's year- round traffic. We all drive
174around Lee County. You can imagine the bus is trying to get from A to B, picking up kids at different bus stops, trying to make it on time. So, we have to adjust those routes sometimes to make it leave earlier, pick up kids earlier. And you'll see that again on a later slide as well. We're the earliest pickup times. But, those are things we deal with. Some things we can control. We can't control traffic. We can't control accidents, but these things happen. roadway infrastructure, same thing. We deal with the things that as a county, it's a it's a growing area. working with the county and DOT, talking about the things that we look at that maybe could help improve those things that we see on the roadways. But these are things we'll continue to work
175with as we move down the road. high school choice, we are exploring high school proximity. When I and I'll give you an example when I say that because you'll see again the early start routes. How early do they start to get kids on time? But for give example, South Myers High School has 39 buses. One bus has one student, one bus has three students. Just give the example of some of the things we're looking at and why and how can we improve. Also, additionally, looking at the transportation for early childhood center as well, helping them get their own drivers. That helps leave our drivers availability for the for our routes. That's one thing we're looking at. And then look at the homeless student McKenna Vento. Again, we want to do what's again in the best
176interest of the child. I think it's one thing we have to remember when you have a student or that may be on a bus that drives 105 miles per day, they may not be in the best interest. So, working with executive director Colleen Tim and her and her team they're working with us now looking at those students but Kenny Vento homeless again homeless and foster what's best for the students. So, now we're taking a deeper look into those as well. what we can do better to improve on those arrival and pickup times each of those areas. So now we're going to dive into the data of what we looking like from last year to this year. So if you all look, we've increased from 71% to 91 this year and went from 60% in the
177PM to 69% in the afternoons and defining on time because there was some discrepancies and everybody was asking what exactly is considered on time. So for here, we got tier one with our high schools on time. It's considered 6:30 a.m. with arrival for our buses. for tier one also, which is a K to 8 in the morning is an example like what Dave was telling you all with some of these students that are getting up very early. Yeah, it's a little shocking to hear. And the average route is about an hour and a half long right now. With tier 2, which is our elementary, we've gone from 79% to 93 with a 14% improvement within the first 30 days. And the same, we know with our increased bus operators will continue to allow us to
178shorten our longer routes. we are continuing to address persistent late buses and utilizing a team approach to these challenges. With tier three, which is our middle school, we've gone from 85% to 97. with that being a 12 a 12% point improvement from the first 30 days. And right now we're trying to increase our bus operators. continue to address the late buses and still you using the team approach for the challenges. And here just to giving you all the data here on a line graph for you to have the understanding from for AM with all of our tiers. You see that the high school which is tier one is in the blue. the green is your middle and the orange is your elementary just to give you a visual data what we're looking like right now.
179In the afternoons at high school, we've consistently maintained 99% on time and it's improving weekly. our bus ramp on time rates are excellent, but of course, our routes are a little lengthy. So, you'll see within the next slide, you'll see the time start dropping. So, our high school latest drop off right now is at 4:04 in the afternoon, which is in the west zone. And again, the average route is about an hour and a half long. So in tier 2 in elementary, you start seeing a decrease because our high school routes are a little lengthy. So the arrival to the elementaryaries are a little late right now, which we're working on. So we're we went from 71% since the first day to now 77%. And which is a six% improvement in the first 30 days.
180we've increased our bus operators and continue to allow us to shorten our longer routes. continue to address any persistently late buses, utilizing the team approach and targeting additional strategies to improve overall performance. And then you see the middle school because we're late to the elementary now we're going to be late to the middle school. So you start seeing a little decrease. So we are 69 64 so it fluctuates because you know like Mr. Nulan was talking about earlier there are some challenges that we are going through to try to get on time every day. but the arrival percentages has remained steady. we've we've increased our bus operators. we are definitely working with a team approach because like you say Dr. Colleen and her team have been working very diligent with us. We are working with
181everyone to get these improved. Also looking at other opportunities of transportation to assist. And then it's just give you the line graph of that data to show you in the afternoons as well. So, as as Jerry mentioned, one of the things we've been working on increasing is our increase FTE for bus operators to 580. I know we have a good amount testing this week, for example. Again, as mentioned, this will help shorten those routes that we're talking about. So, that obviously increases our arrival or pickup times either way by doing that, looking at the locations they go to. we're looking at different software programs right now that are more efficient. they're upgraded for our rallying system. That would be very helpful from what we currently use. So, we're having we are having conversations right now
182with that. looking at some options. As I mentioned earlier, we still are reviewing our homeless student transportation program. We're looking at there's also opportunities for maybe private transportation that are out there that other districts do versus what we do currently. But we are looking at all options to see how we can increase and improve not only efficiency, but what's in best interest of the child. I think it's the one thing we want to remember that we keep in mind we look at this. also we introduced sign up for transportation to route students who need transportation versus qualify. I know it's kind of been an issue. They may qualify for a bus stop but maybe they don't use the bus stop. So what does that mean? They mean the buses go to the bus stop, nobody's
183there. So those are things we're trying to work on right now that's taking place. working with the office of school choice to identify students who would like to enroll at a school closer to home as we just mentioned and gave you some examples eventually south like eventually mentioned south high one bus one student one bus three students maybe we you know having those conversations with family which again team approach working together contacting families to see maybe if they would go to a closer school would be helpful also working with our directors obviously they're looking at all these individual issues at school sites. As Jared mentioned, when you break down the AM arrival or PM pickup times, you can go into it and see what bus you may have a bus maybe it's late every day
184for some reason or vice versa. So, we're taking a deeper look into those to figure out why is that happening. That could be a longer route. We don't know, but those are things we can chip away at to increase our success and what we're trying to achieve overall. And really, I get to I get to share the good news of of the added instructional time that's that's been part of the process. And really, it was an opportunity at the high school level to add 2 minutes per period. seeing 99% on-time drop off and equally high pickup has just helped facilitate those additional minutes at the high school level. Two minutes period may not seem like a lot, but if you think about seven periods a day, that's 14 added minutes per day. multiply that by
185180 days in a school year, we're talking about minutes per year. That's 42 hours of additional instruction per year. It's a lot a lot of time. Right now, going into the end of the first quarter, we've already had about an extra day and a half, close to two days of instruction with the extra 2 minutes. Now, it gets more exciting when we think at the high school level. If we spread that out over four years, we're talking about 168 hours of instruction, really an additional month of instruction for our high school students. Now, the that alone is great news. I like I love hearing that the elementary schools are at 93% at the early drop off. You know, our elementary schools usually start their day with the 90minute reading block. So, what that means is
186that more students are arriving on time to school. more students are there and present for their 90minute reading block which is really the essential part of student achievement. middle school. Likewise, when we have such great drop off times at the beginning of the year, we tend to schedule our math and our ELA classes, our reading classes into the morning. so having our students to school with with the percentages that we're looking at has will have a strong instructional instructional impact as we work on the picking up. We'll work on the picking up. Thank you. get working on and we'll stand by for any comments or questions from the board. Mr. Persons, followed by Miss Jordan. Well, this year is a lot better than last year, but you didn't mention that last year was a lot
187better than the year before when we didn't have any proximity. So, we've been steadily moving along. So, I it's definitely going to come up in academics. time you're going to see a big resolve for that. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Jordan. Thank you. thank you, gentlemen. my question is 3:43 a.m. for Dumb for Dumbar High. How that's 3 hours and 27 minutes before school starts that these kids are out there trying to catch a bus. And how many is that one student or how many people are actually on that bus that is going there that child has to be picked up at 3:43 in the morning? Right now we have like 20 students scheduled for that bus that one does get on at 3:43, but it's just the proximity that they live from that school
188and the distance we have to travel to get them. I mean that bus goes to Bonita and go all around and bring them back to Dumbar. So that's why they get on the bus so early. And is that because Dumbar is one of those schools that expands to every single person though? Yes. Okay. Versus the other schools who do not. Well, right now it's a multiple zones. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Miss Shaviano. Yeah. thank you for this. I know I had a lot of questions coming in. It being kind of my first school year going through first year transportation. and so I had a lot of parent questions and I was like, I will get back to you. So, I had lots of them, but I'm happy to see the increase for sure with middle
189school, elementary school, but then to Miss Jordan's point with those early pickups and then those delays in high school kind of pushing everything else back after. And I don't know if this is a discussion or something we table kind of future with high school proximity. I didn't pay attention to proximity in high school because I have elementary and middle school. And now that my oldest is going to high school, I'm like, "Oh, this makes sense now. Now I get right? Cuz I'm going to be looking at that soon. so I don't know if that's a discussion for something for us to look at cuz I know we did middle school about 2 years ago. I sat on that committee and kind of went through that to maybe help this problem more cuz again driving county
190is large and there's lots of traffic and in the north cape we're doing utilities expansion so there's even more traffic and they're delayed a lot on that end with the busing. So, I don't know if that's a conversation for us or if that's in the pipeline for that, Miss Dr. Savage. Yeah, we internally were already prepping for that conversation because I that's part of the reason why we wanted to make it visible to you all is the understanding of the why, right? So, when you see a 343, I mean, it's a great opportunity because that student chose Dunar, wants to go to Dunar all the way from Bonita, but we're we're busing that student and a lot of other students along the way. We pay for that to fuel it. We pay for the driver
191and that's money you could pay teachers. That's a lot of other other things. So the key for us as we enjoyed with elementary and middle was how much choice are you willing to transport for and how much is too much. Right? When it was elementary we had 17 different schools we were busing for in one neighborhood. And so high school is the only one that hasn't gone through that revision process. And so that's something that internally we're looking at to start formulate some reasonable recommendations because in a nutshell the reason why it's so much later because one question you might ask is why is it so on time in the morning which again if we had to choose morning or afternoon which one's more important the morning because they get to school but it's not
192great customer service if twothirds of your buses are late every day to that bus ramp. And you know who else would be upset? You know the teachers have to work that ramp. Administrators have to sit with the students waiting for the bus to arrive. And so while those on-time arrivals are there, but here's the nutshell why that's the case. In the morning, you have the difference between you have if you have an average bus length of an hour and a half, which you saw, and you have in the morning about an hour and a half time between that high school and that elementary school in terms of the second they drop them off on the route, they immediately can begin going to the next route. But in the afternoon, you don't have that as much
193time. You have a 2:00 to your 3:10. all of a sudden you're you're dealing with just over an hour. So that means your routes if you were to run the exact same routes in the morning you're about a 20 minute difference right there. So you're kind of set up to fail and you as you correctly said member Chaviano then middle school is automatically going to be behind because while they're late getting to the elementary bus room it's going to make them late. That's why it's so important that high school does impact all those things why it's so critical that we are responsible in that route design. So we didn't feature that. We don't want people to get alarmed by that conversation because obviously very serious, but it's something we have been looking at internally and
194we wanted to make sure we connected the dots with this presentation. So, I just would like to go through myself to ask Dr. Savage to piggy back off of that question. I thought we were no longer if you were out of zone, we're no longer that's now that parent's choice and they would have to provide transportation. So, can you just clarify? Yes. For elementary and middle that is the case, but high school never went through that proximity shift. They're the last one. And you see the issue that causes for the system, right? So, we could say it's transportation being more efficient. But how do you fit a 90-minute route within an hour and 10 minutes? Mathematically, it just doesn't connect, does it? And I think all of our high school families that rely on transportation,
195which is even increased this year, that's another piece that made it a challenge, is we have more riders this year in high school. So, when you hear of South Fort Myers 39 buses, some of which have very small numbers of students, it's not because they don't want to fill the bus. It's because the distance they have to cover makes it impossible to get more students on that route because they're picking up one student in Bonita, right? So that's just one to connect the dots because you all are seeing it. That's why we're being transparent with the data and that's why some of the schools still feel that issue as well. And I had one last thing. Sorry. so you mentioned the software. I had seen I think I went to the West Compound early on
196just to kind of like see what that all was about. And I know I gave kudos last time, but it's a lot as far as a software piece, but I know there's a lot of parents and some discussion of I don't know if it's keyed in or if they swipe because they have their card, but sometimes the ID is put in wrong or whatever the case may be, like the wrong notification is going out. So, is it a key or are they actually swiping their student ID when they're coming in? they can do either or. So, we do have the scanner for the come for the cards or they can type their ID's number. So, both options are on the buses. So, if they miss Cal, it'll pull up another kid. one number off, you're
197clocking another student. Got it. Okay, that was that was one of the questions. All right, so I think with the new software and then that notification too, cuz it has like that GPS component cuz I know a lot of that early on they were trying to find and track the bus and they weren't being able to track cuz there was like a delay. so outside of like making your routes efficient, is the parent communication side of hopefully the software we're looking into going to be a little bit better? Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. That's a big thing. All right. Thank you. You're welcome, Mr. Fisher. Thank you. just a clarification question if I remember. So, you're looking at hiring and I know this is also HR more sub drivers as well as part of the equation.
198Yes. Okay. Okay. No, cuz I know you know you've hired enough bus drivers, but obviously circumstances happen, certain different things that happen during the week. Obviously, people get sick and those kind of things. A follow up on that for the board in regard to high school proximity of some the those of us that were through it with elementary and middle. We started talking about high school but one of the issues is and we can obviously work this resolve it was the special programs at high school versus elementary and middle where you have to figure out what is available obviously each one I know that will be a factor. I know Dr. Savage has kind of talked about it. So kudos especially for middle school in the morning. It's it's amazing the on time compared to
199these last couple years. So, I am very concerned. I've talked to most of you about some of these early and long routes of four and I am concerned, you know, like Dr. Savage said, it's better that they're there in the morning, but tier three still for the afternoon, the trending data is still we got some work to do, but I know we've got some great people to help and I appreciate it. Thank you. Well, Mr. Fischer actually took my question regarding the sub substitute but buses drivers but what is your pool number like what did what how many people do you have right now in a pool in your substitute bus driver pool right now we have three substitute drivers and okay so that's I mean that really puts it in perspective and so what
200what is your goal to increase that pool like what's your number are you looking for the happy the happy number my happy medium is 15 but I would love to be at 25 awesome all All right. Well, good luck. I I wish you well on that. Thank you. But but thank you because it's it's informative. Three is just not we know that's not enough. That doesn't even that doesn't even put a dent in it. I mean it's just so difficult. So I know it's a work in pro progress. and I'm looking forward to an update. This is only the first month. So I think it we can get better from here and I know we are. So I think that the evidence and data is trending that way. So thank you. Any other questions? Okay.
201so I have a few things. so when I make this comment, I just want you to understand how much I think you all are rock stars rocking it. We are coming. We have come leaps and bounds from where we were. First of all, second of all, let's say we take this one off Bonita student, Cape student, Elvis student, no matter where that is in the district, is there an opportunity for us to partner somehow with a like a Lee Tran or maybe a hybrid situation with public transportation that would be willing to help at the hours of 3:30 in the morning because I'm not sure they're that busy at that time of the day. Is there an opportunity for us to somewhat hybrid partnership with one of our public transportation for for something like that?
202I don't know what I don't know if they're short drivers. I'm just asking. So that's a question. Definitely research a report back. I know we've looked at some different partnerships for a lot of different things. Whether it's with students with disabilities, whether it's like as we mentioned the Kenny Vinto transportation, they're looking at a lot of strategic pieces particularly for outliers, small numbers that are in very long distance situations. We'll be happy to provide just a little bit of detail probably in the board weekly to give you a sense of kind of the work that's underway as well as maybe entertain some more in-depth maybe one-on- ones with the board members to go into more depth of some of those things as well as kind of reach out to some of our partners, see what
203we can do. Yeah, I think a private partnership is the kind of the way to go with some of these things. You know, we have multiple public transportation opportunities in the district and I think that we need to sort of start thinking outside of the box until we be we have the infrastructure that's going to allow this to be sort of a I mean, we're we're a huge county, you know, and and this needs to be a little more successful. So, that's not a negative to you. That's something we need to figure out. and then my other question would be, you know, you have a lamp, you rub it, you're asking the genie, come out. Besides every parent driving their own child to school, what is, and I hate to put you on the spot,
204and please don't feel like you have to answer this now, Mr. McKinley, because I do have so much faith in you. what do you need from the board to help us get from where we're at to where we keep talking about where we want to go? What do you need from from us as a as a board two? I can't drive all the children but in all honesty and the support you're giving right now is actually amazing and the collaboration of everyone within the district. I mean like it's been absolutely amazing the team we have right now and the efforts that are being put forth and I have to give a huge kudos to my drivers in attendance that wake up every morning that actually get this done and to the schools and their patients.
205So in all honesty, what you're doing right now is actually absolutely amazing and I thank you for that. Okay. All right. Well, if there's more, we I'd love to know. So, seeing nothing else, thank you so much. Thank you for all you're doing. Appreciate it. and I'll see you at 3:30 a.m. Okay. Next, we have the maintenance update related to the RSM audit. Donald Nice and Scott Cook will be presenting this afternoon. All right. Good evening everyone. this is my third time speaking and I will note that I actually turned the microphone on first this time. so good good afternoon Dr. Savage, board, team and community. last month I was here to speak on something different and briefly what came up was a question about our service tickets and how we process them and what
206we're doing to understand the challenges we face as well as invent processes, implement those processes and work through them to provide our customers which really are the students and the teachers and the schools the best possible service. that we are able to provide while also being fiscally responsible in doing so. And so with that said, I'm very proud of the maintenance team and the work that they've done over the last few months as well as what Scott Cook has done to to really explore and get this process back on track. And with that said, I'll turn it over to Scott Cook who will be doing the majority of the presentation tonight. Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for the opportunity to kind of present our progress from that RSM audit that was completed back in March
207on the maintenance department. So, we put together this again, this is just an initial update. We're about 3 months into a lot of the big changes we've made. and pretty excited about showing you where we're at. First slide is just some general facts kind of about the maintenance department. Some did you know FAQ things here. one thing we didn't have on there at the top there, there's 162 positions, but we also serve 107 sites. And I'll reference that a little bit here in the into the presentation, but just a general overview. We are a very, very large district and 27th in the nation really sticks out. So, this is the key one that everybody was talking about after the RSM audit. 104 days to complete a work order. And this is the one that grabbed
208everybody's attention. It was kind of where we started. We started with that, went backwards and looked at everything to figure out how do we get here? What do we do about it? And then how how will we resolve it? Because it will get resolved. We're not there yet, but we are well on our way. So, this is kind of a list of all the things we found out. Not a list of solutions. This was a list of the problems that really lended itself to that 104 day number that became kind of famous. That first section really is one thing. It's all the work orders on paper, but it's simple paper inefficiency. schools would put in a service request. It goes downtown, goes becomes a work order. Literally was getting printed out, put on a clipboard,
209and texts were going out there with clipboards and paper filling them out. Stuff was getting lost. Obviously, you can see how it goes. You've got multiple trades. Everybody's got paper. So, that was really the main part of that. There was communication lapses. We found data organization and really kind of just a lack of being able to to find transparency in the systems of seeing where we're at, where work orders were and where they were in their progress. So those are things we wanted to address. The other thing I'll reference a little bit in this is technician complete versus complete under the cate categoration of work orders. That audit was based on work orders being totally complete, contractors paid, all wrapped up and done, and didn't really reflect the actual service to the school being complete.
210That was another item we really wanted to look at and address what what were we going to gauge oursel on. So this was kind of like the four main parts we really started to look at to start making some progress on these problems. A lot of this began in March and it's really gone all the way through the end of September. In the processes department really ongoing still is trying to find KPIs. what is a good turnaround time for a school to put in a request and for us to get that request done. What what's a good time for each specific thing they might ask for? We also need to go and we looked at our fleet inventory. I know that's an ongoing thing with transportation, but we've taken a complete inventory of fleet, all
211of our equipment. We have that ready to go and we also have kind of uploaded already what we need to move forward after that's done. That hadn't been done in years. This was the biggie, technician notes, digitizment to tablets. So, back where I referenced just a second ago, the paper and going up with clipboards, every technician that goes to school site now, they have little digital notepads. There's no more pen and paper. Everything's instant. They can put it in there. Everything is going to be uploaded automatically. It's taken out a lot of possibility for human error in that chain. In the people part of it, we've upgraded our trainings. I'll reference that a little bit more in the presentation. And then workforce optimization. I mentioned how we have 162 positions in the maintenance department. We
212really wanted to look at are those in the best spots. Do we have the right trades? Do we have the right departments? Do we have the right people doing the right things? It the IT collaboration was paramount on this. So this started right back in March as well. They really helped us get in there and redo the people soft access which is was very difficult on the school end. The end users struggled getting stuff in there. maintenance our time working through peopleoft really made that simple provided a dashboard to the schools where they can look on there and see their request in real time see where it's at where it's at in status we can check it provided some accountability so huge kudos to the IT department for helping us there outreach so really a
213lot of the issues we had with the 104 day was communication just communication with schools as you're going to see through this presentation a lot of effort to improve simplify and really make efficient communication with the schools. We've also tried to add new vendors. This will be an ongoing thing. We found we were short in areas. We weren't able to provide services that we needed because we just didn't have the capacity. So, we've been engaged with try with procurement trying to add new vendors. One of them is the fencing projects. We've recently gone to procurement. We have added a fencing vendor to try to expedite those those fencing projects. So this one, this is kind of the new categorization we're working with at maintenance department. So this was not real organized before this audit and
214before the changes were rolled out in July 1. So just kind of going through each one of them. A critical if somebody codes if we code as a critical response that means we respond today and I want to make sure it's so the key word is respond doesn't mean that's going to be fixed. So a critical is like you've got a whole power system down. We had that recently at a local elementary school. Those require immediate response. An urgent service request or an urgent work order is going to be respond within two days. Usually we get there the same day as well. But that could be something that it can wait. It could happen on the Saturday. Maybe it can wait till Monday. Maybe we can address that. But that's going to be very quick.
215We got to get out there. Most of what maintenance deals with its core competencies are in that standard 30 to 60 day range. you might have a broken door, something that doesn't kind of, you know, like squeaks or things like that. A low priority be more of a wish for the school, not necessarily a need, but more of a want where we're going to get to it, but it may not be prioritized over the needs of a school. And then we go on with the SRAFE, preventive maintenances, hurricane, and capital projects. And I'll explain those more on the next slide and how those changed. You'll notice priority code number eight, it's not there. That's just a new code that it helped us in people software. We can pull of all our service requests on on
216in real time and see where they're at. Excellent. So this is just kind of example I was talking about and again the main focus of our audit and our response to it was really looking at the critical, urgent, standard and low. So and those kind of give some definitions where they're at. What was happening with that 104 days was the service requests also took into account these ongoing and long-term projects. There was actually we still have a handful of of hurricane things we're still trying to go through and mitigate were captured in that queue. So those aren't really counted now towards how do we gauge what our core competencies how do we get out and service our schools? What should be looked at? What's immediate things for maintenance? And that's your critical urgent standard and
217low. Now this is where we start getting into the data of where we're at. Kind of gives an idea of what maintenance deals with on a daily and a monthly basis. start and we rolled this out in July. So, I want to point out starting with July here, this is with using new priority codes again, just the one through four, the critical, urgent, low and standard. We had 1,315 work service requests come in. I'm going to explain it. Service requests come in, we make them into work orders, and we were able to complete 976 of what came in for just that month. So, it's not that's not the total we completed. We actually completed another 123. It's not in there. This is data we were able to pull now because we had to wait. We
218uploaded this a week ago, but we actually completed 1,099 total, but we're addressing them fairly quick and we were able to get the majority out of the, 315, we were able to actually address complete and get them tech complete where they were completed at the school level, 976. Obviously, the rest of those that don't get completed will go into the next month. And again with that low or low priority or standard priority, we have up to about 90 days to get those done. So same thing with August, busy month, people come back from vacation, schools are going to start. We took in 2,00 2329 service requests. We completed the ones that were put in that month. We completed, 158. We actually completed total and those could be rollovers from July. We completed 1,871. again not
219in there but we pulled this data I think as of yesterday we wanted to try to get you the freshest data possible and then you see see the same thing for September things settle in but we got 1,736 we're actually complete that month 655 of those but now checking the data yesterday we really did 1577 total completed for that month and to give you another idea on this one important one there's about 110 service requests on average every day that come into the maintenance department from schools So they get about 110 and those can be any of those ranges. So quite a volume when you're really looking at in the thousands per month that they're trying to deal with. Now this is kind of getting more to the question of the 104 and why that
220was out there and and putting a little more light on that. This is one of our first KPIs that we're trying to get is what is our what is our time for our actually actionable service request that priority 1 through 4. So we started mapping it back in March to see where we're at. and roughly those standard one through four service quests, not your ongoing SREF, not your capital projects, you're seeing the averages for the month of what it's taken to complete those. As you see, you get further away from the month, those numbers do, the days do tend to go up a little bit because we might be completing a service request that had a 90-day turnaround time that was put in in March. We might not be completing that till June. So, that's
221why you'll see they'll grow. But we're starting to see back in March and April, we're starting to kind of establish around 30, a little over 30 days to complete a standard service request for a school, which is definitely not the 104 that we originally thought it was. Now, we did try to get some ideas, and this has been difficult. This will be an ongoing effort. What is the good turnaround time? And reached out to the auditors and asked them. They really didn't have key data with it, but other districts were around 30 days to complete a service request, but we don't know yet. And that's I guess that's a different kind of data to try to gather. Are they doing the same thing as us? We can kind of assume they are where they're doing
222just the ones that are actionable and the ones we're working on that are kind of in that core competency of maintenance. So again, priority codes one through four. And these are tech complete. That's the other key thing I want to stress. Tech complete is when we go out, we fix it, everything's done, and a school's got their they've got their needs met. But that doesn't mean that we've necessarily paid the vendor, we've completed the paperwork. it just means that school is good to go. So that was another key difference in getting the actual numbers. The 104 actually reflected us doing a service request and if it was done through a third party or or a vendor, it wasn't closed and considered complete until everybody was paid, which sometimes can be the ongoing and go for
223months. This is when when are the school's needs met and that was what was most important for operations to capture. What when are we meeting our school's needs? So this is a better much better reflection of that. this one. Now, this really the key of this is to show this is coding mistakes. You'll see April, it showed 142 days to create to address a critical service request. Well, that's not accurate. They were all addressed that day. But this is where they go in, they were on paper still. School puts in a request. It goes to a dispatch. Dispatch sends it to a trade supervisor. tradeser prints it up, assigns it a code, addresses it. And this is kind of where the data started and where it was kind of a mess to sort out. We
224knew we were doing better than 142. We also knew in May we're doing better than 48.8, but really analyzing those showed it was all coding mistakes. There might be something that was really literally cleaning a gutter that was coded as a critical needs to be done today. It might have been painting a wall again listed as critical really could have taken us 90 days. So now rolling out the people soft changes the new dashboard for our text to actually pick is it just one through four simpler. You can see in July when we lucked out in June we actually had no critical sent in there but starting in July we're averaging about 10.2 days to complete a critical service request. Again they responded to right away but about 10.2 2 days to complete and August
225was 2.7. And that doesn't mean we were that bad in April. They didn't think that bad. It just means that the coding was all messed up. It was it was really kind of a mess in the queue of what we were looking at. With our new systems, people softs simplifying. Much easier to see how long it's taken to address those critical needs. This will be the same thing on the urgence. Those are within two days to be addressed. Again, you can see we know that maintenance was showing up usually that day or at the very least the next day, but it's it's skewed in numbers because inoft we didn't have the codes right. We weren't assigned those right in in the tech area and that was again paper probably some some human error that we
226did some training on. But now we look and those are actually a little bit more in range where they're getting fully completed addressed that day or within two days but completed where the school has everything back to what they need within 11.6 6 8.7 and 4.1. So much better numbers to work with. Now some of our big achievements while doing this. So everything got broken down starting in in March, April, May, July. We rolled everything out and also continued to do some things starting off the school year. Biggest thing is we wanted to really follow up on on the one vision and one team. So academic alignment was important for maintenance to become part of that to support the district and their academic goals. So maintenance for years and years and years worked in zones,
227a maintenance zone. So they didn't really change much. You had his own supervisor. But then recently now we've gone to regions for academics. Well, we wanted maintenance to match right up with that. So if you have the north region has a regional superintendent, they should also have one maintenance service advisor. So the zones got changed out where all the schools now line up and I'll show you that lines up and every single academic region now has a maintenance manager for that re region. So zones were gone and now that regional superintendent, they have a question about a school or they need to know something at school or a principal in that particular region, they have a one-stop shop and communication piece right back to maintenance where they can all go to that one person and
228collaborate with that one maintenance service advisor. work shift changes. This is this is one that's ongoing. Currently, we've all maintenance starting in July was really and for years had been 6:00 a.m. to 2 pm. That was not meeting the needs of the school. We know we have schools in session all the way up till 4:00. They had needs even people at the schools till at least 5. So, we tried to split a balance. So, we are now making changes. We've got 13 so far and a lot of new hires that have gone to 8 to four. So that has increased our capacity to go out and address schools quickly. We don't have to call somebody off duty to go out at 3:00 to fix a plumbing leak or something at a school. We usually have
229somebody on the clock that can handle it in those critical areas. It also was a was kind of a fiscal decision as well. We don't pay overtime, so we overlap just like the schools will have some custodial crew go in and open a school and then hours later they'll have the night shift come in. So we're we're kind of modeling that a little bit where there's overlapping service. So, hours of service really went from 6:00 to 2 all the way from 6:00 to 4:00 p.m. a lot of feedback on that. So, it's been great. We're able to get quicker responses out to the schools. There's a service man service manager activity report I'm going to show you. This really increased accountability and transparency. So, service manager in the regions now, they go out and visit
230schools. Well, we'd like to know where what's going on, be able to follow the progress and see what's happening. So, now we map that out. when a service manager goes to a school, they'll put it in the system and we can see what they did, what they spoke about, what they worked on, what the issue was, and see the people they talked to by putting in their comments. And we also tied it where our regional superintendents can look at that as well. So, they can say, "Hey, I've noticed you've got this going on." They can look on the calendar and see that maintenance has been there, maintenance been addressed it, or if they haven't been there and haven't addressed it, it's very transparent of what's going on. We're going to continue to work with it.
231There's been a couple tweaks we've tried to work on with some of the dashboards that are going back to the schools. Training for staff and maintenance employees. we have I'll show you an example. We've changed that and we're looking at more ways to train honestly building supervisors the school level to have them kind of partner with us and help us to speed up these times because a lot of the requests we were getting in really weren't maintenance requests. They were kind of school requests but maybe they didn't know how to do it. so we're trying to retrain or find other ways to engage our building supervisors to make them partnered with maintenance so they can kind of take some of the things that maybe they weren't trained or weren't sure they were supposed to do.
232improve visibility and status update. We'll talk about the invis the visibility part that's been that's been key on this. And there's quality control and increased accountability. Again, that's back to visibility and us being able to watch a service request. And schools have the ability also when a service request comes in, they get a newer notification says, "Hey, your service was complete, let me know if it was okay." And if it wasn't okay, they have three days to go back and open that service request back up. So schools can say, "No, no, no, you're not done. You we're going we're going to open that back up." So that was big as well. And getting to the number, make sure we weren't just closing them out, but that they could go in and say, "No, you didn't
233finish." They open it back up, we address it, and we're actually monitoring that really close when they do open them up because we want to know why it wasn't wasn't completed. Okay. Okay. So, this is just kind of an example. This is what our maintenance regions look like. Now, again, an exact mirror. We even the district even updated their documents they sent out to principles. So, if you'll see, you have one regional super and then you now have one maintenance supervisor for that entire region. And that has has worked out well. We had formula we had some regional supers reaching out to two or three different zone supervisors trying to get support for their principles. Now it's a one-stop shop. This is new and this rolled out literally the first day of school. this is
234just a snapshot of one region, but this is that engagement calendar I was telling you about. It really is kind of a tracking to know where the needs are in the schools and where our maintenance service managers are going. So every little spot you can see is where there was either a call or an unplanned visit and they go to the schools and if this was a live document, I could hover over it with my mouse and it would actually show dialogue of of what they did there. It'll say walked AP to look at alarms, walked AP to look at alarm system, followed up on a service request. So every one of those has notes and times of where that person visited that school and had that touch point with that principal or AP or
235building supervisor. This has helped us a lot when we hear like, oh, we go to that school all the time, but now I can see exactly how many times have we been to the school, how many times you spoke with the principal or we're talking with principles. Hey, I see that we had some an issue there. Everything go okay, how'd it go? I can actually look and verify what was said, what was done. This is a huge visibility piece, transparency piece, but it was also a big accountability piece for us. This is just kind of the new priority codes. not really super exciting on this, but one of the people soft upgrades that we did and it just shows how easy it is for us now to assign a priority code of sticking with that
236the one through four. The news the new priorities is that eight where we can easily go in not again exciting for for us to pull data but we can put in the code eight and it pulls basically service times for those codes one through four which again is where maintenance core competencies lie of how quick we're doing things just kind of sample it was one of the calendars they had for the inservice training this summer for the building summers they brought them down here and these were interactive Mr. Denise and I walked and walked through a few of these, but they took the districts the school building supervisors. They literally took them in in areas, showed them how to fix plumbing here at the district office and had hands-on training because we really had a
237lot they didn't know. Had them work on electrons and again it was a hands-on training, something new. it was definitely more of an upgrade from the traditional sit and get and really interactive. And this was popular and something we're looking to to bring even more as we bring new building supervisors in during the school year. maybe bring them down to Canal Street, have them do a hands-on there, take them to the school, do hands-on interactive trainings to try to build their capacity as well. All right, so continuing progress. Again, a lot of this I I've covered but I want to reiterate the service time alignment and critical areas meet the schools has been big and we're going to continue to look at that. Some of the workforce optimization efforts we're doing, there were departments that
238maybe were a little bit bigger than they should be. So, we're looking at trading out positions in those departments and moving them to where they need to be. Chill water comes to mind. We had to shift some things around and get some help in there because of our chill water systems. just a lot of different things going on that'll be ongoing and you'll see updates throughout the year of where we're continuing to make that progress. I also want to note on the workforce optimization. I keep talking about that. So back to that second slide, I'd said that we had 162 maintenance folks and 107 sites. We did some digging. We looked back in 1985, they had 158 maintenance folks and only 54 sites. So optimization is key. We really have not gone up in the
239people and the work has even changed a bit too. Sometimes there's a lot of higher the schools have changed, technologies changed. So a lot of the work sometimes is going with a vendor. So it's kind of evolved. So, we want to take this year and kind of make sure we're continuing involved with it because the resources haven't really changed, but the way we address them has with with the needs that are met. Again, that's that workforce authorization to make sure we have people in the right places. Are we bringing the right vendors in and do we have the right folks monitoring those those vendors? one thing we are looking forward to and again partnering with with safety and transportation. When we get GPS, we'll be in all vehicles and that's going to help us too
240with some efficiencies, making sure we know where those vehicles at, how time on task, also just keeping our vehicle fleet in good shape. This is just a snapshot. This is Mr. Nie's schedule, but really one of the big things is back to that visibility. he's personally making visits to the schools proactively just kind of picking them in a certain region going he walks with the principal sits with them he's asking questions about food service and maintenance and really all across the board in operations. I'm visiting schools following up on where construction work is done or maintenance work is done kind of similar and we have other 20 but we're actually I think over 30 site visits since the school year started and that's that again facetime where the principles see us the APS see us
241they talk to us they have direct communication and they have a face with a name really trying to go for the for the one vision one team approach and that's been huge Mr. has promised he's going to get to every single school. I don't know how long he's going to take to do that, but he's working at it diligently and every week hits three or four schools till he gets them all. And that's huge in building those relationships. So, again, this whole PowerPoint was really just kind of the beginning of of of what you're seeing. And I do want to give a huge thank you and just thank you to Barb and her team at maintenance have been real supportive on on the suggested changes and working closely with operations to to implement these. So
242it's it's been a huge success with three months in and we're looking forward to continue and optimizing everything and improving service to schools. We will develop as a year goes on. Again, that's data. We want to develop our KPIs. That's an ongoing progress. but really excited at the school year we've started one of the smoothest school years for maintenance side of it in a long time and just wanted to give you an early early look at some of the successes in the operations division so back to back to you guys questions comments to the board Dr. Savage any questions comments Mr. persons. I was walking one of the schools visiting classrooms with the superintendent the other day. So, we were there for academics to see how they were structuring everything. Now, the clear blue, the
243principal goes, "Oh, maintenance is so much better this year. Everything is getting done timely. I've never seen anything so great." So, that makes me happy. You got one great supporter, but I'm sure you have many more, though. I hope there's more. Okay. I'm sure you do. It's We'll take one more at a time though. Yep. Any others? Miss Gioanelli? Thank you. so I was curious. I was trying to understand this the no the region thing. go back to that one service the service managers, right? So they're they're under new regions or or so they got schools got switched around. They service managers had a set and now they got switched around and in under the region categories, right? Yes. service managers were some where a lot of them kept some of the same schools but
244basically we took whatever the zones had been that maintenance had categorized many years ago and just made it took the regional academic regional list and assigned them to those regions. so when did this change happen? I believe August 8th. It was the week before the kids came. It was in early August. Oh you made this major change just before school started. Yes. Okay. Okay. that so prior to August we actually had them in four different zones. and that's been that way for at least two to three years because we had to add an additional zone manager because of the large volume. What we were trying to best do is actually divide the district in some equitable amounts. Before each zone manager had about 30 sites by adding that fourth zone manager we were actually able
245to reduce that to about 20 22 sites per per person. So that helped in the response time to facilities especially when we had emergencies and the service managers I think they had like three weeks of planning with it to hand them over but again it wasn't a huge lift for them because two of them had already been in those had serviced those schools before so it wasn't new but it was a good opportunity for them kind of new relationships maybe change of scenery kind of new relationship building and starting fresh in other zones so it was new it was new for probably two of them but the other ones had already been in those areas so it wasn't a huge lift, but they did have they did have about two three weeks we had them
246planning and handing over projects and working on the transition. So, it went really really smooth. We got a lot of positive feedback from it. So, when was the principal told though? Cuz you said it was just on the 8th. July. So, we announced it, but we also we did more than just announcing it. we created weatherresistant contact cards that actually not only had their information, but had scan codes for each of them and had a scan code bar for the after hours person. So whether they're driving, whether it's dark or at night or whatever, you can use your phone. You just scan and it would get that person to whatever zone that they're in. Yeah. So, and that was passed again that they had those all well before the first day of school. Right. But
247you said the 8th and the first day of school was what day? We rolled it out. I think they actually switched the schools, but the schools knew it was coming a service. It was in July. I'd have to look back. We'll have to get the dates, but it was in effect prior to the Yeah, because I would something like that I would assume would happen over the summertime so that principles were aware because I mean first at a school that's one thing you don't want to be having to deal with is who to report a problem to when you don't if you've got somebody new that I just wouldn't think that would be very smooth running. I would say under normal or optimal circumstances that's correct. But I think because operations as a whole was
248really in the need for you know just some good growth and some good change and I think I think the entire district really everybody that we've talked to has appreciated that change and you know there's there is some questions about well I had this person for a very long time now I have this person but but there hasn't been a single complaint or actual factual type information put forward where there were any negative outcomes from that swap. So, but wouldn't the service manager have ongoing projects that could be correct? Yes. Long. So, they're they're handing that off on August 8th to a new person if that I mean that's I'm just I'm playing this scenario out and I'll be honest with you, I did have some principles that weren't happy getting that. They told me
249it was last minute. They got a they got an email on Friday before school started on Monday. And so that was that was added stress to them that probably if it had been happened over the summer they wouldn't be as stressed out. That's what was expressed to me. Absolutely. And I think I think can it be better? Absolutely could be. But I but I will tell you I started on July 1st. I wanted to make the school year as good as possible. And I don't think that change could have waited three months, six months, nine months. You know, in order to to to get dynamic and comprehensive improvement, we've got to be willing to embrace those changes. Oh, no. I'm I'm not saying that. I'm saying well, just the timing sooner than late like than
250the day before school starts. I mean, that's just like I said, we're worried about getting the buses there much less now they got a now you've got, you know, a water leak or no, which we have for some reason. We've had a lot of times now we've had to go bottle waters to schools. I would think that the service manager is the ones in charge of getting that bottled water and getting that to the schools and so forth and not knowing who that would be the finding out, you know, on the ETH, you know, a day before school starts. It's was stressful on the school itself much less the new manager that might have taken over that new school that they were not very familiar with. I'm just thinking out the scenario of that and
251could be. So I would also add though since we rolled that change out, I would say that the the regional superintendent along with our maintenance personnel have worked closer together as well as myself and Mr. Cook in regards to the principles and vice principles. We worked very closely with them over the last few months. And again, you may have received information that I haven't, but for the most part, they seem very receptive and very pleased with the changes that we've been rolling out. No, I think the alignment is good. I'm not saying I'm saying the timing was probably not the best time from from a couple that I that I spoke to that, you know, it's just stressful. First week of school is very stressful. Yeah. so I was popping in the first week of
252school. I was piping into all my schools. I got them all done that week before and the to the third week of of school. So, I just that really threw me off a little bit. So, I didn't really understand it. So, that's all I had to ask that question. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. That's who I am. thank you very much for the presentation. my question is when you referred to the building supervisors when we were speaking about some of the things that had not gotten done it was because the building supervisor maybe did not know that they could in fact fix that or do that. Where is that at now? So do they understand what they are able to fix or not fix? Because I felt like it was put off. Well the it
253didn't get done because the building supervisor had not done it. So, do they understand what their role is as far as the school is concerned? Because that's their schools. To speak candidly, building managers as well as custodial staff is something that I'm I'm going to be deep diving on, I'd say, over the next 6 to9 months. One of the things that we're looking at doing just on a cursory look, my initial thought is that there's not a lot of consistency in the hiring, the training and really the execution of the of the building managers and the custodial staff. Not because of any ill intentions or anything like that. It's just because those employees reside at the school level now and school A and school B might do things completely different, right? And so my expectations
254at school A for a building manager might be completely different than than than than school B. And so we're looking at possibly possibly centralizing those functions so that teachers can spend more time focusing on teaching and administrators administrating and so operations can look at operating so that we can give them those consistent standards and training. But we have to look and make sure that adds more value than it does potentially create problems. and we're just starting off on that. So, thank you. And because I two times you kind of like mentioned said the building supervisor was one and then the other one was the mistakes of the coded mistakes. There was quite a few coded mistakes. So, and that all comes back down to training. So, the training and consistency across the board is always
255good. So, thank you for that. I appreciate hearing that you're going to be training. Thank you, Mr. R. Okay, time for a kudo. That was not a negative. Okay. No, I just wanted to say one of the things that I noticed go being elected last year was going to the schools was the restrooms. Last year they were horrible. I had so many people including parents complain and this year it's like day and night. I don't I wouldn't I'm not talking about the newer school like Bonita Springs High School. That's a given. That's they've they've kept that in perfect shape since day one. I'm talking about the older schools, but now you go to a football game, that was that was one of the challenges. You go into the restroom, ladies rooms, whatever the case may
256be, men's room, they were they were a problem. Half of the urinals didn't work and that kind of thing. Now, you go in these schools, and I know they're older schools, but they're like day and night, and a lot of people were talking about that when we get together, particularly at the one event we had at Ster High School, just stay at night. So you folks have some good plumbers evidently on the payroll and you're doing a good job with that. So I just want to bring that up. Thank you, Mr. Ribble. so just a couple of questions I have is so and maybe I missed this, but we talk so highly of our certifi certifications in some of our high schools that do have tech do have tech programs. Do we are we ever
257able to do something where our students can be student on assignment and help with some of these issues or is that not I'm I'm so glad you asked that question. So, one of my biggest goals and we're still we're still flushing it out, but we have a lot of our entrylevel positions in maintenance, they're difficult for us to fill because the local employer pays more. and so what we're looking at now is some type of work program, CTE partnership, trade school partnership where we can actually get people in to work for a low wage while they get workrelated experience. And my hope is that if we're creating a good environment, we can sell them on staying for retirement and the great team vice vice just training them and them leaving us. But if they do
258leave us, it's still good for the community and we still got that labor and it's a win all the way around. And so we've already identified a position to give up which will create four internship positions, but we're creating all the administration and building the partnerships now. But I got to say to me, like I know that's not specifically in my job description, but it's one of the most exciting programs I'm working on. I'm really excited about it. Okay. I can tell. Thank you. so what I because my second question would have been, do you really have enough do you have enough maintenance crews across the district or is that a real need? I mean, I would say the answer to that is some would say yes, some would say no. I am personally looking
259at every single position and I am not ready yet, but at some point I will be ready to be able to tell you yes or no and what exactly we need and what that'll look like. And that's another one of my goals for the year is we have great people. We are doing great work, but what else can we do? How how and how can we do it better? That's one of our goals for this year. I appreciate that. And I and I will say on piggyback on what Mr. Ribble said. I have heard that there's been quite a bit of improvement in this in this part of the district. And I think that if you, you know, if we attack things as this is my house and when the AC goes out, I want
260to lose my mind or when my sink isn't working. And I think if we all attack those things like I'm going to say in my mind, this is my house, so this is going to be a priority. And I think when I think you're on the road to that. So I truly appreciate that. and I certainly know our administrators, teachers, and definitely our students because if the IEC goes out at one of our schools, like it has, my child is the first to tell me. So, all right. Thank you so much for everything you do. I appreciate it. All right, we are going to move on to public comment. Attorney Dupe Bruno, do you want to address public comment? Yes. Thank you, Madam Chair. School board policy provides the opportunity at this point in the
261meeting to address the board concerning any matter on this meeting's agenda. If you completed a public comment card, please provide it to staff. Public comment will be held at the podium in the center aisle and in the front. Please be advised that the board will not respond during public comment to remarks made by speakers. Abuse of language defined as swearing, use of profanity, or name calling is prohibited. Speakers who fail to follow proper decorum in the chambers will be ruled out of order. Any speaker continuing with such remarks will be required to relinquish the microphone per board policy 0169.1 and may be removed from the chambers and there will be one warning. Per board policy 0169.1. The time per speaker is 3 minutes. You will find a countdown on the big screens in the front
262of the room. Once your time has elapsed, the microphone will automatically shut off. Please state your name when you approach the microphone. U Madam Chair, there are two individuals that would like to address the board. It appears it's with regards to NN which was not on the agenda. However, I would recommend that we allow them to speak since we opened the door when Mr. Rickenbacher answered. I think I was told to make sure. Yes. If I may. Yes. will the following individuals please line up? Denise Everly and Chris Mio. God has spoken. Thank you for letting us speak. Denise Eberly. I'm going to start off with a letter from Johnson Engineering to Sergio at South Florida Water Management District dated September 16th, 2025. Please remove the development named High School NNN under application number 2550127-48540
263from the review time clock. All documents submitted since the last request for additional information. Letter was sent for this application should be considered draft. Once updates have been revised, documents will be updated for review. We will keep you updated on further correspondence with USFWS. As we continue through the process, I'm asking you to stop and reconsider before moving forward with this high school project. I also ask that you pull it from tonight's meeting. How can this board justify approving construction when the cost has already jumped by 22.5 million, which is unnecessary if built in Lehigh acres? There's still no South Florida Water Management District permit approved, which has been falsely claimed that there was for three months. And just because a request has been submitted, doesn't make it so. Not no completed or submitted FGUA
264sewer or water plans and an ongoing federal title 6 civil rights investigation. And with the federal shutdown, those delays will only go longer. Such a hurry to build something where it doesn't belong. Currently, the plans have been reverted to drafts and the clock has been stopped for several reasons, specifically South Florida Water Management District. Now, we learned from FGA that the project's infrastructure, including the two 500,000galon water tanks and lift station, adding millions more, is designed to serve developers. Lee County School District is paying for these costs, and once complete, FGUA takes ownership while developers connect, saving them millions. millions but burdening taxpayers who foot the bill. This isn't a school project. It's a developer subsidy disguised as education spending. Meanwhile, Lehi students will face longer bus rides and higher transportation costs at a time
265when the district is now trying to shorten routes and hire more drivers. So, how can Lee County School District claim to have an accurate guaranteed cost when the key permits and plans remain incomplete? This project must be pulled until every permit and approval is in place and the district should reconsider the Lehigh acre site where the need exists. The reason Lee County School District purchased and expanded that Lehi property after the quadruple a fiasco in Estero was because Lehi Acres needed the school's den and it's Thank you, Miss Everly. Your time is up. Good evening board members. My name is Christopher Mio and I spoke last few months back at another meeting and as I had mentioned that time we spoke about the danger of or the interference of shooting ranges on private property around
266the school and then also the roads and utilities. I haven't heard any response back yet as far as what the school would do if a private person uses their gun range around the school during school hours. but I would very very interested to hear that if that has been found out. but most importantly is the roads and the utilities. As we heard tonight, we talked we heard a lot of work of conversation about the busing and the and the and the problems like such as over at Riverdale what they had had in the past. But looking at the Joel and Tucko location, biggest road is Joel, which is two lanes and has no utilities as was just talked about by Miss Denise. the Joel and David location has a five lane road in front of
267of Joel. And at that location, there's plenty of utilities. There's no problem hooking it up. It will cut the cost incredibly. building at the Joel and Tuo has the appearance of fraud, waste, and abuse with taxpayer payer funds. We got we got J the Joel and Tuo pro pushing the Joel and Tuahoo site ahead of the Joel and Davis site appears to be a backway door, a backdoor way of getting the utilities to Alba so that the developers can can take advantage of them when you know and so that just sounds like it's a it's a it's a it's a unethical thing that we're doing. the portion of Joel Boulevard in Alba is not of of Joel Boulevard in Alba is not SK is on the DOT schedule, but it's not scheduled for the next
26810 to 15 years. So, so if the school is built there, you're going to be dealing with this till 2035 of a of a of a road that's inadequate for a huge school. So, we're asking you to reconsider this. I'm not saying get rid of the school. Yes, it's going to be built there, I'm sure, at some point, but build in Joel at Joel and Davis first where the roads and everything are compatible. If if you have if you have buses trying to get down Joel in the Joel and Chucko area, they're going to be sitting in traffic, come out 6:00 to 8:00 a.m. every morning and see how bad Joel is. From from Lehigh Acres to Highway 80, you can't move. So, what are your buses going to do when they can't even get
269to the school? Okay. The proposal for Joel and Davis first the proposal to is to build Joel and Davis first where the road and infrastructure are already in place. Save the Lee County School District a large amount of money because the utilities are already there. Once FOT completes Joel widening project, then revisit building at Ch Joel and Tuahoo. during this time develop this time if the developers want to come to to Alva let them put the utilities in and then the school gets to hook up to those utilities that the developers put in place let's save money do the right thing and walk away from this at Joel and Tucko build an out in in in Lehi thank you sir your time is up that concludes public comment thank you next up is good of
270the order board members, do you have any comments? We are going to begin with Mr. Fiser. Thank you, Madam Chair. two things hopefully real quick. First, u member Duvenelli had mentioned obviously the board first off board auditor. I'm going to see if I can convene before the action meeting with HR to see how many applicants where we're at. Again, I believe we're at two. So I don't know if we want to try interviews on that. I mean, we can always go back and maybe discuss a little bit when the action meeting tonight to see that. I know there's obviously we want to get this done. It's just, you know, as we've been advised by HR, we want to make sure we have enough people obviously to choose from. I will get back to that information
271a little bit later on in the action meeting. If that's all right, if I'm not able to get an answer, I'll send off something tomorrow. second thing, board, we talked about the clerk of courts and waste, fraud, and abuse. We've actually talked about that. I brought up 2023. We actually did a workshop in 2023 about working with the clerk to essentially pro provide value added services free in this cost since well it's already been paid by the taxpayers and not any additional cost to us of fraud, waste and abuse. And we gave guidance to I believe in the July 29th meeting in regards to Superintendent Carlin to work with Clerk Cars to see what they could come up with. And from my understanding and I will you know obviously follow back up here with Dr.
272Savage in a moment is they are looking at to perform a pilot project where essentially they would see you know do a dual option where we're not replacing waste fraud abuse hotline but it's going to be a separate trusted second option for that to see how it goes file the date on that and to see then eventually hey is that something we want to use in the future. So our attorney sent a memo indicating that she thought that board action was needed. I know there's a little bit of back and forth on that. we did give guidance on July 29th. my suggestion again I'll you know ask Dr. Savage here would be again since it's a pilot project and there are two executive administrative officers just trying to do that maybe as I said if
273we want to just give a consensus on that and then we can see how that goes and ask for some data as it goes along. I mean, we've talked about this again. I look back, you know, back in 2024, 2023, 2025. We've gone through this over and over again, and I think it's something that we should, you know, essentially allow the clerk and the superintendent to see how that project goes. Again, if we were replacing the whole thing, I would get that and I want to go through more thorough process, but let's see where this evolves. I don't know if you have anything else to follow up, Deputy Superintendent Savage. Appreciate the question, Member Fischer. So, basically what I'm what I'm hearing is based on prior direction the board has given of an of an
274interest in this engagement that what what the desire possibly of the board would be is to engage in a pilot offering that the superintendent would be executing on behalf of the board to really test this out with the clerk of courts to see how it goes. and then bring back information of how many folks are even utilizing it. my understanding is that the clerk of courts offers this same type of approach on their current website where they're able to intake things along those lines. I understand when the board attorney sent kind of an opinion on this, one of the things that was requested was specifically to develop some type of formal memorandum or interlocal agreement or something that effect. What I'm hearing in the comment is basically because this is really more of a pilot
275nature and not necessarily something we're trying to get into a long-term engagement or overly define it beyond that more of an exploratory aspect that would not be the recommendation that you're verbalizing this time. Certainly, we're able to work with folks in all capacities that we do. We often engage with municipal folks all over the place, different governmental entities. there's nothing that would preclude us to given the board's direction to move forward on something of that effect and then keep the board apprised of details of that as we go to continue to keep the monitoring. But that's completely at the board's pleasure determining what they would want to do. we really work at the pleasure of the board. So hopefully that is helpful feedback on what you just said, Mr. Ribble. Yeah, I'm really interested in
276hearing more about your idea on this, Mr. Fischer. I think it's something we really need to take a look at. To me, it makes a lot of sense. So, I'd be entertain a hopefully get a consensus here tonight that we could do that. Miss Jordan, you have a followup. I absolutely do. thank you so much. July 29th, we did not. You Mr. Fischer, you brought it up. There was not a consensus. You just you made that comment to the superintendent. At that time, I did not even hear about this until I got a notice for a press conference. it is the board's duty to auditors are are under our preview. So, when I got a notification of a press conference between the superintendent, the clerk of court, and yourself, I had a little bit of
277an issue with that because we did not have this conversation that we were going to have a press conference and that he was going to be doing the clerk of court was going to be doing anything. and then to receive emails. I did speak to RSM who who actually are our auditors who do waste fraud and abuse. and I reconfirm that twice already with them to make sure that I was not losing my mind. But to me to have to find out that I feel like it was being circumvented. The board was being circumvented and only going through and actually the an email that we received actually said that they might have talked to the board might. Yes, this is from the clerk's office. This plan this means I plan to work much more closely
278with the superintendent than the schoolboard attorney. If a situ if a situation arises where the board needs to be informed needs to be informed it is our we do need to be informed when it comes to auditing a particular situation. I will coordinate that through each individual schoolboard member. That is very concerning to me because again auditing is under the board purview. And then actually when I asked the our board our board attorney to to look this over and it came back, yes, we are it is under us. So for us to be excluded from this conversation with the clerk of courts and yes we brought the clerk of court when it was Linda Dogget way back when Miss Juvenelli was on the board at that time. She was here RSM was here. The clerk
279of court could not do it. Did not want to do it. And RSM was the person we hired. We brought them in. And I could understand if they could not do it, but I would not feel comfortable with another entity coming in and just randomly speaking to the superintendent and deciding what they're going to do without us. And it has nothing to do with who they are or anything like that. It is what is in the statute. Mr. Fiser, respond respond to the chair. I did ask if there's objection during that meeting. No board members made said objection during the July 2th meeting. I'm I have the floor. Madam, we've talked about this since October 23. I can refer to the news article in the minutes where we did have a workshop talking about this
280concept. We've talked about it in 2024, 2025. This has not come out of nowhere. We've had many, many discussions on this board about it. So, again, it's a pilot project, but it's not talking about audit. It's talking about waste, fraud, abuse hotline. I believe the superintendent handles per statute the day-to-day operations of the district. So I personally in my reading of it I don't think we need to give any kind of consensus but if that helps the process I think we should. So but saying up here that we haven't discussed it for all these years I don't find that to be true either. So we've had many discussions whether both in public including with the clerk here as well as behind closed doors. I know they've brought it up in one-on- ones. At least they
281have with me multiple times. So thank you Mr. Persons. I waited a minute to speak because what I don't like about this is that it's not done the same process as as our other hotlines. We have agreements for Fortify and Firefly or whatever. I would think we would need some kind of an agreement. Some of the emails I saw going back and forth, the clerk of court says, "It's taxpayers money. I have the right to go anyway, whether you want me or not." And I totally disagree with that. We send tax money up to the state. You can't go up there and audit the state. Okay? We are a separate entity from the county commission. So I have no problem with him doing it with an agreement, but I think we do need an agreement
282even for a trial. I think there needs to be very set parameters. And so I won't support it without an agreement and not just with a thumbs up. And so that's where I am, Miss Gioanelli. Thank you. I don't remember much of the conversation on the 29th and now you got me. I'm going to go back and look look at that meeting. But I am not opposed to the clerk. I wasn't opposed back in the day, but the Miss Jordan is right. The clerk said she would have to hire at that time she would dog said she would have to hire staff and additional staff and so forth. And so I would want to have I had brought this sent an email to the superintendent. Let's have a workshop. Let's I want to see what
283would be the process. I need to understand it. Oversight is the board's purview and I am not going to relinquish my oversight, the little that I have left to just it going straight and what not knowing what that process would be and how it reports back to back to the board. And furthermore, that's why I brought up the auditor position. I think the auditor I think we need to have a in-house auditor would be key to how that would be directed and in a directed to the clerk's office and I think we could look at additional you know processes and we could we get that directive. Yeah. that let the clerk's office audit this one versus, you know, because we were t you're talking about they're supposed to audit fraud, abuse, and waste, and RSM
284is supposed to get that, but we just recently had a transportation audit that did not that was fraud, abuse, and waste, and that did not go to RSM. So, I question how that's going to roll out and that is that's what I need to see. I'm not opposed to Kevin K's doing that, but what would that look like in the process? That's why I wanted to have an open workshop. The community needs to know what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. And I would completely agree with Mr. Persons. We would need an agreement to do that. And I just do not believe that the board should be out of the loop at all. Thank you, Mr. Fiser. You're the chair. Again, I don't again, I don't think we've been out
285of the loop. We've been sent multiple presentations. We have had board workshops about this before and for a pilot project, how is any different when any of the vendors pilot something? For example, when cameras on a bus, the superintendent has authority to do a pilot program for that. So, I don't see how it's any different. So, that's my thoughts in the matter. Miss Jordan, then Mr. Ribble. Thank you. This is totally different than a just a pilot program. It is circumventing us as a board. And when three of three individuals, yourself, the superintendent, and the clerk of court, regardless of what their names are, it that to me creates a problem because again, the only way that I even knew that we were having that this was taking place was because there was going to
286be a press conference. That's embarrassing. Not only is it embarrassing, why why were we not privy of it before there was a press conference? That just does not make sense. And again, we have an audit committee. We have I mean, we have all these people that are reporters to the board, but yet we're going to say this one glob of whatever we're just going to let them pilot, and however that works is fine. They just tell the superintendent and we're just out here. I'm sorry. I don't think that I cannot would never vote for something like that. Mr. Ribble, did you have Yeah. Aren't we jumping the gun here, though? I mean, we're talking of We're talking about coming up with a presentation. Of course, we wouldn't we wouldn't take any action unless we had
287a written agreement. I think we got to back up here about 10 or 15 feet. Let's come down with a with a something on a document, describe it exactly what what the concept is, how it be executed, and move up move on from there. I'm not proposing that the board give up any of their authority in this process. But I would like to move along with this audit process because right now it's not really happening. So those are my thoughts. Mr. persons. Do you have anything? Yeah. I mean, again, I have no problem with setting this up, but I just don't think a thumbs up is an agreement, you know, and that's what I was hearing was we give a thumbs up, they do a pilot program with no agreement. And I cannot support that.
288So, you know, I agree with you and I sort of agree with Mr. Fischer. I'd like to see it, but I just think because I agree with Mr. Jordan, we it's our job. So, we're all sort of saying the same thing. It's just the process that we're going about it. I think we need some kind of an agreement for that. So, just to move the conversation along, you know, I'm always in favor of the more transparency the better and I'm happy to bring on another venue for that. And if Mr. KS is willing to do so, I fully support that. I think it's important that not only are we transparent with the public, but the public also knows that they can be transparent with us. And if we need to offer another hotline instead of
289just one that one person is overseeing, then I think that's I think that I mean I think that's great. there needs to be another opportunity for if there is an issue for another hotline to be used. So, I fully support it. If it takes an agreement to get this thing in the movement process, then that's fine. But, again, it is just a pilot, but if an agreement is what we need, then I'll agree to that. But, I'm definitely fully on board with moving on with this process. Mr. Fischer, I want to put the board on notice. I may be making a motion tonight, tonight's action meeting to approve an authorization allowing the superintendent to start a pilot project with the courts. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Fiser. Miss Giovenelli, do you have anything? Back to
290I just want to see how it would be played out. I don't And I think I agree with you about transparency and the community needs to see that. If I don't know it, how would the community know it? And that's the transparency piece. I don't have a problem with another maybe option, but how does that involve, you know, us? How does that involve the our board attorney? How does that involve the superintendent? How does how is that in involvement going to be? And I think that I mean, I just don't like think we just blatantly say, "Okay, now we do a pilot program." What is the pilot program exactly? What is that? What does that look like? That is what I'm talking about. Thank you, Miss Gioanelli. Are those your good of the order closing
291comments? I'll reserve for this evening. Thank you. Okay, Mr. Ribble. Yeah, just real quickly, I had a great visit with the Early Childhood Learning Center and I want to give a few kudos out to Dr. Bethany Quizenberry and her staff. This is something that you can't make up when you get there a half hour earlier and you're sitting there with the windows open and you observe the preschool the early head start folks willing four or five or six children around the carriage and seeing the interaction. Some are crying, some aren't crying. The ones that are crying, she's working or the two attendants there are trying to calm the students down. Then you have the next group which is another year or two years older and they're walking around and they're connecting with the sun and
292and the rain and the weather or whatever else happened while I was sitting there. But that was kind of interesting. They certainly have their hands full, but they have a passion for taking care of the students. I was really impressed with the staff there. I thought it was phenomenal. Move right along. I want to move this into my relationship with the Florida GF Coast University dealing with the science of reading and of course Dr. Cuba McCoy is here which ties into the early learning situation I observed over early learning center. we're addressing a program for teaching reading early on to the students that are in the early head start the head start and the pre pre kindergarten classroom and we put together or I put together a letter this month that'll go out. So that'll
293be posted sometime in next week or two. And I think there's quite a few folks out there, whether they're grandparents or parents or dads or whatever the case may be, that have a child that really needs to get a good start learning how to read. So by the time they get in the third grade, we overcome the challenge of the level of reading that we have. We still need a lot of work to that. So Dr. McCoy, thanks for your help with the process. We actually made it a term paper or thesis. So, until until I sent it over to communication department, they cut about 500 words out of it, which was all footnotes, but anyway, it'll be in the Naples Press without the footnotes, I'm sure. Thank you, Miss Jordan. I think I said
294enough right now. Thank you, Mr. Persons. I'll save mine for tonight. Miss Shaviano, I will save mine for tonight. Okay. I have a couple of updates for some some committees that I was able to participate in. So, I have the school health advisory update. Lysa and Heather do an amazing job when they put on their committee mornings. So, a couple of things. I know that mental health is incredibly important to some of us on the board up here. So, I just want to just kudos to Park Royale. they do a partnership with our students, our teachers, and that seems to be a great marriage between the district and and Park Royale. So, they offer so many programs and it's not just for for adults. They're they also partner obviously with our students and even our
295staff should that need to be the case. Drughouse Odyssey is always such a great event, such an incredible experience for our for our students. while it's hard sometimes to even fathom something like that happening to to anyone in the district, you know, any child or or or or adult, I think it's important that we still partner with Drughouse Odyssey. I was able as an educator to take my students on that field trip and it is very realistic. and and it is it might be a hard talk later on at the dinner table with your parents, but there's also an opportunity now to be able to watch a video they're going to offer. and actually Byron Donald's makes a little cameo appearance in this video. So, that's that'll be something you'll see sent out. So, keep
296your eye on that. we went over Oh, she we did talk a lot about stress and time management techniques. So, I'll be happy to copy this and put it on your desk. but they are partnering with our counselors and things such as that. as far as ISO committee, they, really the stress is obviously, Miss Gioelli, you sort of tapped on it earlier with the signage at any of our construction, any of our construction, whether it's a rebuild, a remodel, a future home of. Exactly. So, that was something that was mentioned. also the opportunity to get out and not just with our partners in like the chamber and the Rotary clubs, but also some other places that are community like smaller communities like Whiskey Creek Clubhouse was even mentioned because that's a family own family homeowner
297neighborhood with I don't know might have 500 students that live in Whiskey Creek that attend our schools. So, a great place to start thinking about in your areas that of of connections that the board members may have to be able to host some of these events on what halfsent sales tax does for the district. So, I'm just the messenger, but and then the only other thing I have is Miss Jordan, your question earlier was connected to Q15. I didn't know if you were still going to pull that for discussion. I'll think about it. I'm not I'm not sure. I will be pulling it if you do not. Okay. All right. Thank you. and attorney Jupe Bruno, I don't have anything. Thank you, Dr. Savage. thank you, Madam Chair. I actually just wanted to give an
298answer to Mr. Pson's earlier question about how many foreign exchange students that we had, and we actually have 21 students. They're going to put though more comprehensive information about where they're currently placed and so forth. that'll show up on the Friday weekly. We'll have more detail about where they are, where they're from, those kinds of things. the other thing I just want to mention just because I know there was some interest on the trip piece. You know, one of the things that we have now for frequently asked questions is a high school NN landing page on our website knowing that's an area and it's put together a great timeline as well as claim verse fact. couple of areas that were brought up today, specifically the land at off not the non Taco site essentially being
299evaluated that date piece is in there as well as the allegation around developers and so forth. It's all there was with an attempt to try to put that message out there. I think in in light of that, you know, one of the things we probably could do is consider doing something for Fort Myers Beach as well. you know, as you all are well aware, we're going to be bringing a good cause item this evening that you all have received for the Castalby process. And so one of the things I've already heard just coming through our communication channels is what is this? What are we talking about? Well, if you recall in August at the workshop at the 1:00 meeting when we had our workshop, it's very clearly slide five of the presentation where we disclosed
300that we were submitting this report and then that as soon as the report came in, we would then bring it to you all because it's your action that allows us to send it to the state. contrary to what's being circulated, it does not mean that the site would be bulldozed. That is how it's being construed is that this is an automatic bulldozing of the site. And that of course is not exactly accurate. what what just to kind of clarify again this is something that we have been anticipating. It's a report. It's a necessary step if we wanted to do a complete rebuild of any campus. Any of the options that we want to do that would require building a completely new building or destroying the the prior building. All those things are required to do
301this analysis which is a state of Florida requirement. It's something that they do an analysis through their process called the Castaldi. It's been done for all of the current buildings that we've had to, you know, we rebuilt Cypress Middle, we rebuilt Franklin Park, we tore down the building over at Bonita. It's a very consistent practice. I understand that can be upsetting and folks are not always kind of hearing the details of what we're saying. We're communicating that, but just want to kind of put that out there so there's folks who are concerned as they may reach out to you and contact you. Just wanted you to be prepared. That was the meeting where we discussed this happening. we received the report from the third party consultant Sunday morning. Our staff reviewed it with them on
302Monday, which was yesterday to get all those details. absolutely, we could we could delay it if we did. The problem with that is again it just delays. This doesn't this goes to the state. They review it. They make the determination based on the facts. The facts don't change. They are what they are as part of that report. That is their duty to review it on their criteria. They then make a determination what they would recommend back to us if we were and let's just go to the if if there was any desire to tear down the historical building. There would still be more procedures that would have to go into effect which is review by the historical preservation board. There's additional pieces that would happen. This is strictly the state level oversight which again we
303were transparent that has we have not hid that from anyone. We talked even about charter possibilities being rebuilt. All these things we did in public meetings. I just want to surface that in case you're hearing kind of emails I'm getting the communications I'm receiving are kind of the opposite of that. So I just want to be very clear when we do the good cause edition. I'll certainly give a very brief version of that of what I'm saying right now. But I wanted to give you a little bit more expounded detail as you may get that communication between meetings. that's all I have as a comment right now. Thank you. Thank you. Today we will have our school advis school board action meeting at 6:00 p.m. at this point having no other business to come before
304this body and seeing no objection, this meeting is adjourned and the time is 5:05 p.m. Thank you.