School Board Business Meeting 6 p.m. 4-13-2021

001good evening everyone i'd like to call the meeting to order at six o'clock on the 13th of april this is the penny river county school board meeting the pledge of allegiance this evening will be led by sebastian river high school's navy junior rotc under the direction of lieutenant commander james landis us navy retired and master sergeant michael hussey u.s marine corps retired ready ladies and gentlemen please join me in the pledge of allegiance of the united states under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all ready folks blue up [Applause] oh we've got a big crowd tonight i'm not sure who you thought the entertainment was going to be but at any rate enjoy yourselves [Laughter] first order of business are there any items board members wish to remove from consent to action hearing none

002i'd like to now turn the meeting over to dr moore for a series of presentations thank you mr chair we do have a number of presentations uh that we'd like to acknowledge and highlight some of the great work being done throughout our district as well as some individuals within our district and for that i will turn it over to the public information officer miss christomatics hello good evening everyone thank you for being here tonight tonight we'd like to start out with a very exciting presentation it's called the white glove award and we like to recognize our custodial teams at our schools every quarter um based on the percentage that they score in their their cleaning inspection and ann rieben can tell you a little bit more about that but it's pretty cool because yes they

003do get scored they do have percentages and this is a very cutthroat competition [Laughter] the white club award and this is ms ann rieben custodial services coordinator and trainer for our district yes it is amazing how much this can get excited in this district this is the white glove award so um if any of you are not aware of the white glove award it's i'm here to present it for the second quarter uh it's been a difficult year for everyone and these are our front line workers they've done a tremendous job with us this year so i want to thank every one of them for that much um the white glove award is been presented quarterly to the school with the highest average clean inspection since 2018 school year each year every school is inspected

004each week i'm sorry is inspected um by the custodial coordinator me um for overall cleanliness this has become the fierce competition that we are seeing tonight so um i'm gonna we have the first second and third place here tonight and so i want to start out with third place rosewood magnet school elizabeth lewis and alejandro alejandra just got promoted i understand to another position but he is um they are the uh been in the top five since the beginning of this uh in 2018. so they are very strong school very clean school so we want to thank them for this and we do have our year awards coming up uh at the end of the school year and i know they're going to be somewhere in there competing again so thank you so much and

005this is a plaque for your school all right second place and first place are left i know these guys are sweating it right now or here so uh who should we start do you want to have a conversation first yeah okay all right so second place is indian river academy you've got to give it to this group they've had a change over mid-season we had someone retire in january so we have added jenny to our group congratulations and also wendy our head custodian and sean they've been fierce too i can tell you they've remained in the top five all year and they had a score of 93.28 which is very good by the way roosevelt had 93.20 very close competition but they are in second place for the second quarter and they are very strong

006dedicated team and you don't mess with these ladies i can tell you because they make sure i know okay congratulations just can't take you out so i guess everyone can guess we're on first place vero beach elementary school i do want everyone to know last year they were first place but unfortunately with everything that happened at the end of school year they were not allowed they were not presented to the board so congratulations for your first place last year and congratulations for your first place this quarter i can tell you i got a phone call after the first quarter from the principal and from the team wanting to know why they didn't get first place so they said what can we do we are very competitive and we want to be number one so you

007did it congratulations in addition to the regular team i wanted to introduce this is raven raven works for manpower and um i want to congratulate her personally because first quarter she was on at this working at the school that won first quarter uh cleanest school and she now is at this school again that got the cleanest school so she's doing a good job and thank manpower for that one too they're doing a good job okay jennifer and miguel here we go and where's raven okay we'll get you here have it okay okay and the plaque i'm going to put one down oh i think you have two there we go okay there we go and i don't know if you can carry this very far if you want to carry the trophy okay all right

008well congratulations would all of our white glove award winners please gather up here under the school district of indian river county sign on the wall please and we'll take a picture oh hello um [Music] great thank you so much thank you and while while everyone is um leaving can we just have a round of applause for all of our custodial staff because they have been working non-stop they are definitely some of our behind the scenes heroes that are keeping our district running every day especially during this past year and a half throughout this pandemic we had almost every board member um request for this next recognition along with a colleague right in miss barbara hires are you here tonight barbara a parent sorry it's even better it's apparent to ask us to formally recognize mrs

009dawn miller and for those of you who do not know mrs don miller she heads up our a plus art program which is a very special program that i am going to let dr jones everyone's hiding um come up and talk a little bit about and then i'm sure if the other board members if you have a comment about uh mrs miller and her work more than happy to share mm-hmm good evening and thank you as a former principal of three schools i always loved visiting classes each and every day it truly was the best part of my day and one class i always wanted to go to was our autistic class as a gift for middle school principal i was honored having the first autistic middle school class in the county in 1994 and

010then i had the privilege of those students going with me to sebastian river high school inclusion is so important to staff students and parents and we created programs so our students would feel included in every respect through elective classes and mainstreaming during core classes when the students were able to do so well the desired outcome was success for our students ms miller what she has done for autistic students over the past several years has been exemplary in the spring and summer of 2020 she hosted zoom for your room zoom from your room meetups for fun and friendship dr moore was a special guest for one of those sessions in august of 2020 she hosted a two-day zoom summer workshop entitled symbols of me which allowed the students to explore colors objects words and symbols to

011express themselves and then continue to hold weekly zoom art classes throughout the 2020-21 school year including a spring break workshop the workshop was called nature's poetry when i watched the video our district did uh regarding dawn it was just truly beautiful i love the overall goal communication skills are so very important and this is so they could ask and answer questions carefully while at work they were also taught to advocate for themselves and i love the circle up when they began and also when they close their sessions these students will move on to their jobs in life and be ready because of dawn in her program mrs miller thank you for what you do for our students i recognized several students in the video and they were having a great time thank you so much

012mrs heyers would you like to say a few words my daughter lindsay over there has been working with the a plus art program for several years now and she's really blossomed throughout it not just through the art but the social part too and i felt it important to let the district know the important work that dawn was doing with our special needs kiddos and i'm really thrilled that she's being recognized here tonight thanks dawn do any other board members have any comments about the program or mrs miller no pressure i mean just thank you thank you thank you for all you do it's it's appreciated and it's wonderful that a student actually is here to to recognize the teacher as well okay mrs miller would you please come up so we can present you for

013art with our certificate of appreciation and she also brought bridget and i'm going to let you miss miller tell us a little bit about bridget and what she does to help the program because i know she's your wing woman so thank you so much for your work for our district and your service to our students all right [Laughter] there's a long story behind it thank you lindsay thank you barbara lindsay has been a part of the program for at least three years right barbara yeah so this is a very hi everybody she's the star um this is a part of the art for health sake program at the vero beach museum of art bridget is my colleague and co-founder of the program and um i'm actually a little overwhelmed so thank you barbara for the

014recognition and thank you to the school district for recognizing the work that bridget and i get to do i'm not going to talk too much but i do want to thank bridget for being my colleague we have so much fun and true testimony to the power of the arts and circling people with love and inclusion and what that can do so um thank you for the recognition thank you and thanks buddy [Applause] dr moore and i were privileged to be invited to one of the zoom sessions about a year ago we'll have to share some of those pictures on social media we both ended up with mops on our heads and surgical masks and everyone was having an absolute ball so it was it was really fun it was really fun to see everyone enjoying

015themselves so much so now we're moving on to our shining star awards and first we have our individual shining star and his name is mitchell ledford and if you haven't heard of mitchell you will soon because he qualified for the u.s olympics trial in the 100 butterfly at the isca international senior cup mitchell was in the company of olympic greats ryan lochte and caleb dressel during this monumental event we will all be cheering for mitchell on june 13th through the 20th where the top two swimmers in each event will make team usa for the summer olympics so this is so exciting and i know that his parents are overjoyed and this whole school is proud of him and we're just praying and keeping our fingers crossed for mitchell that he will end up on the

016olympic team because how cool would that be to have a sebastian over high school shark on the olympic team right calm down peggy so um coach barlow coach barlow would you like to say a few words about mitchell i'm sure you have plenty to say i won't keep you that long go right ahead i've been in practice for four hours my voice is a little cracked as it is thank you all that's a prestigious award for mitchell um i've had the privilege of coaching mitchell and his brothers for the last 12 years i i moved here uh 15 years ago to start our our club program with treasure coast swimming at the north county aquatic center michael stutzke did me the favor of bringing me into the swim program and i've been coaching the high

017school team for the last 15 years mitchell is a very unique individual just for a little background i've been coaching for 37 years i had an olympic gold medalist in the 2004 games in athens uh that was at 800 freestyle relay gold medalist and i coached her down in delray beach for about nine years and i've had the privilege and honor of being at the olympics and and having a swimmer and standing watching and i can tell you true to my heart that this individual here tonight is the closest to the talent and and what it takes to get to that level uh he's 16 years old he's only a sophomore uh for him to make the u.s olympic trials is a phenomenal task in its own right but for a 16 year old boy

018to do it is even more 16 year old girls are a dime a dozen to to achieve that just because of the maturity and how they physically peak but for a boy to do that and when he steps up here to to say hello you'll never realize he's only 16. but he's a hard worker he's extremely intelligent he's got a 4.0 grade point average um he's he's not only an academic all-american he's an athletic all-american as well uh his future is really bright he has very supportive parents and teammates and uh it's an honor to be part of sebastian river high school not allowed to have something like this help you know recognize the school and what the swim program is and so i mean it's a very lonely sport it's it's it's hours and

019hours of dedication and getting up early in the mornings to swim it's a very empowering sport and i really look forward to the next few more months and preparing him getting ready for this great endeavor so um thank you very much for the honoring him tonight and let us come and tell you a little bit about swimming and we appreciate it and hope that you'll watch in the next few months as his progress moves forward and there on so thank you so for obvious reasons mitchell you are our shining star for the month of april in the school district of indonesia and if you if you could stay until the next shining star presentation we'll get photos up at the front too okay congratulations mitchell we all want to be like you when we grow

020up next we have our school shining star award and tonight we are recognizing treasure coast technical college the nursing schools almanac released its 2021 rankings of the best nursing programs in florida and we're proud to announce that treasure coast technical college is on the list of the best licensed practical nursing programs in the state yes treasure coast technical college is ranked as the number one lpn program in florida principal christy shields is here to accept the shining star school award for treasure coast technical college there you are thank you congratulations good evening school board and dr moore uh thank you on behalf of myself and all of the staff at treasure coast technical college it's great to be honored with the shining star award with me this evening is the practical nursing director leslie merits

021she is the reason behind this number one ranking all of her hard work and dedication over the years has made the program what it is today so leslie thank you on behalf of myself the administration the students for all you do we we truly appreciate you um and i wouldn't be doing my job if i didn't shamelessly plug my school and the program while i'm here so for anyone who's listening if you're interested in becoming a practical nurse we are currently accepting applications for our january 2022 program start date and you can find that application on our website so i encourage anyone who's interested to apply also we have a phlebotomy program that's starting in may as well as a cdl program that's starting in june so thank you again um kristen can i have

022all of my shining stars please go can i say something yes of course i just want to um um mention about treasure coast technical college one of the one of the reasons why i'm so excited about this for you all and grateful for the work that you've done is that their school just had their grand opening two years ago so to actually be number one in the entire state of florida with just a two-year open is really phenomenal it really speaks to the dedication and the hard work of everyone there including obviously i'm sorry what leslie and leslie is it okay leslie if i say less um so i just i just want to applaud you because that is really really uh it's hard work but it proves how hard you have worked at it

023so thank you so much for [Applause] get one that at a time okay all right ready one two and three perfect thank you so much have a good night are you gonna stay here with me thank you bye thank you in february we participated in casual for a cause which we do monthly and students and staff were able to make a donation to the american heart association and dress down for the day we're proud to say that the sdirc raised a total of three thousand two hundred and forty four dollars and sixty three cents for the american heart association and we would like to point out that storm grove middle school raise the most money with a grand total of 554 dollars and 80 cents our representative from the american heart association michelle turnage is

024unable to join us this evening but she asked that we thank the school board and dr moore on her behalf and share her appreciation of the sdirc's continued support of the american heart association next i'd like to turn this over to mr rick meyer for a united way presentation so one of the things that's interesting working at the state level when i was there at the department of education is that you get a chance to interact with the statewide version of many different organizations when you come back to a local district you always wonder you know what is the local version of that organization going to be and and so this this evening we have a chance to recognize and thank the local united way when i came here i've been nothing but impressed with

025miss meredith egan and what they're doing and so as we we began to understand more and more about the impact of covet on our students the united way reached out to us and of course like they always do with everything how can we help and so we began those discussions and meredith if you'd like to come up and speak a little bit about what you guys did to help us out like i said one of the things we knew we needed to do for the students was to provide additional summer learning experiences and it was just wonderful to see the united way reach out and partner with us in order to provide what i think is going to be a groundbreaking experience for our middle grade students to pick up where maybe they had some

026gaps in math so thank you so much for that [Applause] hi everybody thank you um yeah i mean exactly what you said you know united way knew that uh summer learning loss was a big deal we know that every year we also knew that covid learning loss was going to be compounded on all of that so we came to you guys and cindy and really asked you know what can we do and we knew that there were pieces that you needed to get in place right away specifically staffing to be able to ensure that you got the highest most quality teachers signed up for this program right away so that you could get the ball rolling on all the other pieces to fall into place so we knew that from our coveted funding this was

027a perfect fit to make sure that we were meeting the needs of the students in a way that was appropriate for united way funding and also was going to make the biggest impact for your students so phenomenal i couldn't thank you enough like i said it's uh one of those things that you you have an opportunity to see from afar in tallahassee but to be here at the local level to see what you guys do the immediate impact that you're going to have just thank you so much can we get a photo at the front please oh this isn't my phone roll it down [Applause] and meredith was just telling me when she walked in about the day of caring that we're going to be partnering and planning in october we're super excited because it's

028always a huge event and you know we've had to miss it with covid and it's uh it's just good to see some things like that getting back to normal so okay thank you everyone that concludes our presentations for tonight mr bear what we have a meeting going on we have a meeting going on [Laughter] all right i forgot to formally adopt the orders of the day so i may have a motion to adopt the orders of the day so moved second second second all in favor aye aye all right the next order of business is citizen input and it doesn't look like we have too many people that want to provide citizen input so this should go fairly quickly many of you have been here before but i will go and read sort of the

029rules the public may offer public comment by appearing in person such persons will be placed in the meeting room subject to space availability additional attendees will be placed in areas outside the meeting room and invited into the meeting room at the appropriate time alternately the public may offer public comments by emailing comments to the following email citizen input april 13 at indianriverschools.org all public comment emails must include a completed speakers form available in both infillable and pf pdf formats all emails must have the completed speakers form attached or the public comment submission will not be considered all emails containing public comment with a completed and attached speakers form received by 12 pm on april 13 2021 will be provided to all school board members prior to the meeting and will be appended to the meeting

030minutes the public is advised this email address will be used solely for obtaining public comments for board for the board meeting and should not be used for other purposes or questions persons may only speak once about any given item consistent with school board policy 0169 additional guidelines each statement made by a member of the public shall be limited to three minutes duration persons will be recognized in the order in which the requests were received persons may speak for up to three minutes at the beginning of the business meeting during citizen input as indicated in the order of business and for up to three minutes to each action item during the action agenda and each board member discussion item as indicated on the order of business persons may only speak once about any given item only

031the individuals submitting a speaker's form is allowed to address the board time may not be yielded to other speakers and i would like to remind everybody that this is an opportunity for community members to speak directly to the board when concerns arise community members are always encouraged to contact school principals or district staff to resolve any concerns as quickly as possible so i will we will proceed with the citizen input people here and then when we're concluded with those we do have four or five emails uh two three emails that will be read afterwards and the first speaker this evening is paul wescott good evening i want to address the issue or a question concerning the chief executive officer i've read the job description i'm not here in order to convince you that work doesn't

032need to be done i'm hopeful to maybe provoke some thought as to maybe a better way of approaching the situation the job description looks like you're creating an entire department currently as i understand it you already have a dr long in place by herself it seems to me that the job description speaks to an earlier issue that hasn't been addressed i would submit that a better approach is uh addressing the the question of equity equity is as i use it and understand it is ownership you look at your mortgage statement equity means what do i own our community i think is a little deficient there personally meia culpa what that means is a community approach where we use the resources we currently have the relationships we currently have build a core group committee if you

033will i don't really like that word a whole lot but a an advisory board a committee who can help dr long reach into the community in order to address the needs the needs is reflected in the res excuse me the residue of the desegregation order are only two addressing academic uh performance issues for the minority community and recruitment of faculty the recruitment of faculty is multifactorial we are in a community that has needs where the middle class is concerned that's the economic bracket where we're going to be recruiting or trying to recruit faculty we need to do what we can to make that transition to our community easier there are other issues that need to be addressed as well with regard to that on the students i attended the spring showcase it was very powerful

034very positive some of you were there a lot of good energy that should be used i there were students there that spoke to some of the issues particularly the middle school area the middle school arena is where the students are making the decisions that affect the rest of their life the most that is where we really need to be pouring into them pouring into the school system as much as we can through an advisory council mentors what have you in order to support our community schools these are our students uh additionally there's um the k through third grade where those foundational building blocks of the rest of their education uh uh need to be met we as a community have a responsibility to there rather than bringing an expert from out of town which i'm

035concerned that this job opening is going to do mark twain's review of an expert is someone from out of town who's otherwise ordinary okay we've got somebody that may come to town who doesn't know our community i think we've got the resources to do the job already thank you the next speaker is mark mccain yeah thank you for allowing me to talk um i was asked to come to talk about the whole mask issues with school i'm a pediatrician here locally i've been here for almost 20 years i was born and raised here i went to rosewood gifford high school along with my wife my brothers i've had two kids go through the school system one's university of miami as a music education major i have another university of florida and a freshman here in

036high school so i'm uniquely qualified i would say into being able to give the medical aspect of it along with how schools work because i sort of know how they work better than other people with my parents being school teachers here from the 60s to the early 2000s and you know our in my experience this past year our approach to children this covet vaccine and his covet disease has caused more disease than we prevented i've uh started more kids on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications than i have in my entire year combined this past year i've had more suicide attempts i've had more kids admitted to mental hospitals i've increased more dosages of adhd medications i've had more new starts than i ever had and it's not just mask it's our entire approach to children we

037have damaged an entire year's worth of children um and we can't get that back but we can we don't have to continue it now i don't think masks are overly important in elementary school age as you get higher they probably are in fact at elementary school the most likely room to pass covet would be the teachers lounge between each other that being said i would actually rather make a compromise and not recommend against taking masks away i'll make some of my friends mad but that's okay my biggest problem with our approaches are quarantining we are quarantining thousands and thousands of kids unnecessarily i haven't seen the latest numbers but very very very very few of these quarantined from school exposures have come down with covet and in fact the state of ohio if children are

038massed in school and they have an exposure at school they don't have to quarantine they just have to monitor for symptoms and i would beg the school board now to make that our plan i know the goods against the health department health department is so singularly concerned with only this virus and not the entire well-being of children as everybody in this room is and so they don't see all the points so i would ask the school board to go to the three-foot recommendation that now cdc says which the aap marion county pediatrics had said back in may um i'd ask them to stop the quarantining if we have kids in masks kids not being in school is the biggest detriment that we're having right now we have fsa testing coming up we have finals coming

039up we have ap tests coming up and we arbitrarily are quarantining these children and sometimes they're out of school longer than the kid who had covet um and this is just you know i think the school board needs to take a bold stance and they need to say look i know this health department says this we've got a three-quarters worthy worth of data saying this is unnecessary um and that's that would be my approach so thank you [Applause] the next speaker tina newberry [Applause] so good evening dr moore and school board as a 22nd year veteran teacher former teacher of the year twice in okeechobee county current school advisory council member and moonshot academy tutor for first and third grade students after school i am appalled with actions of one parent who has no regard

040for me as an educator i am speaking to you today requesting your assistance to rectify the matter and provide advice to move forward in a week's time the parent has been on the radio twice eliciting false facts about my school team and me the inconsistencies and lies shared on the podcast were full of false statements and accusations at one point the parent shares how success is important as an educator i know how important success is and how to establish a strong foundation to achieve success and strong outcomes by creating a positive culture the success for students is even greater when there is a partnership between the school and the family our district states sdirc stronger together how can a parent who is so far removed from making decisions with her child's teachers be able to

041threaten undermine bully and then publicly broadcast she needs the red carpet rolled out for her when she is not working with us but against us the 2021 school year has been a very difficult year i have spent the year teaching and reviewing new policies providing daily reminders about new protocols in place all the while continuing to educate and creating an environment where all students thrive how can a parent question the district's reopening plan in april and not adhere to the signs posted in the classroom and throughout the campus allowing the parent to spend the day with her child was approved however how can a parent continue to undermine my authority regarding school procedures and daily functions that have been implemented all year for instance the parent had an issue with the location of recess and

042where the students could play i instructed the students who were with the parent to move away from the covered hard court due to the pe teacher's equipment being ready for the next class the parent continued to ask why the child could not play in the pe area i explained but she continued to interrupt and push she questioned so we are not allowed again i informed her she could remain in the area but the children needed to move to the recess court she then turned to the students and started pointing with both fingers at each of them and angrily said no did you hear that she said no not only was this a complete disregard to me but her actions were disrespectful to the pe area pe teacher since there was clearly no understanding or compassion

043about why we do not play on the pe court with equipment i appreciate your time and hope you support and advice will hinder my any future negative encounters with this parent [Applause] next speaker jennifer freeland well stated good evening um i i just want to come and say that here we are 34 35 days the end of school we had no idea in august what this year was going to hold i don't think any of us really had a clue or thought we'd make it here um but i wanted to take a minute because here we are in the home stretch and i want to take a minute to say how proud i am of what we have accomplished together this year i would like to thank dr moore and his cabinet they have worked

044very hard and diligently with ircea as well as with teachers in this reopening and the whole chaos that is covet i would also like to thank our school administrators from keeping it from turning into a circus and i also want to uh continue i want to thank the continued support of cwa and its members i'd like to thank the parents who have been flexible and supported i want to thank from the bottom of my heart the teachers of indian river county thank you so much you've made it you're here your students are ready i swear you're not the worst teacher ever i want to thank our students and just so you guys know summer's almost here we'll leave you alone soon but i wanted to wish all of the teachers and in particular our students

045the best of luck as fac testing starts this week you have no worries guys you've got this we're on it [Applause] the next speaker is lamar notorious or giacomo no to giacomo i'm sorry i don't do this very well each time but i'll get it i don't see her i'm sure thank you thanks so much i don't have much to say really i just want to bring up the issue of masking our children again um last last time i testified i had checked the florida department of health website and there were eight children that have died from covid in our state at last check now i haven't checked it in a couple of weeks or maybe a month but the point is that our children are not really at great risk for covid so the

046no reason to have them masked for seven hours a day and i would ask you i would urge you to do the right thing and to unmask our children or to at least make it a parent's right to well the parents do have the right but restore the parents right to choose whether or not their children wear masks thank you next speaker larissa parkelin good evening my name is larissa pacquiaon my son is kindergartener and during this academic year i was first time involved in the school system and his education looking back through this academic year i have two main questions quench questions in my mind first who are the children in this school system looking to the job you've done this year i have strong feeling that children are just in numbers without any

047identification that are attending school for this district employees to be employed then who are the parents in the school system are the parents just a child the children providers for the system of education unfortunately i don't see anything other than that and i look how just as i look how disrespectful and ignored you had been behaving to the parents this year starting from september when few hundreds of parents came up here and spoke about mask issues with their kids they were they begged beg you for optional masking and many parents as well send emails to you with begging you to make masks optional and finishing with the situation with stephanie justice last week when she wanted to enter the school because her son has problems with mask breathing and headaches she entered the school and

048she had she was has been behaved as a criminal at school the most disgusting thing here is this is your ex-colleague she has been spent four years in the chair where you are sitting right now and you're treating her like this now i'm all my thoughts going to her nine-year-old son and i just can imagine how scared he was seeing his mom with police police officer behind her because of your negligence this boy easily can have lifetime trauma and unfortunately i don't see with this behavior because i any respect to the parents because i am symphony i am tiffany and every parent who has children in this district is tiffany because i can be easily in this situation every parent can be easily in this situation and i'm really really disappointed about it many parents

049now knows about what happened and many of them are worried to come here and speak because if it's happened to her it can happen to anyone i'm not worried to come here and speak up i don't but as an involved parent as a responsible parent for my children as a taxpayer i have so much i'm very concerned about your work and what you are doing here thank you for your attention [Applause] next speaker vincent napoleon [Music] oh hey in school we don't deserve to be treated like this please let mass be off channel there's no point of them no point at all mass don't help at all mass make everything worse next speaker nicole campanelli good evening my name is nicole campanelli and i've been here plenty of times for you to know me as

050well as know my son's story i just want to say that i've sent you emails of countless math studies as i stumble upon them and it's frustrating to hear crickets from the people who are supposed to do what's right for the children in this district we are on day 399 of the state of emergency are we really in a state of emergency with a virus that's recovery rate in this county has consecutively been 97.6 percent for months president biden said in a presidential town hall first of all kids don't get covered very often it's unusual for that to happen the evidence so far is children aren't the people most likely to get coveted so why are children being forced to wear mask all day especially when you can go into a restaurant sit down at

051a table and eat with whomever you please people eating are not social distance kids sitting at their desks people eating food is it because you can't eat and wear a mask so coronavirus does not spread while eating please explain it to me it must be a cunning virus i guess last month governor desantis held a roundtable discussion where two doctors stated the following children should not be wearing face masks they do not need it for their own protection and they do not need it for protecting other people this was dr martin kildrough and then dr j bahatri stated that mass are developmentally inappropriate for children yesterday at a roundtable discussion the doctor whose name i did not catch he stated children are at a very low risk for mortality from this disease they don't spread

052it very much there's no reason why small children should have to wear masks the negative and harmful consequences of children of mass is that they need to see expressions and they need to be able to breathe properly why are we still dealing with this dr moore you stated on bob sosa's radio show last week that any staff who wants it can get their vaccine on april 10th so now they're protected right so where are we on the plan with that we've been you guys have been working on since last june um if you think that people have trouble now with communication and social skills just wait until these poor children grow up after living in a faceless world you really have no idea what psychological harm you're causing to children down the road and i

053think it's extremely sad that our children are now being raised in a world where they're being taught to fear everything fear of each other fear of the world fear of illness viruses and fear of the air they breathe do you know that prolonged fear is terror and that terror becomes trauma the psychological damage being done right now is irreversible and i've emailed you countless studies but it seems to fall on deaf ears please take the time to read them and stop listening to pseudoscience and stop using our children as political pawns thank you speaker karen rutledge good evening it's been a while since i've been here been busy taking care of uh coved patients as a frontline critical care nurse anyway i just want to kind of express i support optional masking i also support

054changing the criteria for closed contact criteria for quarantining not only am i a critical care nurse and been taking care of the sickest of the sick in indiana river county for a whole year i haven't gotten it haven't had a sniffle still working front line never needed a test but i use common sense when i'm out in public i also sit on the school advisory council at sebastian river high school one of the services that i provide as the secretary there is that i do trend the data that is listed on the florida department of health website with regards to the cases in indian river county and the evidence is right there for you to look at it just as it is for me to look at which is that the overwhelming majority of cases

055uh in the school system are students over 80 percent are students about four percent are teachers and about two percent are staff i wanted to refer you to on that same website the surgeon general general for the state of florida had a 16 question and answer [Music] paper and on there in particular there's the last three questions number 14 had to do with um is there any way of knowing whether any of these cases were contracted at school and what they're showing is that there's a low secondary transmission rate in schools across the state the other thing that he mentions on there is viral transmission seems to occur almost entirely outside of school campuses that's not my words that's the surgeon general of the state of florida in question number 15 he refers to or

056the question is asked about quarantining and i don't know if you all read this and i know that y'all are aboard that are governed underneath the health department that's really what our problem is here people is the health department needs to get out of our school system but the fir one thing that he says in here in his answers is the department can ask to quarantine or isolate in response to a confirmed case of coven 19 ask the last time i looked and i looked at a dictionary a lot of times when i was in school was ask me and simply that ask not mandate not require not request but ask to quarantine i understand positive cases i 100 agree with that but kids meeting close contact criteria is not an exposure and putting them

05714 days out of school is just unacceptable we will never get back those gains so i ask that you consider that with moving forward with your plan really look into this quarantining there's no evidence that supports it and the school you've just got to kind of be our voices as parents and teachers and staff that they need to get out of it not to mention i want mask for graduations [Applause] next speaker haley russo good evening ladies and gentlemen um my name is haley russo i have a student that attends indian river county school district he is a second grader i completely oppose children being masked in the schools there is overwhelming evidence of this being more harmful than it is for good kids are very least likely to carry or spread this disease this

058is going on for way too long this is getting out of hand my child comes home every single day with a migraine headache not to mention while he's at school seeing nothing but above the face it is it's not helping anything um i fully support you to make the best decision for you and your children but we also want that opportunity to decide for ours i believe it should be optional i believe that parents should have the opportunity to choose whether or not their child wants to be protected and if my child is to be succumbed to something that i as a parent will take care of that myself it's been a year cdc has changed their recommendations from six feet to three feet things are getting better the numbers are dropping get the health

059department out of our schools take care of our kids um there are also three north county charter glendale masters who have been mass optional and their numbers are lower than indian rivers the evidence is overwhelming let's get it together and be with our children thank you next speaker is jennifer pippen good evening my name is jennifer pippen i'm an admin for we the people of indian river county and the chairman for moms for liberty indian river county i first wanted to say thank you to terry and jacqueline for bringing this to the agenda today and for the first time since october actually making it a priority for our children and to the rest of you that have answered my emails and have actually responded in the past month i thank you for that too it

060is appreciated my speech today is this going to be the same thing that i've been saying when i spoke to dr moore before school started parental rights don't ever stop they don't stop with the virus they don't stop ever and masking is one of those things we need to make it optional for our children we need to have that that light at the end of the tunnel that end result because this board has always planned to make a plan and i'm hoping that you actually make the plan today there's 23 counties now in florida that have optional masking 17 of them on the first day of school in august were mask optional so there is other boards that are doing this for our children it's not just you guys many recent events here in indian

061river county we've had optional masking such as the frog lake festival in fellsmere firefighters fair events at riverside theater parks birthday parties skate factories and many many more how is it that our children are the last to be unmasked and when they go to these events with hundreds of people in close contact they don't have to be masked it's not infringing on anyone's rights for it to be optional for students teachers and staff the problem is we're having too much government and not enough parental rights it's really sad that the cdc can make recommendations the health department can make make recommendations but it lies with all of you to make the choice it doesn't matter what governor desantis says the doe you have so many different branches of government telling you different things or not

062giving you the correct answers and it is put with you for our seniors something that you probably haven't thought about a lot of them are legal adults they're and they deserve the right to be unmasked taking that final picture coming through your school district give them the option if they want to wear a mask or two masks that is absolutely their right we don't want to take that from them but give them the option to do so and for our kids going into next year and summer school cdc is making recommendations of three feet that's not a law it's not a statute it's a recommendation thank you have a good evening next speaker megan brucia good evening school board and dr moore i am reaching out to the school board because i am in dire

063need of your support and guidance i'm a fifth grade teacher veteran teacher with more than 20 years of experience i'm a highly respected leader at my school having earned teacher of the year not once but three times in my career along with serving as grade chair teacher mentor and math coach liaison for my school are a result of hard work and dedication for a passion that i turned into a career over 20 years ago currently i have a parent in my classroom who has made my job a nightmare the constant threatening and bullying tactics on her part is something i will no longer tolerate last week she insisted on spending the day with her child at school not to volunteer and help but rather to evaluate my teaching and observe and take notes on other

064children in my classroom she and her child refused to wear a mask the entire day this created an extreme extremely uncomfortable environment in my classroom since day one i have spent time in my classroom assuring my students that they are safe i have exhausted all efforts to continue to do my job to educate children and maintain safety as a top priority in addition to teaching and learning this one parent refuses to follow the chain of command she has canceled requested conferences and neglected to reschedule instead of a partnership to support her child's education she has created a hostile situation she has personally attacked my teaching practices grading policies classroom management and even accused me of bullying her child recently she went on a local radio station and spewed nothing but lies about myself my fifth

065grade team my principal and my school the lies she told during this interview are sickening she states that she had an interaction the entire time while she was at my school with a police officer that is not true she was in my room for one hour and 10 minutes without a police officer this has become public slander defamation of my character i will not tolerate this any longer to read a post from her social media that states and i quote i learned firsthand this week that there is no safe place for parents and children in public education rock me to my core to read this to read those words were heartbreaking furthermore this situation does not make sense to me i have numerous text messages from this parent praising me as an educator thanking me

066for instilling a love of learning in her child but then suddenly all of this has changed according to this parent i am an ineffective teacher i am unaware of her current agenda how am i positive that her actions are negatively impacting myself both professionally and personally professionally as witnessed by another colleague the parent berated the principal in front of the children personally my husband continues to beg me to take time off from my job because he feels and sees how her actions are damaging me thank you for your time and i look forward to your support so i'm able to handle this unfortunate interruption appropriately with passion compassion and grace thank you next speaker kevin browning good evening board um like to speak br speak briefly about equity equity includes title ix gender equity and

067education title vi students right to education title vii employment and discrimination in education ada ese all of those topics fall up under equity so this morning i sat in on a workshop discussion and the first equity committee that met they met for a year and made recommendations in 2019 that they sent to the board who subsequently had a workshop recommending changes that the interim superintendent charted out it was said that the changes weren't voted on those changes were then echoed by the second equity committee which i chair who asked for the board to vote on them the presentation that i heard today said that the recommendations were already being put in place in the strategic plan so if they're if you say they're in the already working on it in a strategic plan then the

068recommendations are obviously good and attainable why not put them in the joint plan why is there a chart that says that the recommendations are in this plan and that plan but there's no evidence of what was done with those plans and with the what you say you were going to do one of the big issues is the plan says that we're only not only allowed to have one teacher per school one minority teacher per school i'm being told that nobody wants that but to me that sounds like lip service some articles are saying that some organizations are going through the diversity and equity dance with no real intention of doing anything that desegregation order that joint plan is older than i am i'm 50 years old i have little kids but i'm old enough to

069have grandkids something could have been done by now i'm a firm believer in equity so here's a crazy question for you is this a smoking mirror show are you wasting money pretending that you want equity and an equity position and in the end getting nothing accomplished or are you really about business and doing what's right thank you the next speaker asus lavendera thank you good evening i'm here to encourage you in the most strongest terms to stop the mandate of mass for our children in schools and in fact if necessary to change them to these visors here and i wanted you to know this is a tremendous compromise on my part my wife didn't understand why i'm offering this as an alternative but you're about to you have a handout on the first slide you

070see a man who has been laying drywall sheetrock and you can see even though he wore a type 2 surgical mask such as you're wearing he actually has drywall dust all over around his nose and mouth drywall dust is approximately 10 000 nanometers in size the corona virus uh is 125 nanometers in size this mass did not stop drywall dust you can see on the next slide what you're looking at is the actual side of a box of surgical masks and i'll read it to you you all have it it says this product is not a respirator and will not provide any protection against covenanting coronavirus or other viruses or contaminants wearing a near-loop mask does not reduce the risk of contracting any disease or infection mass have no ability to protect anyone from coronavirus

071but here's where it gets bad the next slide you'll see is a paper and you can see in the third paragraph that what this was is a paper co-authored by dr anthony fauci of nyad along with two other doctors they were talking about the spanish uh flu pandemic of 1918 and what they discovered is that while 22 million people died in that pandemic by autopsy 92 of them did not die from influenza they died from bacterial pneumonia and they discovered that that bacterial pneumonia came from the upper upper respiratory tract the mouth and the nose and other uh studies have subsequently shown um what was the source of that bacterial pneumonia you can see the last slide i've got is a cartoon that appeared in october 1980 and depicted the fact that in 1918 the

072department of health mandated that all americans wear masks okay and um so and this happened in many other countries as well so possibly many many millions of people died from bacterial pneumonia from the mass now we're seeing reports in this country of bacterial pneumonia from the masks okay and we may actually find out eventually that many of the people that have died from covet in the last year that did not die from coronavirus no one dies just from coronavirus in fact had bacterial pneumonia and that material bacterial pneumonia actually may have been caused by their constant mask wearing so that's all i've got to say i want to thank you i wanted i want you to know that myself and i think i can speak for everyone in this room we have great love for

073the children of indian river school county and can i say we have got great admiration for this school board and i want to see you all go down in history as heroes and not monsters next speaker chris allen hi my name is chris allen and i'm an indiana county resident and i continually come here to say that the school board should do optional masking for children i think couple of weeks ago governor desantis said no masks on a public health round table where they said children should not wear masks they don't need it for their own protection and they don't need it for protecting other people they also mentioned that it was developmentally inappropriate and not the right thing to do because how are you going to teach a child how to speak and say

074words correctly if they can't see your lips i want to make note that the cdc now recommends three feet and if i recall correctly they changed it because there's no real science that said six feet worked so initially they said six feet because when you sneezed the spit could travel up to six feet and then all of a sudden now it changed to three feet so there's another thing that they keep pointing out which is their inconsistencies um let's see the optional masking in florida started out with i think 17 counties and now it's up to 23 so a few more are realizing that they are allowing optional masking because i don't know maybe it's governor desantis finally allowed it and i just urge you to do the same so that we continue being at

075the front of making positive changes for children i take my son to gymnastics and we heard a lot of parents in there about to take their children to school and they're literally begging i hope there's no masking next year i really hope there's no masking there and you know there's a lot of people who don't come here because they can't and we tell them to email but it's just like last year it's roughly 50 50. so we just urge you to keep being at the front and do optional masking and that thanks next speaker rick allen hello again rick allen here and i don't really have a whole lot to add you've heard a lot you've heard an awful lot tonight and i hope you carry through with your your plans to go ahead and

076make a plan to please make masks optional in schools do the right thing the recommendation from cdc is just that a recommendation it's not a mandate to you you have the choice to make it optional please make it optional for our kids thank you next speaker is d lavender hi my name is dee lavendera i attended a school board meeting a couple of months ago where some parents were speaking out against the mass during this time of the meeting to all of you who sit up here as our school board you represent us you guide and direct and make policy that is followed throughout the school district and as i listen to these parents make their comments some in tears over the masking i understand that school board training says let these comments go by

077do not respond but it was so negative from my perspective to see you sit here and listen to these parents crying and it seemed to fall on deaf ears not i understand we're sorry we unders you know we understand you're having a difficult time not one comment from this board to those parents who express their deep concerns about their children the parents are the ones who raise the children and they have chosen to allow you people in this district to educate their children that is their choice they don't have to but the parents are the ones who should be i think held in a higher regard when it comes to the choices of their children you are educators by and large i think everyone in this room is an educator at one level or another

078but the evidence that has been presented tonight and throughout the last several months shows that masking is a joke it does nothing other than it misleads people to think that by covering your mouth and your nose pulling it down all over the place we see it does nothing to protect you from this virus and can cause dental disease gum disease breathing problems panic attacks on and on and on and i am deeply concerned that you guys sitting up here do not realize that and you continue to go on and on with masking these kids i hope that you will consider that you took an oath to uphold the constitution of the united states and that constitution grants liberty and freedom to the american people and i think that you would do well to reconsider this

079masking mandate mandate on children and anyone who comes in this building thank you [Applause] next speaker danielle mccabe good evening school board and dr moore i'm also seeking your support and assistance as a former teacher of the year and veteran teacher with more than 20 years of experience i am highly qualified with a master's degree in elementary education and certification in reading in my 20 years of experience this year has been unlike any other regarding new policies procedures expectations rights and responsibilities and like my fellow colleagues i have spent time in the classroom ensuring a safe learning environment to maintain the safety for everyone and provide daily instruction to all of our students my fifth grade team and i had a parent spend the day with her child because the parent had concerns about wearing

080a mask at school i was both surprised and concerned to have this parent and child spend the day not wearing a mask or face covering this has not been the norm in my classroom or at our school nor has the concern for wearing a mask ever been discussed by the parent or child to us our team has tried a number of times to contact this parent for a conference forming relationships with our parents is necessary to support the best interest of every student and this is important to me as a professional usually parents will contact our team to discuss items to problem solve together for the best interest of children in forming relationships to foster the learning environment parents do not share false statements and accusations about teachers and staff on the radio or in

081social media how can we possibly solve problems if we don't even know there is a problem in the first place attending parent conferences communicating with teachers and being honest supports the relationship and benefits the whole child at our school we all work tirelessly to ensure everyone is safe and successful i'm requesting the board to support us to continue to implement the rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders and to move forward from this professionally compassionately and gracefully for the best interest of the child and thank you very much and thank you for those who came out to support us [Applause] next speaker susan meal so since i oh thank you for having this meeting and allowing us to speak this evening since i started talking to you all about the new position for an equity and

082chief officer of diversity or whatever it is i've talked to a lot of people in the county and around the communities related to the educational system here i've talked to parents i've talked to teachers i've talked to community leaders like freddie woolfork and i've talked to dr long that's on your staff a quick search of equity in schools i found a list of recommendations from this industry that included diversifying staff alternative disciplinary actions culturally relevant teaching practices i found a nine ways to promote equity in classrooms that included moving towards standards grading as opposed to letter grades and removing pre-requisites for honors and placement and advanced placement classes so there's a whole wealth of information out there what i have figured out in the last month is that number one many people in our community

083and in this school district are aware of the problems including dr long and also we're aware that the school can't solve them all just ask freddie woolfork there have been in the past and there may still well be today teachers and staff who have acted inappropriately to kids everybody knows that should stop this isn't rocket science and it doesn't take someone with a certificate in edi or dei or whatever it is to come up with creative ways of addressing the issues and there is no way that you can sit here today look us in the eye and promise us that this person from outside won't over time change our grading systems change our curriculums and implement many of the programs the parents across the country are not happy with and are fighting today this is

084just the beginning and these changes happen over time and there's no guarantee that you will even be here when they start to impact our kids or that you would even be told about it or know about it i'm still looking for the minutes by the way of the meeting where you all discuss this and i can get some tenor for how you all felt about it and when you voted so if you can you could send me the link to that meeting or those minutes because i'd like to see that [Music] so i still believe that this is an expensive symbolic gesture which is a total waste of taxpayer dollars a black gentleman once said to me susan don't forget black folks pay taxes too and i say to you don't forget students of every

085color and race come from disadvantaged backgrounds and if you really care for the kids you'll give dr long the resources she needs and you'll start start tackling all the problems you have here thank you the next speaker is melissa burdick but i'm not sure you've checked the box you wish to speak to an action item i wasn't even planning on speaking tonight but you know there were some good topics so i just jumped on it so i'm um parent of three in indian river county i was a school teacher for 10 years i was a department head in union rep um i'm definitely in favor of optional only for masks i do think they should be removed but it should be optional we've taken our daughter out of school because she's had to be on

086antibiotics twice already because of the skin infection under her face under the masks so it no longer became an option we pulled her out so that's one topic so my agenda item number one um the second one was regarding excuse me the diversity and equity position which i do i think you did an excellent job sir you've had 50 years to fix the problem and you haven't and you're just dressing this up as something else and i feel personal about this because my son was subjected to this because he was white as if he was the problem because we impose this on somebody so when you bring up diversity and equity it's just a pretty package for racism and it falls under critical race theory which is founded in the frankl school way back in

087germany and that's what it is it just makes white woke professionals feel real good about thinking you're doing something when you avoid the real problem and i say this as a parent a teacher and a christian who we should only see people as god has seen people not because of their color their race their sex their gender choices you name it but that's what you're setting up this is an amazing county and you will destroy it because you will impose this on our children to see people only that way and not as humans and i could also point out you point that on to my kids i'm gonna point to each one of you because you're not very diverse you're pretty white and you're pretty professional and you're pretty woke if you implement this on

088us we will come for you it's hate and it needs to stop especially given the conditions of what we just went through in this entire world this past year we do not need this we need to address people all people all colors all races all sexes get this crap off and you can choose i know this is coming from washington it's been imposed on the schools up north i've seen the destruction it's done in families it teaches hate it's marxism it goes against our constitution it turns kids against their parents against every foundation that we are trying to save and those foundations which will overcome race and discrimination and bigotry and that is on you so as somebody else pointed out you choose to be a hero or you choose to be part of the

089problem for another 50 years thank you [Applause] next speaker stanford erickson board and dr moore i really appreciate that you sit here and listen to us and uh i appreciate that you have it in the beginning of your meeting i've gone to some of these meetings where at the end you have to sit the whole time and then you get to speak i've been in education i've written an education i really appreciate chairman barefoot i know him i think he's a well-intentioned person i feel that it has been 50 years and we should spend the money but i think we have to spend it in an intelligent way and i've turned around companies dr moore that's what i've done in media and usually you bring a high-powered person from the outside and he brings people

090in and he turns around companies and goes somewhere else turns grounds companies joins you understand i think the wonderful thing as i've done research on this and i wish i had done more before is that you have a poster child who's running your equity program now born in this area educated in this area a graduate of vero beach high school got her undergraduate got her master's got a phd taught at various levels in the school you used her and put in an equity program then you gave her a secretary and no staff and no money and then you come after 50 years you say okay let's bring in a high-powered person that perhaps dr moore knows and let's do something good here and then dr moore can go somewhere else and turn around another school

091my feeling is that you should listen to dr long i don't know much about dr long i talked to her for about an hour because i just wanted real i'm a reporter so i that's what i do i talk to dr barefoot i talked to some of the journalists who wrote about this this is a difficult program and the african community understands it's a difficult program in terms of single-parent children you have single parent children that are white poor people so you want to take care of all of them and chairman barefoot believes in that and i believe in that and i think you have to spend some money but i think to look somewhere else when you have a very qualified person who knows a community who can speak to the community speaking to

092the community is very important and i've read some news reports that you didn't do that very well dr moore it takes a while to know a community i spent seven years in the ghetto in san francisco because martin luther came to my school and he said go down south and i said i'm not going down south but i went there so that i could understand and it's a difficult time there was one i took the children to the library got him library cards took him got him library cards this one woman she came to my house knocked on the door she said look at thank you for taking my children but don't take susie to my to the library mr stupid like i am she wasn't stupid and susie wasn't stupid we were stupid so

093it's time to be useful to the community please support dr long and doing that thank you [Applause] that was the last speaker we now have mrs maddox i'll turn it over to you for the email that we received yes we have two emails that um were submitted with the speakers forum one is from sarap zhang to whom this may concern i vote to allow optional masking for our children requiring children to wear a mask all day is ridiculous children need to see smiles and facial expressions who truly knows how this will psychologically affect our children in the future stop the government overreach and leave it up to the family to decide if they want to muzzle their children or not where there is a risk there must be a choice and from beth himminger hello

094and to whom it may concern i'm hoping you understand the concerns i have for children wearing masks for hours and even at all the pandemic has been with us for over a year now there's no scientific proof that children benefit from wearing a mask a child's immune system requires breathing air to build their immune system these masks are destroying this i am praying and sincerely asking you to make this optional to wear a mask at school i understand you have rules and regulations but this clearly should not be one of them please allow our children to breathe freely with fresh air with all due respect thank you that's all i just dr moore thank you sir as we wrap up public hearing first and foremost thank all of the individuals who came and speak i

095know in some ways it is very intimidating uh to share we truly value your opinion i just wanted to respond to a few things that were said first and foremost quarantine uh as we mentioned uh numerous times quarantine is the authority of the health department this school board took on the health department and explored where are the possibilities for us to take legal actions to ensure that we minimize if not completely reduce quarantines and we're going to continue to engage in that particular conversation one of the speakers referenced the vaccination uh yes our last vaccination uh offering two employees was april 10th that was the first initial cycle so we go through a the entire process which would take us through the end of the school year um as it relates to graduation i i

096think we do have very innovative principals who are going to do their absolute best to ensure that that picture is a mass free picture and our students who were seniors last year man they didn't have it the way that anybody would want it and our our staff will continue to work uh may not be a complete mask free graduation but that's a very big football field we can spread them out and ensure that they can sit follow the current procedures and plan uh we can be innovative with the with the glass of the principal on one side the student on theirs uh so we we here and as comments were made uh over the course of several months regarding the mask it's never not been about listening and receiving the information um from my perspective

097do we want mass i don't think anybody wants masks and we are now engaging in the conversation as a result of an item brought by ms berenborg and miss rosario to determine what is the path forward and that is the dialogue and the conversation that we will have we will do so in a way that ensures we are safe we are understanding the perspectives and truths of every single individual in our community running a school system for a diverse community with multiple points of view is not easy i wouldn't wish it upon anybody but yet here we are called to be in these positions really to think through how do we do this work and we will in fact do this work so looking forward to bringing that information i know it's an item that's

098coming up but as it was mentioned there it was the equity position um i haven't interviewed anybody um haven't gone through a process uh did we put out a job application uh or ask individuals to apply absolutely yeah that that's what we did uh but we haven't taken any other steps um and as i informed the board today the the actions and the perceptions around the presid uh the position is the exact reason that we need to pursue and define how we do this work and we will do a better job of informing the community so as we go out towards the end of april and in may we're going to have opportunities to engage in the conversation as to how this district should be structured in order to do this work i'll tell you

099this equity is not the responsibility of one person it is not deb's long job i won't say i mean everyone else said your name so i'll say it too um it's not debs long uh responsibly by by herself and one of the first moves i made when i got here uh was to say no it is everyone's responsibility and we're going to put it in everyone's evaluation and we're going to sit through and have the conversations to ensure the work is being done at all facets of the organization at all facets of the organization and we need to continue to do that so at upcoming meetings we'll be able to engage in that particular conversation uh and define uh is it a new position is it a reorganized office that's the conversation that will we

100will be having but we are dead set in addressing and designing the district in a way in order to ensure that this work is being done and it is an absolute commitment for this district i was going to address mr browning's remarks but i didn't want to address it with him not in the room so i'll say it we are fully committed to doing this work lip service yeah no that's not me and that's not the principles that's not these teachers that is not this district staff it has been priority number one really to create opportunities to ensure all students all students have the opportunity to maximize their full potential and there is serious work to do in this district when you're in the bottom quartile not bottom quartile but you're underperforming in ela performance

101in comparison to other districts there's work to do and it's absolutely okay but when you look at our students when you look at our educators uh you know there are opportunities really to ensure that that support that they need the uplifting that they need is being provided the development they they need is being provided in order to ensure we are one of the top 10 districts in the state of florida in this in the state of florida in every year within our strategic plan so as we look at this work is it lip service no we have done a absolutely tremendous amount of work we've reorganized the district we've created a strategic plan as reference the this um this morning i guess it was 53 recommendations that were made by the 2019 equity committee uh

102have been incorporated and highlighted and and shown within our district strategic plan within the african-american achievement plan that has been approved and since we've developed those documents there's been a pandemic school has shut down we closed march 13th and didn't open opened up 10 days later so the opportunity to provide input now regarding the work that we're currently doing i'm begging for i'm begging for am i in this work to do it absolutely is this team willing to do it there are some agreements that i know this board agrees with that were made in the 2018 recommendations and what i shared with mr browning is when the equity committee meets next time ask the board to incorporate them into the strategic plan when i go into my planning and present to you these will this

103will be the action that we take for the 2019 annual targets that's an opportunity that embeds the work moving forward so there are opportunities to receive feedback engage in the dialogue regarding where and where recommendations we could we agree upon that can be incorporated into our district's strategic plan and i'm looking forward to engaging in that particular conversation as the equity committee uh begins to meet and those are just some comments based on public hearing thank you sir mr zario thank you very much um i there there's so many um we we typically do not address um citizens when they come up to the podium during um citizen comments but um at the end sometimes we may you know address some there were so many uh great comments i wish i could address all of

104them but i will say uh paul wescott um you caught my attention when you mentioned a different view on equity with regard to ownership and i'm gonna i'm gonna look into that much more and i'd love to have a further conversation with you on that um with regard to some of the concerns from teachers that came in um and a parent in their room i trust that we've already had a conversation uh dr moore and myself i believe dr moore may have had conversations with other board members on that and he and his team are already working on um addressing some of those issues and concerns and i trust that he will and his team uh mr bass uh will address them appropriately and um at that point go ahead doctor i'm i'm sorry but

105you are um a hundred percent uh correct mr rosario um our teachers our principals our school site staff have done an absolutely amazing job in doing um this work teaching is complex each and every single school year but to do it in the midst of these challenges these challenges and obstacles is absolutely a job well done and it breaks my heart to be in this particular uh reality and for teachers at his school to be faced um with this predicament but we will support and provide the needed guidance in order to ensure on both sides of the issue we can be in the best interest of children and get this work done thank you um with that said i don't take lightly when parents have concerns or when teachers have concerns i know that we

106are all in very very difficult times but i will say that the person who was mentioned as the teacher which was mentioned at the podium we're talking about tiffany justice what was mentioned is that we she was our co-worker and she was she was our co-worker she was a board member she is no longer a board member and and there are no favoritisms there is there is no no issue um with that regard because i think there were some comments that were mentioning that i will also be as transparent to say i had no idea what was going on uh personally and so i don't want anyone to think that this board member either did or did not purposely do or do nothing about what occurred in the school which is not by the way

107a school board member's job our job is not to get involved in the day-to-day operations of what happens at schools it is dr moore's responsibility to handle and manage what happens at the schools on a day-to-day basis if however he does not handle something or have his team handle something appropriately then of course board members will get in in involved if we need to but we were aware we were no we were made aware of what i was made aware of what happened and at this point just to address it we are going to patiently wait for the response of dr moore and his team to take care of that unfortunate situation um mrs freeland i wanted to ask you to listen to our earlier conversation when we had a our the school board members

108had our fsba training session earlier before the school board meeting one of the questions actually i'm going to pull it up one of the questions that we were asked was to identify what we were most proud of about this district and what do we want to make sure that we preserve protect and keep at all costs and um i there are so many things i just i'm talking to you because of what you specifically said at the podium and it and it it really hit the heart of my answer to this question and the first thing that i could think of was how our teachers and our custodial staff and all of our administrators and district leadership really pulled together during this last year during the pandemic and that was really what was what made

109me the most proudest the only thing that came to my mind was that among one other item but that really did make me proud to be a board member in a school district that really worked hard to open schools really worked hard to do their best during a a time that's really unprecedented nobody really had a handbook on how to handle these things and indian river county i believe especially under dr moore's leadership really did do a fantastic job i know that masks are an issue and we are going to continue that conversation in a little bit but overall that's what makes me proud so thank you for that all of you by the way everybody thank you all right um moving along with the agenda uh we need an approval for the consent agenda

110can i have a motion to approve the consent agenda still move second a second all in favor aye aye motion carries five zero may i make a comment on that sure um consent 9a student code of conduct there was something added to that um could you make a comment thank you miss yes um during the workshop today we had a a fruitful conversation and one of the items uh that i um asked the board for permission to add um was to end page seven of that plan under the areas of responsibilities and of parent slash guardian to include a reference link to school board policy 5780. it reads is this please reference school board policy student last parent writes for additional information we're adding this because we anticipate the student's bill of rights uh that

111is working through tallahassee right now parents bill of rights um get my glasses fixed um if that item is approved and even if it's not we we have the opportunity to reference this policy and create our own parents bill of rights which will be a sister document to this but that is the foundational document which is the policy mrsa dr moore we also added uh the extracurricular activities to the 10th bullet under the parents responsibilities through the chair yes we did we all set all right next accident agenda item this is public hearing on english language arts and structural materials adoption this item deals with adoption of english language arts and structural materials dr moore have you documented that this public hearing was properly advertised in accordance with state statutes yes i have all right

112we're now going to recess this meeting conduct that public hearing is advertised the public hearing is now in session dr moore are there any written responses to the advertised public hearing to be read at this time um through the to another or not to the public public's invited to address this issue at this time is there an individual representing an organization or his or her own personal or public interest who wishes to speak i've concluded that the announced public hearing on the adoption of the english language arts instructional materials has been conducted pursuant to notice and that ample opportunity to address this issue has been provided to all the board meeting is reconvened at this time i just want to make sure that i did everything properly here the attorney is shaking her head yes

113thank you that's why we have our attorney right here so that i don't make mistakes all right the next action agenda uh the approval for the creation of a plan to make face coverings optional and reduce quarantines mrs barrenborg yeah before we do that on the last action item um because we really didn't vote on it but it's action so are we supposed to vote on that because it's just for alpha hearing i have a question about it though can i ask my question now sure okay um and i'm looking at the um all the attachments on there i know originally we had talked about amplify and um then in my one-to-one meeting which i'm sure you've had those same conversations with everyone else that that did not make the state adoption list so are

114you because it still says amplify on here so where what are we going with amplify or hmh so to the chair uh initially the committee did vote to um recommend amplify as the elementary product the state adopted list came out so we have paused that we did want to provide the opportunity during a public hearing for the public to give their opinions about the amplify the committee has subsequently reconvened and voted to recommend hmh as the product and so that is that is the product that is under public review right now for 20 days we will be bringing an item for public hearing for hmh to to receive any comment from the public on the 27th and then we will bring a proposal to the board for the final product to be adopted after all

115that is concluded i would say right now given the fact that hmh is on the list and amplify is not then that's clearly the direction we would go the two products the other products middle and high school remain unchanged they were both on the list thank you and and i encourage parents to have concerns about things that are in textbooks to this is your time to be able to look at that absolutely absolutely and our staff is happy to you know answer any questions that any parent has thank you all right um face covering is optional mrs barrenburg are you going to read that whole item i'm challenging you or do you want me to read it why don't you read it because it needs to be read into the record school board members are

116responsible for determining the policies and approving plans for our district as such a plan needs to be developed regarding when to allow children to have the option to wear a mask in school given the significant progress observed in the local community within last month related to covet 19 rates and the opportunities provided to district employees to receive immunizations the school district of indian river county must work proactively to create a plan for phasing out face mask face coverings and minimizing quarantines we need to determine when safeguards need to be in place for our students to move forward in school what qualifiers need to be in our community to move forward this recommendation is being made as a result of the number of citizens and employees given the chance to receive the covid vaccination as well

117as the recent governor's roundtable on changes in the cdc recommendations therefore this item directs the superintendent to determine what safeguards need to be in place for our students to move forward in school as well as what qualifiers need to be in our community to move forward the discussion points that i put on there were opportunities for vaccines and vaccine vaccination rates changes in cdc recommendations and i want to be clear about the vaccination and vaccination rates i'm not talking about students okay changes in cdc recommendations community and school coveted 19 rates guidance from local health professionals thank you dr mccain for being here today and speaking i didn't know you were going to speak nice to see you safeguards in place the superintendent will provide a presentation to the board during the april 27th workshop

118the superintendent is encouraged to invite any local experts that could provide additional insight regarding the district's plans for phasing out face coverings and quarantines this presentation should include recommendations on face covering requirements as well as quarantine guidance for summer programming as well as any modifications to the sdirc save at school plan additionally on june 22 2021 the safe at school plan for the next academic year 2021 2022 will be presented to the board and that is my item so um back in october i had actually put something very similar to this on the board agenda for action and asked that we develop a plan because right now you know no one knows we get all kinds of data we get everybody supporting their side clip art down to pictures cartoons to medical journal articles so

119it's really interesting to sit and be a board member right now for the last year and i've learned so much and i don't know what to believe tell you the truth because there's stuff out there that can be skewed all kinds of different ways and in this day and age people have that ability to do it so well so we have to depend on more information so when i saw the governor's round table oh let me go back to october so um october that all got put on hold because of a lawsuit and so we had to be very quiet there was a speaker tonight that said we sat there and listened and didn't say anything well we have an attorney that is really good at helping us understand that we could put ourselves in

120a place we didn't need to be so it is frustrating that was very frustrating but now that that is beyond us and we can start to move forward and our numbers are changing and things are happening like the icu beds um i asked today we have 24 beds in our icu i believe are being used now no covid at all in icu and 11 patients in the coveted unit at one point it was over 40. so i'm monitoring that information monitoring the the rates looking at the data that we can use to make good decisions so that's something that i've been asking for but when i saw the governor's roundtable where he brought in experts and they talked and i called the governor's office just a couple days later and i asked you know are

121you giving us the directive or guidance on how to move forward when should we take masks off kids when can we move forward from this that's going on what can we do and the guidance that i was given was to call the doe i was a little frustrated by that i did let them know i was frustrated by that and that i was told would be given to the governor himself and i was fine with that um because i'm i'm frustrated that board members are being put in the middle of of things where we really should be getting guidance if you go out and have a round table and say this we should mask kids and you're the governor give us give us that guidance help us so i called um the doe like i

122was told and i had done the same thing six months ago and i knew what the answer was going to be so i actually before i called the doe i actually still had the eight on on the phone with the governor's office and said um you know last time i was told to call the doe they told me to follow cdc guidelines you read the cdc guidelines they say to mass children so are you sure that's what you want me to do again this time and the answer was yes so i called the doe i didn't get a return phone call i happened to be in tallahassee the week after so i was up there talking to some people that really could help me with some things and i got a call the next day

123i got a response the next day about my question i had had the week before and the response was the same follow cdc guidelines and it is frustrating to be in the middle of this i understand when we're talking about um what was it 13 to 17 23 counties now because i have been paying attention to counties a lot of them are small counties don't have that many kids here here's what my biggest concern was at the beginning of all this was everybody's talking about quarantine quarantine and it does concern me because especially since just a couple months ago every time we had kids quarantine they went back to school nobody got positive and yet we have all these kids missing school so it's very frustrating to go through all this but um you know

124the the quarantine issue is somewhat out of our control you may say that they can suggest um but we went through this before you know i brought up an action item back in october i believe it was correct mr gresa about um basically bringing going against his heart health department and um that didn't go so well so you know it is frustrating to to deal with all this but we have to have some sort of plan i'm a planner i don't like to make decisions overnight i think if we unmask children tomorrow we're an assessment period right now our kids started assessments today and anytime that's precious time in school you know we don't let anybody disrupt classrooms and and students because you know all that hard work that the teachers have done we can

125undo it like that and that's not fair to the teachers that have been working so hard with kids so i don't think i'm asking for something to happen overnight i think that would really cause anarchy and chaos and i don't want to do that what i do want to do is give parents a light at the end of this tunnel and because we have been living with this for so long and you know it has concerned me about what's happening with kids and mental issues that you've been talking about and that's why i do want guidance from our local experts and i do want guidance from people yeah we make the decisions but you know it's hard to make a decision when you're not an expert in something and so you you depend on other

126experts the question that i've had in all this is there's just too many expert opinions out there and we're getting it from all kinds of sides it's quite interesting because um you know anytime i want somebody to get on my side and think the way i think i'm certainly going to go out there and find an article that supports my opinion and stay away from the ones that don't i know how to do that but and i appreciate all of you that are doing all that work and i know you're you're you're feeling very very um concerned and upset and frustrated and you know it's been tough so i think um my my reason for putting this on there is to ask my fellow board members to direct the superintendent because it's not our job

127to make the plan even though i really wanted to i put that in writing at the beginning he said no you're not supposed to do that i said you're right i'm not um i i do want you though to know how i feel about the kind of information that we should be considering and originally when we did this it was to um lower the amount of people in hospital beds if anybody remembers back to when we first put masks on people it was because of the hospitalization rates and we were overwhelming our hospitals and our icus and sure i'm going to be part of that solution i'm not going to be part of the problem but now things have changed now our numbers are changing now we look at kids not being the super spreaders

128that everybody thought they were at the beginning of all this and i'm telling you from being a teacher for umpteen years they can spread other things so talk to any teacher 10 days after school starts and you'll know that their voice changes and they have a cold and so that was a concern because we didn't know what this was and i think you know we have learned a lot but we also don't know if we've learned the right things because there's so much misinformation out there it's so hard but i also think we have to give parents the option of protecting their child the way they want to protect their child and how that works or that looks we can't say overnight masks optional but we can give parents enough warning and enough time and

129for them to make a decision and for them to say you know my kid can still go to school with a mask or a face protector or whatever they need to do and feel comfortable and whether or not we're going to still be able to do virtual schooling in the fall is another question because those of you that don't know are funding and and being able to fund and pay for all these things to help kids depends on that fte money and if we're not allowed to have virtual school and get that ft money that's a real wrench in this this whole decision making because now we're looking at making severe cuts and you know some of this when we first looked at it i was looking at the point of you know people are

130like well tell the teachers to buck up well here's the problem you know having been a teacher without a teacher you don't have a class yeah we can do that we can send your kids to school without without masks but guess what they're going to be sitting there in an empty classroom with no no one teaching them so that was a little bit of a concern on my part too is we have adults that we're concerned with um they are our employees we're the biggest employer in this in this county so kids number one safety of kids in school and the welfare of children number one but number two the other adults that are working with those kids because let's face it you don't have a school without the other the adults helping the kids

131so that was a concern of mine but board members we discussed this item quite a bit today i appreciate the discussion that was had my concern is that we need to have some sort of plan and planning out now for what's going to happen this summer and i did request just so you guys know the this afternoon i did request no masks at graduation for kids when they were sitting on the field for when the kids come up to get their awards across the stage work it out so that those kids can walk without a mask on get their picture finally and something a parent can have a picture of their child without a mask on okay um so i am asking the board to vote on this and ask the superintendent to give us

132uh some sort of presentation on the 27th of april uh mr rosario um thank you for those of you as as mrs behrenborg just mentioned if you hadn't had a chance to listen to our earlier discussion i i really highly encourage you to do so so this way you will hear what every single board member has said and rather than us having that whole discussion once again i just wanted to add to what mrs barrenburg mentioned were new cdc guidelines that i shared i gave all my notes my highlights to dr moore but i too have had i wish personally that we can go to no masks but one of the things right now that i was uh that i am also very concerned about is the quarantine specifically and now that we are in

133testing season and new guidelines that were provided by the cdc um really outline what close contact um means and that quarantine people who are quarantined or students and teachers um should quarantine unless they are and i'm just going to read this out loud again because this is important unless they are fully vaccinated or have tested positive in the last three months and do not have any symptoms and i think that that new those new guidelines may help us to engage in further conversations to eliminate the quarantine at least for the end of the year we should not um i i can't i can't really rehash all of our conversation earlier but there are some other opportunities for us to look at descards to look at how we are allowing even even currently how we are

134allowing students to eat in cafeterias if at all dust guards might be another option i've been talking about dust guards for a while face shields as one was just mentioned earlier as a parent brought up earlier there there are other options for us to look at in terms of how we get our our how we get our momentum going to become optional mask optional optional mask district also i i in that plan which we are asking dr moore um to review it is a very specific review as well as our current all these plans our current um safe safer schools plan uh page by page to either edit tweak and change safer at schools safe at schools okay because it is there are some things that are written in that plan now as it is

135with regard to six feet whereas cdc is now offering three feet um and and so we have to change that things have to change within our current plan regardless so that's part of the um the the the request uh that the board asked of the superintendent earlier today um to be presented to us at the end of the month i just wanted to you know bring to the attention these items and dr mccain thank you very much for coming today a medical opinion here at the at the podium is extremely important i spoke with several doctors and pediatric dentists which we encouraged dr moore this morning to invite to become part of the new panel to provide input on what that would look like moving forward for us so i think that's it anybody else

136care too the only uh i don't have anything to add to what's already been said i just did we we talked about dates this afternoon and are the dates we talked about the same as the dates that are listed here yes and we talked to clarify we talked about given how volatile is the environment and that it is changing that these are draft plans pending guidance from medical and educational professionals that you will continue to receive up until and into the summer prior to the opening next year so that whatever it is that is presented to the board on april 27th and then on june 22nd for those respective reports are conditioned on what we know at that time and knowing that circumstances may change into the future and i just want to clarify that

137moving forward that these be because the environment is constantly changing because new information is continually coming out these are not static plans these are these are dynamic and moving with the information we receive did you that that is correct and to bring context to it my concern the reality on august 10th when we open school is going to be significantly better god willing then on june 27th and trying to afford us every opportunity to move us to where i think we collectively all want to go um with the appropriate amount of time which is the rub in order to allow parents to make decisions so declaring on june 22 june june june 22nd this is uh the latest information that's available right now here is our intention as you said we will continue to look

138at it and maybe we could even identify if conditions a b c and d exist then we will go to you know another option those are all things that we need to explore over the course of the next month i i have a question um how what's up to this point and maybe this is for you mr bass what what percentage of the teachers and the custodians and the other staff that work in the schools have been vaccinated and how many more dates have been arranged so that those who haven't that want to become want to be vaccinated can can get a vaccine i don't think we should yeah i don't i think there's and ask that why not because our decisions aren't based on vaccinations i'm just asking i'm not sure dr moore suzanne

139suzanne purely statistical information about employee vaccination rates to the extent that we know it um it is fine correct this isn't you're not asking individual employees to share that information but purely statistical information to the extent that you have it is fine to discuss and then whether you want to take that into consideration or not in your future decision making is again completely up to you and through the chair just let the cat out of the bag um because there were options for individuals to not access the vaccination through the health department currently we don't have a a number in which we could accurately say because there may be individuals who went to publix who went to the other provider because that was afforded to them you know through the governor whereas the health department

140couldn't do it until there was an executive order allow them to do it so to give any information we probably would be under under reporting and but we do have other dates if people want to pursue it so what we believe in these public entities the answer that question is is is yes so on june 10th mr bass june 10th that's just like uh wishful thinking on my part um april 10th which was this saturday uh mr bass uh sent out an all-call to employees who who wanted to participate or access it the turnout was just the saturday now they go through the three-week cycle the second shot the two-week cycle so there's that was that was offered and additional opportunities i don't know mr bass can address that um from from this point on

141there will you know we hadn't planned any more additional opportunities through the health department um in fact they are moving to a inside vaccination uh offerings starting to end i guess beginning of may so we took advantage of the last opportunity to really get the drive drive-through because it was so successful and it operated so well so as far as a first dose another cycle we have not planned one okay yeah the reason why i actually put that on the item opportunities for vaccination vaccination rates i wanted to make sure that there was a long enough window that those that wanted to become vaccinated could become vaccinated so that that was a consideration that if employees felt like they needed that protection they were able to get ample time to get that done um i

142don't think anybody wants an adult to to be fearful of their life and if um we have offered that opportunity for them to take advantage of this before we make these decisions i think that's appropriate all right any other comments questions well i'd like to call the question i may have a motion this is barrenburg it's your yeah i'll make a motion to approve a second second uh any further discussion all in favor aye hi motion carries 5-0 thank you all right we now the next item is the superintendent's report dr moore uh no report this evening okay the next item i put on the this is a discussion item it's it's not an action item if you recall from our last workshop not today but a few weeks ago we talked about creating something

143on the website where we and frankly i don't remember exactly the specifics of the conversation maybe i'm getting older i just had another birthday but um and happy birthday oh thank you this weekend um but i think the purpose of this was was there a way to in place for the community to email board members in one location on the website as opposed to perhaps the way it's now where we all get individually but i'm not to be perfectly honest i don't remember the specifics of the discussion does anyone if not we'll just move on i remember it go ahead yeah we had brought it up as when we have our board training that's also um recorded in our last board training we had one today but we had another one a month ago and

144it was brought up as a suggestion um to make things easier for people that wanted to contact us instead of having to type all our names because i know baronborg is long and rosario is not short so instead of finding all our emails and writing them all one blanket place to be able to email everybody at the same time so that was brought up i think i'm not sure who brought it up but i thought it was a good idea so i think that's why we said it has to go on a board discussion and if that's the will of the board i don't see it you know providing a link email your board members you would click and it would allow you to to make that happen i think it's a relatively easy step

145if that's the desire of the board so oh sorry so would that be like uh info at in you know school board info at indian river schools that would come directly to all of us or would that go to nancy who would then forward it to all of us how would that reach us the way i recall the conversation it's just a convenience to our community rather than going through and who's was it barefoot is it it is you know is it rosario email your board members and it will send a it sets the email up directly for um the community member to provide that information to board members that would be forwarded directly to us with that link to your email right an administrative intermediary right mr rosario um just for a point of

146clarity is the email is the option to email a group email a group option for all of us together or individually and or as a group it could probably be done either way you can click all and send we all get the same one so someone doesn't have to type in each name or if they have a specific email they want to send to any of us individually they could identify that i'm sure it can be set up that way i i i think the best plan of action is for mr mcdonnell to come and give here your options a b and c um me i would prefer to go to all board members so you see all board members because typically board member behavior is this was sent to me please send to other

147board members and you guys not knowing that would kind of make your lives a little bit more complex but some people would want to send it to one particular person well it they that can be there as well and that that's there for them now if they wanted to click on when they go to the board members page they have the opportunity to access each individual email this is just rather than clicking five different times one time and into two different platforms there i have definitely received emails that have been targeted to me and another or another two board members that have very intentionally not gone right so it's tricky on how that works there are some people who want to communicate to one or another board member very intentionally just to those two or

148three or one or we could be very intentional in our verb this link sends email to all five board members we want to address them individually please visit their individual page i think if mr mcdonald comes and makes sure he can just show us exactly what can be done and then we can decide that makes it's not necessarily for our benefit it's really for the communities so mr mcdonald if you're watching right now all right hopefully he's just enjoying the scene there today i hope so do it at one o'clock in the morning the next discussion i am also put is the as the citizen uh input policy um and correct me if i'm wrong uh mr agresta and dr moore but uh we have suspended having to be show up in person and allowed

149to use email through the end of april is that the the governor has waived uh the rule that for citizen input you had to show up through the you you had the option otherwise if that executive order if that's what it was expires then it goes back to you have to be here in person yes sir the board took action to suspend being here in person for public comment during the dependency of the state of emergency issued by the governor's office so the governor's executive order does not speak to public comment or board meetings it simply speaks to the to the state of emergency and then once this school board's action was once that executive order expires then any waiver of your board policies would go away and you would go back to your normal

150processes okay well we don't know what the governor is likely to do when that expires at the end of the month one can assume that it may be extended maybe probably will be extended for a period of time allowing for the option of of communicating so that's one thing that uh and perhaps we just wait and see whether or not it's i mean we could go around and around to the pros and cons of it but perhaps we ought to just wait the other question is and it came up today in master board training and i believe we've discussed this in the past is that citizen input early in the meeting when it lasts a long time and fortunately in the recent past for the new school board at least for dr jones and i

151we've not had to be here until all hours of the evening but the the business of the business meeting is the business of the meeting and sometimes you get the sense that if citizen input it goes on and on that you really don't address and don't give sufficient time to the actual business matters that are on the agenda so the option of course and i believe the facilitator this afternoon referred to that as some districts put citizen input at the end of the meeting and i don't want to i don't know that we want to get into a long discussion tonight but if if we're going to continue the policy or the giving the options we might want to also consider the pros and cons of flipping where on the agenda citizen input comes mr

152rosario well you you put this on the agenda as a discussion item so this is where i guess we're going to discuss um the previous board discussed this you two of course weren't on the board we've discussed this prior there are in my opinion many more cons to have citizen input at the end of our meetings um i i will not be in favor of that at all i am very okay with the way that it runs now having citizen come in a lot of our citizens have young children they're eager to get back home to their children um and then the other thing to keep in mind is that citizen input doesn't necessarily have to be at the very beginning they can actually provide input before each action item or before each item action

153item misses the aggressta just to be clear that i know what i'm saying yes your policy allows for a public comment before each action item also at the general public comment at the beginning of the meeting and it also allows for public comment um specifically to school board discussion items so i'm totally thank you for that uh clarification i am i'm totally okay with the way that it is now i i am not in favor of going back to the citizen input policy and changing it at this time but thank you for bringing it up uh dr ship did you have yeah i was under the impression um since this is a discussion item uh that we were talking about something slightly different i agree with mrs rosario in this i'm not in favor of

154moving it to the end i don't think that's fair to people who have a limited amount of time to come out um and i and i think it is a disservice to them um to have them sit through what could be an hour or two of our meeting so i agree with you on that what i the reason i thought you had put this on the agenda because of course we can't talk until we're sitting here um is because what has come up a couple of times is amending some of our policies around citizen input and i know i forwarded to everybody an example of something from polk county that referenced when a lot of members of a particular group come having representatives of that group speak rather than every individual of that group or

155in in the polk county citizen input they they do some things i would not be in favor of so this is for point of clarification and discussion only but they talk about limiting the overall amount of time of citizen input in their case they limit it to 30 minutes unless the board collectively decides to extend that i'm not suggesting we do that i'm suggesting there are a variety of ways to address citizen input that are different from how we do it and that other districts do it differently that actually is what i thought was the reason that you would put it on the agenda not just switching the time but switching the structure of how we do it um the other the other thing that has come up in this board before is uh and

156is referenced in the polk county policy public participation shall be permitted as indicated on the agenda before the board takes a official position on any action under consideration so citizens come to speak to items on the board not just a variety of items now i'm not what that potentially does is limits input to things that citizens may want to make us aware of that are not necessarily on our agenda so i think we have to very carefully consider that i think this is a much larger discussion than we can have on what is now our 11 um today that that we can do service to but i would recommend we put it for discussion at a future point to consider how we may want to amend our citizen input policies that that uh your um

157last point has a lot of merit and you're right that was also along with not just where it appeared but how much how you allow people to speak and the one thing that that which we have now if you want to speak to any action item citizens can speak to that item as it comes up and maybe that is the way to handle or you do it all up front and then you remember what was said when you get to the action item and remember what was said and that in effect tonight uh mrs barenborg you referenced a number of the comments when your action item on uh the plan the request for a plan was was fully discussed so why don't we put that on a one of the workshops we'll know a lot

158more specifically as it relates to whether we will continue to provide an option for in person or via email citizen input and i don't know when the i guess the next workshop will be the 27th or we can wait for one into may uh mr mr behrenberg you only heard from two board members i mean if we don't have consensus to review the policy for these purposes um i would i'm eager to hear what dr jones and mrs berenberg have to say about it well i certainly know that it's very very important for our parents to be here and and speak as long as we have it where they can speak on action item you know i'm okay with that i do like a couple of the recommendations from polk county if you have maybe

15930 people want to speak you could ask that group to have five or six represent even today when we talked at our workshop one thing we're trying to work on is not repeat what somebody else is saying so a lot of this has been said before but obviously citizen input is crucial it's crucial to me as a teacher an administrator and as a board member and as ms berenborg said earlier you know we get hit from all sides research and data anyone who's done research know you can find research to support research to not support so it is our job to listen um do all the research that we can do and then and to make a decision but as long as we're okay with um having them speak during the action item i'm okay

160and maybe look at a couple counties who if they have 40 or 50 people speaking we could have representatives but that's something to discuss with the whole board yeah um actually this there is another point that nobody is brought up that i'm going to bring up and that is there have been some people that have wanted to come and speak and then they see that they're going to have to wait around for literally tonight was what an hour and a half two hours of citizen input and there are people that say you know i gotta go home and feed my family i wanted to speak to something that was on the agenda tonight and i can't i can't stay and and i've heard that frustration too so you know it's kind of oh we want

161to hear from everybody and like there were some points brought up tonight that weren't on the agenda that were important to hear from so um it is i think a long discussion i do think we need to have the discussion but i also think we need to figure out you know what's how's the best way to handle it when you have especially like 14 hours of citizen input all on the same thing you know it and not i'm going to tell you right now because we already have that policy in place where somebody can come speak on behalf of a group everybody want they showed up they want to speak yes and and they have that right so i think what i want to get away from is the business of the board not taking

162place um because of and i'll just put it out there sometimes some people come just to speak to the camera and that's happened before on different topics so um if if there is something on the agenda they want to speak to i want them to be able to tell us so that we know information before we vote on something but i also think that if there's not something on the agenda right there then maybe the other place for that is either at the end of the meeting or we reserve a certain amount of time for those and i have seen other boards that do that they say okay if it's an action item you know here's citizen input for action item and then we have a certain amount of time and if you're first coming

163in and you in the door that's why the time stamp is there then after 45 minutes it's cut off i have seen other boards do that because i did ask when i was up in tallahassee i met with fsba and i said hey tell me about other things that are going on around the state and this is a problem in lots of areas there are some boards whose meetings have gotten hijacked from people that want to come in and talk about national problems and they're bringing it to this to this stage and so it is frustrating because you do want to hear from everybody but you want to make sure that what you're listening to is something you can actually do something about and you have a vote for it and sometimes we can't change

164national politics so i want to make sure that we're staying to the point and being fair to people that came to speak and then realized they got to go home and feed their family and they can't speak because there's too many speakers once i'm sorry dr chef um in addition because i think it's important as you mentioned there were things that were spoken about tonight that i'm i'm really glad that that teachers came out and spoke teachers don't often come and speak at our meetings and when they do um it's significant it's noteworthy i acknowledge them for doing that and i wouldn't want to limit that because it wasn't on our agenda tonight that said um there's something in the polk county policy too that i would like us to adopt some version of at

165some time when we have more discussion which is the presiding officer may one interrupt warn or terminate a participant statement when that statement is too lengthy personally directive abuse of obscene or irrelevant request an individual to leave the meeting when that person does not observe reasonable deporum et cetera et cetera i won't go through all of it um i appreciate the passion with which people speak um i also appreciate that that uh it is hard to to have certain things sort of thrown at us with a lack of respect with a lack of decorum with anger with bitterness with vitriol um and it's our job to sit here and take it and i will never respond in kind to anybody that way up here but i do think that it is appropriate of us to

166have rules about that and i think it's worth talking about how we do that can you can you uh maybe uh mrs poiseller when nancy gets back circulate a copy of that i did you already got it did i get it you did i'll send it again if you like i probably it was sent to you on friday april 9th at 12 55 p.m okay but i'm happy to send it again if you'd like by the way there's another i think it's is it orange county that has a different citizen input do you know mr gresta yes orange school board also has a different structure for its public comment that was one the fsba told me about too so that might be one we want to look at if you know of any other besides

167orange county it would be useful to see you know we could maybe cherry-pick some some things as dr schiff says it would really enhance ours although i have to admit when i saw tonight the number of of citizen requests to speak it actually went pretty quickly and it was informative as um as dr schiff just so i'm i'm not necessarily advocating that that we'd limit citizen input because i do think that that they have it all right the question is is there a way to tweak it around the edges that for the exception not the rule that we would have a policy to fall back on i just want to add one thing that i said at the workshop earlier and i never say it right dr moore but making sure that our staff resources

168don't dwindle because ever everything that we're asking to do so we have to have a balance here obviously listening to our citizens respecting our staff and their time and um moving forward with the mission of the district and um absolutely we don't have enough staff as it is so we're going to definitely honor their time anybody else want to add to this discussion item if not the next discussion item is you mrs rosario which is masks is it something new i put this on the agenda for discussion a a while ago long before the action item was on here so there there is nothing further to discuss i'm sorry except look at the earlier discussion how do you know it was on there before the action item i'm curious because the agenda wasn't even created

169when i sent it into nancy that's why there was nothing on there except my mask thing okay the agenda wasn't created and so she said i will put it on this is a really good evidence to the public that we don't speak to each other not at all all right there's another discussion item which which is you mrs rosario again on micro credentialing yes so um i uh was aware of um recently made aware let me pull it up here so i know what i'm talking about i was recently made aware of a what we i don't know board members if you recall oh sugar if you recall a while ago dr moore mentioned that we were we as a district were going through a micro credentialing process and so it was made aware to

170me what um what that was and so uh i requested access to part of whatever the micro credentialing has become or is in the process within our school district i have i have some concerns over it and and i brought it to dr moore's uh attention and i'm grateful for him and his team looking into it um the first there are several modules within uh the micro credentialing process the first one being courageous conversations but not moving forward because it's a 60 hour credentialing process still as i was researching what micro credentialing was in my mind the first thing that i thought of was a way to i guess something with regard to onboarding is just my initial thoughts um a a way of onboarding someone and making sure that we are hiring the best

171qualified candidates um in terms of maybe licensing or certification or expertise areas of expertise so that's really what i was thinking of what i've come to realize is that micro credentialing is something that is really i guess the the the up and um mini courses i i suppose i can say it like that they're like many courses created personalized and flexible for educators um and many of them should be performance-based so that teachers have an opportunity to really fine-tune their their craft and so that they can without actually going to a college or to a university to take a college course they can do it through a micro credentialing course it's actually pretty interesting i'm i'm very interested in it to be honest with you so in talking with dr moore and um with mr

172meyer um i suppose at this point i would just ask i wanted the board members i put it on as a discussion session because i'm not so sure that you all are aware of what that was when dr moore mentioned it i just assumed that it was what i thought it was and it really it it wasn't so i put it on here so that we're all aware of that and i would like to ask dr moore if you could um put together a presentation for us so that we know a little bit better of what that is it's really part of professional development um and i'll just hand it over to to you thank you thank you mr rosario and we will put that together that presentation you're right it is being flexible and

173nimble um as educators how they receive information while the same time giving them credentials so very very being very specific to individual needs and then combining themes or topics uh over the course of extended amount of time really to continue to grow them so this is something that we will continue to explore looking forward to bringing a presentation to the board on how we're really going to take you know long-term professional development and really break it down into small chunks that are very specific in terms of the course of time very specific to the reality in which individual educators live so they can design their own path and choose which professional developments they have so flexibility at the school site flexibility at the district rate um so looking forward to bringing that presentation with what

174we're currently doing uh how it's being implemented as well as other opportunities to be more flexible and nimble around professional development thank you um and i just want i'm going to open it up to board members um input on this but some of the areas for obvious reasons that i think would be really fantastic for us letting dr moore know of course or opportunities for these micro-credentialing mini-courses really around some of the areas that you mentioned this morning and i wrote many of them down even through our discussion academic reading proficiency ap and advanced course offerings how can teachers and and school staff actually provide opportunities for students in these areas opportunities for access to scheduling uh or specific scheduling coursework scheduling academic academies after school clubs and activities and there's so many different ways

175to to provide it teacher subject area specific mastery small learning communities common planning obviously around equity and of course treasure coast technical college and college and career readiness opportunities so there are so many ways that we can actually focus and i'd love to see us focus and create micro credentialing in these areas because they rightly align with our strategic plan and where we want to go absolutely and really combining the needs so one of the things that miss basura is leading this work is how we define our school you know we're recreating our school improvement plans and one of the processes that we'll go through in that is for schools to identify which strategies they're going to be using and we'll have the ability because it's our own plan to define which schools are looking

176at what specific strategies and then us as a district we now know exactly what our teachers and principals are saying that we need so it becomes this bottom-up approach versus this top-down approach really really having the opportunity to listen to what our teachers want to develop them inside their classrooms uh and then we turn it over to the rest of mr meyer's team to create development around the specific deed in which teachers are asking and do it in a very nimble way so looking forward to bringing that presentation anything further all right that uh concludes discussion items and uh we go to school board member matters i didn't forget mrs berman no you didn't i didn't want to get in the wrong side of does anyone have any i do mrs barrenburg is that okay

177um i'm not sure if board members got this because i don't send the emails directly to you i ask um this week i asked peggy to send you one about matthew mcgarry a student at vero beach high school did you all receive an email matthew mcgeary is the son of only child of sherry mcgarry i did not get it but i know the story not from you but yeah um there's an email i asked peggy to forward it to you about that there is an opportunity for anyone to donate towards a scholarship for him this young man lost his father on april fool's day only child his mom died of covid in the district in january so there is a way to give money towards a scholarship fund for him and tony coons at vero

178beach high school is collecting that in the name of matthew mcgarry superintendent i afford it to you as well if you wouldn't mind getting that out to whoever you think would be willing to do something for this child he is a scholar at vero beach high school and he is pursuing a um computers he wants a computer degree in something with computers at irsc so um that's an email that i forwarded to you guys about an opportunity to um help a student that you know is we have a lot of needy students but this is a child who has parent both parents have been deceased in the last two months now he's an only child without parents and he and his mother was one of our employees that died of cobid so i think that

179that's a really unique opportunity for us to support a young man and show him that we are best buy kids you recognize it pride of tribe terry remember yes yeah that's where i learned about his story and then did some more research about it why why why we not set up a gofundme i mean unfortunately i am aware of similar things yeah i think if we just if right now we're trying to do a scholarship for scholarship night which is april 28th so there is a time certain on this um that's why we went ahead and said you know tony coons of vero beach high school will accept any donations anybody wants to give after that you know if somebody wants to do a gofundme but i think right now we want to honor him

180at scholar night at his school and it would be wonderful if that young man was honored that way on scholar night can i um sorry i'm not at the mic i've been sitting in this chair for 11 hours now i gotta stand up um can we make sure not only that that we get that email i'm sure it's just it's been a busy week um also is it appropriate is that anything we can push out through social media through our own social media if not i would encourage all board members to push that out i don't know if it's something that that we can do as a district that may open a pandora's box um but here's here's the one caveat to that and i will say this um because i was given the permission

181to say it he he is a child with a disability i did mention that in the email because i think him being able to overcome that disability and become a scholar is amazing so i'm not quite sure if people want that way out but i was given permission to give that out to um employees board members and things like that um can i go on with my members matter or do you want no i i just wanted to i don't know if it would be dr moore or someone else i mean have have has anyone thought to reach out to irsc irsc offers scholarships um during scholarship nights for and and multiple uh they have the ability to do full scholarship actually and they've done it before this might be one opportunity as well as

182meeting with them tomorrow so i i i can address that um as well as our ed foundation that's what our ed foundation is for right we have a need we reach out to them and we don't know what the need is so um my other items thank you board members for feeling the same way i did about this young man um you know we hear lots of stories about kids and what they're going through and it breaks your heart this one just tore me up and so um having the fact that his mom was an employee i think is why i brought the item on here um i attend uh the for the last two months i've attended nemours monthly webinars and i don't know if you've gotten that invite but i attended this last

183one was quite interesting as a matter of fact dr moore i didn't get a chance to talk to you about it but the expert on this one was really good it was about human trafficking and um the the the things to look for um the kind of the indicators for teachers and adults to look for on children that are being trafficked so i'll i'll get with you about maybe perhaps having that person um speak i i she was powerful so nemours has really good speakers and really good topics so that was a good one that i listened to i got to visit several schools this week and mostly because i went for assistant principals thank you which was nice to do i know that they really enjoyed their little bar of chocolate but it was

184nice that they got some sort of recognition and you know in front of the cafeteria kids it was cool so it was nice to be at oslo oslo um that's where i learned a lot about and matthew was at oslo because that's where his mom worked so um anyway it was nice to go to the schools i got to go to and i know i saw other board members at some of them scholar night at vero beach high school it was not only is it great to go to that event every year and it seems to be longer and longer and more and more kids which is a good thing but um what i noticed this year was the inclusiveness and i didn't see that before and i know you commented on it dr schiff2

185it was wonderful to see kids who may not be what you consider the scholars of this school they worked the hardest that they could do and get the grades that they needed to get in their in their classes to be able to be scholars and and the way they beamed and ran across the stage i thought that was awesome also i i attended with um i saw dr uh jones here as well at the unified track meet again another inclusive event that was wonderful and not just inclusive but it had um kids that were helping other kids that kind of like the inclusive inclusion dance kind of the same thing you know and it was really nice to see the partnership between kids that um may not be included all the time and kids that

186were track athletes all the time so that was nice uh superintendent student advisory council ended the year celebration several of us went to that and what i thought was unique about it first of all it took place which i haven't seen that before that we actually thank the kids who you've gotten to know and get advice from and be pelted with questions and suggestions and i thought they were awesome those kids are awesome um but i think what was great is that they actually got to see a review of what they asked for if it's been put into action or not and why and how it was put into action and i think that was the part that you know several kids commented on how nice that was that when we say something it's actually

187listened to and followed through with because um you know i commented somewhere else that you know i've been on on boards or groups and committees and it's just that we meet to me check box and and it wasn't you know something that was really your opinion was valued and i think the kids actually had their opinion valued so i appreciate that thank you for your staff for being there and doing that for the kids that's all i have dr jones thank you mr barefoot i was scheduled to attend the african-american student council meeting but they switched it to today and i couldn't be there but i have let mr morgan mr adams do i will be there in may very excited to see that group of students and i know be a new group and

188i said that's okay but they did a great job at the gyac spring event so i'm very much looking forward to that attended the faith-based community meeting with dr moore i thought that went very very well good good feedback the virtual career fair mr bass and ms hofer that was a lot of fun i was in for the first two sessions and i just loved the interaction with the students as terry said with the pride of the tribe you know kovitz made us come out of the box on some things and yes when you go outside you have to think about the weather but it was a great event watching the kids and mr ray hall students there was a lot of inclusion there which we saw at vero beach high school for the unified

189sports program and i had the privilege at the fhsa to bring that to our state tournaments and it was i'm going to tell you the best thing i ever was a part of um still working with mcam bold idea 4 with our after-school program and making sure we're aligning everything so that they are supported the district and some of the areas that um we need to work on this summer i'm anxious to go to the steam program at um that's right this saturday this saturday bikers against bullies friday at sebastian looking forward to that um and as terry said the student advisory was great i love the they kind of told you what you needed to know dr moore they were it was good and if anything anybody's not doing anything friday night i'm throwing

190out the first pitch at the baseball game at vero for teacher appreciation night and i do not have to get close to the plate on the fly though not the first bounce on the fly yeah yeah that's it thank you mrs rosario thank you um yes likewise i attended the pastors association uh and faith-based and community meeting last wednesday the student the superintendent student advisory luncheon that was pretty eye-opening for me because when dr moore shares with me in particular what's going on you know he kind of says we're doing this we're doing this we're doing that and you know we kind of move forward into what's on the agenda but i don't really ever get a true visual as to what that looks like i did not realize that his entire cabinet is involved

191in that student advisory i did not realize that they were doing all of the things in the presentation that they were actually doing um and so that was actually pretty interesting for me to learn um and and i was it was it was nice it was really really nice to see the involvement between the students and and and cabinet really um and the staff that were there um so i appreciate that and i would encourage you dr moore to share a little bit more of the details that are happening because sometimes even you know people mention that something's gone and i'm like what i didn't know that i'm so we're we're often so focused on just the meetings and the discussion sessions that um uh it would be nice to know some of these other

192details you're right uh looking forward to hearing you speak tomorrow at the taxpayers association luncheon and scholarship night is on thursday i don't know if that was mentioned for sebastian river high school i do have a question and i don't know who to probably dr moore the workforce housing committee meeting next week it is on an evening wednesday evening is that going to be aired are we able to join that uh via teams do we know or can we make arrangements for that please so it's it's a board committee i don't know that it's it's it's aired um but we can we can put it on teams i don't know that's that's not an issue i would love i would love to attend yeah i would love to i just can't physically be here but

193i can do it you know even if i can uh call in i would love to be able to hear okay yeah we'll follow up mrs houser that's not a problem okay um our fsba training today was actually um i know we didn't work completely on uh what our protocols will be but i know that we we did get a lot of conversation um uh going with regard to what those protocols might look like moving forward so i for the new board members just to let you know um terry myself and and and mara dr schiff we you know we this has been a topic of conversation for us since we were elected which is probably like two years now on getting something written down with regard to protocol for us so the more that

194it's delayed the more i'm like oh my god can we just get something written um but i'm i'm encouraged today incar i was encouraged today that we um i can see the light at the end of the tunnel so that's good and i do have an idea i wish kristen was here dr moore as we were offering the stars the awards today during the presentations the shining star awards it dawned on me not just now it dawns on me all the time how important our partnerships are right uh even with our faith-based uh community members and other other organizations that were a part of that meeting how important partnerships are to the lives of the students in our community because that's their purpose as well it is to impact the lives of children everywhere and

195today we heard of from a partnership with vero beach museum of art north county aquatic program was mentioned united way was mentioned steam fest was mentioned about saturday that we are partnering with and one that we have not mentioned yet on having an uh event earth day on saturday is the environmental learning center and we partner with them often we partner with so many and i thought that if we could add um another award once a month or however may at every meeting maybe once a month maybe um and call it the pop awards p.o.p uh meaning power of partnerships where you going with this because i was thinking it's so powerful there's power in partnerships and there's there's there is re and of course i i had this pop pop you know award um

196so maybe that could be something that we can consider offering an award once a month to a a local partnership that we are involved in mr bass is smiling and i'm almost afraid to ask is that not not a good idea no um so i i just thought i'd mention that because i thought it was a wonderful look i want to thank our partnerships dr schiff okay um it's been a long time since we last met so a lot has happened obviously but one of the things that nobody has yet mentioned since we last met is i want to acknowledge dr long for the equity in action day at gifford youth achievement center on march 17th and encourage you encourage your work in this area so thank you for that it was a it was

197a really interesting day um let's see uh the the student advisory council presentation was was really interesting the other day i mean it had food too which was great that really helped um but but but uh going off what some of my fellow board members have said for those of us who were there we got to see the presentation i'd actually it'll be redundant for some of us but i'd encourage a public presentation about that so that the public actually gets to see that as well and that you can highlight the outcomes of those initiatives so that we can really again publicly highlight how we're incorporating student voices so one of the things that we're doing in i think it's a june workshop is is a what we call product rollout or well call product

198rollout that is the unveiling of the 32 34 programs that we will be rolling out completely new aligned to our strategic plan um in that uh you'll continue to hear student voice also we are presenting that superintendence council that design that we created this year in hillsborough for the florida school board association so uh miss maddox and her team were there to capture it after you all left they interviewed students uh they got their feedback what went well how did it work um so we can bring that video here just in terms of to show the power the purpose of what student voice really can do and driving and informing a superintendent in a school board so on that line i'm consistent with that you know that um we've been having a lot of conversations

199about college and career readiness and i know you're rolling out a lot of new initiatives for next year but i'd like that also to be available in a public forum so parents are aware of it because i'm not sure everybody is aware of all of the things that are happening for next year around college prep and career readiness in ways that um have been really underserved in the past and that that we're really beginning to highlight next year not just for our seniors but building up through ninth and tenth and eleventh graders as well absolutely yeah so i and and i can't hear that presentation enough times quick enough um again along with outcomes and where it is and where we are in the progress of rolling everything out um vero beach high school scholars

200night as others have mentioned i want to follow up on mrs barenborg's comment about how inclusive it was um and what i learned that night is the reason that that's true is because it used to be and i i say this for the record it used to be we only acknowledged our top scholars in that night it was only like the top 10 the top the ib scholars the ap scholars so in this particular event it was specifically acknowledging anyone who had over a 3.75 gpa which allowed everyone to be included everyone who was achieving that within their own curriculum of study and that's why we saw so much more inclusiveness at that event which again i acknowledge was terrific um i participated i was at the fsba i'm a member of the fsba equity

201committee and we had a meeting on the 9th this past friday what was great about that and at my often what happens at those meetings is we have presentations and we have people who can come in and do the work and what i requested is that we use the time to actually talk with each other with other school board members about what are they doing what challenges are they facing what obstacles what's going on in their district we had an outstanding conversation about that as a result where i learned a lot from other school board members about what they're doing and i believe we will have a gathering at fsba for anybody who wants to join to participate in that conversation it will be an informal gathering if that happens i don't know for sure

202yet um because that schedule and agenda is already set so it may be a lunchtime meeting or a table set aside for that or something but i want to make y'all make everyone aware of that um on yesterday i think it was um i sat in on the central florida school boards coalition meeting which was all about upcoming legislation so i won't go into all of that now and to be honest it's way too much that i can keep track of without a lot of cliff notes there's a tremendous amount of education related legislation occurring right now i don't know if this is more than usual it seems to be it's yeah it seems so much more than it that is typically happening and it's a lot to keep track of so i know that

203we get emails about it we're on meetings about it but there are a lot of re uh bills in the going through the legislative process right now that are going to have considerable implications for how we do our work in the coming year so um that was an interesting meeting and and i admittedly a little hard to follow because there was so much of it um what did i forget the only other two things is i would encourage you um m can um dr jones you this you reminded me of this mcan is doing these vignettes yeah that they're putting up on social media um and they're interviewing community members and they're doing a terrific job they've been highlighting a lot of equity and diversity work they take a particular letter they did compassion c

204is for compassion d or i think it was compassion i might be wrong d was for um diversity they're doing a lot of these they're doing a puppet it's geared towards kids it's i encourage you to get on social media and look at some of that because they're doing a really nice job of them lastly i've been in some conversations um with deep palazzo who is the safe schools coordinator for equality florida talking a lot about what's happening in this district what's happening in other districts and i look forward to our being able are we're having more conversations about that in lgbtq awareness and rights for our students in our district um and the advocacy and work that we do in support of those students and that's it um i guess it's my turn um

205the only thing i will mention is that i had the privilege last week with uh chris cummings and sean o'keefe we interviewed 27 young women who had applied for the agnes people scholarship and they were amazing and the uh the total amount of money awarded was 000 now that's spread over four years there there were a few that got 10 000 which would be uh 2500 a year there were a few that got eight thousand and there was a few that got four thousand so divide those numbers by by four um and so uh eight of them were for from sebastian river so i get the privilege thursday night i guess to present those 16 from vero beach high school that's the 28th i think and then the charter high school had three and um

206it was really interesting to look at the academic the difference in the academic profiles of these kids a lot of them were right at the top of their class both on an unweighted and weighted basis but others were in the middle of the class and the ones that were in the middle of their class in many respects were the more interesting because they all had great stories and it's always fun to give away somebody else's money but at any rate and i know that uh mr fagan circulated a uh an email to all of you he started the process of seeing if there's not a better way to manage the funds that are in that trust as well as put to work the money that otherwise just sits there until it's spent and i have

207to say mrs esplin has done a marvelous job she's got a spreadsheet that keeps track of every dollar and make sure that you are in a position to have the money that you've committed to three or four years down the road so when we gave away 199 000 we had to be aware of how much in effect accounts payable we had for people that were already awarded scholarship and interestingly enough of the 16 vero beach high school girls two of them were already one was an indian river state college and the other was i think in university of central florida and for whatever reasons they didn't they weren't able to or they didn't complete their applications a year ago so they came back and they did a wonderful job and they're they're uh some somewhere

208in the mix one of the young women was one of ten and she was the middle child and to sit there and listen into her life experience of what it was like being the middle child of 10 kids i mean i can't imagine at any rate um if those if those were the meetings that that i get to go to i'd go to one at least two or three a week it was terrific so that's really all i have can i mention something about agnes people sure um bob sue said asked me questioned me about agnes peoples and who she was and you know i knew a little bit about what it was and then nancy sent me the um actual uh i'm not sure it's a will or whatever it was that i got

209the trust okay the trust and i read that and i thought i still don't know who this woman is so i went to the genealogy department of the library last week and i do some genealogy research every once in a while so i know her and i asked if she would be kind enough to do some research on this woman who gave a lot to vero beach and to girls and found out that she never lived here she was born in scotland and came to america met her pastor husband went back to scotland got married had a couple kids came back to america and one of her boys wound up settling in vero beach when he got married and one thing he'd always talked about was their her her love for education because back then

210women really didn't get the opportunity to go to college but she went to a school and got an education and just valued it tremendously and kept talking about how important it was and when the at t stock was left to her son and daughter-in-law her daughter-in-law myrtle is actually the one that decided to set up the trust and so they decided it was going to go to girls to further education in college so i just thought that was a fun fact that we should know because we talk about her every year and i always wonder who she was okay um so that concludes board members matter um any any closing words of wisdom from our illustrious superintendent uh why why thank you sir just excited about the the momentum that we're building um really beginning

211to take traction uh and we're gonna see some significant uh improvements as we move through the next 32 days this board is tasked with taking on challenging complex decisions that aren't going to make everybody happy but at the same time we've been able to really pull together as a system to move this work forward so excited about where we currently are and even more excited about where we'll be going and um looking forward to marrying off a daughter this weekend so that's going to be fun congratulations congratulations father of the bride that's right you got to go back a special thank you to mrs poissell for filling in so abele for nancy thank you thank you keep things moving everything is adjourned 919. mr feyden