OCPS | 2022-02-01 - School Board Work Session

001good afternoon everyone thank you for joining us we are here today for a work session let me first recognize that we have a couple of board members that are with us telephonically we have member gallo who is in tallahassee member gallery you on the line yes madam chair i'm here and thank you and member gould are you present with us in virtually i am thank you all right and all other members of the board are here present and in person so we have certainly a quorum we have unanimous support of this work session which we have all been waiting for and excited to hear from miss lindsay but before we begin let me ask you all to join us if you will for a moment of silent meditation followed by the pledge of allegiance and

002now for the of the united pledge of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all and just as a reminder we are still under a mandatory mask requirement for all adults on the premise of orange county public schools that includes the chambers and the lobby this would be a good time for me to remind everybody to do what i didn't do and that's turn off your cell phones or turn them onto silent i also want to take a moment before we begin to thank dr jenkins for extending the mask requirement certainly we hope that we are coming to the end of the omicron variant but of course there's the omicron stealth now so with a little luck that will not materialize into anything

003meaningful but i think it was certainly responsible and prudent and from the feedback that i've received from teachers and parents it was extremely well received and a lot of grateful relieved families out there so thank you for that as i mentioned before we are going to have a presentation regarding our ese program and the audit conducted by our independent auditor miss lindsay and we're very excited to hear that i know board members have had a chance to have a briefing but this will be a great time opportunity for us to have a full report and to have a discussion and i would encourage board members the questions that you may have asked in private if you think there might be questions that would benefit members of the public we have so many parents of our

004esc students that are very engaged which is a huge blessing for our students in particular our yes these students in particular have parents that are so engaged in their children's education and i think there are probably questions that they would ask if they were here so that's why i want to encourage board members to ask the questions that they may have asked in private so that we all can benefit especially the parents of those students miss lindsay welcome and thank you thank you very much madam chair members of the board dr jenkins i'm happy to be here this afternoon to discuss with you the results of the last of four audits related to the district's ese program that you requested last year and we'll have a brief review to start off first of all you

005may recall that a list of topics had been compiled by the chief academic officer from emails and interviews with school board members the detailed list was grouped into common topics four of which are listed on this slide and you've seen this slide before as agreed at your work session last year these are the were the four areas where we focused our attention three of these audits were completed last year and discussed with you on december 7th today we will talk about the fourth one use of financial resources first a review of the overall objective scope and methodology for these audits it was really at your direction a lot of analysis what's really going on what did the data show so we did perform extensive analysis of the ese program and various aspects of it over

006primarily the last two school years although in this presentation you will see some data from the third year back and our methodology which is detailed in appendix 1 of the report basically in summary consisted of data analysis interviews and review of documentation for this engagement we also obtained data for similar size districts in the state of florida from the florida department of education so that we could do comparisons with our data and you will see that as we proceed again this is a refresher the sampling plan that we used for a deeper dive on individual schools was a sample of 40 schools representative of all of the characteristics of the district that we could envision so that there would be no skewing or slanting of data because we didn't kind of have a good cross-section

007of information it was designed to avoid that and in this case for this audit we met with each principal at the schools as well as reviewing their budget information and i have the details on that shortly so for ese funding and resource usage this one really is all about the money we focused on sources and uses of financial resources for the district's ese program with particular emphasis as i said on the past two years we looked both at the resources available to pay for these costs as well as how the resources were expended and what the costs actually were for these two years a bit of background because this is a big area and i think background helps to sort of set the context schools provide exceptional education exceptional student education services to students with

008physical emotional behavioral and learning disabilities and to gifted students now in florida esc education is funded primarily by the florida education finance program otherwise known as fefp and that includes supplemental esc guarantee funds which i'll explain later efc funding is provided over and above base funding for the education of all district students via a weighting factor that considers the amount of additional services those students might require for their education additionally the district receives funding from the individuals with disabilities education act otherwise known as idea or idea and that is federal money not state the weights that are established two different levels of ese students help to convey the extent of the services that they need to meet their educational needs and they range from one those weights i mean the weights not the levels from

009even one to more than five and a half times the level of a base education this means that the extra services are deemed to be required and that many multiples of services to provide the necessary education the highest weights are for levels four and five where services could include extensive modifications to the learning environment and may require continuous and intense one-on-one assistance or multiple services or substantial modifications to the routine educational processes students in these categories may be wheelchair bound require assistance eating or with personal hygiene or may have severe cognitive functional limitations funding as i said earlier could be perceived as a layering with everyone's educational funding at the base because we have to educate every student in the district and then the waiting factors for the additional services needed for ese piled on

010top and the federal money at the very top this diagram displays how the various source of funds for ese are layered on top of base funding all district students are in the bottom base by virtue of weights applied to ese students based on those additional services i described a moment ago additional funding is provided for those students so i've highlighted in the next level on the pyramid levels four and five which are weighted in the fefp levels one two and three are provided in supplemental funding called ese guarantee but that's still in florida considered part of the overall fefp funding altogether the money provided from all of these sources provides resources to the district to pay for ese program costs so let's talk about budgets and learn how these resources are provided to create a

011budget at ocps our budget starts with and is built around fte or the full-time equivalent student enrollment school by school classroom by classroom school by school fte is the foundation of each school's budget each school's enrollment forecast is used to calculate the amount of money and allocation that will be provided to each school for its operations allocations are made for various types of costs based on projected fte some allocations are fixed at a certain number per school for example one principal or one media specialist perhaps other allocations are variable based on fte with break points at certain points as the fte increases for example the funds allocated for an elementary school's music art and pe teachers will be greater in elementary schools with larger enrollment the allocation amounts and the break points are determined and

012approved by the division of teaching and learning this allocation methodology is built into an excel budget model managed by the district's office of management and budget principals use these budget models to document their decisions about how to spend the resources allocated to their schools their proposed budgets are approved by their area superintendents and then incorporated into the district's overall budget the entire budget process is conducted over a one-year period the timeline here is a graphic display of that along with key points during the process as i said earlier fte is the foundation so this process begins with survey 2 fte from the preceding school year which starts our estimation of the next years and gets refined as we get survey three data and then as enrollments actually show up in the schoolhouse when school begins

013once school starts adjustments can occur when actual fte differs from the projections used in developing the budget these adjustments are called recalculations and can require principles to change their staffing so this is all our background information that's not really audit results per se but just to kind of give some context and background this is a summary of some of the procedures that we performed as i said earlier the complete list of our detailed procedures is in appendix 1 to your report and i should have mentioned earlier but our report and management's response were attached in board docs for this agenda and you have that available so we did perform extensive procedures summarized on this slide and dug into the sources and uses of funding and did a lot of data analysis we'll get right into

014it now this report and this presentation cover our results in the sections dealing with the topics on this slide we began with how funds are managed at the schools then looked at the costs of our ese program we then reviewed the funding sources received for ese education and how they are expended and finally we looked at medicaid in the coming slides we will review the results in each of these areas the first section addresses management of funds at schools as i said earlier we worked with the sample of 40 schools with which you are already familiar we reviewed the budgets that those schools submitted by the and the budget status summary reports of actual expenditures for each school then met with each school principal and while each school has its unique needs and characteristics we

015have summarized some of the commonalities in our report and on this slide so generally speaking principles said that they do adhere strictly to required ese staffing ratios they use designated ese funding first upon the advice of the office of management and budget because that money doesn't roll from year to year they often have to split fund positions either because a person on staff is serving multiple constituencies or one source of funding is not sufficient for the entire position we'll talk a little bit more about split funding later they indicated that esc designated funds are not sufficient to fully cover what they need to do on their campus for the ese program almost all of the esc designated funding is used for personnel and we have the data on that coming up as well as i

016indicated earlier recalculations can be difficult and painful and i'm sure you've talked to people who've had to deal with that and for members of the public watching that is when the rubber hits the road so to speak if the enrollment projection is high and staff have to be reduced and most of them indicated they really want to maintain mainstream excuse me the ese students where that is supported by the iep for that student so we received the funds from the state we've allocated those funds to the schools the schools have developed their budgets from those allocations and school begins and we start recording actual costs of educating students including ese so let's see what we did with it this table recaps the costs for a student an unweighted student in the esc program according to

017data compiled by the florida department of education we represent this on a per student basis because it's easier to understand sometimes than using gross budget numbers in the millions of dollars and as an educational institution we relate best to students we obtain the data from the state program cost reports on their website they call them transparency reports the data show that for every dollar of ese funding the district received it spent another 53 cents per student in fiscal or another 64 cents per student in 2020. our costs of educating ese students exceeded the funding we received for that purpose and one might wonder is this typical and so we compared ourselves with other districts to see i realize on the screen it may be a little hard to see but hopefully in your hard copy

018it's a little easier the orange bar is orange county that's kind of easy to do for us the other bars represent the other large districts in the state as well as on the far right the state as a whole you'll notice that we're really right in the mix most every other district in the state and certainly those large districts with whom we compare ourselves are also experiencing roughly one-third funding shortfall that's a rough estimation in even the state as a whole so we compare right in there with our peer group as well as with the state as a whole you may note that the southeast florida districts are somewhat higher in absolute dollars than those in other parts of the state this is largely due to what's called the district cost differential which is a

019component of the fefp funding provided to districts with a higher cost of living however that doesn't tell the whole story the mix of ese student weights is also a factor as these charts are calculated again i will say it again on an unweighted fte basis so now we'll compare ourselves on the total esc student costs these are sort of macro pictures of funding and costs but how much do we actually spend per student in theory a students with an identical iep should have the same services provided in any florida district at approximately the same cost the main factor that would influence different costs being variations in salary levels because different districts have different salary levels but the same iep should produce roughly the same services at roughly the same costs around the state this chart

020shows that orange county spent in fiscal 21 12 608 dollars per ese student and that compares with the other large districts as you see on the chart the data for fiscal 20 is also presented on the right again i would say that we're right in the mix not there's not an outlier situation here and palm beach does have more cost per student because they have more resources available now we're going to look at revenues we've just looked at costs what does it cost to educate a student now we're going to look at the sources of funding for paying those costs we have three primary sources of esc revenues the esc guarantee which i've talked about before the federal money idea which i mentioned briefly and then the fefp which is the base part these charts

021show the totals for the last three years and i didn't print the total on here but in fiscal 21 we had 160 2 million dollars and in fiscal 20 169 million and in fiscal 19 167 so we've got significant funding here that is our educational resources available for ese education and by the way these amounts include funding for charter schools ese programs and for support for private school ese students which in 2021 totaled almost 10 million dollars let's talk about the esc guarantee first this is state funding that is part of the fe fp but it is supplemental to the funding provided to educate all students and calculated as i've said previously based on fte weights assigned to ese level it is allocated to students based on ese levels 1 2 and 3 projected fte

022and used almost entirely for personnel the employees hired with this money are ese employees in the schools and those who serve more than one school such as school psychologists and speech and language therapists as you will note on the slide more than 99 of this money is spent on personnel positions that are exclusive to esc are pre-approved for example a varying exceptionalities teacher or an ese para those positions are pre-approved for principles to purchase with this source of funding non-ese positions if a principal wishes to use some of this money for those must be approved individually with justification and i'll explain when that might be applicable in just a moment we noted that non-personnel expenditures which amount to less than one percent of total efc guarantee expenditures are approved via emails back and forth between

023the requester the approver and the budget department and we have recommended that they use the established workflow process for approvals that already exist with the district staff wholeheartedly agreed with that recommendation and they're moving forward to make that happen i mentioned split funding earlier ese funds are not sufficient to cover every ese position in some cases an esc position must be funded from more than one revenue source non-esc positions may also be partially funded from esc dedicated sources and i'll explain how that happens first of all let's look at what positions were funded over the past two years i'm going to read down the left hand side of this slide where fiscal year 2021 is presented at the top of the column 512 employees in ese titled positions were paid in whole or in part

024from this source 242 of them were 100 percent funded from the ese guarantee 270 were funded in part from esc guarantee and from other fund sources of the 270 split funded positions 18 were in titles that were not specifically related to ese now position titles don't always reflect the role performed the 14 exceptions we had earlier we were explained that those positions were eligible for funding because those instructors taught gifted children it might have been a fifth grade teacher or a history teacher but they had gifted children who are part of the esc population in their classrooms so that the principal would explain this to the budget department and the esc department and a split funding would be approved based on the ratio of non-ese and esc students in the classroom when we were performing

025our tests we looked for the gifted endorsements on those teacher certificates since they had gifted students in their classrooms some of them didn't have a gifted endorsement which is fine there's no prohibition against a non-endorsed teacher having gifted students in the classroom but in those instances the district is supposed to inform the parents with a notice it's called out of field and we noted instances 14 times involving 13 teachers one appeared in both years that we analyzed where that out of field notice was not taken care of so we've made a recommendation that the schools be sure to do this in the future and you see that in our report and in management's response next we'll talk about idea funding let's see oh hang on i'm sorry let me finish talking about substitutes a small

026amount of ese guarantee funding is used to pay for substitutes for those staff members funded from esc guarantee when they have to be out of the classroom and we noted when we were looking at the reimbursements that the kelly substitutes are not required to have an efc endorsement to their certificate but as i believe you all know no substitutes are required to have a certificate or an endorsement we wanted to just make a recommendation that this be evaluated as to whether in the future it might be a good practice or perhaps that additional training could be offered to substitutes in ese classrooms with an additional stipend of some sort in that situation as we know in today's climate it's hard enough to fill substitute positions without adding additional obstacles or hurdles so we didn't recommend

027that be implemented just that it be evaluated now we'll talk about idea idea may be used only to pay the excess costs of providing special education and related services to students with disabilities and may not replace state or local funding this is known as supplement not supplant as with the esc guarantee most idea funding is spent on personnel there is a bit more non-personnel expenditures here because idea is used to pay for contracted services such as physical and occupational therapy and to equip and supply new ese units so we're buying mostly people but some things as well a significant portion of the idea funding is used to pay for bus monitors for students who have ieps that require that assistance overall over the past three years more than 86 percent of idea fundings were used

028for salaries and benefits some of the non-personnel expenditures other than what i just mentioned to you included substitute services for those same faculty supplies and structural materials and we did see some positions split funded here but they were strictly ese positions here's a similar chart about how the positions funded from idea line up i'm going to again read down the 2020 column 944 employees in ese positions were funded in whole or in part from idea in the fiscal 21 year 436 of them were 100 funded from that source and another 508 were split funded now we'll move on to a small category of resources that is known by the acronym fiddlers this stands for florida diagnostic and learning resources system and also includes the florida inclusion network this is a state grant from which the

029district records approximately 1.8 million dollars a year over recent years the service provides diagnostic and instructional support to esc programs and families of ese students the grant is operated in the state of florida in groups of districts that the state calls action resource centers ocps is in a center with six other central florida districts the grant is managed by one district in each center acting as a fiscal agent orange county public schools is the fiscal agent for our center therefore the 1.8 million that is used that flows through our books is used for all seven districts in our center not just for ocps the chart on this slide shows the positions that are funded from that money and how many serve the district only and how many serve the center as a whole and you

030see the data on the chart in front of you the amount of money involved is not significant to the overall ese program and it is mostly used for training and support and diagnostic services as i mentioned earlier we also have in terms of managing the program the ese department at the district in our session in december we talked about how that group is subdivided into five sub-departments and they're listed here on the slide i know you're very familiar with that like most departments the expenditures here are mostly for individuals as well the whole district budget is mostly people if you exclude capital but there are costs in these departments also associated with curriculum support training in county travel for personnel who must travel from school to school dues and fees and things of that sort

031i have a chart that shows you a pictorial of those expenditures for the past two fiscal years you might notice a an odd variant between the two years that occurred because right in the middle between these two years approximately 250 health employees were moved from instructional support behavior and specialized to health services this was part of a reorganization by the department that they believed would help them better serve the needs during their pandemic but it's the same staff the same overall money just moved from one operational unit to another next we'll take a look at medicaid we evaluated medicaid even though it's not specifically an ese program school districts are permitted to file for reimbursement for providing eligible service services to students on our campuses who are medically excuse me medicaid eligible examples of the

032type of reimbursements are noted on the slide but it should be noted that we can also provide services to students who do not have ese ieps for example a student who goes to the nurse for an insulin injection may not have an iep or be an ese student but that service can be billed to medicaid if that student is medicaid eligible but the majority of these services are for ese students we evaluated the process of filing claims and how the procedure moved forward with some testing first of all let's recap the revenue just to give you perspective over the last three years the district received more than 26.7 million dollars in medicaid reimbursements and this money is recorded in the general fund the district contracts with a third party claims administrator to administer this whole

033process which involves a predetermination of medicaid eligibility and then a capturing and tracking and submitting of claims and resolving any denials that might occur along the way as well as ultimately securing the reimbursement payment we noted during our research that the florida department of education offers the dis any school district a cost free symptom for medicaid claim tracking and we asked why the district here chose to contract this function instead of using the state system we were told that staff believes that the contracted service does a better job but we were not able to obtain any data or analysis to indicate that was the case it may very well be that paying the cost of third-party administrators is more cost effective but being analytical people like we are we like to see data to back

034that up so we've made a recommendation that the district perform a cost benefit analysis here and see if in fact we might be getting the best arrangement for our budget there are almost 30 districts statewide who use the fdle program including some that are near us as well as some that are close in size like pinellas which is close now we did test a sample of medicaid claims very small sample because this was not a medicaid audit this was a ese audit but we selected 13 specific individual student claims out of a submittal and the first thing we wanted to do was see that we had the parent consent form on file for that nine of the thirteen requested were readily available the other four were a bit of a challenge for staff to produce

035two were obtained fresh during our audit and two were never able to be provided the students i guess were no longer with the district this was complicated because this form is obtained one time in the enrollment of a student with the district it's not an annual form and up until very recently these were all paper so it's easy for paper to get lost or misfiled nowadays these forms are obtained electronically during the annual or in the enrollment process excuse me and should be able to be retrieved more securely we did recommend that the schools be diligent in this regard and they are moving forward i do want to point out a positive aspect of the district's third party claims administration arrangement and that is that the contractor has an important audit report dealing with its

036controls over our data this is important because they have access to student records in order to perform the services that they do for our district and security over those records is imperative because they contained personally identifiable information of students and their families this type of audit commonly called a sock report is required by the district's its standard 006 and i just want to point out that they have it and that's a very good thing we also took a look at private insurance a few medicaid eligible students may also have private insurance it's not common but it does happen and it is permissible for districts to file claims with students private insurance when eligible services are provided of course parents must consent and they may not be required to provide any copay or deductible we perform

037some research to see if this is practiced anywhere and we did not find any florida districts who are doing it and only one ohio district that has just a handful of these situations most do not idea can be used to cover parents co-pay and deductible but it's unclear whether that would have to come from the same pot of money we already get or we would be able to get additional resources obviously if it has to come from our currently existing idea funds that would just dilute them further we did inquire of district management as to whether we had ever pursued this what the analysis had been and the people with whom we spoke have not looked into this matter so we're recommending that the district crunch the numbers to see whether at some point the

038cost and effort needed to file private insurance would be worthwhile and to periodically i don't know every three to five years or something recheck to validate this decision or change course if it looks like that's a better option for now based on our research we agree that not filing for private insurance is appropriate but it might be an option at some time in the future we made six recommendations as a result of this audit four which i would characterize as opportunities for improvement and two which i would characterize as deficiencies that need to be corrected they're summarized on this slide and i believe we've touched on each of them the first one involves using the district's i buy workflow process to document approvals for the use of ese guarantee funds for non-personnel costs the second

039one is dealing with the out of field status notifications for teachers of gifted students who do not have that endorsement the third one is evaluating whether substitutes in ese classrooms should be required to have additional training or an ese certification the fourth one is dealing with obtaining and retaining the parent consent forms for medicaid claims the fifth one is the one we talked about just a moment ago about periodically evaluating the cost versus the benefit of using a contracted medicaid claims administrator compared to the service offered by the state and the last one is the one we just discussed about periodically evaluating whether to bill students private insurance for eligible services our conclusion as a result of all of this work is that the district's practices for allocating and expending resources of the ese program

040are consistent equitable and operating effectively and efficiently this report was finalized and discussed with management in january and you do have a copy of our report and management's response with your agenda materials and i would be happy to answer any questions thank you miss lindsay i am sure we have questions i'm just waiting for board members hold with us member felder thank you chair first of all miss lindsay i would like to tell you thank you and i so enjoy when i have my private time with you to have so many questions you're so very patient with so much of the stuff i may not understand and i appreciate this the summary and we were able to download and get some information first of all i am very happy that the audit was done i

041believe and you did an exceptional job in making sure like people used to say cross every t dot every eye because it's important that our parents as well as our teachers of esc students that they really see what's being done with the funds and they have an assurance that their children are being careful in the proper way that is so important and teachers don't need the stress of wondering where funds are going to be for certain types of materials that they may need to use to make sure the children who are esc get equitable treatment that is so important and i'm so grateful that you took the time to dot every eye and cross every t now one of the concerns about the possibility and i it's probably going to cost us money superintendent or

042may maybe something impossible to try to force substitute teachers to be esc endorsed however we talked about it in in our meeting and we both agreed that perhaps the best choice will be additional training because i do believe that our substitute group that company that hires the substitutes out they do try to offer that because it's important that children esc children are in a classroom with a teacher whether it's a substitute or a regular teacher that they are properly trained and know really how to work with the children because we want to do our best even if a teacher is absent that the child gets the best educational experience not gonna be the same because the teacher is not there but still but to make sure we do that so i am in favor i

043know it's not put in policy because that may be difficult to do if you put it impossible because that might not can occur we have enough hard enough time getting substitute teachers in but certainly if we could think about adding that you know suggesting that there be some additional training for substitute teachers that come into esc classes i am also and i'm going to wrap it up very happy about the situation medicaid i did have some questions about if the student or the family decides to have private insurance they don't meet the deductible or you know we're going to have to meet and then you said ida funds would do that right if the district if the parents cannot pay the deductible the id id ea funds would do that for them that is an

044allowable use of idea funds yes okay so hopefully we haven't had that situation because you talked about something a situation in ohio right we have not had the situation here in florida we do not we do not build private insurance at the moment okay well that's that's a good thing okay i think that's kind of all i probably may say something later but okay i'll wait because i think some other fellow board members may say some stuff because i'll talk about something else i'm looking at the monies and stuff and the principal's having autonomy and so forth i'll talk about it later if i need to but i just wanted to say that in the beginning again to thank you for your very thorough thorough report and answering all of our private questions that we

045have when you're meeting with us i appreciate that so much thank you thank you member felder let's go to member caster dental thank you madam chair and thank you miss lindsay that was as usual i appreciate your objectivity and your thoroughness and for anyone who's watching from home or from work i want to just reiterate that miss lindsay does not work for the superintendent but works for the board and that's important for for really establishing that trust when people may have a doubt or wonder what's happening when they don't see things that are not evident so the fact that you were able to do this and i mean you did exactly what the board wanted and i appreciate this you really made the funding visible and that wasn't something that i as a board member

046could do when i explain anything to an esc parent exactly where the funding is coming from and what resources we have so you really did a great job and your team did a great job of really finding following the dollars and illustrating how they're being spent and utilized and that really helps us to strengthen that trust we have from our parents and our community members so i appreciate that if i can i just want to recap my understanding and please correct me if i have something wrong so we have we receive federal funding from idea annually we receive state funding for esc in the form of a weighted fte for those students and 99 of those dollars go to salaries essentially 99 of the esc guarantee funds guarantee funds yes okay but all of those

047esc guarantee funds and the others go they are spent the ones that are earmarked for our ese students are spent on our ese students yes that much and more right so that was i was i was glad and relieved to see that because i know some of our there are some parents who believe that we are not putting our resources in the right places or or adding them or contributing to the contributing to as much as we are supposed to by law to our ese students and your audit showed that we definitely are and then some so while i'm glad to see that we are covering and making sure that our ese students are being served it also highlights another problem with our funding so even though we have the weighted ftes the idea dollars

048and the base student allocation it's still not enough and we have to reach into our general fund yet yet again so we continue to reach into that general fund to cover a lot of shortfalls from the state when it comes to our transportation budget the state gives us i believe about 35 million dollars but that does not come close to what we need to get our kids to school so we put in about 30 more million from our general fund to cover that so that's another shortfall and then we're making up the difference with the ese funding and teacher pay raises come out of that and salaries our health insurance i guess is all part of that so it helped to illustrate how stretched we are as a district and how hard our district and

049the professionals here work to stretch every dollar to make sure we're doing what we need to and we are feeling the pressure it's not just a matter of penny pinching but that contributes to the burden on more of our employees when they are asked to do more with less and so this your audit helped to highlight that yet again i have a question about our school-based budgeting that if you can't answer maybe the superintendent can i recall when i was teaching at the school's elementary school i would be a part of a school-based budget committee and that was very informative to see how little wiggle room principles have and how how difficult it is and tricky sometimes to make your teachers line up with the number of students you have and make it all fit

050with all the different variables but do we have is it is it a common practice that every year each school has a school-based budget committee that helps to oversee or participate in that budgeting i will defer to dr jenkins and her team because i don't know every school's practice okay so principals are still encouraged to share with their faculty all of their budget information but you've touched on a very important point there's not a lot of wiggle room once they meet the categorical requirements and the class size reduction requirements there's not much left for any kind of discussion with their faculties but all of our principals do have those discussions with faculty members okay if i may in an effort to increase transparency and trust and understanding by our community members and parents and even

051teachers because i know not all faculty members participate or are aware if we could make that more of a regular process at each school and make sure that we have maybe an ese parent an esc teacher represented on that committee so there is a regular process and i believe their sacs also have a look at their budget and that would be those would be the sac sac or sac and that would be both staff representation and parent representation when you say more regular sacs on an annual basis participate as well okay is it just the sac that would review the budget or is there a budget committee from the sac are you just saying that the sac committee so there's something required so mr paul marine is trying to get my attention there's something required

052statutorily that includes the sack i'll let him speak to it exactly marina you recognize thank you madam chair it's actually in the contract article 20 section c a minimum of three to a maximum of five teachers from each school shall serve on their school's budget advisory committee formed for the purpose of making recommendations on the school's general fund budget teacher members may be elected by the faculty minutes from such meetings may be requested by the faculty and may be posted on cta bulletin board and at the school by the association representative so there's a contractual budget advisory committee mr palmerini would you speak to the sac having exposure to the budget as well if you'll take a moment to look for that yeah give me one moment and i'll chime in when i find it

053just to while you're looking that up i just think that even if there isn't a lot of wiggle room or flexibility by the principals i think it's extremely important to have that transparency and let people know that there isn't a slush fund somewhere that someone's controlling even if it's just to have people understand how the public dollars are being spent at their local school site i think it will help maybe again build trust and also understanding of how tight our funding is remember kester dental maybe we can move on because i actually want to kind of piggyback on some of your comments if i could and then we'll recognize mr pomerani because i completely i completely agree with you that sometimes we go through a process not because we believe that we're going to find

054a solution to the problem but sometimes the process itself solves a problem and the process of just looking for funding and bringing more people to the table in that process as we're going to do as we're doing right now with our faculty i hope there are i mean this is a genuine process i hope that we will find collectively some even if they're small individually that collectively they amount to enough money that we can keep that longevity supplement and definitely that would really be my hope but i also feel that the process that we go through if we can build trust in the course of this even if the answers aren't the ones we necessarily want to find if we can at least understand what the problem is we have a better chance at collectively

055i want to use the word attacking not a good word but maybe that's how i'm feeling deep down inside addressing the problem so one of the things i also think that one of the things that i hear is the concern and then i do have specific questions to this but i wanted to just kind of piggyback on where you were the concern about how much money is being spent at the district so when you're going through the school-based process budgeting process i think that the question the question i get all the time is how much money is going into esc department how much money is going into this department we're seeing the numbers of employees in the district increasing and i've heard these over the three years i've been here and yet comparatively speaking when

056you look at our administrative overhead on a per student basis compared to other districts we are quite low dr jenkins if i can call on you for those statistics and then perhaps from the point of view of of also just recognizing in the absence of trust you have to go the extra mile and then some to produce evidence to support this and maybe miss lindsay can help us on this front dr jenkins i know when i came in it's one of the things i was focused on and immediately reassured when i saw the administrative overhead can you address that first there is certainly madam chair there is a state report that comes out annually we were in the top 10 i believe there was no other large urban district that had a lower ratio of

057administrative costs per student i can't quote the exact number i was looking for our chief financial officer but we were at the lowest of large urban districts and among the top 10 i believe even out of 67 districts for keeping our administrative costs as low as possible i can certainly get you the actual ranking it's done every year it's a state report that is available and she is in the back of the room i've been looking for her too and was thinking is she not here but she is she is there with her computer so maybe we can hear from her briefly and then we'll come back to mr palmer as and also as she's coming down i want to i want to be clear so between the faculty reviewing the budget and the sac

058having an opportunity to give input as well i want to be very transparent in that folks don't believe there's some large sums of money that are eligible so our teachers are going through our entire faculties are going through round table discussions to say what is it that we might be able to squeeze out for teacher raises and we have a sort of a cheat sheet that says these are categorical these are paid for by federal dollars these are not eligible computer purchases are a capital dollar that can't be swapped over and so they actually have a cheat sheet that they can go through so people aren't frustrated to think there are millions of dollars that they might have some greater input on it was my concern transparency absolutely but full disclosure of what's actually eligible

059for for the debate and for the brainstorming around the savings of dollars because by the time they finish calling out federal and then state requirements and state categorical dollars and underfunded issues such as our transportation which we have to have to cover it's just very good for folks to know up front so they're not frustrated when they realize how little is still eligible for discussion and manipulating those budgets i for one i understand completely what you're saying and managing expectations is important being frustrated i would like to see more of our teachers and our parents who are frustrated with us i would like to see more of them have the opportunity to get frustrated with the process we go through but i agree with you i don't want them to feel misled that we're saying

060oh we know there's a pot of pot of gold at the end of this rainbow you know just go out there and find it so i'm trying to be as as fair and open and honest as i can with people i if i thought there was a pot of gold for three years now i would hope i would have found it and i would have hoped collectively we would have found it and i would have hoped that you would have heard this board and understood this board was unified and wanting to find it so i don't think there is i hope that there might be some small incremental changes that we can make some things that we might be able to trim back on but i agree with you when you look at transportation when

061you look at esc and you realize that 53 of the funding that we're putting in 53 extra funding in order to just meet what we need to do for those children and we're putting in twice as much funding for transportation as we're legally and we legally have to do that and we morally have to do that to get our kids here safely so those are those are the big buckets that could be filled by the state at this point if they would just simply fully fund the things that require us miss concolino hello so regarding the administrative costs per student the educational funding accountability act requires that a report of administrative expenditures be produced for each school district so and this is based on the program cost report and based on the low the latest

062report which is 1920 we've just completed the 2021 i don't have the administrator for 2021 yet the results have not come out but i can tell you that ocps in 1920 spent 565 dollars and 20 cents per student for administrative costs from its general fund and we continue to have the lowest administrative costs per student among large urban school districts and we are the 11th lowest of all 67 in the state thank you that was exactly the information and perhaps you could share with the board separately not just that information but where we could independently pull it up that'd be great thank you i think i just think sometimes when i hear from parents i know that information i've heard it over and over again but i can't put my fingers on it and that

063would be a helpful thing i think for all of us to kind of bookmark how we could and as parents teachers everyone who wants more out of us than we're we're able to deliver remember castor dental let's hear if we if we have an answer from mr palmerini and i'm going to come back to you to finish mr pomerani thank you madam chair 1001 452 that is district and school advisory councils it says a school advisory council shall be comprised composed of a principal an appropriately balanced number of teachers education support employees students parents and other business and community citizens who are representative of the ethnic racial and economic community served by the school and then one of the duties listed in subsection two of the statute is with technical assistance from the department of

064education each school advisory council shall assist in the preparation of the school's annual budget and plan as required by 1008.385 subsection 1. so sacs help the budgeting process at every school and then we have the contractual school budget advisory committee that also has teacher input on it as well remember caster donald you get that down or would you like mr pomerania to send us those statutory citations no i understand that i've been on the sac committees and so i know how they operate but in an effort to encourage some of the parents to participate i wonder if it would be helpful when the sac committee is meeting to have a presentation of the budget if they open that up i know it's already open to anyone else who wants to come and attend but if

065there is a way to advertise that more on the marquees and let people know they are welcome we want their input we want their because not every person who is on the sack would necessarily be the same people who are necessarily interested in these budgeting concerns so i just wanted there's more we can do to be more inclusive probably a question not for mr marie but for you we'll certainly look into it man yeah thank you yeah when you say that go ahead remember casting you're still recognized go ahead okay i just wonder this may be for miss lindsay maybe not i don't know who knows this but i know we're looking at the state funding and how tight that is but we're also getting money from the federal government is there an expectation or

066a request or a way to appeal to increase the funding from the idea for our students as well or a process or maybe the superintendent knows that would be in our platform for lobbying at a national level there's concern over adequate funding and so it's certainly already on the radar you can cert this board can certainly add it to their legislative platform as well i don't believe it's specifically called out on your platf on your federal platform but we'll check it okay thank you thank you ma'am thank you member castrol i'm really interested to see if there is an opportunity i was even thinking like maybe presenting it to the pta if there were just some sort of a way that a large group similar to what we did if there was some if somebody

067has done that in a way to kind of help people walk through the process to understand it would be it would be i think really beneficial and pta is your other group that's you know the cheerleaders for the school but they're also the people engaged enough to benefit from learning the challenges and the i really still believe that the most effective tool at changing the funding equation at the state level is parents across the state we know it's not us but if there were just some way through maybe through fsba and the pt essays statewide if there were some way to just get a movement going then i think we would have a chance we're always so frustrated here because our delegation is so supportive of us and that's wonderful but if they can't overcome

068the odds in tallahassee then we need to make sure that those that are in a leadership position those with the most power and influence have the same constituency with the same knowledge base crying out for the same thing and a statewide effort would have a much better chance of gaining the governor's support we saw what the governor did when he realized teachers needed to be paid more unfortunately that left our veteran teachers way behind but it does show the power of that position and we do know that our governor is willing to use his power and use it forcefully and these would all be good things if we could just find a way to have him use that power to fill the gaps that have been created over the years so that's that's where our

069greatest hope lies it's a seems like a long haul but it is i think the only hope that education has right now so i had a couple of well i did want to comment for anybody who might be watching member caster dental made some really good observations about about the role of miss lindsay i also did for anybody who may have missed this the reason that miss lindsay is doing this and has done this much broader audit this is just the last piece and i think for all of us up here one of the most critical pieces as well was because this board asked for that we have this entire board is very passionate about the needs of our ese students and making sure that we do everything right that we can by them to

070help them succeed not just in education but in life and we also have heard the pouring outpouring of concern from some of our parents and from some of our teachers and so it was with that this board said let's independently look at this and see what we can find so i from the standpoint of of trust i wanted the public to know that this was an initiative of the board in response to our passion and the passion and concerns that we've heard i had a couple of questions and this is probably a question for dr jenkins but so on slide well i could call it slide that page 14 on page 14 we see that this year we're spending 153 percent of our 53 of our esc program funds are coming from outside of our

071esc sources of funding and last year i think it was 64 yeah 64 and then if you go to the next slide you see that we went from seven eighty nine down to twelve thousand six oh eight it's not a material it's not a significant difference but at the same time that we were going down ever so slightly i noticed that some of our comparator districts were going up so dr jenkins i wondered if if there's an explanation that you're aware of and i'm sorry i'm putting you on this button i didn't ask ahead of time but do you have any idea why we would have seen this slight slight downtick i'm looking for dr vazquez i don't want to answer inappropriately we can certainly look into it for you it is a small amount

072it is yeah we would need to look into the right the reason for the can you speak a little louder we would need to look into the reason for the small decline and again i apologize for putting on the spot i really do if you could look into it because i am pretty sure that there's a an explanation and then just let the board know one of the other things that i asked miss lindsay about i was a little surprised to see that might be on slide 14 where it shows the pers i was a little surprised when i looked a little more carefully at so palm beach county is actually receiving less first per student for ese funding than orange county and so is broward and the reason i point those two out is

073under the district cost comparison differential that the state uses both of those districts are higher than us palm beach county i think is that like about 105 percent of the state's cost their cost of hiring personnel and ours is right around 100.58 so there are four percentages points higher than us almost five percentage points higher than us and yet they're getting less in funding for esc students and so i thought that there was just something wrong with this data and miss lindsay looked into it and it turns out that the reason for it should i do you want me to let you explain it i'll let you explain i found that too i'd be happy to as i said during my presentation chair this information is on a per unweighted fte basis and so it

074doesn't take into consideration how much we actually receive or spend on a weighted basis yes palm beach gets a larger amount of money per student because of the district cost differential but their esc population has significantly less level fours and fives than we do we have about four times as many fours and fives as palm beach county does and those of you who are familiar with the weighting of the levels of esc students would know that those two levels are the most intensive in need of services and the esc level four if i'm remembering off the top of my head don't shoot me doreen i think it's like 3.3 something for a level four and like five north of five and a half for a level five in fiscal 21 i'm talking about so if

075it multiplies very quickly and if we have the mix of the weights can change that dynamic very quickly because again these charts are unweighted students and so in the case of the chair's specific question i pulled the palm beach raw data and looked at it they have a lot more esc students than we do but in terms of the weighted grouping ours is for lack of a better word heavier and therefore generates that additional difference so and if you also look at miami-dade county they're at seven point four seven four seven thousand four hundred or at eight thousand two twenty five that tells you the same thing that the waiting or in other words the composition of their esc students they have a we have a higher percentage of level four level 5 ese students

076so we're getting more money because of that i thought that was important for us to know not because of the this audit or the finances but because i think we need to be mindful and take into consideration when we sometimes hear ourselves compared to miami-dade county or palm beach or broward county in terms of stats around their ese students and the and i don't know how to i don't know the word i'm looking for i'm sorry that the stats were not we're not if we were looking at level one to level one esc students and comparing them we'd be comparing students of at the same level of need when we're comparing students at four or five five in particular we're talking about students who have a great much greater level of need so it's not

077just more expensive but the approach towards caring towards those children may be different and so we just i don't think we can continue to just look at raw data and think that we can make a judgment call about how we're doing i think we need to look much more carefully i think the changes this board has wanted to see in a lot of areas when it comes to our esc students is just spot on right i have no doubt about that but i do want to be cautious after seeing this about thinking that we need to have the same numbers as other counties when we don't have the same makeup of a population as these other counties that was my i hope that all made sense remember bird you're recognized vice chair thank you chair

078yeah that makes a lot of sense for sure because you know we're talking about room classrooms that are you know much lower student teacher ratios you know you've got more pera's assisting so yeah that's that's a really good point i want to answer a few questions and then i have some some comments so let's see when we talked when i talked on my in my private briefing with miss lindsay we talked about the kelly or the training for the substitute teachers and i agree with member felder that you know this is definitely an area that concerns me but for all the reasons that you said this would say it's challenging just with the nature of the fact that finding substitutes in itself is challenging one of the things that i had mentioned during that briefing

079was looking talking to kelly services about us developing a training that would be available for our substitutes to take much like they and i don't know if they're still doing this but they would do a an extra training that a substitute could take and if they took that training then they were paid at a higher rate same thing with this if you took this esc training then you could be paid at a higher rate when you substitute it for an esc classroom if we could look at developing something like that it might be enough incentive to to get some more get some of those substitutes trained and just basic things to be able to help them in those classrooms i would love to see that happen because i really do feel like these kids need

080people that you know have a little extra special training if they're filling in for that day on page seven of the report it's not in the not in the presentation it was mentioned that many schools you know we're talking about the funding of positions and many schools you know are allocated a 0.5 position for like a school esc school staffing specialist and this is i think more question for dr jenkins but i remember when we when we did the other dsc audit report work session we talked about the workload of the staffing specialists and how they felt you know very overworked and so i think the way it was explained to me that if they're funded at point five principals will combine or says in the report principles will combine the duties with another position

081often like an esol compliance specialist so that they can fund them fully so my question is why can't we in an effort to help with this workload for them allocate a full position for our staffing specialists as opposed to 0.5 dr jenkins thank you madam chair i believe we've taken care of that because we had some esser funds if it were not for the esser fund the answer would be because we can't afford it okay but we have taken care of that in our s or application okay all right and then i have one more question this one is in regards to what mr palmerini mentioned earlier about for mr for dr caster dental what she said about the staff budget committee meetings i might have misheard him but i thought the way he read

082it sounded like it said teachers may be on three or something teachers maybe on a school budget committee was that correct mr pomerini is it is it that the teachers can serve or that the teachers are required to serve on a school budget committee let me i'm getting to the provision again i think it's at a minimum of three and a maximum of five but give me one second okay not for sac for the yeah i'm not talking about sac i'm talking about for the school that was in the teacher contract yeah the article 20 section c a minimum of three to a maximum of five teachers from each school shall serve on their school's budget advisory advisory committee formed for the purpose of making recommendations on the school's general fund budget okay so then

083every school does have i think i can kind of miss that if you said that i'm so sorry i apologize but so every school does have this school this advisory committee for the budget is in other words what you're saying and teachers do have to serve on it that's my understanding that every school has it and under the contract three to five teachers have to serve on it okay okay good and then just in kind of comments on the sac and pta like what you were talking about chair i think the biggest challenge is i love the idea of trying to figure out how to advertise more but i know with several of my schools they try everything to advertise for the sac and they even hold their pta on the same night as their

084sac in an effort to get more and it's just it's nearly impossible i have one school that has sac money that they can't even spend because they have to get a quorum to vote to spend the money so and they try everything you know meals feeding you know like all kinds of things and it's just it's such a challenge sometimes to do that to get parents involved so you know i think when people i do think when people come to us with these questions about finances and stuff that we do need to be referring them have you tried going to your sac meeting have you gone to your local schools pta because at the sac they talk about the budget i've always told parents if you really want to see the genie behind the curtain

085you know go to your sac meeting because that's where you learn about everything about the school that's why i always joined the sac because that was how i learned all the background workings of the school district so in the way things worked at my school so i really anytime people come to us i think that's what we definitely need to be doing and you know i'm very very appreciative of i told miss lindsay i gave her numerous compliments about how much i love her work that she does here and the work she did in this audit but i'm trying to kind of guess what some things that we may hear and this is what i'm guessing and i could be wrong well you've checked everything at the district level everything is efficient the audit said

086everything is efficient except for those you know five suggestions that's all fine and dandy but when it comes to what my kid is receiving at my school i still don't think they're getting what they need and i think this goes back to what we talk about how there's kind of somewhere the message is getting lost between what we're what we have set up here at the district and what needs to what's supposed to be being done and what's actually being done and so i really want to encourage us to continue to allow our parents figure out more and more ways and i know you guys are doing a great job the esc department you have such good resources online and you have you know that the parent ticket things they can fill out but i

087really want to encourage us to figure out ways to help address individual parents concerns at schools because i think you know there's 200 schools it's a lot of schools sometimes things are not always going to be done right and so i really feel like the parents have to have a way to communicate out to someone maybe outside the school if they're not getting what they need at the school and that's you know one of the reasons the parent advisory council i was always a big proponent of that i thought that was a great way for parents to have a place they could come to share their concerns of ways that their needs are not getting met because you can say that everything's efficient and equitable and consistent but if it's your child in your school

088and you feel like the needs aren't getting met you still have to have a way to address that so kudos to the job and kudos to the district and i'm you know i'm not trying to take anything away from that but i still want us to make sure we're now that we've addressed this side i want us to keep making sure that we're that we're doing everything we can from the school site side so i think that's all i have thank you chair thank you vice chair remember gould are you still with us so you're recognized thank you chair i appreciate that and i appreciate the comments of my fellow board members i want to follow up a little bit on something that you and remember caster dental highlighted and i think that is certainly

089the challenges with the investment in education to meet the local needs of our community and i think it's only going to get more confusing and being clear on sustainable dollars and non-sustainable dollars is going to become very important in our discussions i just heard on npr this morning that some of the federal legislators are saying that the schools should use you know these temporary funds to boost base salaries but you know i hear nothing about long-term funding after those legislative acts are completed so that's a concern and i think it's going to be confusing for our community and i also wanted to just comment on some other outlines of comments that you all made and that is we have a lot of layering of legislation some of which really needs to be looked at at

090the state level not just legislation but policies and procedures by the doe that need to be looked at and peeled back because they may not make sense in this current environment they may not meet the local needs of each and every of the counties in the state of florida and they may not meet the needs certainly of our residents our students our community nor are they responsive to the current economic impacts that vary widely from county to county because of growth because of loss of jobs and lag in hospitality that we see et cetera et etc so and then of course with the pandemic just layering on top of all that so i don't really have a question but i thought it was worth highlighting some of the challenges we have with this especially right

091now while we have the state legislature in session and now is a great time to be talking to the legislature to the department of education about making sure we as a school board in a partnership with the legislature can respond to local needs thank you member cool remember gallo you're recognized thank you madam chair first i want to thank miss lindsay and her team for such a great job and for working so hard on this audit over the last few months it was a lot of information to get together especially the financial part because i know we were waiting on the department of education for some of the information needed so i really appreciate their hard work and all this great information so i have a few comments and then i have some questions i'm

092going to talk i just want to touch on the budget because i've heard several board members say that we need to be more transparent and it needs to be easy for for parents and the community to kind of access the budget or the school budget to just kind of see where the money is being spent and i know we have the age it's the data portal from the department of education and there is a there is the financials is listed but it's very confusing right like if you go on it just kind of breaks it from the school level to the federal level you know to school site funds and then what's the indirect school cost so it's not very easy to understand or really doesn't break down how the money is going so i

093didn't know if maybe that was a possibility maybe we could look at putting something online that would be more easily understandable for parents in the communities to look at since we already have a place or a placeholder on every school-based website already to go to the edu portal and there's so much information on there and i know that we have to provide information on our sit plan which has like a lot of good information so i just didn't i just kind of want to throw that out there maybe that's a place where if we could list something that was a little bit more direct and a little bit more succinct that we could understand it might be a good place to put it that parents could find easy and would help us be more transparent

094i do have a few questions one was in the presentation mrs lindsey commented on the differences between palm beach county and us because those numbers are a little bit higher is that they had different resources and i just wanted to know what those resources were like what resources does palm beach county have access to that we in orange county would not well first of all i don't i didn't audit palm beach county but i believe they have the same resources we do in terms of general sources it's simply that they get the district cost differential which gives them a bump every it's it's like a currency exchange you know a dollar there has more a dollar of fefp funding there it has a greater value than it does down here now you could argue that

095it doesn't go necessarily any farther and that would be appropriate because that's the whole point of the district cost differential is to even the scales if you will and balance that out but in point of fact the extra resources they have is just extra value in the same resources that we have i may have not used the most correct term when i said that help at all okay it did i just in looking at it did and i appreciate that i just didn't know if maybe they had a secret sauce that she came across and and looking into other counties but when you look at palm beach county they are spending even out of their own general funds a lot more money than any other district in florida like that's their they are kind of

096the outlier in their per pupil spending for esc students and yet we just discussed when we talked about the makeup and how our population is different than other counties population palm beach was one of the counties brought up and it was discussed that they had far fewer level threes or level fours and fives which are more intensive view students so my mind immediately goes well then their needs would be less the cost would be less but that's not what we're seeing on this chart we're seeing a lot more funding be put into esc so i was just curious on that discrepancy and if there was something to look at there like is are they doing something that we could replicate or or figure out that was that was my point to asking that question i

097will tell you member gallow i did put that question to the ese management team just to see if they in discussions with their counterparts in palm beach had learned any insights as to what might be going on down there they indicated they had not that is best they know and i don't mean to speak for them they can speak for themselves but but the report back was it seemed like they were doing the same things we are i would like to point out to the board which i know you know but just for purposes of the audience to the extent that we go or that any district goes deeper into its general funds to cover ese program costs at some point one might argue that you begin shortchanging the non-ese student population so obviously by

098law and by everything that's right morally we need to provide the ese students with the educations that are called for based on their various disabilities and ieps even if it costs more than the resources we are provided but at some point and i don't know what palm beach is doing so please don't take the wrong message here but at some point if you go deeper and deeper down that path then the parents of the non-efc students might say wait a minute you know what about my child so it's it's it's a delicate thing at some point i don't think we're anywhere near that tipping point because if you look across the state oh excuse me if you look across the state you know everyone is about in that same range we're there we're not an

099outlier and so forth but that's just a point to consider okay thank you i appreciate that remember gallo if you could hold just a minute i think dr jenkins might have some comments offer on that yeah we had some of the same curiosity and so finance and some of the esc department were trying to look into what the difference is there what initially comes to mind but we've not confirmed yet is that they have that additional teacher pay differential from their millage that may be inflating the cost of actual teachers don't know if that's the clue or not but we're certainly looking into it and that would make sense because as i said earlier a student with the identical iep in orange county or palm beach county or you know st john's county or anywhere

100should theoretically cost the same but we have variations in pay scales around the state and that exact and the biggest cost is people so that makes perfect sense remember gallo you're recognized thank you madam chair i wanted to talk just a minute about the substitutes i think that actually i want to talk about two things i think that we've kind of hit home on what we were trying to accomplish with the substitutes or the need for our substitutes in our eoc classrooms to be have better training or receive better training and we all understand the challenges or the barriers to getting that done i think i loved member bird's idea like offering it to them and if they if they go through the training they get a higher daily rate of pay than other substitutes

101i think that there are trainings that you go to that as a sub you get a higher rate of pay i went through it and i think i made i don't know ten dollars more a day than subs that didn't go through it back when i was subbing so i think that's worth looking into and i didn't know if we could look into or if this is even a viable solution but looking into that when we have a substitute since there are no substitutes that are certified in esc right now i mean we have esc teachers that are subs and they're probably few and far in between and hard to get into an esc classroom right now but if we're putting a non-ese trained substitute into an esc classroom would it make sense then not

102to use esc dollars for that sub would it make more sense to just use the pot of sub dollars that each principal has to cover that sub i didn't know if that was something that we could look into if that was a possibility or if that would put i don't want to put you know strain on on a principal's budget but it just makes sense that if it's not an esc train and we're not and that person's not really trained in esc and they're subbing the classroom and we're using esc dollars that maybe we could find it from another pot yeah but and then go no that's all right go ahead all right thank you and then i wanted the yes are funds i know that over the last two years well actually that's not

103true over the last year we have taking some of our esther dollars and there's been an infusion of sr dollars in into our schools was any of that looked at or do we have any numbers because i know that what we're shown here is that we're funding we're funding to the best of our ability we're funding above what we receive from the state and from the federal government we have received more federal dollars and do we have any idea how much of those dollars are going towards our esc students dr jenkins you recognize thank you madam chair first on the substitute issue remember gal it's an interesting concept i don't think that's actually how i don't know that there's a way to circumvent paying for subs in ese classrooms with regular ed dollars but the

104issue the greater issue is there is no such certification at this point and should we get that certification i certainly don't want to limit and not have enough substitutes for my ese classrooms because those children have to be served regardless of the individual being certified or not we have to have services and supervision for those classrooms so certainly we can look into that kelly services is an outside vendor we can certainly talk with them around how they can incentivize all of their substitutes here's my solution i'd like for all substitutes because my esc children are not always in self-contained classrooms they're in all of our classrooms we want them in the least restrictive environment so i'd like for all of our substitutes to have modules completed that are going to help them better serve the

105needs of ese students and then i'm not hindering or limiting how many substitutes i can get for my ese classrooms secondly when it comes to ese i'm sorry to escher dollars we do have some dollars that for learning loss that are provided for our ese population we can certainly refer you back to that discussion i can't quote it for you here now member gala but we do have s or dollars that are aimed at our ese students as well and not included in this calculation of course at this point because thank you we don't have those dollars yet thank you member gallow thank you madam chair and thank you dr jenkins and i certainly appreciate the need to make sure that we have subs in all our classrooms especially our ese classrooms i wanted to

106point out and i know that i discussed this with mrs lindsey during our conversation when we talked about when we split money when we have to do the split and they're coming out of esc funds the guarantee funds that when that happens that we are tracking that those students are that they're getting differentiated learning like i want to make sure that the public is aware that when we split like if you have esc students in a classroom and half the money's going to that teacher that teacher is providing differentiated or differentiated learning to those students so they have to actually provide more you know more than what they would to the other students to for that money to be split is that is that correct or can you explain that a little bit better than

107i did mrs lindsey i think so when when we talked your concern was that if the teacher was partially funded from ese sources that they were indeed providing something other than the same classroom instruction all of their students get to that subset that was an ese student and in response to your question i said of course because there's either an ep or an iep that governs what needs to happen we were talking about gifted so i'll focus on gifted at that time and there are many ways to serve gifted students there can be particularly if they're in the same classroom there can be different assignments some enriching assignments that are part of the curriculum but the gifted student is given something more challenging or an additional enrichment type of activity that is appropriate for their

108ep or there can be other types of activities that occur during the course of the instructional day or week and that would happen in the classroom even as it were blended does that address your comment it does thank you thank you very much and then one final thing madam share yes of course remember kelly are you recognized i just want to kind of piggyback on what what other some of my other board members have discussed i think that it's we've already kind of tackled the that the majority of these esee dollars are being spent either beans are being spent on personnel that are in our schools that are helping are directly helping our students and that the cost of of the money that goes to the elc is very minimal so i appreciate the other

109school board members that brought that up that asked that question and i also just want to state that i agree with i agree with member byrd i really appreciate this presentation today i love that it was it was broken down it was easy to understand and i'm hoping that this will be helpful to our parents who had many questions i think moving forward i agree with member byrd we need to you know we need to keep moving forward we still have a lot of work to do in ese i know that we're making progress and i'm i'm looking forward to making more progress and i'm proud of of the district and the board for all the work that we've done and we're trying to do on behalf of esc students so with that's all i

110have thank you so much thank you member gallow and well said member lopez you're recognized thank you madam chair as i lindsay as i told you in private i highly appreciate your professionalism and also your commitment with with our community and with the ese students i think that is a great job we all i think that the district and this and the board are looking for transparency and trust i love the fact that you have you know you and your department identify deficiencies you know data survey i think that the survey is very fair by having different schools different populations different type of of demographics so i think that you know is very fair we always have space to grow but i have a few questions about the kelly services because i know that is

111a challenge about not having substitute with certifications or esd credentials but at the at the school level do we have any type of initiative or program for teachers aid to have esc credentials or to make to to help them to become esc teachers or not i believe we do and i'd like to defer that question to dr jenkins because they manage that dr jenkins dr vazquez can speak to that dr vazquez yes in collaboration with our human resources department we've had a program in place for several years where classified staff is able to attend i believe it's rollins university and acquire their four-year degree it's been a very successful program dr williams would be able to provide the actual number of graduates that we have had and we encourage anyone out there who is interested

112to reach out to our human resources department we are always looking for talent within our own organization you thank you so much for that information and i also want to emphasize that every single time i have a situation with an esc student in my district and i approach the esc department they always find a solution so i encourage the parents that are listening to this work session to keep going with those conversations don't feel afraid talk to us we want to build the transparency and the trust so i am at least i am very pleased 100 of the parents that approach me i always have a response from dr schuller e and avi so i highly appreciate that as well so i and i know that is a challenge because in the esc department is

113so unique you know every case is so independent so individualized and it's so hard we cannot generalize so feel free to to speak to us and you know if you have imagine that if you have esc student plus is an eso student so it's more complicated so if you feel more comfortable you know speaking spanish you know i'm here too so and we have in the department we also have people who speak spanish and we have people who who speak haitian career as well so i just want to emphasize that as well thank you thank you member lopez excellent points so we are about wrapping up let me go to member bird and then i have a couple of closing comments and we'll move on to our next topic i'll be quick i just thought

114that i would check to see if i was reflecting on how much i really do love reading these audit reports and i was trying to see if we have it easily accessible for families to see these audit reports on our website and you can if you go click on departments and then look for the internal audit which you know i was looking under a for audit or you know it was it took me a minute right okay so my point is maybe we could put a link to the audits all the audits that are being done or all the audit reports under school board since the auditor works for the school board that might be an easy way that way parents would just have one click because it was a little it was a little

115tricky to find it took a lot of steps so i think if someone saw audit reports on there and it was just one click it would be easier because i think that you answer a lot of questions that people come to us all the time asking in all of your reports so i would just like to make that suggestion excellent another suggestion might be that we just look at our search engine because sometimes i do get a little frustrated with the search engine because i want to be able to put the word audit in and it just did to take me so i don't know i don't know enough about technology to know i think that's something you contract out with or something but great great points by everyone i want to thank you again

116miss lindsey for excellent work on this in the entire audit but bringing us home to a close on this issue is really helpful i think i don't want to reiterate a couple of comments that i heard first member gould if you're still with us when you spoke about congressional members suggesting that we use ese dollars for or i'm sorry s or dollars not esc dollars sr dollars for raises if those are our local congressional members please let us know i'm thinking that maybe there'd be a way that we could politely send some correspondence up to clarify the challenge that would create i think sometimes we think that if you run for office you're going to be a jack of all trades and we all know that's not the case so understanding finance and sustainable budgets

117isn't necessarily something you have to know at the legislative level so it would be helpful probably to clear up any confusion around that i also want to echo the words of vice chair i actually i'm a little surprised because when my kids were in school i was on their sac committee i was vice chair i was chair of the sac committee i thought pta was good but sac was like you said that's where the decisions get made that's where you understand how things are allocated that's where you can have tremendous impact and i even got involved with the sac committee and attended all the meetings two years before my kids started middle school because i knew middle school was going to be a rough time and i figured the more engaged i was the more

118the administration the teachers everybody saw me i wanted them to see me as a positive influence when i tried to sit in on a classroom before my kids were in school i wasn't exactly seen positive and the lack of reception positive reception and trying to keep me out made me suspicious and gave me cause to wonder what was going on in the classroom that the union had this provision that i couldn't go in without anyway the whole thing brought just made me very nervous as a mom with a child entering middle school in two years so i will never take the mom out of me and the experiences that i've had along the way good and some not so good that do help shape how i respond to the things that i hear from parents

119and students and teachers today the good the bad and the sometimes problematic most of the time those problematics are not accurate and there's always another side to the story but i just for anybody listening i'll always be the mom first and i think that's probably what we all need to be so miss lindsay and lindy lindsay thank you again we will be calling you on you again i know you're always working on audits for us but i'm sure this board will be asking for your insight along the way and we're forever grateful to you and your team and your advisory committee as well for the support that you provide this district all right we are member gold and then we're going to move on to communication with our legislators remember google you're recognized so i

120just wanted to follow up that was a national public radio report this morning i didn't catch who was cited as the quote about utilizing that funding to to give raises across the country it wasn't local because i would remember that okay thank you okay wonderful well maybe we'll get the council of great city schools to see if they can track down that person and politely help educate them but i know our delegation so well as you do and i know all of them would be welcome to hearing from us if we had any advice on what works and doesn't work it's one of the things i do love is our local delegation both at the state and the national level are very very supportive of us and we're blessed to have that support we are

121going to talk about two letters one that the superintendent has asked us to review it doesn't require a vote of the board but we like the board to be aware and i always want to know if i'm communicating with the board if there's any hesitation that the board has about that because i try to be very respectful of i'm the chair but i'm not the voice of this board if you're not comfortable with my voice so let me start with the superintendent on the assessment issue dr jenkins thank you madam chair board members will see including those who are online i did email you the latest draft actually it is addressed to commissioner corcoran for the past two years florida department of education has weighed florida's standards assessment testing in schools because of the covet

12219 pandemic orange county public schools continues to face challenges as a result of the pandemic and the obstacles that have disrupted learning opportunities for our students a district currently serves more than 206 000 students and employs 14 000 teachers the delta and omicron variants have had a huge negative impact on student and teacher attendance this school year since january 4th 2022 we believe this level of learning disruption justifies flexibility under state and federal accountability systems ocps specifically requests that fldoe provide the same flexibility provided last year for school grades if you recall that was schools could opt in to receive a great district opt-in for specific schools to receive grades if they so desired also the third grade retention requirements and teacher evaluation calculations to fulfill our vision to ensure every student has a promising

123and successful future ocps also is requesting that fdoe re-evaluate the fsa testing schedule for implementing new scores for this year's graduating seniors and allow the previous scores to be applied to the 2021-22 school year these suggested recommendations will help lead florida students to success thank you for your consideration and response to educational needs during the covet 19 pandemic several board members raised this issue i believe hillsborough and miami-dade had sent a solicitation to the commissioner and we wanted to respond as well i think this covers basically where our concerns rest i've heard positive murmurings at least that there might be consideration this year because we have not fully recovered and students are still suffering from lost learning time and we don't want our teachers punished either where they have to have calculations made that impact

124their compensation based on some some very challenging times here in our district so we're very hopeful we'd like to send this signed by the chair and by superintendent to the commissioner certainly didn't get any written feedback certainly want to hear if you have any additions or concerns about this communication before we go on to the second one all right i don't see any buttons remember cobra you recognize just very quickly i appreciate the advocacy on this issue vital not only for students but for teachers like you said and i'm glad we're having this conversation up here because we do as a body advocate with our legislators and with the department of education all the time but i don't think the public gets to see that and so i'm glad we're having this pub this conversation

125here so thank you for that and for reading the letter to them thank you dr jenkins anything further okay all right the second the second issue is a bill that you all have been hearing about through our through mr lagash who might be here with us in the room oh no of course he's not goodness gracious no he's in tallahassee and the bill isn't exactly on point but there were several reasons that i thought it would be good for us to be on record with our local delegation and the entire legislature for that matter because there's been so much conversation about library materials there is some concern that i have that there may still be a swing in a direction there's some conversation about what should be discussed in classrooms at different age levels and

126i just don't want there to be any ambiguity about where this district stands on the issue of having materials available for our lgbtq plus youth in our schools and so i had asked for support of scott just the end of last week and jason if they would put together a rough draft for us to look at made a few minor revisions to it is here in front of us i'll read it very quickly but the primary goal is just make sure we're ahead of any any change that might come that we've given notice to the legislature where we stand on this but we've also given our team in tallahassee a tool to take back with them around because i don't expect quite frankly i wish i could tell you that every legislator is going to

127read this say let me drop everything see what orange county has to say probably not the case our members will but not everybody will but at least our staff would have a tool in hand should they need it the letter reads dear florida legislators as the fourth largest school district in the state serving more than 2006 students orange county public schools is a place where all students have the right to learn in a safe and welcoming environment free from harassment or discrimination with values that include inclusion and respect we believe education must cultivate acceptance and respect for everyone regardless of sexual orientation gender identity or gender and gender expression ocps also supports positive representation of all children in literature in which they can freely see themselves we are committed to including age-appropriate non-sexually explicit reading

128materials in our libraries that help all children grow into productive citizens with the critical thinking skills necessary to contribute positively to society i see a typo there as we work together to lift up all of florida's children towards promising and successful futures we hope you will stand with us in our efforts to promote awareness understanding and acceptance of others as dr martin luther king jr said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere respectfully signed by myself and dr jenkins unless this board has concerns remember gallo you're recognized thank you madam chair i am very happy with the latter i like the intent of the letter and i like that as as linda mentioned that we're we're openly advocating for what we feel is important here in orange county and i love that it has

129a positive tone because we're being positive in our desire and our want to lift these children up and to make sure every child in orange county public schools feels safe and accepted and loved and supported and that's our role as school board members is to support all of our students so i just love that it's a positive message that just says you know what we support all our students and we're going to do everything within our power to make sure they're successful just like we would for any other student in in our district and that's important to us and i think that's what this letter does it says this is important to us and it's important that we communicate to our community that it's important to us and i think it's important for them to

130hear our voice on this so thank you madam chair and the and dr jenkins and for all who played a part in crafting this letter i appreciate it thank you member gallow remember bird vice chair you're recognized i'm just going to echo what member gallows said i tol i totally agree that this the tone of this letter is just so positive it says exactly what we need them to hear and what's important to us as a board so i really do appreciate you writing this letter i do agree too that the public needs to needs to know that this is where we stand because these bills that are being proposed in tallahassee are frightening for many reasons but specifically because they completely go against everything we talk about in this letter so i think it's

131important as you mentioned earlier to get the public to advocate i think if the public knew what was being what was happening in tallahassee i try to share as much as i can with the public that i talk to but i think that they need to be made aware and when the public knows about things that are happening they show up just like they did for the bright futures bill last legislative session they showed up they spoke at session they reached out to their legislators and they that bill fell by the wayside so i think as much as we can get them engaged more the better and i would just like to make sure we i don't know how communication the community communication department is going to handle the letter but if we can somehow

132make sure that our public knows about that we're sending this letter to tallahassee that would be a good thing as well thank you vice chair maybe we could find a way to along with sending it to them send it out either as an attachment to news you could use or something along those lines so we can get it into the hands of the public and we have our communications meeting coming up and we often talk about ways to put maybe a little corner in there for messages from the board this could go into that category too there's been a lot of talk about library material and i think it's impre extremely important for people especially our children to know where we stand on this issue and i do have one i'm going to go to

133member castro dental i do have one question i am so sorry there's no end to the number of times i can edit a document it is one of my shortcomings i will have to acknowledge that but when i read it again this morning i did wonder if we should add when we talk about having cultivating acceptance and respect for everyone we didn't include race ethnicity we didn't include religion i was the focus of this really was on what the legislature is focused on which or may be focused on however i wouldn't want anyone to read this letter and not believe not understand that we take equity and inclusion very seriously at all levels so just food for thought that we could work that into that sentence but the gist of this letter is really about

134our lgbtq students and protecting them dr jenkins and i'll go to remember kester down so madam chair i love editing as well so we might say instead respect for everyone and emphasize that word everyone including instead of regardless of you could say including we could say regardless of race ethnicity religion sexual orientation gender identity and gender expression i was looking to narrow it but we can expand okay we can expect if you've got a way to narrow it go ahead and so i was going to say respect for everyone hmm yeah regardless it's still got to go in there or maybe we just emphasize or bold everyone because if you put start listing different categories it's going to get steep yeah so i think maybe if we emphasize the word everyone and i wanted to

135i wanted to have the word including instead of regardless but you could say including our lgbtq community okay member castro dental and then i want to make sure i got your one typo as well was it who instead of who contributed okay with critical skills all children grow into productive citizens with the critical thinking skills necessary should not be who contributed got it to contribute got it remember castor dental and i'm sorry the reason i held off is because if i was going to suggest a change here i thought it would be easier to get everybody's thought on that so you're on the spot on the hot seat right now i guess huh me yeah your comments and your thoughts no i'm good thank you madam chair thank you no i want to just say

136that i appreciate these letters being taken to tallahassee to reflect the sentiments of the board and i know that you know we're coming off some important impasse meetings and the current environment around our teachers is important as with with you know how stressed stressful the job has become these last few years well these last this last decade really but in particular this last few weeks with our what we've experienced with the impasse and we've talked up here about our efforts to support teachers support the profession do what we can to eliminate some of the burdensome workload increase morale because those are all so important so i'm i'm really happy that we have people who are in tallahassee now with scott howitt and jason lagosh representing the board and we have some board members going up

137today or tomorrow and some who are already there i just want to point out that there are bills in tallahassee right now that have been in committee that are not supportive of teachers and i really would hope that our board when you go up make sure you discuss in particular some of those bills because we can't say we support teachers and we're doing what we can to help the profession and then go to tallahassee and support the opposite i know you would agree with that i know there's also a bill house bill 1203 that restricts teachers ability to bargain when it comes to evaluations and i don't think that is something that we would support having just said that we support teachers in the profession so much and that is a critical aspect of of

138teachers bargaining rights so but i do appreciate all of you going up there because it's not easy to go up to tallahassee it's not always a friendly environment especially with school boards under attack as well as you enter the building so i appreciate that you all are taking your time to go i wish i could go with you and at the same time i'm so glad i'm not but i my thoughts are with you all and i appreciate the time that you're taking to go up there and really support the school boards in general the concept of a school board our employees our students funding there's so much going on right now your presence up there will make a difference or an impact even if things don't always go our way i'm we have to

139keep fighting so while you all are up there i'll be reaching out to some of the local delegation as well thank you thank you member castro dental and i was counting on that thank you member gala amber gallo hi manager thank you i'm here i must be an old cue i'm good thank you okay all right if there's no further comments from the board then i'm about to adjourn the meeting last call three two one meeting is now adjourned thank you all so much for being here today it was a good day those of you hated those of you heading to tallahassee will have a hard copy for you upstairs if you wait just a minute we'll we'll have a copy for you and we'll email it to everyone as well so you