School Board Business Meeting and Presentations 5_30 p.m. 2-28-22

001welcome it is the school board's meeting tonight however we are starting at 5 30 with our awards and presentations this is new to us so at six o'clock we will start the business meeting at 5 30 is when we're going to start doing awards and presentations since we love to celebrate what's happening in our schools so at this time i'd like to turn it over to dr moore thank you madam chair i do have the first presentation which is the sharing of information as a result of our partnership with the learning alliance now i've been here for 26 months and one of the things that we did upon my arrival is begin to look at partnerships and what was exciting to me is a community that truly understands the value and importance of public education

002and the learning alliance in a huge way has always been partners in our district and a number of meetings with them upon the the first few months that i was here we asked for more with as much as they gave we asked for more we wanted to ensure that we had instructional coaches in all of our elementary schools we wanted to ensure that we had k2 interventionist in all of our elementary schools we wanted to expand our summer school offering and we wanted to expand after school services and support all things that the learning alliance did and at that time they stepped up in a 1.3 million dollar way meaning they significantly took their budget and expanded it in order to partner with us to provide that level of support and service to our educators

003and teachers and they're once again stepping up to support our educators and ultimately our students the learning alliance has been around for going over 10 years and that work has always been about ensuring when students finish that third grade year they've hit the high mark of ninety percent of students scoring at level three or above and the power of that ninety percent of students scoring at level three changes lives and we want to do everything in our power in order to hit that number as quickly as possible we have been working in partnership for 10 years to hit that number but we don't want to wait another 10 years one of our nation's problems just not here in indian river county but across the nation is that of teacher retention and recruiting and retaining high

004quality high skilled educators and when an individual comes into the field of education who has had training they are two and a half more times likely to be to stay and be successful in comparison to those who have had no training two and a half times more likely to leave the profession after the first year so learning alliance uh once again is going to significantly enhance their investment in our children in working with us over the course of the next two years to create a moonshot academy a moonshot school where we'll be able to leverage their contributions to provide support to our students and really focus in on new teachers coming into our profession providing high levels of support over the course of the year to create a lab school in which we can take

005all educators across our county and ask them to come in and look and see what's taking place at this school we'll be able to provide what we call a principal coach someone 100 percent of their time available to coach and support principals we have that coach in supporting for teachers but let's do it for principles as well let's do it for system principles as well we often talk about data in our school district as being one of our super powers but if you don't have the ability to know how to maximize that data to drive and improve instruction you will not be as successful as you possibly could be so a data coach to help understand and use this data just not to understand but to inform instruction so we're very excited about creating a

006moonshot school over the next two years a significant contribution being provided by the learning alliance this will be a learning school this will be a hub that will determine where it will be located and we'll use it as a model across our district and ultimately across our nation on how to create a system that really provides the highest level of support for our educators and we're very excited that we can do this with the learning alliance i don't know if someone from the learning alliance wants to speak but i see megan back there liz back come on liz remington liz remington is coming to co-founder [Applause] thank you unprecedented public-private partnership that could only be accomplished through the incredible leadership of dr moore and the support of the people in this room so our goal

007is to be the literacy capital of the nation and to be a model and i think we are well on our way to do it so thank you thank you can put it in there and i'll turn it over to mrx for presentation number two good evening everyone and we are very excited to have our own special half hour before the business meeting now to recognize all of our students and staff and community members are doing awesome things in our district and we have just a few monthly initiatives that i want to mention february was black history month and it was also cte month now we have a very special video coming up about one of our black history month programs but first i'm going to talk a little bit about cte month cte month

008is career and technical education month in earning an industry certification that leads to post-secondary credit through career and technical education programs in indian river county schools can save families hundreds or even thousands of dollars in college tuition and fees we are very proud of the cte opportunities at veer beach high school sebastian river high school and treasure coast technical college now if i could please have miss felicia brown and dr robinson come to the podium and while they're walking up i'm going to explain why they are come on guys a few months ago it seemed like a few months ago miss brown emailed me and she said you know we've got this really outstanding program and could you um get us some publicity and i saw you came to the right person um and i

009heard about it and she was had all organized so easy to work with thank you so much but anyways she um was recognizing the african-american unsung heroes which was recognizing our black law enforcement officers who have made a difference here in our county and i'll let her say a few words about it hi everyone i'm a bit nervous so please forgive me so again again my name is felicia brown what the idea of this program um it was derived to me because i thought about a lot of my family members who are law enforcement officers and um one in well actually three in particular is that officers who actually passed away you know not in the line of duty one was in the line of duty but of course a lot of them were related

010to me and spent a lot of dedicated a lot of years in indianapolis county serving and protecting our community just like all officers do every single day and sometimes we tend to forget about those particular things and so black history month with it being black history month we do have to unlock just recognize not just black history but all history pertaining to our police officers and giving the respect that they deserve and i just wanted to recognize one of the one of the programs of just recognizing our african-american unsung heroes within our county and appreciate them by honoring all of the county you know police officers within our camp well indian river and to just basically talk about the historical figures so the first black police officer here in in river county was deputy dallas

011yates and he pretty much is on song because pertaining to some of the articles and new article news articles that were presented you know back in 2015 there hasn't been anything else pertaining to that and a lot of our kids have been talking about him and wanted to know the history of gifford want to know the history of vero beach and as a history teacher at the time during george floyd it was something that our students were curious about and wanted to know more information about so of course this kind of was out of my room and i wanted the community to come out and educate and so that was the purpose of the unsung heroes event but with the thanks of mr eric seymour and you know dr robinson you know and of course

012the school board members and the community it came out to be a success so i'm gonna let dr robinson have the floor to be able to speak [Laughter] i just like to say that it was a great event and opportunity for me myself to learn a lot of history not only about the unsung heroes but just the history of and some of the experience of all of our officers in indian river county whether black white hispanic whoever to how they go out each day and we want to just recognize each and every one of them and give them honor and respect and thank them for all that they do to keep us safe here and so it was a great opportunity and we're grateful that dr moore and the board members allowed us to have

013such an event and everyone from the community or the sheriff's office local police officers some were retired some were going into retirement they all came out and they all shared into this event and we just had a great time and i'm very grateful and honored for that thank you now before you sit down hold we have some don't come back come back and don't trip on that on your way back we have a certificate of appreciation for working so hard on this program thank you very much and for dr robinson [Applause] here we go [Applause] and now we have our video of the moments we captured from that amazing event [Music] today's event was the unsung heroes of indian river county african american law enforcement we are acknowledging all of our law enforcement of course

014but we are definitely acknowledging our african-american law enforcement who are not highly recognized in our county in this event we wanted to recognize the fallen heroes as well as recognizing all of the heroes in our event and just idolizing all of the african-american achievements within the departments i think it's great again you know just really honed in on the representation of everything you know showing kind of like where it all started to where it's at now going from not so great times whether you know sheriff yates or deputy yates was the first one he can only patrol certain areas when we arrest certain types of people to now you know the diversity comes in our opinions our decisions are valued they're taken seriously they're upheld to the same standards any other individual out here i

015think it's great that we're honoring that kind of seeing how hard it was back then to see how things are now and just being grateful for that change with the month of february being black history month what time is better than now and as indian river county school district as well as oslo middle school believe in always educating our student and being student-centered i think it is very important as i say oftentimes that sometimes people walk away one half of one side of the story and never have the whole story so by educating our students as well as our community we will get the whole totality of what african americans have played in our law enforcement and we want to honor not only our african-americans law enforcement officers but we also want to honor all

016of our law enforcement officers in this event my mission is to make sure that all students are educated from this event i want them to be able to look at it from a different perspective in law enforcement everyone decides to take an oath those officers white black hispanic asian they took an oath to serve our country to serve our community and that is an ultimate sacrifice we want students to really honor that part and how to make sure that you don't give up you keep going you keep pressing forward yes it is black history month but it's everyone's history we want to not only just acknowledge our black officers but we want to acknowledge all of our officers because all of our officers contribute to black history so after attending this event i just feel

017like it would bring a positive change to the way other kids in the community see police officers and other law enforcement and it would just bring a change to the way people think of police officers and see them in a new way [Music] i'm very excited because there are people in the department previous and past or some currently still there that has done a lot for the community and needs to be recognized so with this being said the in the african-american community let people know as well as kids know that there are african-american law enforcement officers out there and they're here for you so we really truly thank everyone who participated especially of course the school district of indian river county for giving us the opportunity to sponsor this event at this time so thank

018you so much [Music] [Applause] so thank you again and thank you to our officers who are here tonight serving it's always a pleasure to have you here thanks very much another district initiative was school counselor week this was we had national school counseling week it was the week of february 7th through the 11th to focus the nation's attention on the unique contribution of school counselors within u.s school systems national school counseling week sponsored by the american school counselors association highlights the tremendous impact school counselors can have in helping students achieve school success and plan for a career national school counseling week is always celebrated the first full week in february and the 2022 theme was school counseling better together our school celebrated school counseling by taking part in the 2022 national school counseling week photo

019challenge by taking pictures to recognize how they are better together and posting to the sdirc student services twitter account so thank you to all of our school counselors [Applause] okay we have a very special recognition for our teacher and employee of the year and before we play the amazing video i want to recognize mr sean conway and mr jason banks yep we had we had a sweep this year and uh vbe won both the teacher of the year and the employee of the year for the district congratulations and mr conway he disappointed me a little bit tonight because i thought they might be wearing their saturday night fever outfits but they didn't so they're just dressed you know normally which is boring but that's okay so we have a really awesome video for everyone [Music]

020[Applause] [Music] our employee of the year and that individual is from vero beach elementary school jason banks [Music] [Applause] at first i was like man did they just say my name and uh i was just overwhelmed like oh my gosh i did it you know and it was you know thanks to all the people that i worked with my coworkers for voting me for being an employee of the year and now the represent the district is going to be such a great honor we have a clean suite from vero beach elementary school sean conway being announced as the district teacher of the year was just so overwhelming and i'm so grateful and i'm humbled by it i know that all of us teachers we're we're in this together and i know that we all work

021really hard each and every day and this is a community that i really love to be a part of and and i'm so thankful that we get to do this together my favorite part about being a part of vero beach elementary is just the fact that we have this this tribe that we call ourselves we're a family together we love working together we we know that we have each other's backs even recently going through a hardship with my family and my dad being in the hospital it just showed me how much people care it's just a great thing that extends beyond just the four walls of our school jason and i are very excited to be able to to sweep tonight and and to do this together we even planned our outfits together um to

022be able to celebrate together as brothers and as co-workers and it's just such an exciting thing for all of us to celebrate tonight [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you thought i was kidding about the outfits but i wasn't they did not disappoint at the gala they had a lot of fun they made it they made the whole night even more fun dressing up in in those outfits so thank you and congratulations again to vbe and deshawn conway and jason banks [Applause] okay each month we select an organization in our county and this past year we have gone local with our organizations there's so many different ones here in our county that could use our support and last month we had gifford youth achievement center and we would like to present gifford youth achievement center with two

023hundred and forty two dollars and fifty cents and storm growth middle did raise the most money uh and 385.73 cents so congratulations storm grove miss bieber and i believe mr wolf fork is um miss perry here tonight are you here alone okay mr woolfork please come to the podium [Applause] we have this big fake check for you and you get to keep it this time yes you get to keep it and we'll give you real ones too so this is uh on behalf of all the students and teachers and staff members um at our district we're honored to be able to share this with you so [Applause] exactly i just want to take this opportunity to say thank you so very much we are not a stranger to the henryville county school district we've been

024hooked at the hip since 1996 when we first came up with the concept of the gifford youth achievement center with the acronym gyac giving youth a chance and that's what we're all about and that's what the school district is all about we are stronger together thank you so much appreciate you much all right a couple more presentations we have a brand new a student recognition initiative that we are bringing to the board meeting tonight for the first time it is called our student spotlight and tonight we would like to recognize two students from storm grove middle school and they did the plant the moon nasa challenge now the plant the moon challenge is a global science experiment and competition to see who can grow the best crops using leaner i can't even say it using

025lunar say it girls thank you participating students design and conduct their own plant growth experiments which are then evaluated by a team of subject matter experts now when i watched a video earlier today i honestly couldn't believe that we had students in this district i know we have some super talented students but this is like astronaut type stuff i mean they were amazing so we have a very cool video and after the video i will introduce you to these wonderful young women hi my name is gabriella hi my name is caitlin we are the stormgrove stingrays and we planted the moon [Music] our science teacher miss sleeper introduced this nasa competition with us and we entered it because we both love planting in space when we enter the nest competition nasa sent us lunar regolith

026which is like soil that is interpreted as what the soil on the moon is we were looking at studies and other stuff like that to see which crop would grow best so that we can like choose a crop and we chose quinoa quinoa can grow in poor conditions and high altitudes and that works really great with the moon because it's in high altitude and like the atmosphere of the moon is poor so and it has high minerals and vitamins included in it and you can eat it in different ways along with testing if they could grow in lunar regulus we our independent variable was if we put seeds on the plasma ball for different amount of times if that would affect their growth rate the seats that were on the plasma ball for one minute

027grew the tallest it took like about like three months and like we would stay most days after school to take care of them and like to water them we were just really happy that they were actually growing we saw that the one minute were actually like growing the tallest they came to like i think like 11 or 12 centimeters so we were actually like pretty happy to see that because we thought this would never work along with doing the nasa project we turned it into our school science fair project we won second place at the school science fair and then we went to regionals and we won first place the coolest thing about this project is that for plant the moon project for nasa we won first place for most innovative we were like so

028grateful it was like such a big reward because we spent three or four months on this it was like nice to get the recognition our projects showed that quinoa is able to grow on the moon and then that can lead to more crops going on the moon which can lead to possibly humans living on the moon next year we want to continue this project to see if like we can do it better and we can also add more trials with like longer amounts on the plasma ball to see if that helps it grow more or less or adding the plasma ball in different ways my name is gabriella my name is caitlin and we planted the moon i told you it was amazing i can't even cook quinoa and they're growing it in moon soil

029i think my last science experiment was something with corn muffins and baking powder so let's welcome these geniuses up here kaitlyn and gabriella [Applause] congratulations girls girls [Applause] we're looking forward to seeing what comes next all right last but not least we have our vero beach high school girls weight lifting team presentation now please help us congratulate the vero beach high school girls weightlifting team on winning the 2022 fhsaa state championships in the snatch on february congratulations so 14 girls on the vero beach girls weightlifting team traveled to port st john high school to compete and coaches brian seacrest and pete deluca coached their team to a victory in the individual event also in the traditional meet 12 of these girls competed and sarah eisworth finished first place avery teske finished fifth and ayanna harrington

030finished second in the respective weight classes overall the team finished 4th so congratulations ladies first of all i would like to thank the school board for uh recognizing us here tonight and uh also uh these girls worked very hard throughout the whole entire year i'm so proud of them coach seacrest and i are so proud of them and the parents are and i know the indian river county school board and community is all proud of these girls tonight thank you fun fact coach duluth was my pe coach in middle school thank you congratulations i know and that concludes our presentation six o'clock on the dot thank you [Applause] um explain explain [Music] it is 605. we're going to start the business meeting at this time um welcome everyone we are at uh the joe n

031islette junior teacher education center this is the meeting of the school board business meeting and it is february 28th and it is 605. we will begin our meeting now at this time we'd like to have everyone please rise for the pledge of allegiance yep join me of the united states of america and to the republic for which it is one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right face i'd like to give them a round of applause the pledge of allegiance was led by vero beach high school's air force junior rotc detachment 043 under the direction of wade e dews chief master sergeant retired and ussaf and dean rasdale retired major usaf thank you for your service okay at this point we're going to i'm going to ask for the adoption of

032the orders of the day board members is there anyone that wishes to move something from consent to action okay is mr barefoot on uh okay all right thank you teams i should say all right since there are no items moving from consent to action i'd like to call for a motion to accept the orders of the day so move second okay dr jones on the first and dr schiff on the second okay and uh any discussion yes not discussion i just wanted to have something to say okay no yes um i just wanted to um bring to everyone's attention if you haven't already known right now one of the items on the consent is the approval of the math instructional materials recommendation for 2022 adoption period right now this is not a vote for the

033actual curriculum this is just a recommendation dr moore if i say it wrong please correct me this is just a recommendation for several of the books that were currently under review we have yet to receive information from the doe as to which book curriculum items are approved by the doe so as for now we are basically in a waiting period we should approve a final curriculum on april 25th or at our april 25th meeting for final adoption at that time prior to that we should hear from the doe and obviously as soon as we hear from the doe we will let the public know what the final decisions were at that point for those of you who have concerns over the math curriculum or some of the issues with the math curriculum we want to

034thank you for providing your input there is still what we talked about at our last meeting and mr meyer confirmed if you still have any concerns over some of the curriculum that are there you are still free to email all board members mr meyer and of course dr moore and let us know of your concerns um so that as we move forward we can hear from the public on uh what that might be dr moore uh would you like to say add anything to that well said thank you okay i would actually like to add something to that i actually had a conversation with jacob oliva this morning who is the k-12 chancellor for education i asked him about um i if the committee is going to take concerns of citizens into understanding when they're

035because they have the ability to ask a publisher to change an item before it's printed once it's printed and we adopt it we don't have that right so um that's where it happens up at the state uh he asked me to resend an email that citizen had sent to me and i did that this morning from mrs meal and he accepted that and appreciated the the input so i wanted to let you know that that's still being discussed up there and they are looking at the concerns that citizens have okay with that being said anyone else yes ma'am um i think sometimes we're remiss that we don't acknowledge the donations we receive every month and i i would like to get in the habit of doing that please we had over 22 thousand dollars in

036donations this month um and i want to acknowledge sebastian little league the marx families the education foundation lashonda's companion care ays employee leasing in the beachland elementary pta thank you for your contributions we could not do all of this without you thank you dr jones i was good with the consent item okay at this time i'll ask for the vote all those in favor say aye aye aye anyone opposed all right it passes 4-0 all right so uh board board members we at our last workshop we had all agreed to the new change in our script and our in our um protocols so because of that there's a script bullet point that i'm going to read okay so that it can keep me on track and also all of us on the track of what

037we all agreed to so the first one says school board members are expected to model appropriate behavior including courtesy active listening and respect the second one says during board business meetings each school board member has a right to initially present on an item for up to 10 minutes tonight that doesn't happen because no one's presenting an item following the initial presentation the item each board member may initially comment on the topic for up to three minutes the discussion will continue in a round robin fashion until the discussion is complete the board chairperson asks for a vote or the board member or a board member calls the question without interrupting another board member in order to hold true to our protocols i've asked the school board attorney to keep time even for us the board it's

038too much to keep track of i guess for me the board chairperson retains the sole authority to call on board members to speak those were the items that we all agreed to okay all right at this time i'm going to ask for citizen input and with citizen input make sure that we understand the following guidelines and i need to read the guidelines for everyone's understanding each statement made by a member of the public shall be limited to three minutes in duration persons may will be recognized in the order in which the requests were received the time shall start when the speaker is at the podium and the school board attorney will be the official time keeper you will hear a beep at the end of your three minutes persons may speak up for up to

039three minutes at the beginning of the business meeting during citizen input as indicated on 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 a given item the time period may be extended by the presiding officer only the individual speaking submitting the speaker's form is allowed to address the board time may not be yielded to other speakers during the meeting please refrain from clapping or outbursts of any sort so that we may proceed with dignity and decorum by not infringing on anyone's individual first amendment rights i need to remind everyone to direct all comments to the chair not to the individual board members or to the superintendent board

040members may or may not address any citizen input statements at the end of the citizen and book comments as board members listen to citizens without interruption citizens are asked to give board members the same respect as per florida statute 1001.36 subsection 3 the presiding officer of any district school board may order the removal from a public meeting held by the district school board of any person interfering with the expedios or orderly process of such meeting provided such officers first issued a warning that continued interference with the orderly process of the meeting will result in removal with all that said we will start i will call one name and the person that is on deck and that is your microphone may i ask a question sure um this change in the time just occurred at our

041last uh workshop and it's my understanding that a lot of citizens are not aware even though they were it was posted a lot of citizens were not aware so i'm just worrying that we have so many citizens here and no one had a chance to actually submit their citizen input form on time unknowing of the new changes so i would like to ask board members i don't know what the process is but to give everybody an opportunity so that if they have any forms that were not submitted that they would be able to submit those forms so i'm going to ask the attorney for this since this is a legal question now i don't think it's a legal question i think it's a procedural question which is legal for us thank you chairwoman i would

042say that we have a policy that's been adopted so we should abide by our new policy and that there was notice of the new policy that it was adopted at a public meeting so that the all the notice requirements for adopting that policy have been made and for members of the public to please keep that in mind in the future in submitting their forms thank you okay so technically it is a policy correct not a procedure yes that is correct okay so what about those people who were standing outside who weren't able to get in who literally had their forms at the door and weren't allowed to hand them in because doors were closed by police when did that happen they we've had too many people in here i i watched it okay let me

043let me ask a question were they allowed to bring them into the lobby the the board adopted a new policy the policy dictated 5 45 was the starting time forms are not submitted inside of this room they're submitted outside of this room so there weren't a matter of being able to come in here you submit the forms outside in the window we all come in when we sign it so that shouldn't have been been an issue nobody was there that's what we're told that's what they're saying after 5 45. was someone was someone there at the window up up until 5 45 yes yes okay so we have a policy in place we are stating that we had somebody at the window at 5 45. where's the window that you're referring to reception area sarah

044sits in there um and 5 45 was the cut off time the staff follow the policy as it is i don't want staff question or their integrity question they did as the policy was written they remain there until 5 45 at which time implementing the policy it was it was implemented so if we could proceed i would appreciate it okay so here's what we're going to do i'm not going to take questions ma'am sorry um we have a policy in place um board members we have one board member that is concerned about this you know i'm concerned that people don't have the right to speak if they choose to speak a hard line is a hard line i want to support policy i want to support employees doing their job i understand people could be

045frustrated because they didn't know my only concern is whether or not they knew to get it to where they needed to be by 5 45 was that put in the new policy or the format i'm sorry that it was appropriately advertised okay so it was online it was on the door that they needed to submit them to where the receptionary by 5 45. okay i'm going to ask then that we're going to stick to the policy anyone that does not get to speak tonight if you would please put your concerns in writing and hand them to us i would appreciate it okay and then we will put them we can always bring those into the record correct so we can bring those into the record and share those with the board all right i am

046letting lots of people speak sir thank you okay so we're going to start with tammy bogart and on deck will be maureen weisberg excuse me whoever just said that that is your warning who said that thank you okay so i just like to know where is our police officer okay you got a couple thank you all right so we are going to we are going to be respectful of the speakers please and we're going to be respectful of this room thank you all right our first speaker thank you tammy bogart the florida good evening i've been a resident and a taxpayer of indian river county for 35 years and have two adult children who attended high school in vero beach i'm here this evening to implore you to please follow the law and keep the

047list of prohibited books off the shelves in our public schools until they can be reviewed by a qualified panel to determine if they are in compliance with state law since you as school board members are charged with abiding by florida state statutes i'm perplexed as to why so many seem to think this should be left up to the court of public opinion the state statutes are clear and while we don't have to agree with the law we are obligated to abide by them let me also remind you that it's clear and excuse me and succinctly communicated in florida's obscenity statute 847 that any adult who knowingly distributes obscene content to a minor on school property is guilty of committing a felony in the third degree as a taxpayer i'm disappointed that i have to come

048before you yet again to plead with you to follow the law your blatant disregard for the law and the governor's excuse me the governor's executive order regarding mandatory masking is now going to cost the district millions of dollars that's just irresponsible so i beg of you to please choose the correct course of action in this situation set the right example follow the law and act responsibly with the taxpayers money so as not to expose the school district or the taxpayers of indian river county to a costly unnecessary and avoidable lawsuits thank you thank you next speaker is maureen weisberg followed by arlene jameson good evening my name is maureen weisberg president of the local 3180 cwa to dr morin our esteemed school board members the folders you just received are newspaper articles from different school

049districts in florida who gave their support staff bonuses for their professional standards and moral ethics during coven 19. for example vieira florida the brevard school board is pleased to announce that all brevard public school employees will receive a one-time recognition payment port st lucie florida thousands of st lucie public school employees will receive one thousand dollar coven 19 disaster relief bonuses for all their employees today we continue to face the stress and issues of covet 19 with the employee shortages due to illness and the ever rising cost of living made worse due to the issues abroad and inflation we ask that you remember we were there when you needed us going out with no vaccine in sight operating through a complex and dangerous new normal as we decontaminated classrooms and bus food to hungry families

050in truly hazardous and unprecedented times our work which was deemed essential and was instrumental in allowing our students teachers and administration to return school in the safest way possible our service to the community of indian river county which we continue to provide for our students parents and co-workers it is with this in mind that we now ask that you be there for us by recognizing and compensating the contributions of your amazing support staff of indian river county the cwa has made a proposal for one thousand two hundred and fifty dollar bonuses for all the cwa employees we ask that you do what is right and support our request for the covet 19 bonuses for the support staff of indian river county as other counties have already done thank you have a nice evening thank you

051please no clapping please no clapping please no clapping thank you arlene jaminson is next michael c marsh is on deck hi um just some background i was an english literature major i always loved reading i loved words i was one of those kids who read 10 books a day every day in the summer and couldn't wait to go to the young adult section of my time town library i became a corporate speech writer an editor and was a former teacher and i just want to say that i can't imagine anything more important than the pursuit of knowledge and expanding these kids minds and broadening the horizons and i do agree that elementary school children should not be reading sexually explicit books but kids 12 and up should know what rape is should know that homosexuality

052does exist that the holocaust did occur and that racism and slavery were part of our past and to some degree we know that prejudice in many forms still does exist but i think we're on a slippery slope here if you've read animal farm 1984 fahrenheit 451 or studied nazi germany you know it's a short walk from banning to burning books and didn't a pastor in tennessee last year create a bonfire to burn harry potter books because they contain magic really when i taught fifth grade a million years ago the 10 year old kids in my class the boys would come in with playboy magazine in their pockets until they were confiscated and the topic of conversation was often which female teachers wore bras and which didn't ma'am that's what kids do and that was 50

053plus years ago which compares nothing to the porn that is so readily accessible today and the music lyrics that are out there but those kids turned out fine and the same way that i and my friends somehow got a dog-eared copy of lady chatterley's lover at age 13 and somehow we turned out okay the point is to ban books including nobel prize winners in literature is just another form of century and do we want to be like china or russia or north korea if parents want their children to read certain books or not why can't you just tell the librarians and the teachers to not allow it but i don't think you have any right to prevent other people's children especially high schoolers thank you ma'am your time oh no it wasn't morning i don't

054know whose beef it was but i heard the beef i'm sorry it said i had 22. yeah you get you get more time sorry i'm almost done go ahead um let's allow the teachers the librarians the curriculum people the board of ed to do their jobs and decide what is truly brilliant has literary merit or no redeeming qualities i mean of mice and men i just find that shocking and if that is not a i have one sentence go ahead thank you that's not a good enough solution maybe your child should be in parochial school or maybe you should homeschool them but i think our tax dollars should not go towards encouraging your limited viewpoints thank you very much thank you ma'am okay arlene jameson is is next i'm sorry michael marsh is next susan

055lovelace is on deck good evening michael c marsh president of team success and your mpo school district alternate i want to tell you about another great event for valentine's day unfortunately miss ida let's not here tonight but team success on valentine's day we had our tasty treat to transportation i want to thank all the board very much who helped with that i want to thank dunkin donuts you know we went out over 150 of those hard-working individuals at transportation and to see their faces as miss iolet is saying hey come here i mean and some of you were there thank you madam chair and it was just beautiful it was so nice to see how much miss islet is appreciated over at transportation and it was a joy for us it's on our calendar for

056every year to come also during that mental health week a team success went over to osceola magnet school and we took care of their mental health counselor brought a delicious lunch and then we went over to oslo middle school another wonderful school we started dr robinson tonight and uh we took care of those counselors as well now having said all that i i want to clear up a little disinformation about my charity i worked very hard over 954 meals were given out on thanksgiving day and it is disgusting to have to hear that we have to keep having this conversation about water for crying out loud when does it stop i am so sorry that we took in that expired water all seventy dollars of it but it must stop and if it doesn't stop

057well we'll send another cease and desist out to i guess a board member but it's really disgusting that people from the school district of indian river county who came out to help feed the homeless that they have to wonder and say can we team up with michael marsh and team success of course you can there's no more bullying here in the school district of indian river county and i'll make sure of it i promise that because i work very hard with our charity okay thousands of people on thanksgiving day needless to say all the other events that your school district staff is a part of wonderful men and women and we have to keep having a conversation about where's the water piecemail i'm not done yet you're done you're done because i'll keep coming and

058we can keep playing this game but you know what i'm so sorry that we took that water all seventy dollars how did it get there well it's none of no one's business how it got there because we could keep doing our research but i'm sick of it it's disgusting so once again i'm sorry that we took in the water the canned goods were collected thank you very much to communications the finance department who took in the most and we're going to give them that pizza party very soon but it shouldn't have to come this keep the politics out as non-profits we don't get into this disgusting political pandering okay it needs to stop i wear this shirt very proudly and many of you support my organization and some of you used to support the organization

059it needs to stop and then i'll stop i'm tired of coming but i will defend my charity every step of the way as far as books go that's going to be on the other part of the agenda you guys have a great night once again thank you and love you all right mix mr marsh thank you susan lovelace and on deck is maureen schlosser good evening dr moore members of the board hold on hold on hold on yeah we can't hear you mostly because of the rain oh all right good evening my name is susan lovelace and i retired in 2016 from 20 years of successfully teaching higher level english in indian river county's prestigious international baccalaureate program at sebastian river high school i taught works on banned and challenged book lists both at the

060high school and college level because at one time or another almost all titles that exemplify literary merit in an educated society have ended up on these lists what is literary merit it's a recognition that works are not only academically challenging and generate in-depth literary analysis but also serve as powerful tools for promoting critical thinking engaged discussion and the development of empathetic responses in students all great literature minds uncomfortable content racial and social injustice sexuality and gender issues poverty the atrocities of war post-colonial tensions books written by eliende and steinbeck morrison o'brien william shakespeare's plays and even the bible occupy spaces on various banned book lists i concur there are books that do not belong on any high school library shelves as the content is sensationalized offensive and has little literary merit unfortunately students can easily

061access truly disturbing content on their phones in the computers away from adult eyes and support at any time of the day or night it's far worse than what they are reading if indeed they are reading and that's a parental monitoring issue beyond school control what's more concerning is that so many of today's students rarely engage reading at a deep academic level they're attached to ocular centric world of quick answer effortless computer screens that are titillating and sadly addictive but that's another problem altogether the situation serves as a cautionary tale for the district to spend precious time and resources re reviewing numerous challenge books rather than addressing more compelling academic needs such as engaging students in proactive reading and writing is counterproductive organizing banned book drives is a clever guise for covering deeper often sinister political

062agendas ask hitler or the taliban or putin then read about the consequences of such societal oppression in challenged books such as orwell's 1984 hussley's brave new world and bradbury's fahrenheit 451. the ib learner profile describes a broad range of human capacities and responsibilities that go beyond academic success we need to strive to teach students how to be inquires knowledgeable thinkers communicators principled open-minded caring balanced and respectful citizens i've seen hundreds of students emerge from close studies abandoned challenged books exhibiting these positive attributes thank you appreciate it very much okay maureen saucers next ria mckenna is after that good evening my name is maureen schlosser and i am a citizen of indian river county the indian river county school district's motto is stronger together stronger together is the principle that guides our learning community it is

063a reason why we are all welcome here this evening stronger together is more than just words we see the results of being stronger together with efforts like the innovative preschool outreach program the partnership with the learning alliance and the efforts to engage learners parents and the community with advisory groups it's positive initiatives like these that need everyone's support to benefit our learning community indian river county school district is modeling what stronger together looks like when tasked with reviewing over 150 books the district worked together to find a solution mr meyer formed a collaborative team of school librarians and other experts together they followed a democratic process to review the books the team listened to concerns from the community they sought legal counsel they read each book and considered different points of view i can only

064imagine the toll this took on the team their families and the learning community but i am thankful that they embraced the process and stayed stronger together i am proud of their work in defending free thought and expression i'm grateful that the work will continue i'm thankful for the communication about the review process and the recommendations i look forward to addressing some points on the agenda and i know everyone here can agree that we appreciate having our voices heard let's stay stronger together as an entire community let's support the school librarians as they build a diverse and inclusive collection for our learners thank you thank you uh ria mckenna is next and on deck is cindy gibbs hi good evening thank you all for your time and your effort for our community i grew up hearing

065if you don't like it don't look at it so you know where where i lean all right i didn't i didn't grow up hearing if you don't like it burn it if you don't like it bury it if you don't like it get rid of it if you don't like it don't look all right knowledge is power that's an old one we all know that i hope it remains true when the written word is squelched impeded or hindered what happens to knowledge awareness understanding and enlightenment it is squelched and by banning books you are banning conversations dialogue is paramount to progress and humanity the elimination of these books will not eliminate the reality that is in them the world we live in is reality these books are reality these parents are removing themselves from their

066children's reality parents are the ultimate teacher i do not understand why these parents don't want to assist their child in understanding these issues the content in these books is not new pornography is not new lgbtq is not new race relations is not new pornography is evil it rewires a young person's brain the perception of intimacy becomes distorted to the nth degree if the adult is not there to interpret this exposure to pornography who will their friends creatures they meet online pornography will not disappear if the book is removed pornography sits in the palm of their hand it's called the cell phone what are the parents doing about that maybe these groups can't handle the sex talk that's on them it's not on the bookshelf lgbtq i i searched the internet i put in what great

067philosophers and thinkers were gay well i can still say the word right okay fascinating the first date documented was 2450 bc they were two egyptian overseers of manicurists in the royal palace see lgbtq is not new the refusal to see this community as reality is also not new some of the greatest minds then and now are from the lgbtq community are people still afraid it is an affliction and it could rub off personally i find this so ignorant we are in the 21st century and still cannot accept the fact that we are one race on one planet but by god we profess to love our neighbor i find the shame here in the fact these adults do not want to be available to help their children understand these issues when an individual tries to control

068thank you we appreciate your time it is because okay thank you okay that's fine we appreciate your time i can't wait for them to ban peanut butter thank you please let's be good examples for the students that may be watching cindy gibbs is next mary dulce is on deck good evening i find it really interesting that we're having a conversation tonight about books being removed from a library at the same time we're celebrating the re-emergence of the learning alliance partnership with our school district working with the learning alliance first hand watching children's lives be transformed by the increase in the literacy skills that they had in the classroom was just absolutely magical to watch the concept that we would have a group of people who are still angry about books that are just topics that

069they disagree with being removed from libraries in civilized society it's just mortifying one or two sentences doesn't make the whole book i do want to also celebrate though lots of other things i've seen lately and i did attend the cte celebration at storm grove middle school and it was unbelievably cool just the neatest thing ever both of my children were with me they were really inspired and i hope that lots of people went and got to see all of the good things that happen in this school district right now i'm really not surprised about how much violence there is in our schools because look at this room so if the adults in these kids lives can't speak to each other with civility and respect we need to work on our role modeling thank you for

070your time thank you miss gibbs mary dulce is next shayla edwards of zondeck mary dulce dulce sorry good evening everyone my name is mary dotsie i work for the school district of indian river county at sebastian river high i'm a lunch lady but i'm also the vp of food service for their local 3180 cwa i just want to give you a definition of support staff support is a thing that bears the weight or something that keeps things upright i have worked for food service for four years i have been in the middle of the covid i have my letters that i was an essential employee i got letters from ms zork or our commissioner at one time and we have been entirely seen working feeding children that and families that were no way of getting

071out of their homes and we were on lockdown as with transportation as with other co-workers we are loading up coolers going out to places in fellsmere i didn't even know existed and families were coming out like oh my gosh the calvary has arrived we are the support staff i have been working for tirelessly since the whole beginning of pandemic i have not taken any time off i can't afford to we got a generous four percent raise that was blown out of the water by the cost of insurance went up inflation is at 7.5 i am currently a single mom raising two teenagers i make less than 250 a week i work 25 hours i also have two other jobs to keep a roof over our head when i go to the grocery store with two

072teenagers doesn't go very far if anybody knows what the cost of living is i wouldn't trade it for the world my seniors my juniors my sophomores my freshman at my high school i can't wait to see what i have to say i have posters behind me encouraging them to do their best i give them elbow bumps shoulder bumps fist pumps i want them to know that i care they take another apple go get another apple you're hungry i know because the transportation is bringing them to school that's our support staff the custodians are taking care of them by cleaning up the classrooms food service is feeding them teachers assistants are filling in when teachers aren't there i.t department is making sure they have computers if i lost anybody i'm sorry but the sea of red

073those are my staff and i stick by them we have worked so hard to get any type of recognition yeah the teachers are amazing i love my teachers i have a senior here my daughter's a senior she's a b honor roll i get nothing problems from her her friends come to my house because i have the cool house that's why i don't have any groceries but i wouldn't trade it for the world because you know what she also reads the banned books if i were to tell her don't read that don't do that jess don't i also have a daughter who graduated went to college if i were to tell them don't read they would like are you kidding let's go find it on the internet right now thank you for your time thank you

074okay shayla edwards is next ryan blade is on deck [Music] good evening my name is shayla edwards and i am a gifford native community member and a parent of a future student that will that will be attending school at the freshman learning center my concern is based on the fighting and disruptive incidents that have occurred on that campus this past academic year particularly the brawl that took place on february 16th it's a disgrace super scary for parents but also very triggering as these incidents were also my middle and high school experiences this troubling trend didn't start this year and will continue which is the scariest part we are better than this you all have made it a mission to transform education to inspire and empower all students to maximize their full potential emphasis on all

075the students that were involved in this incident will be transformed in traumatic ways graduating from your school district with permanent metal bracelets and systemic societal disadvantage it doesn't have to be this way your educators are culturally unresponsive exhausted and are walking away from jobs that they truly love yes it is the parents job and responsibility to parent their child but what if those parents or you or your educators don't know how it is imperative that a trauma-informed approach be implemented in order to turn the school to prison pipeline off mental health is a very real thing and i ask that it be placed on your hearts and your agenda to address in these learning environments thank you ryan blade is next christy bell is on deck good evening everyone my name is ryan blade i'm

076the owner and founder of indian river news one of the up news outlets here in new york county i would like to recommend this school board table 12a and schedule a special meeting in the next week or two this way everybody can speak not everybody was made aware of the new address i did not see anything in smash and daily nothing in tc palm nothing in viral news nothing in hometown news those are the four local outlets here in this county rhett palmer didn't know about he's local radio hosts and bob sues i don't know if the superintendent goes on there if you mention anything to mr seuss i don't know and i don't know how wide either the relationship is and writes a bit more of a i want to say an international show

077so with that all said i would really like to ask you guys do that scheduled special meeting starbreak and speak schedule out for about a week or two i know you guys got some schedule with the attorney which i understand that see if there's a way you can work around that i think that would be the best solution for this because i got piles of people over there that want to speak which include this county's rec vice chairman the mom's liberty chairman of vice chairman the host of tgi now which is a podcast that i actually went on recently it's starting to get very known around here president of sebastian warriors which is a support group they do a lot of sign waving so i got a lot of people like that in this room

078the other thing i'll mention as well is if you don't let the parents speak to read the excerpts they were going to read tonight if they had you know gotten their forms on time i will personally live stream i'll make a channel on rumble i will personally live stream the parents and citizens reading the materials if you guys are not allowed in here furthermore if these books cannot be read aloud here in this in any of the meetings by the citizens and the parents why are these books allowed in the libraries that the parents can't even read it in here that's just something perhaps that i'd like to think about a lot of that group over there that's the sentiment they hold i've even found concerning myself i'll also say that this just follow the

079city's fashion i don't know if things are different because i know some different regulations for school boards but when i have spoken at a city of sebastian meeting they only ask you to state your name on the microphone and just state your address they don't have a fill out form or anything like that i would really think that maybe you guys might want to look at something for say if people come in late i understand want to be punctual and dock things which i applaud you guys for following policy i really do that might be something you might want to look at because they just you know say if you want to come speak to them just stand up and go ahead and talk and the most they ever had was when damian gilliams and

080company were on smash city council they had people going out the door none of them ever filled out a form they just went in and they spoke so that's something that i would definitely look at to keep in mind for this thank you oh and the other thing before i go actually i just thought of this definitely next time if you make a change like that notice not just me but to all the news outlets and i intend to cover as much of the school board boards including the superintendent's workshops i really don't know if that gets a lot of viewership let alone people go on to website actually check that unless somebody told them hey go take a look at this so i would recommend notifying myself and the other news outlets i mentioned

081here today about this maybe you mentioned this on mr sue's radio show if there's any changes like this that occur in the future thank you very much thank you mr blade christy bell is next dr karen hill says after that tonight i'm not nervous because i'm not talking about anything controversial um i watched the workshop this week or last week whenever it was and there was a comment made during the workshop that i wanted to publicly address i'm the treasurer of team success which as you know it's a small non-profit clear back at thanksgiving we did feed the 900 families and we used many volunteers we cooked a hot traditional thanksgiving meal and we were allowed to have boxes at school in order to just get cans cans of cranberry sauce cans of vegetables i

082wanted to make it clear those donations were items donated by individuals not by the school district i wanted to state it publicly because i saw it on the workshop that it was discussed as the hundreds of items donated by the district that's not what happened we had the boxes at the schools people put things a dollar here two dollars there but that coming together allowed us to feed 900 people it allowed us to cook and actually give a hot meal to homeless people to homeless families to fam indigent families to families who had had tragedy and illness just recently they were able to get that because we worked together as a community it wasn't anything more than just boxes at schools so thank you for letting me kind of clear that i don't know if

083that does clear it up but i wanted to make sure that you know it was just teachers making little donations and then because i still have a whole minute left on the books i understand i read all of what was done read all of the red notes all of that kind of stuff it looks great to me the new process seems wonderful thank you so much for spending that huge huge amount of time i understand some people don't like the books so be it that happens there are books i don't like also but i like the new process and did want to publicly say thank you for making that new process more clear and perhaps giving the opportunity i think it said that maybe the new process is going to allow people to actually say

084what books their kids can't read i know you can't answer back but whatever the case i love the new process i think it's great and i really like to have lots of books on the bookshelves okay that's all thank you so much thank you dr karen hiltz is next susan meal is on deck good evening i'm dr karen hiltz and i'm a resident of sebastian so where to begin let's begin by stating that schools are not the parent and therefore should not be pushing ideological content on any child the school is responsible for ensuring ensuring children learn the basics of reading writing and arithmetic period social and emotional aspects of building a child's character is for the parents to direct instruct and mold there have been a range of concerns expressed in issues discussed over

085the past couple of years to say the least i pray parents don't lose heart and succumb to the system as the authority parents need to be supported by all of us concerns we've talked about our curriculum and what that includes what curriculum to adopt moving forward we've identified critical race theory social emotional learning racism and other isms and now we find ourselves in the middle of a debate on what is pornography i find this incredible because even though i don't personally view pornography i assure you i do know it when i see it but let's consider florida statute crimes and chapter 847 obscenity as it has much to say and i believe it seems to be quite clear however i'll only focus on one definition tonight in the essence of time number 10 is obscene

086means the status of material which the average person applying contemporary community standards would find taken as a whole appeals to be pruient which i had to look that one up interest which prove it means arousing or appealing to sexual desire depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct as specifically defined herein and taken as a whole lacks serious literacy artistic political or scientific value i would argue this definition out of 20 definitions under that chapter does not reflect intelligence that is academic focused but provides an emotional feel-good focus as our elected officials you are expected to make tough decisions and this is your decision don't abdicate your responsibility all of this is conditioning children to have an emotional versus academic iq please think about what you're supporting and the impact your decision will

087have on the lives of children in our communities and one last point i believe instead of focusing on isms such as racism genderism socialism and vocalism we should be focusing on exceptionalism every child is exceptional please reminder we are a constitutional republic founded based on accomplishment by overcoming exceptional odds are we perfect no but we are one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you please [Applause] okay again please stop with the clapping ms neil you are next susan baldwin is on deck i just have to say i'm a little surprised um i came here to talk about um common sense and also the fact that there was a little outrage in me when i saw some of the materials in some of the books that are on that list i

088think some of you here and i know some of the people in this room agreed with that but when i hear people talking about these books like their award-winning documentaries that were written 40 years ago about something and it just is shocking to me because every thinking person that i know that sees the excerpts from these books is outraged and cannot believe they're in our libraries so i say children and young young teens exhibiting violent and inappropriate behavior while the education elite force adult themes and racially biased materials on them one would say what could go wrong why are adults in the room wondering why kids are acting out while we're having brawls we push one inappropriate behavior which seems to be anything goes in the sexual department but we don't want the rest we're

089concerned the kids are beating each other up but have no self-control but we're not outraged that disgusting pornographic materials are parading around in our libraries as valuable literature and and that's what's what's going on so i'm i'm irritated and i'm sorry about that but it's like we flew in from another planet where graphic oral sex depicted in pictures is fine i mean and the people that allowed it to come into the schools and into the libraries are now the ones that will decide if it should stay or it should go so um a book about 9 11. it's probably award winner by by the way uh standards of some people but is heavy in sexual gratuitous sex sexuality in the middle of it so you wonder why why is it there is this the only

090book we can find on 911 and you wonder there seems to be an issue about it being a first amendment issue i have to tell you my father flew b-17s over germany he did that to protect freedom and to protect our constitution and there is no doubt that if he were here today he would tell you this is not what he was protecting as a first amendment right and if there's anybody in this room who has a confusion about what the first amendment means and whether or not children and parents can go buy these books all they want just don't spend my money on it then that person is in the wrong position thank you thank you ms meal thank you please thank you susan baldwin is next dan corgan is after that i'm here

091too about the books and if i might i would just like to read a very short excerpt of one of them this on the list is one of six from one book it's the cleanest and it's the only one i really feel comfortable reading okay all right i would have done anything for him maybe that was my sickness we made love in nothing places and turned off the lights and turned the lights off it felt like crying we could not look at each other it always had to be from behind like that first time and i knew he wasn't thinking of me this is not healthy sexuality and this is not something our children should be exposed to we've been to a number of meetings about this this isn't about censorship it's not about uninterested

092parents enough already follow the law please stop trying to dance around it and just do what you are charged to do thank you thank you miss baldwin dan corgan is next donald baldwin is after that hi my name is dan corrigan i'm here to address the potential for the school board to allow books on critical race theory and pornography into our school libraries critical race theory is identity based marxism marxism is responsible for the deaths of almost 100 million people over the last century ibrahim kindy an author of some of these books and an expert on critical race theory at boston university says that in order to truly be anti-racist you also have to truly be anti-capitalist do we really want our kids thinking that marxism is good or necessary i'm a christian and i

093follow the teachings of jesus christ two of the most important things jesus taught us to do were to love and forgive others critical race theory is the opposite of love and forgiveness instead teaching kids to hate each other and their country books on pornography also have no place in our schools many people are addicted to porn and it is tearing families apart these days divorce is rampant if anyone thinks that spreading pornographic books throughout our schools is going to make children grow up and have more stable lasting marriages they are kidding themselves in a major way it will just cause more pain and suffering for many many people please do not allow books about critical race theory or pornography into our schools thank you for your attention to this matter thank you very much for

094your time thank you mr corgan donald baldwin is next stacy klim is on deck can you hear me donald baldwin i'm a taxpayer in the school district and i'm very upset about the us looking at the loss of 1.3 million dollars for a violation of state law the cdc is advisory it is not a law maker so when fauci says wear a mask it doesn't mean by law you have to wear a mask [Music] he decided at the beginning he said the mass will not do a thing for the virus or maybe very little but it was not a blogger he went and talked to democratic leaders in congress and then he turned around and said wear the mask the mask became a talisman to ward away the virus so [Music] we had problems with

095kids wearing masks a lot of them had masked mouse teeth rotting vision impaired psychological damage and i'd love to see what kind of anthropological studies come out in the future on the damage done to our kids but with this the school board went and violated the law to force these kids to wear a mask is a religion of buddhism that was forced on these kids [Music] and furthermore as a grandparent and a member of society i oppose polluting the minds of our children by placing books with sexual smut in racial hatred on the school library shells if you vote to break the law to put these books there then i hope you get handcuffed and taken to the jail on fourth street thank you sir no thank you stacy klim next speaker becky cook is

096on deck good evening i wanted to just come up and thank dr mr meyer and his staff and dr moore and a huge shout out to the librarians for working so hard on this book banning issue i really really like the policy of having the library book permission form in focus because it's my parental right to choose what my kids have access to when it comes to literacy and ike was going to come up here tonight and talk about this great book our class as a family and how much my son loves it because there's a little boy in a wheelchair in it and he thinks he looks like this really cute little boy which he does and i was going to talk about representation in our libraries but then i walked in and i

097saw all those really cute faces out in our in the yard about the faces campaign that tla is doing and i remembered sitting in this room a week ago with a bunch of leaders in this community and talking about how important literacy was and i started thinking about a little foster boy i had and how he came to us in second grade and he was on a kindergarten reading level and so right away i went to the school and we got him hooked up with services but i i wanted him to have a lot of book exposure because i really wanted him to understand how important books were so i took him to the library one saturday morning and he walked around and he looked at the books and he didn't touch any of them

098and i finally said don't you want to get any books and he looked at me and he said stacy i don't have any money he thought the library was a bookstore he had never been because he was never in a situation who would where someone would have taken with the library so we went to the library every saturday i got him a book bag and he would shove as many books as he could in there and he was always in the kids section but one day as i was roaming around and he was picking his books up i looked over and he was heading over to the adult book area and he went over to the biography section and i couldn't really see what he was doing but he grabbed this really thick book and

099he put it in his bag and he shoved it in there i didn't know what book it was so we went to check out and he pulls this book out and he hands it to the librarian and she looks at me and i look at the book and it was a biography of queen of elizabeth and she looked at me like is this okay and i kind of laughed and i you know shrugged my shoulders yeah so we got home and i didn't know why he had picked this book but as the week went on and we would look in the book and we would look at a page and look for words that he knew and do word identification i finally said you know why why did you pick this big book and his

100simple answer was because there's a princess on the front and i said well actually she's a queen that's just a story to remind us of why libraries are so important and why children should be able to pick what the books that they want just like we can because this is important to their identity development and whether it's a little boy in a wheelchair like my son or if it's some little boy wants to read a book about a queen let him but it's their choice and it's our choice as parents to let them pick the books that they want i want my parental rights enforced and i want to pick the books that they read thank you [Music] okay thank you miss klim uh becky cook is next um e sedun cernovsky is on deck

101good evening dr warren school board my name is becky cook and i am a support staff employee i came i come before you to ask you to consider giving support staff employees a bonus for all the work they have done at the schools during the pandemic the trauma that many employees have experienced during the past two years has been beyond challenging support staff employees are first responders for our school district we are the employees who transport feed care for the students keep our schools clean and safe covett has resulted in an economic fallout which has hit especially hard for support staff employees it has also hit employees health as many many employees and their families were infected with covet many suffered with severe symptoms and many are still suffering from long-haul covet symptoms there are

102support staff employees who are still dealing with the trauma of losing a family member or family friend we have heard about the support staff bonus money that other school districts around the country and in florida have received i've had many union members ask me if our school district is going to do something for us i told them i hope so and i truly hope you will during the 2019 2020 and 2020 and 2021 school years the months of august through february which is where we are currently the resignation rates were approximately and about 13 retired during that time period during this year's time period from august to february there have been 91 resignations and 26 retiree retired employees and there is currently 40 support staff jobs posted i don't know if this may be the

103response to the stress and financial difficulty that hourly wage workers are feeling here in their jobs i stand here before you tonight asking that you consider giving well-deserved bonuses to support staff employees thank you ms sironovsky sorry that's fine the floor is yours thank you and my name is sedun cernovsky and try to be in first grade and get that on the paper it's a lot of fun um i am a resident of engineering company um i'm also a pastor in this county and um i appreciate the tough tough job you guys have to do and i can't thank you enough for the volunteering to that service and we should all be encouraged that so many people have showed up for children both sides and i can't appreciate that enough because that really says there's

104something going on that we care about and i'm thankful for that and for my side of it i am leaning for that weight of you guys have a difficult choice to make of whether to remove or retain some books that when you do read them yeah they absolutely repulse me in certain senses but i don't know if that's a fair barometer of whether it should be retained for availability seeing that you have put other safeguards in place i am very cautious about removing things that i disagree with entirely from availability because there has to be an open discussion of those things age-appropriately of course but to remove them all together i'm very cautious there only because if explicit is the only reason to remove something my bible is next because that's the book i do

105love and there are explicit things in there of which i do not protect my children from but i do absolutely engage them with it and if this is what's deemed by the board of things to look at it looks like you guys took some time with this and i appreciate that so just want to say thank you to everyone who has come out is a good thing thank you thank you sir okay board members i'm going to take a five minute break okay thank you okay i'm going to ask the superintendent to please address the concern that we had that was brought up to us about the 545 start change from the six o'clock start that was noticed thank you madam chair and these would just be my comments following uh public hearing as i

106traditionally do we did post the advertisement on 218 and tc palm which is the practice that we've been following for approximately 10 years any individual who did submit a form and would like to speak i would encourage you to email your comments either to myself or the board so we have access to that information i think our board over the last several months has been very vigilant in creating not only their protocols but structures to hold itself to the highest level or highest standard in terms of how they function as the board because in my mind they are the most important board in this community the school board that is in service of children so as we stand true to those expectations the board collectively has i thank the board for following the process and

107really encourage anyone who wanted the opportunity to speak to communicate that information to me and the board so we at least have your your input i also want to address and acknowledge our cwa workers their leadership maureen and mike did submit a letter to me wednesday or thursday of last week requesting uh consideration for a bonus and payment i know we are scheduled to um review that information and have that conversation one of the things that we as a leadership team have strived to do is to be completely transparent build strong relationships uh and have open lines of communication with all of our employees and i can tell those who are still here you are in fact the backbone of the system and everything that was spoken in terms of the work that was done

108the effort that was provided the relationship with children i can say all of it is 100 percent on point and accurate and what you do in our schools on a daily basis should be acknowledged and celebrated all of the time uh all of the time and we do our best to to rub our nickels together to maximize uh those dollars to be in services of of those who stand in front of our children and those who stand behind in or in support roles as cwa knows we did initiate a four percent raise uh for this particular school year a two percent raise for next year and then in 23 24 a 1.25 percent raise which is a compounded raise of 7.25 percent over the course of three years um and i would love it to

109be you know tremendous amount of more because that is absolutely deserved so looking forward to engaging with cwa leadership as uh in respect to the information in which they they just submitted so those are my remarks based on public hearing madam chair okay i understand the desire to speak and we appreciate people coming out to speak we we feel that we have people that are very passionate about this topic obviously and we want to be able to i i'm a rule follower we're going to stick to a rule that was agreed upon by this board i understand people didn't weren't aware of that however it was properly noticed i am going to ask superintendent he has the forms of the people that didn't understand that at 5 45 is when we now accept forms and

110so from 5 45 to 6 he has those forms please put what you wanted to say in writing so that we can put it into the record we appreciate that thank you all right at this time board members i need approval for consent agenda i'll make a motion okay rosario i'm sorry dr schiff any discussion yes go ahead yes madam chair since we are not going to allow our citizens to speak or make adjustments to our policy which i understand it is our policy so we could agree um if we chose to do so um to allow for uh citizens to speak i think we are doing a disservice to our community by not allowing mrs rosario this is on consent agenda yes i know i'm leading there thank you very much um and i

111think it is um it is our job as elected officials um to hear the voices of our constituents on an item such as this one which is an action item before us with that said i'd like to make a motion that we table this item uh for our next business meeting that that's an action item so we'll have to do that when we go to action this is consent that we're on right now oh my goodness that's why yeah sorry that's why you're interested sorry sorry sorry sorry okay apologize all right with that could we have um a call for the vote for the consent aye mr barefoot welcome would you like to um weigh in on the consent agenda i have nothing to add i can't hear him do you agree nothing to add

112okay thumb up vote we need you to vote mr barefoot so explain it's hard to hear you what's the motion again exactly motion is for the approve the consent agenda items for what agenda what the consent agenda items what is the vote we are voting for the consent agenda items okay can somebody put it in the chat okay technical issues oh my god really is he really eating i can't hear or see anybody call us back do you need a minute all right as i understand it the vote is to approve the consent agenda is that correct that is correct thank you for whoever chatted that yes i vote to approve it okay so um with that the vote is 5-0 thank you all right we do not have any items that were pulled to

113consent the very first item on our action agenda is the only item on our action agenda we do have several speakers four speakers for this action item the item states that on november 16 2021 the school board members of school district of indian river county approved an action item directing the superintendent to conduct a full assessment of the district's school libraries and media centers the attached document summarizes the actions taken findings and recommendations that were yielded as part of the assessment conducted before yes before i call for the motion and before we have speakers i'd like to ask the superintendent to present the item yeah speakers okay speakers actually are going to be going first so the first speaker is maureen schlosser followed by michael marsh [Music] hello again my name is maureen schlosser and

114i'm a former school librarian i'm also an active member of the american association i'm going to stop you right now because i looked um the last time you approached you talked about books this is the item and you can only speak to the item once okay thank you all right thank you okay next mr marsh is next after that is greg [Music] thank you very much mike for liberty here guys the books are going back on the shelves hate to break it to you but uh the work was done the work was good work will continue to be good now let's talk about facts and not fan fiction how do we get here today well this is what happened any individual along with another board member started challenging books there was no parents no educators

115no staff no other administrators one person challenge the books now as i look out over here i see doctors but i see one board attorney i get my laws from attorneys you know so but that's what we did here we followed the florida state statute and some great things came about this but let's get more specific here after the challenge happened we came up with this great appendix age muy bueno and what i would like to see on that appendix h is going forward maybe electronic version of it because we don't want to just keep erasing poor mr meyers and they can't see this stuff you know maybe an electronic version i would just like to see that get at it but let's talk about some of these books some books too gay two black

116to brown um black history month is still today the black flamingo black lives matter black software hashtag black lives matter the black friend the black kids mexican white boy i was a little confused on that one uh rainbow boys black girl unlimited black enough this book is anti-racist i am not your perfect mexican sisters equal hermanas believe that sisters in spanish boy it's a girl what is black lives matter anti-racist baby where's tree remember the non-binary tree so that was those are some of the books and um i want to thank mr meyer's division i want to thank everyone that took the time but what saddens me is do we close libraries to meet with an individual because what the graver concern here is not the porn in the books have these books been checked

117out now that's the research i'm going to do because we changed the boogeyman that didn't exist right that's what we did so we're gonna do through public records we're gonna ask mr meyer's division when have these books ever been checked out because isn't that a bigger problem are these kids reading are they reading because most of these books haven't been checked out but let's talk about the good that came out of it we incorporate a library book permission form the committee was a consensus we're taking away five titles people we wasted all this manpower for five titles and guess what it did not violate the florida state statute after they asked the board attorney and it also did not contain the legal definition of pornography i don't get my law from the janitor i get

118it from the school board attorney so again we went through this rabbit hole of all these books many of them weren't even read by the petitioner any other individual which i don't know if it was a board member or a private person we don't know we're still researching you're going to get that through piecemeal guys but thank you to the division curriculum and institution i think that's what it's called thanks guys thank you green rainbow [Music] greg sims shrott semstrove [Laughter] i'm a citizen of indian river county i pastor a local church viral bible fellowship and i want to begin by saying what a privilege we have as a local church to support the students of our county through ann bieber the principal at the middle school here just next door storm grove we have

119a relationship there for the last two years we have given to the school over fifteen thousand dollars to be used as the administration of that school chooses to benefit the students of that school we care about the students of this county and we're thankful for the privilege of serving in that way i also as a pastor am called to be faithful to the gospel of jesus christ i don't represent this evening any sub group any political party anyone except what the scripture teaches me and what i see in scripture clearly is in the decalogue in the ten commandments one of the ten commandments is honor your father and your mother we are not to take that lightly and being a school board i can't imagine the weight the responsibility of the decisions that you make

120on a regular basis but i am imploring you to respect and honor the parents just as the children should that's how god created us i i will tell you that uh when i think of critical race theory and i've done my homework and research it is not born out of good science or good history it's actually born out of a resentment nothing good can come out of something that is processed through resentment and if you look at god and how he set up human society he actually put restraints for us to protect us to protect children one of the restraints is the conscience and if we ignore the conscience long enough it can become seared some don't even recognize their conscience any longer another restraint would be family and that's where parents come in and

121for children to respect their mom and dad and for mom and dad to have the responsibility they are the ones to choose what their children are receiving what their children are learning now i'm not talking about the basics of you know math and science and and history i'm talking about these matters of emotional change that kids will face we're talking about children who think concretely it's difficult for them to understand the abstract and when you look at the kinds of books that are now being presented at the library when we look at the parents and the pornography issues thank you sir we're putting a lot on our kids parents need that responsibility thank you appreciate it okay mara mcdaniel is our last speaker hi my name is mark mcdaniel and i'm a student here in

122indian river county i disagree with the removing of the books in our school library in 1982 the u.s supreme court ruled on the board of education versus pico that the first amendment includes the right to read library books of the students choosing while the school officials have great power of the contents of the speech of speech in schools that power is not absolute parents and other members of the community may not remove the books from the library shelves simply because they dislike the contents in those books the supreme court said about this case the government must be neutral in matters of religion theory doctrine and practice these concerned citizens must think that kids have such a weak mind that we are controlled by every single book that we read once i read the science of

123being rich i'm not a billionaire yet in the matters that it matters to have access to different perspectives different opinions diverse and critical views this is what education should be about and if you're not teaching us to think critically for ourselves then you are not teaching us at all thank you very much thank you for being strong enough to come speak please no thank you thank you we appreciate students especially coming forward and speaking i know that's tough all right so at this point i'm going to ask the superintendent to please present the item thank you madam chair i will be as brief as i possibly can in november this item came to the board and looking at a number of specific areas surrounding library and media centers the process in which we check out

124books and protections and systems and safeguards surrounding our libraries in addition to that we were in the midst of a process of reviewing a number of books 150 books that had came ultimately for review based on the content within those specific books so this is a hard and difficult conversation it is a complex conversation let me say first and foremost the school district of indian river county did not push away a decision the school district of indian river county didn't do as so many other districts did and said we're just gonna we're good we're following the law and we won't listen this district took on the bold and courageous opportunity to review the content of those specific books and we did it in a way because we really honestly believe that we are stronger together

125and as we engage in this conversation over the last several months and again tonight we will serve as role models those who watch us have this discourse or this conversation will look at our actions look at how we speak to one another and make decisions on how they should act or what is or is not appropriate behavior so as we go through this information i won't go over the totality of the item i think uh the item as presented it speaks for itself there are two governing policies 2520 the selection adoption of instructional materials as well as policy 9130 public complaints guiding the process in which we went through i can tell you right off the bat both of those processes as a team we need to review we need to be a little bit

126more specific and detailed as it relates to what those policies are how they intertwine with one another and that is work this district will engage in so as i go through this we we work with neola which is an organization that provides policies to most of the school systems here in the state of florida they are providing changes or recommending changes to this school board in the coming months there's also a number of things going on in tallahassee that may also impact these two policies so as we collect though that information from those two different entities we well review policy 9130 and 2520 and bring recommendations to this board uh to consider a more clear and aligned and specific policy that governs my work in terms of the daily operations as your superintendent i do

127want to highlight some of the changes one is that every single parent in this district starting tomorrow will have the opportunity to have their voice as a parent that choice will include whether their child has the opportunity to check out books or does not check out books that opportunity will include i will define or identify which books i do not want my children to read in a library it will provide an opportunity for parents to say i have no issues with my children reading books in our libraries we will also ensure when a book is in one specific level it doesn't move outside of that level so if i'm a middle school student i request through our system to read a high school book nope you got to have parental permission now let me be

128clear in my house david moore and jennifer moore as parents would access this opportunity there are books that are in on this list that we as parents would make a decision and say not ready for my one of my two daughters that's my parental right and i would encourage every single parent as we share out this information to access that right that's what i would do as a father and as a husband as the superintendent of schools i don't want to take that opinion or that opportunity away from any parent so the recommendation that i'm making tonight is to ensure that we do honor parental rights they do allow every single family to come together and have the conversation about when are our children going to be exposed to which information and allow us is

129the school system the opportunity to partner so as hard as the conversation is it's complex for me and it's complex for my family what i would do as a father is a little bit different than what i'm doing as a superintendent grounded in ensuring every single family has the opportunity to govern this the decisions in terms of what and when their children are being exposed to certain things this district went through a comprehensive exhaustive exhaustive process the refinings of that process is we are looking at the age-appropriateness of those books and this committee did find five books that they do not think are k-12 appropriate that was the findings there were four books that they found that says this book needs parental consent in order to be checked out there were 25 books that used

130to be available in middle schools that are no longer available in middle schools and only available in high schools some will say that's not enough but it's more than any other district did let me look at challenge material process some will say as you look at the process which was extensive we didn't follow the appropriate process this process when you look at it was extensive as a superintendent of schools i manage the daily operations of the school system and have procedural rights there are certain procedures once again provided by neola that are outdated when you look at this specific policy there is a procedure from 2011 not aligned to the policy that was re-issued in 2018. the policy was followed to the t we looked at it we were extensive the members of this committee

131yes they were all of the media specialists in this district district staff and mr meyer facilitated those conversations they are parents they are members of this community they attend our churches in our community the process ensured not only did we push out the books and ask them to review and read we went through a reader or a validating reader reliability so not only did we look at one we gave them opportunities to look at multiple and we came together they scored that information confidentially confidentially and then they went through a collaboration or a consolidation process where they looked at the outcomes of each specific book and normed on what that specific outcome was it is consistent it is legal the is solid as possibly could be it has been reviews for legal sufficiency and that

132is the item that we're bringing to you today um so with that madam chair i'd be happy to answer any questions that board members may have okay so board members first i'd like to call for a motion move approval okay dr jeff second second okay dr jones and we are now in discussion who would like to go first okay mrs rosario the floor is yours i haven't um and we're at three minutes just remember i have a question for the um attorney okay stop thank you um at what point it's my understanding that once you have the floor or the table once you have the item before you anyone can make a motion to table an item correct or does it have to happen at the beginning thank you to the chair yes when you

133are in discussion as you are now you could make a motion to table it would need a second and a vote like any other motion okay thank you um i would like to make a motion to table this item for the next board meeting please okay any any second okay hearing none the motion fails okay okay is there you still have time no that's okay i'll i just wanted to do that now i'll come back around at the end okay dr schiff sure um i don't have a lot to say on this i think everything that can possibly be said has been said i want to acknowledge and deeply appreciate the work of the media specialists the district staff and others who spent countless exhaustive hours on this task reviewing books and helping to set

134and determine appropriate policy moving forward the superintendent has alluded um to all of those in his uh recommendation i also appreciate the work of our legal counsel for her diligent review to ensure we act consistent with legal definitions and state standards so thank you for that the reason i support the recommendations of the superintendent presented tonight to honor parental rights and ensure that students have access to a variety of reading materials in schools i think this policy as recommended allows all parents to have an individual say in what they deem appropriate for their own children and families in the school setting by creating opt-out and review procedures for student instructional and other materials as the superintendent noted what i may choose for my child may be different than what i vote for as a school

135board member those are different responsibilities but i have the responsibility as a parent to preserve that right to choose from my child and nobody gets to take that away from me all parents have the individual right to determine what they feel is appropriate for their own children and for their own family and for that reason i support the superintendent's recommendation that's it okay thank you dr jones thank you to all of our speakers today um you spoke with passion you spoke with concern and i appreciate you coming out thank you to mr meyer in the committee a lot of hard work i know you met several times we had all the dates and so forth and i know this takes an enormous amount of time away from your duties especially as we are preparing for

136state testing i look at the number of books in our middle and high schools they range from 8 000 in one middle school to about 23 000 in our high schools when i looked at the list um looked at it carefully we had five not appropriate for k-12 and four with high school parent consent then obviously i looked very closely at the information that ms shattuck sent to us and reviewed the laws and policies relevant to instruction and library materials the one thing that i don't want to see and me we may have to talk about this a little bit more but i think dr moore answered it is we may get 10 more books to look at this week 15 the week after and so forth i want to make sure those books stay

137on the shelves and that if we start that parent request form tomorrow so the parents can realize maybe they want their child to read it maybe they don't but as long as the parents have that information i'm fine with that you know as a former middle school principal high school principal parent and grandparent i certainly understand what our media centers do for our students it is a safe haven for many students it is a safe haven sometimes for staff members just to go in and you know have a little time for themselves but i am very clear on the fact that i don't want to tell someone else what they cannot read that's up to the parent we have that form i think it will work very well and if we do go to that

138committee dr moore on the recommendations or we look at the books coming in and so forth we had some concerns about that i want to make sure that committee is very diverse you know when you take a look at the books on our list we had several dealing with race sexual orientation some with religion some with culture i want to make sure we have a representation parents students teachers media media specialists and so forth because we are a diverse community and we want to make sure that we represent everyone so i support the superintendent's recommendation thank you thank you dr um i'm sorry uh superintendent would like to say you you you ask some questions so um when it comes to reviewing or placing books on the shelf we anticipate additional books coming in we

139will be very vigilant in making sure families understand when a book is being challenged that it is being challenged so if school communities or parents want to say i'm going to in the midst of this review not much not allow my child to review that book then we do that so by putting the parental right in place and when a book is being challenged notifying and allowing parents to take that access if they so choose i believe is the right thing to do um you also mentioned um looking at the library spaces as a whole i neglected to mention one of the things that will be convening starting tomorrow will be the media specialist district leadership and students to look at our two high school spaces to re-envision what that particular space looks like and

140amidst all of the noise we cannot lose focus or sight on the fact that is a space that needs to prepare students to be successful in today's world and what you see in those two spaces is not going to do that so we need collaboration spaces we need times for students to come together and do research that will prepare them to meet the occupational or college rigor that is expected of them so we'll be bringing that information back to the board which is uh how we're going to use some of our carers dollars or esser funds to renovate those spaces uh to increase the opportunities for students truly to go in and participate in those particular spaces thank you okay so i believe it's my turn to actually get my three minutes is he there

141he's not there i'm here oh you are here okay do you mind if we see you i i don't control that i'm sorry i'm gonna be lost i i did somebody block him you couldn't you control that from there okay we can see you go ahead mr barefoot oh you can't see me fine well um i think that um both dr jones and dr schiff said it very well a lot of time and effort had put in to review all the book i think that the report that the superintendent gave gives parents the type of role they deserve at any time sure that to the acceptable that the book during library that are page approved the superintendent the f and other members of the community could put in the time get us whoever they are

142i support uh very much the doctor more as a recommendation okay thank you all right you ready start time okay thank you all right my turn so um i take this very seriously having been a teacher for many many years i stepped into the library as a librarian for a year i was not a librarian i stepped into that position for a year i understand fallet i understand what that system is like i also understand bulk buying and that makes me nervous so i went through this list very very very carefully and i not had the opportunity to read all the books i did read as many as i could as far as the younger books go because i know i can get through those quickly but i did look up every single title not

143in the follett system bless you but i looked it up in the system in our county library because i wanted to see another comparison and the county library does a category for each book they put them in a category and i asked today i had a meeting with mr meyer again and asked one of the books bless you that were that i looked up in the system over there that were not put on the list to remove or were not put on the list to have parent permission but yet said adult on them as a category i asked why were those books still being approved to put on a high school shelf versus being removed now unless i read that book from cover to cover i would not understand whether or not that was violating

144anything but when i asked the answer is that the age of the main character gives it that category so if the main character is an adult is going to be an adult book so i understand now why that had that character or that category in it i did discuss several books with them and got the feedback from the team there would be books again i agree with you there would be books as a parent that i probably would hesitate my own child getting out of the library when my kids were going through this school district i did not have that opportunity we did not have this transparency back then we didn't know what was in the library because falet didn't have that option for parents back then so given that i want to thank somebody

145that you have not thanked yet and that is mrs pippen i'd like to say thank you for bringing this to our attention because even though people may criticize someone for wanting to ban books which i don't believe that's what she's asking us to do i think that it's important that this has been brought to our attention we need to know what it is that parents are upset with because i'm a true believer in parent choice and parent permission and parents being involved with their children and so for that matter i'd just like to say thank you for bringing this forward um i have some follow-up and hopefully we'll come around to some follow-up here but i'm going to start in with the library permission forms the incorporation of the library permission form into the existing

146focus parent portal is a good idea in theory and initially when i heard it i was all on board but after giving it careful consideration it does not adequately address or remove the books that have nudity sexual content sexual conduct sexual battery bestiality sado mastochistic abuse and is harmful to minors or any matter that matter that is defined as in the statute 847.001 that would be explicit and detailed verbal descriptions and narrative accounts of the same as outlined in florida statute 847.012 all this is all this is doing the library permission forms all this is doing is giving parents the ability to give permission to their children to have access to unlawful material we are asking parents to participate in providing that which is which our statutes say may not be available and that is

147a quote if this library book permission form does not include the option of such material then i would gladly support it but as it stands right now what is being recommended is another violation of florida statute chapter 847. the current committee members were advised of one standard written in policy 9130 and that is quote the ideas which may have been unpopular or offensive to some and that instructional materials and library books should be quote taken as a whole these can be found in statute 847.012 however from these two lenses they were given directions to recommend or to not recommend some of these library books the idea uh the the language ideas which may have been unpopular or offensive to some is not written in statute the taken as a whole is but i would like

148to point out something that has not been made public and that is that the phrase taken as a whole only applies to the definition of what is harmful to minors and what is obscene it does not apply to the definition of nudity sexual matters sexual conduct sexual excitement masochism sadichism sadism abuse sexually oriented materials human simulation or specific sexual activities identified in part by the arousal of human genitals acts of human uh of sexual intercourse sodomy fellatio fondling or erotic touching mr rosario okay so we're we're on our second round now because we all agreed to this man madam chair i'd like to call the question i think we've had enormous conversation about this over months and months and workshops and workshops and meetings and meetings okay hold on i i would like to speak

149as well but we're following robert's rules she called the question do i have a second second okay so ms schiff has called the question dr ship sorry and dr jones has seconded it okay all those in favor say aye aye any opposed no no what did mr barefoot mr barefoot hi i okay i was hoping i'd have to be able to make another comment but i guess i can't okay so we've called the question so the question is now called now we vote on the item i'm correct okay all right so we're going to vote on the item at this point we have an item before us and let me re-read it approval of library books and media center on november 16 2021 the school board members of the school district of indian river county

150approved an action item directing the superintendent to conduct a full assessment of the district's school libraries and media centers the attached document summarizes the actions taken findings and recommendations that were yielded as part of the assessment conducted i will call for the vote all those in favor say aye aye aye any opposed opposed okay the motion passes four one wish i could make the other statements that i wanted to make um but i have to honor robert's rules i just wanted to make a comment that i'd like to thank mr meyer and the the committee also for all the hard work that they put in for being voluntold or to volunteer to do this hard work i'd like to also appreciate everybody's input on this at this point we are up to our superintendent's report

151uh thank you madam chair that um no report this evening i do want to mention at the request of our chair i will be bringing a presentation to our next workshop where we're talking through our progressive discipline our code of conduct things that we're doing in order to ensure that in our schools every single student walks in feels safe feels comfortable and knows that they're in a place in which uh they will be safe and learning can take place so we're looking forward to uh addressing that request that you brought madam chair as well as uh information that dr schiff shared around the mental health of our students so we'll bring that presentation looking forward to engaging in conversation because i know it's a priority uh to all of our board members um you're talking

152about the item i asked about um student discipline student discipline the say hold on a second we'll wait because we have people that are disrupting our meeting right now go ahead dr moore student discipline um specifically the fights at vero beach uh seeing um the flick what we're doing in response there's a number of things we as a staff have been doing uh in order to look at our code of conduct in order to ensure we're taking absolutely every step humanly possible to ensure students understand the consequences of their actions and the impact those actions may have on other students who are in the building while the same time being very intentional of organizing ourselves in a way to make sure students can be successful they understand what behaviors lead to success in the long

153term lifetime impact other decisions may have so that's the conversation we want to pull together and have with our board at our next workshop okay thank you sir uh we do not have any discussion items we had a speaker for the discussion item but we do not have a discussion item so we do not have another speaker school board member matters mr barefoot would you like to go first you want the board committee updates miss baron oh sorry thank you yes board committee updates my apologies hold on i need to find that got them okay so board updates hold on one second i am looking for i do know that there's a legislative update i'm looking to see where we have that we had some of that okay i'll just do it under board member

154matters update okay so we are up to uh who would like to go first i'll go first okay go ahead i only reporting on metropolitan organization i think since the last time i spoke to this is who meet they've also held two uh visioning workshops for the public uh the first workshop had a hundred people present the second workshop we're somewhere in the 60s a variety of top were discussed everything from the conditions of certain roads the bridges the issue for the bikers on and on and on uh the next meeting which uh is in uh in april there will probably be a vote taken but um people should be very impressed with process that the group undertaken to get input presidents from all parts of the county and i'm pretty confident that the long-term

155planning will come out in ship with the florida transportation authority will be well received uh that's really all that i can thank you okay um you also sit on city of vero beach planning zoning commission have they met they're going to meet this week last two meetings canceled but frankly there's virtually nothing that goes on there that would impact old brick a lot of it has to do with specific building codes as in vero beach okay um city of indian river shores planting in zoning you were also on that same thing it all revolves around variances around the all the building that's going on in the shores uh nothing that would be correctly irrelevant for the school okay thank you dr jones did you say you wanted to go next balesmere planning and zoning last

156two meetings were about building of smaller homes they talked quite a bit about sunshine law the recreational trail and the grant for the preserves walking trail and their new playground talking about 512 traffic and how parallel roads will help their impact fee credit long range transportation map and their riding club the economic development council has not met since before the holidays they will meet in march the last topic i remember was talking about the containers uh building those containers here that would be for smaller homes not smaller homes here but in the country so we're going to get an update on that value adjustment board i'm the backup on that but i did go about three times last year and the next meeting is april 6 and i will be attending that the executive roundtable

157i attended on friday and they would like you and dr moore there next time to talk about um okay don't go there kids for hope dad hope it's okay and um i said you have more information on that and they were talking a little bit about their funding but they're also talking about a survey they would like to do carrie lester from the drug abuse program ms behrenberg and the survey is called community that cares kind of bringing everybody together we used to do those surveys in the district with miss tardy and this is one they're hoping that we can do within the district so they'll be talking about that next time okay great thank you welcome dr schiff yeah the sebastian uh city of sebastian planning and zoning um meets some of the time

158doesn't have a lot of items come before it and rarely has anything that affects school board and uh school planning so there hasn't been anything on that that's affected us directly okay um and i think is that the only one you sit on okay um mr rosario um the only one that i uh went to last month was the executive roundtable this month i believe uh dr jones um was to sit on the executive round table and they talked about uh substance awareness at our last meeting so i don't know if that was a subsequent uh conversation at this one um that she just attended but the value adjustment board meeting is april 6th i already rsvp yeah yes yes ms said okay no i already rsvp to that so that's fine that's kind of

159why i wanted to have this like this so that we could discuss it because we can't so i appreciate that okay and that would be it and that's it okay so the ones i'm going to report on indian river county planning zoning commission has been busy last thursday i got to attend briefly the wonderful um what are we calling that a roundup or something of uh entrepreneurial symposium yeah symposium i got to go to the very introduction of that because i had to run to zonium planning because last thursday they had the visioning workshop the second round um those of you that don't know you might want to attend mpo has now got this so it's passed off to them and npo will be discussing this in the next meeting so mr barefoot get ready

160they're talking about opening up the western part of the county for growth and what is that going to look like i did bring up the question of how would schools be formed or land be saved for schools out there and also a bus depot you got to think about that as well yeah so if you think of anything else that we need to consider for uh if this possible expansion happens uh well and of course i mentioned workforce housing because i mentioned that everywhere i go so that was a concern of mine as well that was brought up and and many people on the board also brought that up so it wasn't just me uh treasure coast council of local governments met this last uh february i was up in tallahassee when that when they

161met i am the chair of that committee and i'd like to just personally thank um publicly thank uh vicky solay the ceo of treasure coast community health who was the speaker for that event and um very well received so uh this next meeting will take place this wednesday and we'll have a speaker talking to us about water so that that is what's coming up this week um there is a uh moonshot community action is on here so would anybody like to speak dr jones won't you speak to that one sure we had a meeting here with about 60 business partners and it was a to reinvigorate the faces campaign that was started 11 years ago actually we have a follow-up zoom meeting tomorrow on getting that out because several of the groups several of the

162people there said they would like to have one of those meetings where we put the poster with the children's faces all over the county and so hopefully we'll be getting that out and push that again as far as early learning literacy but it was really a good meeting and like i said this room was packed and a lot of elected officials and business partners united away from everybody so it was wonderful thank you also we had the central florida public school board coalition did anybody attend that okay just asking all right thanks we covered all those except for the last one which is the legislative liaison that's me um you asked for an update and uh tallahassee has been busy two of the i'm going to point out right away because two of the bills

163will be focusing on what we discussed tonight which is instructional materials and the difference between instructional materials and library books there is that question of is there a difference or not i did call jacob oliva this morning and spoke to him at 7 22 this morning i appreciate him taking my call that early he is the chancellor for k-12 education i asked him specifically whether or not the current statutes as they are now and the current policies in place now uh whether or not instructional materials includes library books if they do if and i i interpreted it and he interpreted and he said i was correct on this but i also checked with our attorney i interpreted as a book that's removed from the library by a teacher to use for instruction is now an

164instructional material okay so if that changes that is being debated up in tallahassee right now and so if that changes then we will see for uh further information coming down from tallahassee about that but i did check with him because i wanted to be sure there are a lot of people throwing this around telling us that they are attorneys and that they know more than our attorney does i'm going to tell you that that's what the chancellor of education told me this morning so i did ask him specifically that question all of the different items that i i put on here i gave you an update as of this morning however there were several subcommittees that met today and i know i believe the house is meeting tomorrow on the floor so a lot will

165happen this week as well there are several bills moving i put the moving bills on here there was one of concern that people had that's not moving and i put that on here to let you know it wasn't moving so anything on here if you got a chance to look at it that you had a question about or concern about is this these two documents that you left for us separate okay this one was the one on there's one that says school board legislative update as of 227 222 yes that's the one i'm referring to is that the one where you've noted what's i just saw these today yes what's moving what's not moving i put some stars on there for example education by house pk 12 appropriations subcommittee there were a couple of speakers

166that spoke to this one tonight that is the bill it's not a bill that is a addition to the budget for the pre-k 12 appropriations subcommittee it's a recommendation from that subcommittee to go to the house has to be agreed upon it will not be decided until signee die signee die is the term for the last day of legislation so this is the virtual school changes the funding for virtual djj programs digital classrooms and the punishing of the 12 school districts for past votes so that will be probably sorted out on the very last day of session is it i don't see on this sheet is it on these where is it that you know what's moving and what's not these are obvious all of these because they're on this page yes and i wrote

167exactly what's happening where they are as of today on here and anything that's not on here then is not moving not necessarily and these are the major ones that we've been referring to and talking about for the last three weeks i could go through the all the 175 of them but i really didn't have the time especially with reading books and going through everything that we went through this last two weeks so i did my best to as of yesterday this is what is happening in tallahassee as far as education goes um the other thing i told you is if you see a cs on here that's a committee substitute and that happens during committee meetings or hearings when they decide as a committee to make an amendment and vote on it and agree to

168it the other thing is sometimes it's just for technical reason a misspelling or something like that so just so you know that's why when people look at it and they go i don't see a difference between this bill and the cs bill it's because of possibly a technical error yes when i sat in on the legislative platform with fsba on friday they really talked a lot about assessment and a lot of discussion on the baseline year and they said that was going to still move forward you know what assessment will we be using there's still a concern with the number of times we're doing it so that's was a hot topic and also talked to someone about the parental rights bill today i attended the equality florida conference on zoom and they said they were

169looking at an amendment in the senate i don't know where that went today or if it did anything but that one they're looking at very closely all right so you mentioned those two i'll bring those up um hb 1193 and cssb 1048 which is 12 through k through 12 assessments um right now as of sunday it was added to the second reading calendar in the house okay so that means it's probably moving through the house and then um in the senate it's um a committee substitute by appropriations and it's the it's being read the first time okay so it is moving obviously that's a big um agenda item for both both chambers so that is moving but yeah we'll see what the final result is of that one also you mentioned cscs hb 1557 and

170sb 1834 parental rights in education that is the name of the bill it specifies parental rights for being notified when a change in student services or monitoring of mental emotional or physical health or well-being for a child while in school vote passed in the house and in senate appropriations committee now which means it hasn't gotten to the senate floor yet on that side so both houses have to agree in the final for a bill to become put on the governor's desk then it becomes law once he signs it any other questions there was a lot there is a lot going on as far as education goes up in tallahassee and it's fun to keep track of i will say that okay so those are our um committee reports and now we're to school board member

171matters who would like to go first i'll go okay mr rosario i attended the treasure coast uh builders association and they are having a build your future career expo on march 9th from 10 am to 1 pm at the united against poverty building on 27th street their really really asking for us to share this with our students with the entire community really and even with adults who may be interested in paid training so that they can find a job because i believe there are going to be careers or trades builders there electricians plumbing hvac concrete screen and installation and so much more where you know it's almost going to be like a job fair so if there is anyone who is interested and if we have any students of our own at um our in

172our vocational training programs it would be nice to share this with those students uh i'll give this dr moral just going to give this to you if that's okay so we can find a way to share that also the treasure coast builders association shared some concerns that they were not invited to sit on the workforce housing committee and i thought that that was pretty interesting um because that's what they do the treasure coast builders association um would like to sit on the workforce housing committee i thought we invited somebody from that no no yes the board established that position and it defined the individuals who would serve in those particular positions and keep in mind we did that almost a year and a half ago now yeah well they're just finding out about it now

173or sharing it now whatever i went they shared it's a valid concern and it would be something that i think worth us looking into with the with that organization um the next thing that i want to share is steam fast steam fest is coming up everyone knows that i am a huge proponent of steam fest put on by a very small homeschool co-op called vero beach academy they're amazing steam fest is a fantastic event held once a year at the ig center this year it is going to be i think april 12th i don't even have the date here i just have the flyer i don't have the date i'm going to pull it up the flyers doesn't have the date on it no this isn't the flyer this is like i just printed from

174their website is a saturday would it be the ninth it's a saturday no no i'll get it i'll get it while we while we look it up while i look it up um so they're gonna have events such as um drones or it's called drone zone planetarium experience 60 hands-on exhibits the vero beach museum of art is going to be there with a walk-through art project they are going to have the mad science show once again as they've had in their pr previous years they're going to have food obviously rhythm round which i think is something new some very specific events that parents can sign their kids up for such as art bots which is learning about robotics and creating their own moving robot out of found objects and motors which is so exciting force

175and motion string art and so many more so i definitely wanted to plug that experience for anyone who is interested tickets are now on sale at steamfest.com or indianriversteamfest.com sorry indianriversteamfest.com in the past our schools have participated this year so far we only have three schools dr moore do you have an update on that do we have more than three schools participating or is it just three schools through the chair we will fully participate as we have in in in past years is it's it's in april but we'll we'll make sure they're there okay so i highly recommend everybody go another event that was shared with um with me was one called treasure coast egg drop dot com um and uh it is entitled the extreme easter egg drop on saturday april 16th uh it

176is going to be interested interesting 50 000 eggs will be dropped by a helicopter from 10 am to 1 pm it's a free event food music games and more just want to share some wonderful events um doesn't say where it just says treasure coast egg drop dot com all over your eggs are gonna be falling from the sky and you don't know where um but it's it's really chicken little has come to life that's right yeah exactly um so guy is falling they are looking for um some participants if anybody is interested um so with that said that's it okay did you find out the date of i'm getting it now okay march 12th for what steam fest march 12th oh thank you coming right up okay um mr barefoot would you like to go

177next go ahead um we are at members member matters do you have anything you'd like to add no the only thing i could have mentioned earlier but the the uh entrepreneurship distance that was um that was organized by miss emerson and tom lang either it was i only wish there were more people here very speakers in the in the breakout room with horrific uh dr jones with their moore obviously um and uh miss fehrenberg was there well so that was hopefully that's of putting a real focus on entrepreneurial thought action and we can be a leader uh partnering with you as well as whatever that though it was it was a good first step that's really it okay thank you um dr schiff uh i don't have a lot because there were some great activities

178and unfortunately i had to miss most of them from cry but there was mcan there was um the entrepreneur night that mr barefoot just mentioned also there was the family fun day last saturday which i don't know if any of you made it to but if you did i'm gonna i'll leave it do you talk to him because most of these uh i've not been able to make lately i will say that um i've been active on the fsba equity committee uh which has been involved in creating a mission statement to uh go before membership perhaps at the june meeting the other thing about that is um they're also developing a question for the nominating committee to be able to ask to incoming leadership around equity issues which we know has been a big thing

179around fsba this past year to that end before we switched our meetings from tuesdays to mondays and i am on the nominating committee for fsba and that meets now on april 10th which is now one of our meeting days so i will not be available that day just letting you all know about that okay so but other uh and um it's senior season so for uh graduating seniors there's a ton of stuff to do so please check your canvas sites parents check the sites we're in the last throws of scholarship applications for seniors many of them have been missed but there are some that are still available and the schools are also putting out links to scholarships that are not district specific but are nationwide actually where you can link up to get assorted there's

180all kinds of scholarships i've been looking at a lot of them it's also time to get your cap and gown and i believe there will be a senior day soon for seniors to get all the information that they need please remember to bring that home to your parents because that's all the information about what parents also need to be prepared for so seniors we're excited for you and we're counting on you um and keep us posted that's it thank you dr jones again congratulations to girls weightlifting from vero beach and also girls basketball vero beach made it to the semifinals with the first year coach and i was going to go on saturday if they won but they didn't win but just so very proud of that team scholarships a lot of the local ones

181are still due march 15th i'm working with the wilson scholarship and putting that information out quite a bit to the ads and the counselors at the high schools i think i mentioned this last time but i attended the snowflake ball with the transition classes from both vero and sebastian and it was wonderful the family fun day dr kawi and safer it really was a lot of fun and i saw a lot of parents a lot of students you know different activities too one of the really good activities was with our sros and it was just for parents only to go in to see what their students may be doing on a ipad or a cell phone or whatever else you have and i think that it would be good for our principals and assistant principals

182also mr barefoot you didn't say this too much but that ecosystem and that cte with you and miss emerson and mr lang it was really really good i was just amazed at everything that was set up we had a great speech on entrepreneurship and looking at their ecosystems and keeping our students in our area and getting them ready as they move forward and thought they did a great job so and i think we talked a little bit about this last time with the science fair but again great job and i was part of the elementary awards and it was a great night thank you okay so um i actually stopped into the regionals weightlifting with you duck for the girls and i was so impressed that's why i asked if they could be honored here

183tonight um and and i asked if all students that have won at the state level could be honored in the future so we're going to be doing more of that i also attended the little mermaid show at vero beach high school which was the um all the whole school um can try out for this show and they got real costumes from wherever but they were very impressive and i imagine pretty expensive but um d rose is the theater teacher there and she is retiring after 35 years she actually taught my daughter 22 years ago my daughter started in her program and so i was just thrilled to be able to be there and bring my grandson who stayed up till 10 at night enthralled with those costumes so the kids did a great job the

184voices were amazing i went to sebastian river high school and went to the esc class that they have there that are students that are after 18 years old and i went to the apartment that they've set up and they have some needs and i just want to put it out there they are learning how to make a bed so they had a bed with everything all made and the lindsay showed me around and showed me everything they have to do um to on their apartment to learn the skills that they need to learn and she told me about them with their table they have beautiful dining room table but they had no place settings no place mats nothing so i asked the teacher about it and she has a wish list out there that she

185has put out there for a while now on amazon so if anybody is interested in that wish list i'm going to ask that the superintendent get that information out but it's not very much that she's asking for but it's certainly could they could use it i also got to go to sebastian elementary and see differentiated math lesson which was great seeing the assistant principal in there seeing the counselors in there seeing coaches in there seeing teach whatever it takes to help kids get back on track especially with the math because they've been held behind so much osceola stopped in and saw a second grade westward westward movement amplify lesson and the teachers raved about amplify and the students in second grade that could tell me all the details about the westward movement just it was

186impressive i taught second grade and i don't remember my second graders having the conversations that we had um so i was really thoroughly impressed with what they're learning in second grade now i was able to share with them the fact that i actually went to omaha nebraska last year and took pictures of all the westward movement statues if anyone's ever been to omaha they have these gorgeous statues all over the downtown and i actually took a picture of all them and was able to send it to the teacher that so she could use it us slow i visited there and went through the sixth grade classes i had some concerns about um things that were happening and being heard about so i wanted to make sure that i've been on that campus a few times

187to see and walk through i didn't get an opportunity to go back through the cafeteria or the other places but i live down the street so i've comes kind of driven by it um car release time and thank you mr seymour for being there i saw you you i can pick you out from a mile away mcann was awesome we are starting the faces project that's why all the faces are out in the front and uh the reason why we don't have them pasted on our schools is not because we're not helping with this project it's because we have anti-graffiti paint and they will not stick to our our buildings so that's good the paint works but we will be putting up these faces in other locations in our school district and we are still

188looking for buildings out in the community to pace faces up so if you know of the building that you would like to have us do that for i know mkhan's doing that but if you could probably send that to us we could get it to them and family fun day was wonderful thank you dr cowie what a turnout you know it was nice that it was a beautiful day too so that helped out but it was nice to see the variety of different groups that you had there and supporting that so thank you for organizing that uh entrepreneurial cte thank you for finally getting cte highlighted more and more and let's continue to do that and show kids that there are other pathways other than to go to just to college but there are other

189pathways that they can pursue in life and um i also am on fsba a couple of different committees now because i went to the fsba legislative liaison meeting in tallahassee and all of a sudden found out i was on all these little things i didn't know i was on so that was nice one of them was leadership and talking about how they want to proceed with um the training that we went through and how that could be kind of monitored and changed and updated for future board members so that any input that you have for that that you know get it to nancy so we can get it to them um and that's all i have all right so at that point i believe we are uh to the superintendent's closing um just thank all

190our board members and community for coming out and engaging in this conversation and it was a difficult conversation um but just proud of how we conducted ourselves in the midst of that particular conversation uh family fun day dr cobb by the time i got there everything that was being passed out and free was already gone um uh and but to see the the joy and appreciation everyone's faces is absolutely outstanding and i and i can't go through all the events that i've been to but as i reflect through over the course of the last month just the caliber and quality of who we are as a community and who are leading these initiatives really is powerful um so a lot of absolutely outstanding work taking place very very appreciative of all all of that hard

191work we will have a workshop prior to spring break but we will not have another business meeting prior to spring break so this is the only time you tune into the school district of indian river county i hope everyone have a a restful and joyful spring break thank you okay unless anyone has an objection i'd like to close the meeting at 8 38. thank you all you