Superintendent's Workshop 1 p.m. 9-14-21

001school board member discussion session to order it's one o'clock on tuesday september 14 2021 um i would like to point out there's a revised agenda that you all have received i added uh to the agenda which is what you see in new agenda item is this supposed censure that i received from the rec and i would like to suggest it's listed under item 3d i'd like to move it up and have it be part of the discussion around protocols or at least a subset of it if that's all right with everybody i don't know that we need to vote but seems to be fine so um i think the first order of business dr jones is oh excuse me uh mrs barenborg you you wanted a few minutes to uh yeah i want to make

002a statement if i could sure go ahead i know you know i you don't know i'm making this statement but there was a vote taken as you just mentioned at a meeting which i attended last week the vote was to censure a fellow board member mr barefoot the vote was quickly taken at the end of the meeting and i abstained from voting i was not only surprised but also dismayed at this vote it is difficult enough right now to serve as a school board member without the personal pressures being put on us about our votes i respect all of my fellow board members and know that all of us are trying to make the best decisions we can during a pandemic and with an extremely divided community after this vote was taken i resigned from

003the republican executive committee i do not approve nor support the centering of a board member i'm asking for our community to please continue to advocate for your issues but please do so in a non-threatening manner thank you all right well um i'm not losing any sleep over the century in case you all are concerned about my sleep habits i'm not a member i don't know how you can center somebody's not a member but you know have at it so um but i do think that incorporating this into uh the uh the board protocol discussion that we continue continually have sort of put off i think it fits in nicely and courtesy that we show to one another irregardless of we may have different points of view frankly i think thinking think having different points of

004view is healthy if everybody agreed on everything we'd probably be making a lot of mistakes so i think [Music] it's a healthy dialogue to have but at the end of the day we respect and we move on so with that dr jones it's all yours thank you very much i attended the fsba meeting yesterday in kissimmee there were about 25 counties represented in the room and about five on zoom and the purpose of this i am on the legislative subcommittee and thank you very much for allowing me to do this is to get our platforms if you will for the school year and it was a really good process it was about five hours where we talked about the top ones that were sent in by each county and then we kind of narrowed it

005now this is just the general terms they're going to do wordsmithing uh gray robinson is one of the lobbying firms that will work with the fsba on this and they were great help on how to frame our platforms but once this comes out in specific wording i will send it to you right away but just as a general concern as far as estate top three or four number one was early learning big push big push free and reduced lunch to be continued throughout the year and a lot of a lot of board members talked about that and as a former high school principal i understand that you know kids on free and reduced lunch sometimes wouldn't even ask for it in high school they didn't want kids to know so for everyone it just makes

006it a really good feeling for students this is kind of combined on cyber security and having hot spots tech hot spots for kids in some counties they were sitting outside the library just to get a wi-fi and i know we worked really hard on that are continuing to do so but that is very very important and the last one it's general but they want to direct funding to the districts because sometimes the state is holding money back now the federal level i'm not on that committee but i listen to it uh funding in general uh fefp really tuning in on the workforce with career in tech a lot of expenses a lot of times you don't get the funding for the first three years and it's hard to get a start up on that mental

007health was number one number one because as we all know times are tough and challenging for more reasons than one i have to bring this up i think one of the many emails we received as a board member came from a student from marjory stoneman stoneman douglas and she basically thinks she said if you think mental health is bad by making students wear a mask shut our schools down and we're not going to make it we've got to be in school so put those mitigation factors in there and another one which i was glad to see teacher retention and pay so those are the ones and they're going to wordsmith it so that it looks good our lobbyists then we would be presenting um to our people our representative and senators so i like that

008now this i just nancy sent out i think this morning as soon as i got it it's from the national school board association on what the federal government is doing and i just wanted to point out uh on page three i'm going to read all of it obviously from the federal government president biden's coven action plan summary providing additional funding to school districts for safe school reopening including back filling salaries and other funding withheld by states for implementing covet safety measures and they said that will be coming from the american rescue plan uh 130 billion billion will be going to state school districts and tribes to support the safe reopening of school they believe strongly that masking is one of the mitigating factors that we need to do so if any school district within any

009state is will tell funds they will support us and just let you know i did call the white house i did speak with someone and i also sent an email regarding this so i'm glad to see this so that's basically the summary um as far as where we are some of the things we talked about i know miss barenborg put some information there on fefp the one for the pilot online training that was not one of the top three but someone from marion county said they'd like to get together to to kind of look at that so that's basically the summary it was a good meeting and let me know if you have any comments or concerns go ahead dr schiff you may have already addressed this and i think i'm just looking at a

010level of specificity which may or may not have been discussed but you said the platform included the early learning free and reduced lunch and funding directly to districts yes there's two areas where funding has not come to districts one is on the free and reduced lunch where florida has not yet applied for the 820 million in food assistance from the federal government which is then not filtering down to districts and then there's the esser funding um there's the second half of esser funding and then there's the third esser funding or either of those things specifically discussed in money going directly to districts the first one was the first one about the food so yes um and again these are just general and they will be a little bit more specific that's a great point doctorship

011so uh the answer was talked about a little bit but they really talked about the one for the food yeah because they're both significant in terms of money being held up at the state level albeit for diff i think different reasons and in different um the pipelines are different but both of them are is sets of money that's not coming to district to support districts for the expenses associated with covet they're going to push it i know they will and i know it seemed kind of general to just you know district funding but the first one was about food was definitely spoken about thank you you're welcome any other comments or questions all right um the long anticipated continuance of the discussion on ford protocol so dr jones you're up again okay as you can

012see at the top it says draft and um you can see where we left off at the bottom of page two my highlighting in yellow just questions i have that i will talk to dr moore about because i wasn't sure of days or numbers and so forth and dr schiff i'm going to depend on you to you're a good editor to look at that so the areas that we have not discussed are on the third page and that talks about meeting expectations ongoing professional development of board members i think we're all in favor of that and then the last one which i want to really talk about is public participation at meetings but i think nancy sent this to you ms esplan about a week ago so i really don't want to go on the

013wordsmithing here but if you have any questions again you could put it in edit because i'd really like to put this forward within the month again i had a couple questions on some days but one thing i wanted to share with the board i did a zoom fsba training and it was open for all school board members regarding handling meetings in these volatile times i don't know if anybody else was on there i did i didn't see you but you could have been and a couple things before i talk about the main theme obviously the board urges members of the public to address school and district concerns using the appropriate chain authority we've got that in policy how you work through to the superintendent i think that's pretty clear and one thing i just added

014to that that part at the end of the meeting at the end of public input we can give sharing and that's fine but they do say and this came from one of the many attorneys on that call that um don't engage in that you know they say your stuff we say our stuff they have to listen to us and we move forward now i want to just review the notes from the session they said you know we should really run our meetings like the florida state board of education very tight meeting i've been on two of their calls the last couple of months 30 minutes done the board meeting is for the business of the board neola states 30 minutes for citizen input chapter 87713 unlawful to disrupt a school board meeting and we need

015to enforce it and i know mr barefoot will talk about that um there's just some ideas for other districts some districts at the time and look at how many want to speak they'll say you got 60 minutes 30 people are speaking you each have two minutes they want to be fair on that some districts do that um the board chair should convey to the audience and i know you do that in the beginning uh regarding policy 169.1 and the florida statute 1001.372 removal of persons interfering with meetings one warning and they can be removed now some groups say because i've been listening to mask issues for 10 months my fellow board members the three have been here much longer they will sometimes say okay you've got one group five of you may speak this group

016five of you may speak because we keep hearing the same thing over and over from each area that's one of the boards that will do that some you are not required to televise public comment you are not required to do so only the business of the board meeting itself the podium they should be careful on that i've had issues with this with a sign sometimes i can't see or somebody's doing some interference saying no or shaking their head or yelling and that person who's ever speaking needs to have that podium and not have interruptions from either group i mean we are modeling what we expect we are a school board of education i think back i'm just going to compare this to the principalship once that school day started those kids were mine i'd schedule

017my morning meetings i would do some at lunch in the cafeteria so i could watch in the cafeteria and i would schedule after the school day that school day to me was sacred the business of the board is sacred to me and we're not getting there sometimes till nine o'clock and every watch some of these meetings we're we're not as focused as we should be it's just so tiring at times we were all elected to do the business of the board calling a recess this is for me mr barefoot every two two hours a lot of people do that we just have a break i know i'm old but that's what i need okay not anything in the law to place detailed public citizen input for minutes ms esplan you could just do a summary

018these 20 people want to match these 20 people did not that is not in the law and one thing they did talk about at the end is we must take threats seriously i remember when the lee county superintendent was shot at that time dr norris who is our superintendent put in a bowl of proof glass in the old school board building it was it was scary and they were listen to me those meetings were not one-tenth as volatile as they are now another thing the fsba has sent to every sheriff in the county please keep our school board members safe and our school district safe and we have to make sure if we get any kind of threat to report that immediately uh dr moore i i would think i'd go through mr bass i

019don't know but that is something to us obviously with with dr moore um and this is probably the best i put it in bold school board meetings are public meetings to conduct the business of the board not a meeting of the public with the board in attendance now this will can be taken out of context but i'm glad this is recorded i'm not saying citizen input is not important but i do not think it should take up the time two to three hours before a school board meeting and yes in this district we used to have it at the end we could talk about this as a group because this will have to go in policy as far as we give a certain amount of time at the beginning and then the rest is at

020the end but we are here for our students and our staff members and our parents and in the hundreds and hundreds of emails that we've received in last couple months our parents want us to do the job that we were to do and when we look at these these in general i just think you know as miss barenborg said earlier we can all disagree but we can do so with respect and without it being divisive and i think that's key because we are the five people here telling him to do the job that needs to be done for our students that is absolutely why we are here and sometimes it gets put on the back burner and that is not right i said this at the last meeting we can do things right or we

021can do the right thing and there's a big difference there i'm very passionate about this i've looked i look back at our meetings i look back at our information i look back at the meetings with the superintendent but you know this is something that i think we have to set the tone for and i know some of this is going to be policy but and i talked to mr grass about this um there's no state statute that says citizen input has to be at the beginning i know we have in our orders of the day but a lot of schools do beginning some say a certain hour some do it at the end counties uh i looked at the information that she sent us but um i just think we have to make a stand

022and we have to make it right now to move forward with our students and right now that's all i got buddy so just your ideas or thoughts i'm sure we all have uh a reaction i think it's a generalization it's hard to disagree with with with the intent of what you just put out there uh miss fairborg you had your yeah i just want to ask our board attorney um for citizen input isn't it only to action items that are going to be voted on that night that they we must listen to them ahead of time um yes what the law was changed i want to say it was back in 2018 which put into law a requirement that local governments have a pr have an allowance for public comment on something that you're going

023to be taking action on it doesn't have to be at the same meeting you can certainly have a prior meeting where you accept public comment on a topic and then take action on it but you do have to allow public comment on those things that you're taking action on our board policy is actually a little broader than that the the our board policy allows for uh public comment on items that will be taken action on as well as school board member discussion items that are on the agenda the board that adopted that policy wish to make a little broader for public comment so you don't have to do it you can certainly craft your policy to just be about action items that you're taking action on dr jones i do do want to respond that

024there are some school boards that do have public comment at the end of their meeting we just need to be clear to allow for public comment at the beginning of the meeting on those things that we are taking action on anything that's not on your agenda or anything that has nothing to do with public education you can certainly set a different time for those public comments to be heard if you wish to hear them thank you can i ask also um can somebody get up to the mic and just say anything they want or do they have to speak to an item that is on an agenda or a meeting item or a discussion item that will be de depend upon your policy right if the board witnesses your policy is not limited you allow

025three minutes for someone to come to the microphone and speak during public comment if the board wished to amend your policy you could certainly do that to only have it only have public comment with regard to things on your agenda you could say only public comment with regard to public education issues i mean you could craft that however the board wished to hear your public comment um mrs rosario you want to go first no no go ahead um okay so i have a a few items that i'd like to either add or edit or talk about some of the bullets the way they are written seem to be combined we can combine some of these items is what i'm trying to say all the protocols yeah on some of the protocols you know it's just

026kind of redundant um for some things like on the board agenda you know there are two items that really speak to the same thing regarding a board agenda for example so my question to mrs d agresta with regard to our feedback on these bullets rather than sit here and go bullet by bullet item by item is it inappropriate for us to create some kind of email feedback to all board on yes it would be inappropriate inappropriate pl please please do not share comments back and forth um discussion amongst the board members whether it's written or oral it really must be done in a public setting but if each of you wanted to come up with your edits and then come back together in another meeting to share those edits with everyone that's certainly appropriate but

027um i i know in the age of electronics there are all kinds of programs you can just kind of go on and everybody together edit a document if you wanted to do it on the big screen in a public meeting that would be great but not from the comfort of our homes where everybody's talking amongst themselves outside of a public meeting so here's the um unfortunate part of our position is that we don't get to know in advance the intent of a particular item on an agenda sorry mar um we don't get to to know that so in looking at this on our agenda as just being board protocols you know it's really unsure if the intent was for us to actually edit and go through each one or just kind of talk about some

028updates do you have anything to add and then let's come back again and discuss it at a future at another time i would like to do that i would like for us to kind of get together and only talk protocol because every time we come together there seems to be something else that we have to kind of review in terms of these bullets um the great bullets we've made great progress thus far but i don't believe that we are where we need to be i think that several of these items need to still be discussed with as a board and only as a board with no other interruptions i will say that there was a question here with regard to the seven day advance and the emergency uh with the board meetings it is this

029actually it comes up in a few different places uh comes up in board chairman chairperson and vice chairperson and then again in board meetings with the seven day advance and then there's a an emergency or and then highlighted the superintendent must post all backup materials for agenda items seven days in advance of dually convened board meetings which i completely agree in the event of an emergency the agenda may be changed that i have obviously in the event of an emergency something has to be changed however there are times where something is not an emergency and it's date uh driven so let's say for example there was a deadline that we were receiving information by thursday or friday before the meeting that's not so much an emergency but that still should allow the superintendent to add

030a last-minute item because we received information that was date specific that sort of so it's not all and only you know a once and for all emergency but we should be able to so how we word that i think is important for us to discuss yeah um and then uh let me see my notes make sure i got it all even i wanted to talk about the backups i know our superintendent is a perfectionist he is a a workhorse and i know that he doesn't like to put out items for backup unless he is absolutely certain that those are the that's how he wants to present it um but i do see the need for uh even if they're tentative for you to put on their tentative or schedule to change or something so that

031at least all of the backups and presentations be on the agenda that i absolutely believe it needs to happen so that we are prepared with our questions in advance of our tuesday meetings and um [Music] with regard to a statement that you mentioned that doesn't have to do with protocol but i'm just curious how dr jones you knew that mr barefoot is going to talk about what is lawful and unlawful because he said at the beginning meaning he wanted to put it down with board protocols gotcha i walked in a little bit just maybe a few minutes late maybe i missed that so it just kind of caught me off guard so i thank you for clarifying that so if after board members add comments uh mr barefoot uh maybe we can set a date

032so that we can just talk about this uninterrupted and finish it done once and for all 100 agree awesome yes okay uh dr schiff sure is this am i on yeah uh i agree because i i i agree that it's not productive to go line by line i have a lot of things that i have questions about line by line or additions or i haven't even gotten to editing yet um so i agree i think we probably need a separate meeting for that i will say though um and i think a lot of these um thank you dr jones a lot of the stuff here for discussion on how we want to handle that are bigger conversations then just put them in a bullet point correct because they're they are um they have a lot

033to do with the ethics of how we do our business here and how we engage um for example i don't while i understand uh having citizen input be specific to items on the agenda there are things that it's really important that we don't know about that aren't on the agenda or when teachers need to make us aware of things or when things are happening in schools and i don't want to not there are there are times when that has come before the board in a public meeting that's been really helpful in ways that we might not otherwise have known it so i i would want us to consider that and i agree that we need to manage how we take input from the public in ways that we really didn't anticipate before this whole covet

034and masking and all of that started um i do think it's incredibly important though which has come up before that how we conduct ourselves in the meeting is exceptionally important and how we require people to behave in the room um and i'm actually going to request mr barefoot that you be stricter than maybe comfortable with that because i think we are at a at a volatile moment and i think every time there's clapping or applauding or booing or whatever it may be every time it occurs it gives license to the next time it occurs and unfortunate you know and none of uh none of us is is able to say or do anything about that except the chair which happens to be the seat you currently sit in um but i think we have to

035be really conscientious about that excellent it will be addressed tonight excellent and going forward thank you because i think we have seen where that's been escalating lately um and i think we as a board cannot do our business in that environment um and as dr jones has pointed out and has come up at other board meetings when we don't get to the business until nine or ten o'clock at night after we've been here in this case it will have been for 12 hours by then we're just not at our sharpest and it's not the best way to do important business um that said to mrs rosario's point about when and how things go on the agenda i actually disagree with you on that there are times when i i appreciate dr moore's uh will not

036put something on the agenda until he's sure it's the thing he wants to go on the agenda because that goes in a public space and when he puts things that are incomplete or tentative or may change dramatically we invite people to respond to to documents or policies or other things that may not even be how it's going to end up and how we're going to talk about it and i think we set ourselves up so i think there may need to be there are there are other times when that happens because of personnel issues and there are reasons for that but i think we need to be really cautious how we do that there are times things wind up on the agenda that empower people then to speak to things which are going to change

037dramatically by the time we get there so i would be really really cautious about how we do that all of that said um i'm not going to go through other stuff because i think we've agreed that we're going to set a specific time to just talk about this whether we do it in another board discussion or we set us a a separate day other than a regular tuesday to just get this handled and done because this is this has been going on for a long time now and we just need to get it done so that's all i got for now uh may i follow up sure two items um one thing that i i had note here that i didn't mention uh to dr jones point um i believe you said that we have

038a public meeting that we hold public meetings that the the boards are public meetings i just wanted to clarify these are not public meetings these are board meetings held in the public so it's a slight change in how it's worded but it makes a big difference where's that on there our you mentioned it oh okay you mentioned it in one so our meetings are board meetings held in the public not public meetings and i think fsba training has provided that clarity for all of us on multiple occasions so i just wanted to make sure that that is clear as board held meetings held in the public we allow public comments but it's still for the purpose of the board to do the business of the board well and again that came from the fsba zoom

039meeting so i'll double check on that okay no no i just wanted to make it clear and then the second thing um dr um schiff mentioned just now with regard to the seven day of the posting of the superintendent's items mrs diagusta our requirement to post our public agendas or our agendas for our meeting seven days in advance is that a requirement by law for just the agenda item 1 a 2 a 3 a b c or does that also require for us to upload seven days in advance all items related to that agenda what the law governing school board meetings requires that your agenda which i'm gonna i'm gonna hold it up the this agenda must be published for a regular school board meeting seven days in advance of the meeting so i'm going

040to say that again a regular school board meeting your regular school board meeting is your second and fourth tuesday at six o'clock all right if you wish to schedule a special board meeting to take action on something um you have to publish the agenda no later than 48 hours before the call of the meeting and again the agenda is the agenda under the administrative procedures act that law provides that any backup for an agenda item must also be published if it is available so the vast majority of information is typically available but the law recognizes that there are some backup materials that may not be available until closer to the call of the meeting and those items may still be included as backup but if it's set up if it's available at the time the

041agenda is posted then that information should be posted as well your board policies go a little beyond that and also make this requirement part of your workshop agendas that workshop agendas must be published seven days in advance with all of the supporting materials that's not a legal requirement it was a an ask of the board that adopted that policy so you can also look at that process and see if you wish to give some flex or some grace in that for those materials as well so why do we have um remind me again why was because it wasn't with this board and it wasn't with the previous board i believe it was with boards prior why do we have that friday cut off remind us again that friday our friday caught off before the board

042meeting there was i the way i understood it it was agreed somehow or another that there would be grace between the seven day and the friday before so by 5 pm i think it was that if you had any backup it had to be published by that time and not after so i'm going to say things like urban legend thinking rules these are all practices that were put in place by a sitting board and a seated superintendent at the time to allow for some amendments to the agenda without it being um a dispute during the meeting itself about what was added on the friday or the saturday or whatever to my memory the discussion was at least give the board members the weekend to review any information that was being added to an agenda again

043those are not reflected in a policy and i would suggest that if that is something the board is interested in doing that we actually write it down because at the moment it's not really written down anywhere it's just this is what we think are the rules interesting this is the first time since i have been a board member that i have heard the word urban legend with regard to this and i know we've talked about this on many occasions and it has it it pretty much happening it was happening absolutely but it it these were just individual conversations about what expectations were as opposed to writing it down in a policy or procedure or your protocols whatever but to document what what the expectation is so i know that i'm gonna i'm gonna end it

044with this because i know we're going to get together and we're going to have further discussions about this and dr moore knows how i feel about being handed material the day before the night before even the day of meeting it does not give this board member enough time to research process the thought write down questions be prepared to respond appropriately it just doesn't so maybe when we come to that protocol meeting we can come to an agreement as a board to establish some kind of i don't know write it in the protocols or create a policy to ensure that we can get all of the all of the material with time with regard to outside influences affecting what items we share as backup i understand that i understand that we are at the mercy of

045some other entity or organization but as it pertains to our superintendent he he is responsible for the items and the backup he can plan ahead of time of course with some leeway but he should be able to prepare uh in advance seven days and post all the items it's it's anyway we can have that discussion when we have come back for protocols thank you dr jones uh just would if um the board members say okay i'd like nancy miss esplin to kind of start looking for dates because this is something we do need to do and try to get us all together on this pretty soon again we just got a basic template we're moving a little bit forward and i think that's a good time to talk about to what is this what are

046this do we want in policy so we'll talk about that and before we just in this conversation mr barefoot i just i want to hear from dr moore as our superintendent um especially in the area of getting the work done before we close out on this part thank you through the chair in terms of the flow of work it's there are strict timelines that the staff adheres to in terms of putting items up that will be voted on and approved uh we're briefing board members uh a month in advance we then take them to on a typical routine we take them to board workshop in the following meeting we take them for approval the only exception to that rule would be um personnel which is what mr grester was referring to that was uploaded on

047friday outside of that staff will have a very hard time convincing me to publish an item that hasn't been fully vetted or discussed with you prior to it being released and fully being ready for approval having items that need to be amended or adjusted is not a good professional practice in this organization the other items that are time pressing which i think ms rosario was referring to is the information as it relates to kovit and how fast-moving it is and my desire to ensure that i provide the board with the most relevant up-to-date information so you can in fact make decisions regarding the pathway forward in terms of mitigation strategies in order to ensure that it is timely it is relevant and is meaningful and if i was to put something up a week ago

048today regarding this presentation uh it would be a completely different conversation because where we were a week ago to where we are today and you'll see that in the presentation is significantly different so in in any organization you have to be flexible to the reality of implementation let's say implementation where we are in time but i think if you're to go back and look at items since i've been here uh you'll be hard-pressed to see any items that are being updated that are going to the board to be approved that are being modified or adjusted with the exception of the personnel item and it's the desire of the board to have that a week in advance that's fine but at the same time that is going to impede the progress or the implementation of work

049here in our system because individuals need to be hired and they need to be put in place uh go ahead mrs barronborg but i will say that what an improvement has been since when i first was on this board um i i see dr schiff smiling because there were times that we would be handed something literally at the diocese to vote on so i appreciate the fact that uh in those one-on-one meetings we're getting a lot of prep we're getting a lot of opportunity to have input our input is being taken in and if in i'm sorry but if we go with this strict seven-day policy then our input won't be taken in sometimes and thought about individually and i think that's important too because we have those individual conversations with the superintendent that we

050can have and then later on hash it out on the diocese with our fellow board members so i think it is important that we allow that to happen but i also know that now we have a lot more prep and um in the the other thing is transparency is putting an out there for the public and i agree with you dr schiff that it needs to be out there appropriately for the public so that they don't have any misunderstandings so that is a delicate balance it's a delicate balance so when we do come up with a policy about this we need to consider that balance mr chair just i didn't fully answer the second part of your question um i guess it's a question back to you as you presented the item i didn't think

051it was to define a date to go through the logistic process of vetting the protocols but to have very specific conversation regarding the structure and organization of meetings specifically referring back to public comment so i don't i don't know if the board needs to have that conversation if there's action to be taken in in the crafting of a policy but i i as i heard you present that item i think that's what you were referring to so if i'm mistaken then then i'm mistaken but if there's additional conversation to ensure when this item is sunsetted the appropriate conversations have taken place right when i um listen to that meeting through fsba and they're at that time for those meetings they're at least 30 to 35 school board county representation and they had that meeting kind

052of an emergency meeting say listen there's issues out there with school boards there's threats out there with school boards they're not getting to the work especially if the citizen input is at the beginning and i'm not saying we have this magical new thing and um mr barefoot might be reading some things tonight and i know we have policy we just can't change it but i guess i wanted your comment on getting the work done if we're not really hitting it until nine o'clock at night if we're not really keeping the focus on it i mean you you've had covet since you've been here for except for the first two months so you know i want i want your opinion on that what can we do better as a board to get the work done for

053you we need to talk about teaching and learning and i think if this board was to reflect whether it has since covet has started what have the conversations that this board has had together as a whole how much of that time has been around masking how many times how much of that time has been around [Music] the problems or procedures around covet and how much has it been around teaching and learning and providing environments where kids can feel safe and i have said to my principals and and staff that what you see on a tuesday night is in no way reflective of the quality of instruction that takes place on a daily basis i have said a number of times what you see on a tuesday night um is not at all the conversations that

054are taking place at a school site at a district or cabinet level i have said to you the kinds of conversations that we have in board preparation and weekly meetings is digging deep it is evaluating the work i think the work the board did at the budget because it is a very set aside process um you all hold a very very high standard for that budget but i would generally appreciate if the bulk of our meetings and some of it is time and this is a attack on public education there's no two other ways to say it is intentional but we need to keep the main thing the main thing and i have misspoken as ms berenborg has reminded me at 9 37 at night saying critical race theory when i was supposed to saying

055culturally responsive teaching so we need to put the business of this board first and miss rosario as she's just captured i think is 100 correct you all have 24 meetings a year to conduct the business of the board we need to honor that time for our students and we need to be in the deep dialogue and conversation around those particular items now what we do in upcoming conversations tonight and where we go uh this evening it's just where we currently are we have to attack the mask issue but as we get ready to engage in that conversation we want to attack it we want to have a plan in place and we want to ensure that the appropriate mitigation strategies are there so we can implement when the time is appropriate the the correct mitigation

056strategies based on the volume of spread or co or covet in our community we need to keep the main thing the main thing so i'm really looking forward you know personally i think with the biggest disappointments going into this school year the energy and excitement was high because it was the conversation it was the dialogue the preparation for the opening of schools was absolutely outstanding and then we have to pivot to all things pandemic and shift our our systems as did every other county in the state of florida but we got to get it right and as a board we need to hold ourselves and as a superintendent hold ourselves accountable to having conversation and dialogue around what improves the quality of education for our children each and every single day so so i'm going

057to chime in here before um when i when i decided to your point when i decided to run uh for school board and i've been around and directly involved in education for a long time my wife and i whatever philanthropic contributions we make i would say 95 percent of it's toward education and health care and i can't remember the last time we had a meaningful discussion about academics about academic outcomes about how do we what can we do what can you do with our support to improve the academic outcomes for all children we obviously have socioeconomic challenges and the like but public education in this country is in a crisis and if people didn't recognize it five years ago they sure as hell do today i hope um you know the the chinese and all

058these other they're kicking our ass to put it in the vernacular our focus on math and science is pathetic and it's not just here i have kids in the new york city school grandkids i have grandkids in the boston schools i listen to it from my children and their spouses about the challenges that my grandchildren their kids face and i think i've said this before i think dr schiff and i got into the discussion one one board meeting briefly we've got the state of florida ranked somewhere pick a number well below the midpoint of the 50 states last number i saw was 42nd i don't know how you come up with these numbers but whatever it is in this county prior to your arrival the last number i saw was 37 out of 67. so

059do the math so we're below average in a state that is in the bottom quartile in the country what are we doing for our kids you compare them to the world that i much more familiar with and that's massachusetts i grew up in ohio my kids are in new york city which is its own in fact my youngest granddaughter is now going to marymount which is a catholic school because the public schools are so bad she's lucky to get in at 50 000 a year guess who's helping with that one i could take my school board salary assuming the governor lets me get it and contribute to my granddaughter's education but we have got to get off this these distractions as important as they are to deal with and start talking about why we're all

060here at least while i'm here because if we don't i'm gone i'm wasting my time and i i think it's and unfortunately we're in a political environment where everything's politicized even though education is supposed to be non-partisan and frankly the folks that i know the comments that i've received primarily emails phone calls from folks that pay attention most of many of them are seasonal residents they're all heavily invested in their schools their kids schools or their grandkids schools they they donate you know the number three three and a half four million dollars a year to the learning alliance to improve reading for k-3 kids child care resources doesn't raise that kind of money but they're focused on over the young arbor cradle to kindergarten and the demand in in that particular or for that organization

061is two or three times their ability to provide because there's not enough teachers so think about it from this standpoint we've got this i'm going to call it almost toxic if not toxic environment if you were a young teacher wanting a career in public education or you think you did and you observed what goes on in some of our meetings or other meetings around this state or other parts of the country you'd find something else to do i would i have a daughter as a high school guidance counselor and just outside of boston they don't have these problems and she can't believe when i tell her some of the issues here i mean she doesn't get it she said don't don't don't these people care about kids education i mean you just think about it

062we get all these complaints about masks and it's the same people that complain about mass that complain when their kids get quarantined that does that make any sense how can you how can you advocate for no masks and i'm making a statement here this is my point of view and at the same time complain because your kid's been quarantined two or three times i mean where what are these people drinking or eating that you can't connect the dots and i'm all for parents rights and freedom of speech and all that kind of stuff but with all of those rights goes responsibility and we are shirking our responsibility by not redirecting the discussion still being respectful of people's rights to to speak redirecting our time and efforts to the education of our kids and if we

063can't do that if we can't do it and if we can't commit ourselves to do it then who can because the people that object to some of the things that that we have done up here if they got control this school board you i can only imagine what it would be like so i mean that's really all i have to say specific to the protocols and i will tell you what i'm going to do tonight and you can provide feedback but i have a question for mrs b agresta the difference between policy and the half and having to post it for 30 days versus what i'll call the practice of the board or protocols protocols now i'm talking about when i was mayor of indian river shores we had all policies but we also had

064practice the way we ran meetings because we frankly didn't want to go through a day posting because 98 of the people wouldn't know was posted all you were doing is wasting time this is a little different so what is the difference what what can we make as practice now the benefit of a policy is a policy and you've got to make an effort to change it if if you've got a bunch of wide receivers come along that want to do something different uh policy is hard to change practice you can change a practice protocols is protocol mean policy or is protocol another word for the practice of how we run a board or a board meeting and i just like some some clarification from a from a legal standpoint you know from a from the

065uh whatever the well go ahead um thank you mr barefoot there is a difference between a policy which requires the 30-day notice of public hearing to adopt and you call it a protocol you can call it a procedure you can call it a management directive a policy cannot just be changed with the snap of a finger these other operating procedures can and i'll give you an example of the difference in your in the school board policies you've adopted a standard where people can speak for three minutes at public comment that's a policy it impacts someone else's abilities rights duties and obligations that's a policy it must be adopted as a policy statement we could not adopt the three-minute rule as i like to call it as simply a protocol so if it's something that's going

066to impact someone's rights duties or obligations we need to adopt it as a policy but if it's simply the way we're going to do business the superintendent will be sure that we have copies of everything 48 hours before a meeting that doesn't need to be a policy it can simply be an operating protocol however i have worked with boards this board and boards in other parts of the state that have adopted that level of detail as a policy so that everyone is clear and it cannot be changed quickly at the next meeting so some of this has to do with what it is that you want to do but some of that also has to do with the board itself how you wish to operate and how much you want it iron clad this is

067how we are going to do things and it's going to take a 30-day notice in a public hearing in order to change it so i'd like to make and and what you just said is what i thought but i wanted i wanted to be clear of course on uh dr jones your your summary and all the bullet points i might suggest when we'll set a date that each of us take the time to identify those bullet points that you think should be incorporated in a policy whether it's we amend a current one or create a new one and those items which we could call how we want to run the place how we would practice protocols whatever words because some of them really don't lend themselves to policy but if i were to air um

068i have a lot of confidence in us as a group not to say that we're smarter better than the next group that'll come along i would i would prefer the 30 days if there's a question put it in policy and make it really hard for somebody to come along and change it if we're really comfortable and i define comfortable as we all ought to be on board not four to one i mean we all ought to be comfortable we can argue perhaps about a word here or there i think most of the time we agree on the on the goal where we want to end up where we tend to disagree is and how we get there that's not unusual you want to go to palm beach shopping you've got a couple of choices you

069can take you route one you can take the turnpike you can take 95. the objective is to get to whatever store you're going to by when it opens at 10 o'clock my wife has taught me that believe me so so i think it would be worth our while and i might have a different point of view and what i think we don't need to put to policy but i guess i would hear air on on putting some of these things in policy forms or at least amend existing policies and i think that um it would be helpful i mean i'm happy to send my my thoughts that to dr moore and he can circulate i could copy you or maybe we want to do we maybe we want to get together again and exchange in

070some organized fashion how to approach this it is sort of hard but to not circulate each of our drafts ahead of time and then be able to you know respond and what dr jones makes sense i'm you know her wording or her just that makes more sense than mine and vice versa be more efficient i guess we can't really do that so that would be one request and as far as tonight's concern mrs diagras was very helpful and she basically sent me sort of a three-step process on what we what we do it's the comment that's made when we begin the meeting and it's pretty much the standard thing that i read mrs behrenberg when you ran a couple of those meetings i thought you sort of gave yourself a bullet point there were some

071good things in there that isn't in the other thing i think we probably ought to take a look at that but for tonight i've so i'm going to read this initial and i can read it now if you want it i don't think it's necessary but what's important is what's stated at the time of the first disruption and it's directed at the person who is disrupting stop interrupting disrupting this meeting this is your one warning if you continue you will be removed from the meeting and the building second disruption if the direction if the disruption occurs again directed the person making the noise you are out of order and interfering with this meeting you must leave the meeting room and building directed at law enforcement personnel in the room please come forward and remove this

072individual you point to the individual from the room in the building for disrupting the meeting if the removal will take some time the meeting will stand in recess until the meeting is brought back to order now and it's pretty straightforward so here's here's the the challenge up to this point if somebody goes an extra 10 seconds or there's some clapping it doesn't bother me but i think as all of you many of you pointed out i think it's time that we really got to clamp down so my concern and i've discussed this with ms diagrast and mr bass earlier and actually with law enforcement because we sort of huddled after the meeting earlier um you always have several people clap or several people just hold up signs and so when you warn someone you know

073no more clapping you're pointing at three four five six people you can't throw them all out or maybe you can but i think if you start doing that we're really asking for trouble because there's could be i'm not suggesting there will be there could be a couple of hot heads in the group that all of a sudden want to make an issue and then we've all of a sudden we've got some of the problems that i guess showed up in some of these other school board meetings have not in florida somewhere else in the around the country that we've all heard about but that's the approach that i'm going to take tonight i may say make a few more comments as we begin and and i understand that this feelings are pretty strong about mass

074or non-basque but but all i know is in my mind and mrs diagresta has i think gave us this information previously and it incorporated in dr moore's recommendation to us on masks is we are not doing anything illegal parents bill of rights gives rights to all parents and the rights of the parents who expect to send their kids to a safe and and secure learning environment is it's their right and certainly mass contribute to that even if at the margin you can talk about all the science and all the studies and you either you with rights come responsibilities and if you have a right you have a responsibility to treat your fellow humans in a responsible manner not your own personal agenda not your own political beliefs put those aside and use some common sense

075and the uh the idea that wearing a mask is somehow in violation of a law the the the executive order whatever it was that said you know no masks the court said you can't do that that that decision has been stayed but it's still in litigation and at what point is a public health crisis which is where we were a few weeks ago and as you'll see as you as you'll see doctor more later things have gotten better i i i just don't understand why people can't be considerate of their fellow parents the the the other children particularly when some of those same people as they said earlier the ones that are complaining when their kids get quarantined so uh it this just doesn't compute for me and and believe me i don't like masks

076and any other circumstances i mean i was i never liked playing batman or superman when was that kid i was always out in the yard with a ball i'm sure there's some kids that love being spider-man and they can wear a mask but the fact of the matter is this is not a game and this is no time for politics and unfortunately politics is everywhere and we just have to and i'm not suggesting that people that voted that really don't want to wear a mask they're entitled to do that but i i would just tell you that and somebody in the 300 emails we've gotten in the last 24 hours i mean my guess is if you look at your phone now you've got another 50. i mean the numbers are overwhelming in terms of

077parents want mass mandate continued uh and i think that um and i'm not we're not here to talk about all all of that and make any decisions but i'm just trying to get some perspective on and and and i'm and i may or may not say something to that regard to introduce the public comment tonight as it relates to this action item because there'll be plenty of people most of the people will be here to speak to this i'm sure they're not here to talk about how the vero beach football team did or didn't do last weekend huh rained out rained out yeah at any rate uh i could go on and on in this uh and i don't want to do that uh but um so before we move on i'd like some your

078thoughts on policy versus practice protocols whatever word one wants to use and we'll head this way mrs barenborg yeah um you mentioned the statement that i read before on that meeting on june 22 when we were going to vote about curriculum and we knew that that was a pretty controversial issue that was before us as well i worked with mr gresta and came up with a statement and i will say that we had really really great community participation that night i didn't hear the yelling and the calling out and the clapping it might have been a little bit but i think i stopped it pretty fast so i think everybody was really respectful you might want to look at that statement that we created to um is that the one that you have i have

079a copy of it's somewhere here a copy of i know i think i send it to her or send it to the superintendent anyway i read it that night so you can look at at the i've got it okay um and i will say that the public was very respectful and i appreciated that um the other thing i will tell you is it seems like to me the number one thing that i think we need to put for front is citizen input so maybe that we can all agree that that's the first thing we need to talk about does it need to be a policy does it need to be just in our protocols do we need to change what we have already in policy i guess that's the question exactly okay and part of

080that is you know dr jones said based on what some other districts have done you got an hour you've got 15 people that want to speak you get two minutes each you've got an hour and a half you've got 15 you've got three minutes each with a maximum of three that's one way to you set it an amount of time and you divide it by the number of speakers you just got to bring your calculator if you're running the meeting another way to do it is that you you could have action items first and you could have a second public speaking session after you've dealt with the business of the school board and someone that wants to and this is to dr schiff's comment there's no question that there are other things on the horizon

081or there are other things that certain speakers want to tee up ahead of time or bring you make you aware of but let's put those seconds so i don't know whether you can truncate or split public comment into the action items public comment and everything else yes but i do think that one the one thing that we should do is consider doing is when you come here you're to speak to issues that relate to public education i don't need to know who won the raiders football game last night i don't need to know about somebody wants to make a political statement on something that's irrelevant because we are nonpartisan when we're sitting on that diocese we may have our political views at appropriate time and place but it's not when we're doing the business best

082for kids and you know people have forgotten this tag line that before i got here you all came up with with dr moore's best for kids when are we going to start thinking about what's best for kids as opposed to the adults in the room that's that that make all this noise so at any rate just a comment um thank you for what you said about what you'll be reading tonight and when you change something it takes a little bit of time but really the only time people should be clapping is during our presentations and recognition you know that's the time sometimes they like what somebody's saying in citizen input but the same time people could be booing so we just we've got to work on that and i think today whenever miss esplin can

083get us all together um we'll talk about protocols and what maybe needs to be in policy that'll be a full day but i think we can do it and i like the beginning of this dialogue thank you mrs rosario yeah i'm um we've been talking about protocols for a long time um so to not be clear on what protocols are is is is pretty uh interesting to me but what we have received certainly in our master board training with the fsba and let me just remind you i don't agree with all of fsba's legislative platform you know items but they do a fantastic job with their training they do an amazing job specifically in the area of ensuring that board members know their role as a board member and how board meetings should be run

084um and so they've clarified all of this so quite a while ago uh when we all my uh dr schiff myself and i don't know if mrs berenberg was there i think you were when we went to the first fsba when we were first elected onto the board the training that was offered then uh shared even then in the subsequent years what protocols are and how different they are from policy and clearly mrs d agressa clarified that for us but their expectations and practices how we word them if we were them as a practice then we can change the bullets to be worded as practice if we were them as expectations then we write them down as these are our expectations for the behavior of the board and for the functioning of the work of

085the board um but all of that um is it it doesn't hold as much weight as policy but i would just be cautious to what we create in a policy because when boards and i think one of the reasons why we wanted to move in this direction is because boards change every four every two years and the changing of policy would mean that we would constantly be change district would constantly be changing these things based on who is the next who are the next board members so i i would just tread lightly on which areas obviously we all agree which areas are the most important to create policy for uh but otherwise protocols could work in the same manner they just they're not legally uh bound i suppose um so those are my thoughts on

086the protocols and let me just i think you you asked mr barefoot for an example of that i'm sure i heard some examples but one example is that the that an expectation uh and a protocol that we've talked about previously in some other multiple meetings that the superintendent should work with the school board attorney on onboarding new newly elected school board members that's a that's nowhere in writing we don't have that anywhere in writing however that's an expectation that could be written down as a protocol so that we are all on the same page in terms of who's doing what who does what in the in the district um for us or in our office and in in our capacity okay so enough said on on protocols um with regard to the meetings and what

087you mentioned there the public responds respectfully when they're addressed respectfully and if we throw around round words or use words like you're going to be thrown out or you're going to be removed or you're going to be forced out it automatically causes a feeling of tension it automatically creates an environment of um you know unwelcome or an environment of you know hairs on the top of your head already going up because now we're gonna fight or now we're gonna push back and i i just caution the use of those words mr barefoot i don't want to throw anyone out i don't want us to give the impression that we are looking to remove anyone or silence anyone or move anyone into another location i think the words that we that are used are going to

088be very very important in this case and how they're also shared will also be important there was something that you mentioned with regard to parents rights dealing with their children and that the same decorum should be with regard to the parental rights bill and that the same in the same way they should treat the board members with respect in the same way those are two totally different things i may have misunderstood what you mentioned but parents bill of rights has to deal with parents and their children and the upbringing of their children and the decisions that parents make on behalf of their children that has nothing to do with how they respond or talk to board members so i might have misunderstood but i want to be clear clear that a parent's right supported by

089the parents bill of rights is one item and then how board members are addressed in the public are a separate item there was something here about you said some these are the same parents that complain when their children are quarantined and also i've never heard of a parent complaining about their child being quarantined for any other reason except healthy quarantines so it's not that they're complaining if their kid is sick obviously i've never heard someone say my kid is sick and i'm so upset i'm quarantining my my child what i've heard was they're upset about the healthy asymptomatic quarantines that's what i think we need to clarify as well rather than saying those are the same like a blanket statement that those are the parents that are complaining that their kids are quarantined so there

090there is more to it than just the blanket statement and i just want to caution how we share this information well let me just clarify when it comes to parents bill of rights nothing to do with how parents address the school board i'm merely saying that parents that send their kids to school have a right to send their school send their children to a school that's safe in a secure learning environment and in a covet environment those rights are just as important as the rights of the people to think they can send their kid to school without a mask oh yeah the the the bill of rights doesn't right and so now we've got a situation where the people don't want to send their kids to school with a mask on and they come and

091they we're well aware of them and there's and we're also if we haven't before we certainly have in the last few days just look at the number of emails uh the parents said not only they expect their children to be able to go to school and we saw what happened early on before we put in these mitigation factors i i would venture and i don't you uh dr moore you would know the number of the percentage of kids that were not in school a big percentage of those were kids were kept out of school because their parents were afraid to send them to school because of the the the virus was was around and yes many of those folks that were ill were faculty and staff but there were plenty of kids in there too

092and so i just want to make sure that we understand when i was talking about that i think you're right mrs rosario in terms of the tone if not the specific words the tone of just remind people that we're here to hear everybody the problem is if once someone starts to clap or you get three or four people clapping what do you do you either say no more clapping you can say or i'm gonna or i'm gonna have you removed please don't clap again i don't want to have to remove you well that that is the third that's a third option and then what happens so you come back and they're still sitting there i i don't know but the bottom line is that that it's my responsibility and up to this point you give

093people a little leeway but i think we're in an environment right now where where people are going to come let them say their what they have to say and i've got to be able to and i can't tell you until it happens exactly how how i will react but i'm sensitive to your to your comment ms rosario i think you're right that words matter and the tone and the specifics of a of a word or a sentence can can the problem you're trying to solve can create another one so thank you for those comments missus uh dr schiff to your initial question about policy and protocols and while you and dr jones have been on the board for 10 months we've been here for almost three years now and we've been having this conversation about

094protocols since shortly after we got on the board and there were a variety of reasons why we could never complete that conversation and who disagreed with who and who felt who was trying to limit somebody else's right to speak or act it's worthy of consideration how these may go in policy and i'm thinking about what you said because yes boards change every two years and boards can always change policies it's just a more cumbersome process but were some of these things in policy when we got here we might have avoided some of the pitfalls that we've experienced over the last few years so i think i support that idea though i'm not exactly sure what it looks like right now in how we put certain protocols into policy to govern the behavior and decorum of

095board members and others in this room i think this room has become as dr jones mentioned an increasingly disrespectful space and to your point mr barefoot um when you spoke about being in the lower is it third or quadrant of the country in florida and then beyond that being in the lower third in the state as a parent of a graduating senior this year it breaks my heart i cannot tell you how much i have struggled with this and the degree to which i see every single day the impact that it's having it's not how i grew up i like you grew up in the northeast the education that i received was very different uh the expectations were very different and i'm watching this now some i don't know 40 50 years later in how

096that's occurring in our district in our schools and the impact it's having on my child and i can't tell you how much i struggle with this on a day-to-day basis the expectations are not very high and irrespective of my expectations for my son um he remains a 17 year old who will push back at his mother like 17 year olds do but that that net of support that holding him accountable that expectation in his school where he spends as many hours as he does i'm not clear that it's there to your point we're not doing well enough and to your point we have now spent a year and a half two years a year two years i've lost track not talking about education not talking about teaching and learning and it uh it it frustrates

097me it angers me and it breaks my heart and it is our responsibility as a board to do something about that and that starts in this room and that starts with how we conduct ourselves in this room that starts with how we ensure that what occurs in this room is non-partisan it is non-political there is a reason school boards are non-partisan offices and to the and it is our job to ensure that politics does not occur in this room and if we are not doing that then we are not doing our job we're just not and it is important that we reiterate that time and time and time again because as we have learned from fsba how goes the board goes the district one of the most valuable things i've heard from fsba is that

098the tenor of the district is set by the board and if we are seeing chaos in this room no surprise we will see chaos in this district and that's intolerable um i i have i have no patience for that um so to that soapbox um so i do think there is some merit to how we uh put into policy ways of being in behavior in this room and i i think we need more conversation about that because i'm not sure what that looks like but but i i can i appreciate you bringing that up um what um what is clear about the parents bill of rights and despite however it's been painted in the public i as a parent i'm completely in support of the parental bill of rights or of parents having rights to

099govern the well-being of their children i've never said anything that disagrees with that however in this bill it also says may not infringe on the fundamental rights of a parent to direct the upbringing education health care and mental health of his or her minor child without demonstrating that such an action is reasonable and necessary to achieve a compelling state interest and that such action is narrowly tailored and is not otherwise served by a less restrictive means that's exactly what we're doing and when we finally get to dr moore's presentation which i'm hoping we get too shortly notwithstanding my soapbox at the moment i think he will demonstrate exactly how he is doing that and how he is creating increasingly narrowly tailored ways of ensuring the health and safety and well-being of everybody in the district

100the parents uh the the parents the teachers the staff and the children and to your point yes i i also have received hundreds of emails i can't even respond to all of them which i will do once i i get time to again send out an email um the vast majority of emails i received are from the parents and the family members that you're referring to who want to to want to feel that they are sending their kids into safe environments and it is our job to create that um so i'm looking forward to dr moore's presentation about how we're going to continue to do that and how we're going to refine our uh our capacity to ensure the health and safety but for the moment i uh to policies and protocols and uh yes

101and to ensuring that we keep this body as apolitical as possible it is incumbent on all of us to check ourselves every minute we sit on this desk dr jones just to wrap this up um i wanted to read the mission of fsba because dr ship made me think about it increased student achievement through development of affected school board leadership through advocacy and support of public education kind of says it all to me and um i emailed nancy and i don't want to do it now because it'll take 30 minutes to get a date and i also asked dr jacobs i don't know if you got that email yet i'd like you to facilitate because we really need a facilitator on this as far as where we are with produce you know and set the

102agenda so i just anytime a meeting is run like that it's more effective so thank you all right i think i think we all agree on this uh just one more i i put this century thing i just want to make sure people are aware this republican executive committee had a meeting the other night mrs barenborg referred to it and i guess they've chosen to censure me even though i'm not a member and if there was any thought of becoming one i have no interest but who knows what might who might show up tonight and uh i've been told you know you get a lot of information uh that someone's gonna come and try and read whatever this sensor says into the quote unquote the record i'm not sure since i get to run the

103meeting and i i think you know we've had the practice of not responding to individual presenters until everybody was done but if that happens tonight i'm just warning you ahead of time i may respond and i may try and add some humor to what otherwise will be something that i could care less about but it is what it is so and i do think though that um and i thank mrs berenberg for her comments uh and i think this this um you know we spent a lot of time talking about trust with the facilitator with with april when she was here i can't think of a quicker way to destroy trust we don't have to agree but we have to at least know that we're being straight shooters with one another and we don't need

104people uh entering into a political discussion and whether it was intended or not and this is not by the way aimed at you personally unknowingly undermining somebody else on this board the the voters will figure it out in due course um and it's just not helpful so um but i just want everyone to know that that we'll see what happens tonight but don't be surprised if somebody does show up uh i may try and have some fun with them to that point i'll be really brief mr barefoot i just want to know that i support you 100 um i too could care less about accenture from a local political party i'm obviously not a member so i was irrelevant to that um but i want to let you know i i think the whole thing

105is absurd i support you 100 and thank you for your comments thank you okay so um i've lost track of where we are in the agenda but i think we might be finally as to what not that this isn't important and and i guess mrs epstein you're going to send it around to google calendar with some dates and we can respond and we'll let's get this uh day of reckoning call it perhaps uh set up and and i do think just to summarize is if we take a little time and try and separate the items that are on the list get rid of consolidate i think mr rosario said there's like there's some redundancy we could probably shrink that list the bullets by a third and then start to group them and i think we

106could uh make a lot of progress so uh so uh can listen can i offer since we're here and we have everybody together um just the thought of the last tuesday i don't know how you all are if you have your calendars with you but on the last tuesday of october um no not october on the last tuesday of september that i think of the superintendent's workshop last tuesday is the 28th that's two weeks now that's our next meeting i'm looking at the wrong month there are terry okay so then we're into october so all right disregard i was looking at the wrong date i'm okay on some tuesdays in october should we just send them over to you to nancy that's what you use send out okay all right so if it um makes

107oh never mind i withdraw that i was going to say the 28th we don't have any agenda items scheduled for that for that board meeting so that might be a lengthy time that would be available for the board to have that particular conversation i still think it would need to be a board meeting but you still have the opportunity to engage in that dialogue uh under that under a business meeting agenda you don't have enough much under the workshop that day no the the business meeting itself oh the business meeting there might be an item here or there depending on how we we vote tonight you can still i think that's better at a at a board discussion session that's fine too that's fine then at a board meeting even though we have time to

108discuss at a board meeting i just think that our time is quite limited and we'd probably need all day to get through each bullet point but like mr barefoot said if we could kind of put our information in first so we can look at it so we don't you know do all the wordsmithing that day that will help with that okay um so do we want to do the 20 do we want to we don't want to do the 28th no because the superintendent still has a workshop on the 28th so he has items for the day workshop nancy will send us stuff we'll get it do we have to do it just a quick question we have to do it on on a day of no or can it be another day i mean

109we could do it on a monday or wednesday thursday uh friday you know you all have obligations elsewhere i'm limited on my days my schedule personal schedule has changed so i have to be very careful all right well i don't have as much flexibility because i'm so proactive miss dan pierre um we only have one or two items on the 28th for the workshop so we could quickly dispose of those items and the bulk of that time can be given back to the board for a a school board workshop so i would only need to present those two items which would be time pressing the relatively straightforward items and then the rest of the time so three and a half hours can be dedicated to finally getting this done hopefully on the 28th yes i'm

110all for that that's fine that's good we've got to make sure we get our information in before that date is it does it make sense just does it make sense is there a way legally so we're not violating something that we could all you know before then let's say by that friday send it to whomever dr moore you could have and see if there's a way to maybe somebody ahead of time could take take each of our uh whatever we're submitting and see where there's some agreement i don't i don't know i'd like to just say a very very familiar process we would follow in miami and issues very similar to this we can workshop it with each particular board go through make their their track changes so as we come together as one i've

111captured each of them uh separately so as we come together as one then you would have the complete product we put them all together and the board would see where there was overlap consistency in terms of agreement uh and where there was an agreement so there's a structure in place where i can sit with you go through the board protocol collapse condense modify add subtract whatever the case need be and do the independent with each board member under separate track changes and then put them all together when we come as a group and then you're able to see all of them and that would facilitate a lot of that forward thinking that you had to guess that eventually i think that would be worthwhile can i make a another possible suggestion only because that's going

112to take up five hours at least of the superintendent's time right he's got to meet with us separately then he's going to have staff put it all together it's going to take well i would i wasn't referring necessarily to me um okay good because i'm like i'm not sure this is the best use of your time yeah right everybody knows whose job it is all right it could be with somebody else alternatively we can submit comments to nancy who can put them in a document and can color code for each of us so that we get a final document with each of us color-coded you know or we can give her permission to consolidate wherever is necessary when we say the same thing and then she can constru sorry nancy i'm giving you more work

113i'm taking it off the superintendent and giving it to you but she can construct a document that can then all go out to us and where there is disagreement or where we're not saying the same thing it can just be color-coded for each of us i think and then we can talk from there that's a good idea okay all right lucky you all right we got we got it okay enough of that so we're going to move on to you dr moore actually the next item on the agenda is miss rosario which is the school board i'm sorry can i i'm sorry to interrupt again could i make a um i want to i really don't want to run out of time to have enough time for your presentation so could we make sure that

114we we may not be able to finish this conversation now but how much time do you think you need specifically at least for your your protocol conversation so through the chair i think this conversation that we're about to have is the most time-pressing um item on the agenda my presentation uh will be relatively brief i'm more interested in getting the feedback from from the board members so my presentation would be 10 15 minutes okay and that includes the other items that you have under your and i would do my i'll move my item uh to follow uh i'll make it my first presentation on my side of the agenda and we'll do the rest if time permits okay thank you mr rarefoot man go ahead sure okay um so board members i i put this

115on the agenda as the school board attorney contract um but it has taken as you uh have probably been aware through an email um a a different turn the original intent was for us to talk about mrs d agresta's contract which i'll let mr dr moore uh talk about a little bit more and then we received for the public um understanding why this is changing is that we received a an email from mrs diogressa stating that she will be retiring in 30 days so she has given us her 30-day notice and so apparently there are some people who did not know in the room um and so as a result of discussing a renewal or a change in the writing and the dates of mrs d agresso's contract um i think now we we our

116entire discussion will will change um on how you know dr moore uh continues the discussion i will say though before we get um sidetracked of all of the backup that you received for this agenda item it was originally intended to discuss some other items one of those during our last meeting i mentioned to you all that there was indeed a packet that i found in my office addressing school board attorney evaluations and i did provide that as a backup so i do encourage you all to take a look at that because i'm not sure where that would fit within this process i also wanted to call to your attention and email that dr schiff sent all board members in i think march of 2020 spring of 2020 there was an email that dr schiff forwarded

117of several different districts school districts you may have forgotten school districts and their the ways in which each one of them evaluate their school board attorneys so it is important it's very very important the only two employees that we are responsible for hiring and letting go is the school district superintendent and the school board attorney so how we do that now we have an opportunity to get it right not that it wasn't right before but um some of the practices i think just uh weren't uh appropriate so dr moore so i don't thank you through the chair and i just don't want to begin the conversation without underscoring the the impact and loss that this is for the school district of indian river county as you know in miami it was a very large district

118and if i had a question regarding litigation i would go to one lawyer if i had a question regarding contract that would be a different lawyer esc student services they're literally the fourth floor was the um floor that serviced all of the legals they had a whole floor of a nine-story building uh that were lawyers coming into the school district having one outsourced lawyer it was something that was very very new to me and i can tell you without uh reservation uh mr gresa is available to me as you morning night weekend always available to answer the question always willing to tell you sometimes what you want to hear a lot of times what you don't want to hear and engage in the conversation of dialogue get me to yes get me to yes make

119me legal and you know we all look forward to retirement at some at some point and we celebrate the opportunity to do so um but make no mistakes about it ladies and gentlemen this comes as an impact to the school district of of indian river county so i don't know about suzanne if you wanted to say i know she's so humble she probably won't want to say anything um and i think thank you thank you thank you so i've asked mr carver here to review the process that we could uh follow for a request for proposal as you know 30 days notice is an extremely tight timeline in suzanne email she indicated that there was a little lingering additional support that she could provide going into the month of december but as we review this

120timeline do need some feedback from the board regarding the request for proposal and then my goal today is to review that create that a sketch out a a timeline that could be followed in order to ensure that we have a smooth transition uh for legal representation for our school district so with that mr carver we'll give a brief presentation regarding the overview of the process some of the information that mr rosario has uploaded um is not new to the board members who have been sitting for the last two and a half years but would definitely be new not necessarily complex to understand for our two newer board members mr carver but you can just review the process and allow them to answer any questions they may have certainly um if you may recall in the

121spring of 2020 i did a request for letters of interest um for general counsel to the board and um it was a little bit less formal process and obviously the the board didn't take any action on the results of that um undertaking this time we're recommending a request for proposal as a delivery model so their criteria will be um um specified in the document that goes out uh a portion of the score is going to be uh directly related to their cost proposal their fee proposal when we did the request for letters of interest we had it on the street for a little bit over a month to make sure that we you know received appropriate number of responses we received only three responses that time hopefully we'll have a little bit more interest when

122we release the request for proposal um i drafted a timeline obviously it can be amended i'll go over it with you very quickly um we would release the request for proposal on september 28th and we'd advertise it a number of at least we'll advertise it three times locally we'll also send it to the the local bar associations and the florida bar association like we did before the proposals would be due on october 28th so there they would be out on the street for a whole month and then um what would happen is each board member would be given an evaluation packet to do individually with with each of the each of the proposals you'd score them my recommendation would be that you would turn that information into the superintendent where we could tabulate it bring

123it back to you collectively show you what the score is so you could see how everybody um placed in the process and then on the 16th of november you would you would short list if you needed a short list and interview the firms that you wanted to bring in what i would need to know uh before release is what kind of questions you would want to ask on the interview i'd want to i'd want to make sure that the um the respondents would be able to prepare because it's a short timeline i wouldn't want to give them you know two days to prepare to come in for it so just in my past practices with other other solicitations having uh having [Music] the questions ahead of time so they know and they're prepared they can

124come in and do a presentation in 20 minutes and you get a pretty good idea um you know um how well they understand the actual scope of services after the interviews were completed on november 16th the the final approval would be december 14th to award the rfp and and award the final uh negotiated agreement are we having questions yet yeah i think we all have questions why does it take so long i mean you know we're today's the 14th of september and we're we're not going to have a final decision i think more to the point how can we shorten this process because if we've got 30 days of our current attorney and maybe if you know if we play nice a little bit of time after that this doesn't get us an attorney by

125the time she has to go and even if it does it doesn't get somebody up on board and i i mean they can they can probably on board quickly but i'm concerned if we're not ready to hire somebody till december 14th that's long after we lose our current attorney so i is there a way without undue hardship to you or whomever that we could speed this up [Music] certainly um i can release it earlier that the document itself um it wouldn't take much to to release i could i could shave a week or two off of that release time which would actually shave a week or two off of all the other um well let me just caution and i understand why does it take so long because of the importance of this position ensuring

126that we do the appropriate vetting and advertising and marketing uh to have the right person fill some very very very big shoes um so i would rather have to if suzanne couldn't stay a little bit longer as she indicated in her email we could outsource facilitation of board meetings in order to ensure uh that we the board has the highest level of comfort uh that we do have the right person uh mr rosario yes thank you i i have a question uh for mrs d agresta and or dr moore with regard to this mr diagra thank you for your willingness to continue on past the 30 days i don't know in what capacity or if you would consider that also i had a question with regard to if you hadn't because i see your your

127facial expression would you consider staying on with us or allowing someone from your firm staying on with us until december or the end of the school year that would give us enough time to really take our time and vet appropriate candidates the right way may i mr bear certainly um as long as you give the right answer [Music] um so under our legal services contract with the board we have to give 30 days notice and so my letter reference is specifically that 30 day notice i am not physically retiring until november 30 which is more than 30 days out the issue of whether my firm can provide some sort of legal coverage through the month of december to cover any last meetings or you know any additional legal work i can certainly speak to someone

128about being that person to to cover if you need something into the month of december absolutely um i i just don't know without speaking to someone first if anyone can do beyond that we they're going to have a very full plate as it is with other legal work and so i i'm concerned that they wouldn't have the capacity to take on this client as well thank you um i think that it's important for us to get this right i don't want to rush the process because of timing um dr moore is right this is a critical position for us to fill critical we are in the middle of a uh you know still in court with the naacp over the desegregation order there have to be these are big shoes to fill and if we

129don't get this right every single you know dotted eye and every cross t has to be extremely looked at looked at with an extreme microscope so i have some questions though dr mr barefoot can i request of mr carver mr carver there are two things that i can think of off the top of my head now i've never been involved in an interview or the vetting process for an attorney uh to fill these this the the position of the school board attorney um but i i can tell you that i'm concerned about licensure i want to make sure the person is licensed appropriately and does the person have experience with education law training in education law maybe formal education and education law or formal experience work experience in education law or in this capacity or

130like this capacity that would be something those are two areas that i would certainly like to know another area another thing that i would like to know and i don't know how this works in terms of your process is this person um going to commute is it is this per the board has to decide whether we now want someone who had the same work schedule as mrs d agresta as well or do we want someone full time i mean these are all discussions that we have to have but if the person were to work in the capacity the same exact capacity time schedule i mean as mrs d agressa is that going to be uh a traveling position or is that going to be a home-based position these are just questions that i would be

131interested in can i point out of clarification are you talking about internal or external counsel or are you talking about somebody local to the area or out of the area because we haven't had the conversation recently about internal or external counsel and if we even want to consider internal counsel or just go with ex that's exactly what i just said so that's what i was having for clarification we haven't we haven't discussed that that's why i said we have to do we have to even find out if that's what we want to do which is why the time into december is so critical for us so so i'm sure everybody's got a comment uh it's pretty simple you either want in-house counsel you want outhouse counsel i don't mean outhouse and i can i'm very

132familiar with both and they're pros and cons to each um an in-house council is going to be more of a generalist and they and they farm stuff out to specialists in human resources or litigation i mean dr moore's had that experience they may have been all employees of miami-dade but you had a team of specialists or you go someone like mrs diagresta who's got a lot of knowledge but she also has a firm that she can go to one of her partners or associates to get help of whether it's real estate or you know some other area so there's pros and cons to both um and and frank i wouldn't i wouldn't eliminate one with the other i i you know i actually had this conversation with dr moore the other day and and uh

133clearly from your standpoint dr moore you know you should you should make the case as to why you prefer one with the other if in fact or you wait and see who applies and then and then decide but but looking at this schedule so you can start in the 21st instead of the 28th you've got all these deliverables based on our next school board meetings can we not is it in is it a violation of something that each of us could meet on you know october 3rd individually why do we have to meet in the public as a group with candidates why can't we interview individually with people we're all sort of around by then maybe that's in violation of some but i don't think so if i may sir um so with the rfp

134process um it the every everything that the an evaluation committee does in relation to our an official rfp is all all subject to public review so when i do evaluation committee meetings i public notice them because it's it's a matter of law and mr aggressive may be able to elaborate on that those rules that govern um rfp evaluation committees mr barefoot if if you're going to use this delivery method for selecting a new attorney then there are certain procedural requirements that require a lot of sunshine on the committee process the the the process that you're referring to where individual board members may be able to you know meet with perhaps who they like who has submitted an interest in the in the work that really lends itself more to requesting letters of interest which is

135a little a little more informal not as many rules and requirements there isn't like a scoring matrix that you would use so if you're if you're looking for a more formal procurement process where there would be i don't say a matrix but there would be scores involved and everybody would be able to add and come up with who the winner is through a scoring matrix then it's really an rfp process um if you're looking for something and i hate to use this phrase but i'm going to anyway a little something more loose where it gives you all the you know ability in the world to do these other innovative ways to maybe interview and shorten the time frame if that's what you're looking for then it's really not an rfp process that you're looking for

136you're looking for something like a letter of interest or just who's interested you know come and we'll we'll talk to you okay i know what i prefer but i'm an outlier here uh go ahead mrs barry yeah is was i dreaming or didn't we just do something like this a few months ago where we put it out right now it was march of 2020 okay you're not dreaming the one of the discussions that we had was march 26 of 2020. i know that specifically um and and um subsequent to that i can tell you a timeline here um on february we even had this discussion back in february of 2019 then again in august 2019 we had the results of the letters of of interest go out may of 2020 we had another follow-up interest

137i mean another uh discussion the board decided to go out for letters of interest um and then after that it just kind of fell to the wayside because of covid so that was right when covert hit right well i don't think it totally fell to the wayside just because of covet if you'll go back and watch i remember a discussion about um you know because we went back and forth about in-house versus out out of house and um i will say dr moore uh one of my concerns was is there enough work for one person and they have to be multi-talented to be able to know all these different types of law so we you know that's a big concern right of whether or not that's going to save us money or not um the

138other concern was um was there an interest out there and i think that was part of the issue that we had last time about the interest i think part of that hold on i'm not done i think part of that was you know suzanne was sitting in the seat and she's very respected in the state and now that people may be aware that she's retiring that might be a little different in what comes to us i would like us not to stagnate this by arguing before we get this process going about whether or not to do in-house or out-of-house i would like us to do a parallel and we can have conversation going along as we go through this process so that it doesn't stop it i think the other thing that happened when we

139went through that process i i agree with everything that you just said about how that search went and why people may or may not have applied in some of the discussions the other thing that happened at that time was an analysis by mr fagan on the cost-effectiveness of the people who applied and uh whether we did internal or external and so to your point about why it it went away in part because of covid but in part because by that analysis we if to the degree that cost was a primary concern we identified that we were not spending any more which had been a concern with our current attorney than we would be if we hired another uh external attorney and in fact it would probably be more expensive given the the month by month

140analysis based on what they told us they would charge us but more to the point i think i agree with you about um having a parallel process right now so that we don't slow slow it down and then we can make the decision when we see what we get and have a better analysis and understanding of what our needs are um oh shoot i had another point now i've forgotten it uh oh um and and that that people maybe very few people applied at that time i think you're right in part because of suzanne's reputation in the state um people were not willing to put up potentially put a fellow attorney out of work that obstacle no longer exists and i think we will our search will be far more successful this time around mr

141barefoot yep go ahead i'm not saying too much because i do not accept your resignation um retirement i don't think it's full-time anyway um thank you very much we go way back and your information to me always um you know you really give the information i need to hear so i appreciate that i did look at the um when i was considering running i did look at the responses for the people and i remember mr gross's firm hourly rate was lower than the other ones if you look back on that that i do remember correctly is the board going out every year looking for this or what are we doing here 19 20 21 why did we go out and look for other people then what was the issue oh there were a number of

142them not necessarily to us but there was concern in the community there was simply an uh um mr gruster has served the board since 2009 without review so there was some concern that we should simply review the process it had not necessarily to do with her competence or qualification how many school districts review attorneys i haven't looked that up no how many how many school districts school boards evaluate the attorney do you know i can't get that number on the top of my head well i'm do because i remember when that was happening and uh so i looked at the information that was sent from the three or four i think it was mr carver and i look especially at the hourly rate so did we discuss those concerns with mr gresa and the um

143her firm that those were our concerns i just don't know how this all happened and had she not retired resigned where are we what was the issue uh mrs rosario i don't presume to talk for suzanne suzanne can certainly talk for herself but i know that respectfully when we went for the letters of interest i know suzanne understood the responsibility of the board to do that she was incredibly as professional as she is right now i mean she's always had the same demeanor she understood that there was concern and that it has happened before prior to this board um and it was sort of the responsive the fiduciary responsibility you know of of someone to of the board to um try to find out if we were doing the right thing by continuing with the

144contract that we had in place or would it be more effective for us to go elsewhere that's i just think that's all that it really was and it didn't go anywhere obviously but here we are now so i don't know if we should spend a lot of time talking about pass i think here right now um we should kind of answer mr carver's question because i think he's looking for your feedback on what to put on the announcement the rfp my question to mr carver before we move forward with that is this scoring system that you mentioned before because i'm unfamiliar with it what is this scoring system does that look similar to the kind of scoring that we used in this superintendent search you know whether we had these little charts where we checked

145off did he have you know phd did he have a you know doctorate did he have experience like is that what that looks like yes ma'am it's a i use a the same form for all rfps for the district and um although the criteria changes in the point distribution changes slightly depending on what the scope of services is but it's um you know it's it's pretty general uh the fee proposal has a has a percentage um and then the experience of the law firm experience of the assigned attorneys will have a score references will have a score in in the instructions to the potential bidders for the rfp are to put certain information behind each tab so that it's easier for the person that's doing the grading to open up to tab one and and

146they can get everything related to criteria one and two or so on and so forth so it's it's a it's a fairly simple evaluation instrument so at some point brevard county had an evaluation which is in your backup board members and items to one through probably three two i i don't know if these would be applicable to the scoring that you're talking about or maybe these might be applicable to the rfp process in terms of it what's required for someone to apply um but things like knowledgeable regarding government in the sunshine laws it says here combines knowledge of law and district practices to present the best possible legally sound recommendations knowledgeable regarding administrative law and procedures employment law issues facing public schools student rights and discipline charter schools and other subject areas of importance to

147the board and the district effectively reviews and approves as to form all contracts entering into entered into by the board stays current with state and federal laws that affect school districts knowledgeable about the district practices that affect the board schools staff and students and knowledgeable of the roles and responsibilities of the board members and assists the chairperson and this i'm adding and the superintendent to fulfill his or her role or responsibilities are any of these do any of these sound like they would help in whatever question you just asked us for earlier if are you referring to the interview questions yeah or items that you wanted to put on the rfp so the the scope of services for um that i've already drafted for this particular rfe came directly from the the one that we

148put out for the letters of interest last year do we have it do we have the draft that you're looking at right now no you do not have the it's the same as the letter of interest it's just same document it just doesn't changed the change the um title uh to rfp and not request for a letter of interest gotcha and uh and all the dates of course have changed um but um what you were just talking about those are like um those sound more like like like an annual appraisal of someone who's already doing the work okay and you might be able to draw first some questions from that information but the the evaluation instrument that i have is a little more general okay but all of those things are included in the scope

149of services all of the all of the knowledge areas that your general counsel to the board has to be knowledgeable in are all included in the scope of services so when the potential bidders submit they're going to want to illustrate in that proposal that they have done all those things okay so the responsibilities the primary duties i see now scope of services school board general counsel there are primary duties a through j submittal instructions experience of attorneys i understand what you're referring to now okay thank you so this remains the same i'm sorry so this remains the same it just changed from letter of interest to requests for a proposal there are a couple little couple little differences because of the delivery model is going to change um the evaluation criteria is a little more

150specific and it also includes the fee proposal in there which is a little bit different than the request for a lot of interest can i chime in here number one dr moore when when the the the rfi and the rfp were you involved in drafting the wording for the criteria the specifics given your experience and what you were used to coming from my we're not i mean i i don't think not to speak for others but my senses were probably not the best qualified people to determine what's needed you on the other hand are and i might suggest that even uh some input from mrs diagresto what are the areas that she finds in her work for the district over the last x number of years or you know how she out would allocate what

151level of importance should be part of how we go out and present this opportunity you know for us to get involved in my opinion for us to get involved in something we're not lawyers and we're not responsible for the day-to-day running and all the issues that come up that require input from a from a legal advice i think what you need and want and you have an opportunity to make adjustments here and would frankly be foolish not to use input from mrs diagras to help put priorities in terms of the amount of time she puts in in these different categories that mrs rosario just referenced from the brevard specifications so through the chair the answer yes me and mr fagan uh did go through the information that was sent out earlier in the school year

152my request for this let me go backwards before i go forwards a is you do pursue or i would encourage the board to pursue a delivery model that we currently have in place outsourcing the work and not having someone internal i think in the long run that would cost us more money in terms of the volume of outsourcing that we would have to do versus contracting with a individual who belongs to a firm uh who can be dependent upon the firm and the volume of support that firm provides i just think it's we're not big enough to house a full body of work for one individual my recommendation here with once suzanne validates that her firm can hold us through it in november is that we sit mr fagan um after he's balanced his budget

153and taking a week off god bless him um comes back mr carver and myself can meet with suzanne go through look at that process is there some tweaks that we can put out uh bring it back to the board on 9 28 this is what we're looking at and then push push it out and then follow a timeline so it's out to about mid october october 22nd we can bring who has submitted back to the board to go through the review scoring slash short listing process as mentioned uh conduct the interviews on 11 9 these are all tuesdays that cord coordinate and if there's any additional steps after 11 9 what are we negotiating or implementing the rfp i think that puts us in a a a good place i don't want to rush the

154process to the point where we're putting out a product that isn't 100 reflective of what we to get the scope of work that we have while at the same time if if we know we have that month of november i think we can get this done still a tight schedule uh and have it put out there i think there's a that proposed timeline would work well i just my own experience being on corporate boards and it's different but it's it's really not that different the board ultimately is gonna is gonna this is a dual report typically between the ceo and the board for cfo and general counsel that's very typical including organizations like this i think what's really important is not what we think we want but what you need in the way of expertise

155given the world that we live in today which is different than yesterday and it's likely to be tomorrow and then we can respond to that we can ask questions understand it better but but while it might be the board's responsibility to hire and evaluate ultimately this person is interacting with you day to day not with us day to day i hope make no mistakes about it you'll get plenty of input and and feedback for me as we move throughout this process all right mr rosario yeah i just wanted a little bit of clarification dr moore you met you used the word outsourcing here historically in this district the word outsourcing meant that we were contracting out apart or above and beyond what we currently have and that just a point of clarification you weren't intending

156were you intending to use the word outsource or were you intending to say a hired attorney in the same fashion that we have mrs d agresta okay correct a hired attorney in in-house with the benefits and the insurance and the support staff that we would have to create is still going is going to have to outsource more be versus an individual who's part of a firm who can be reliant on members of the firm for their level of expertise so incorporated into the cost of suzanne which has always been a misunderstanding for the community that's not suzanne's salary that is the retainer for her law firm services the paralegals the individuals who answers the phone we get a suite of services at one cost um from suzanne which is not suzanne alone you know we

157had katie come in here for a number of months we did not pay any extra money um for ked um there's katie and katie katie and kate um the other one katie here kane uh worked with mr fagan in other contract issues we didn't pay anything for that when you have someone in house who's local you're independent an individual in a cubicle down the hall i'm sure you'd get an office so she'd get an office but they don't have the expert they don't have the volume of support within a particular form therefore resulting in i'm going to have to outsource this to get legal opinion so i think in the long run we're just not big enough uh to say we can have one person uh responsible for this work so i i think the

158this model has been has proven to me over the last 18 months it is an extremely effective model that is this is the model that i would advocate for so i think that that's important because recently it has come to my attention that what we are paying suzanne is not really for suzanne mrs d agresta it's really for her entire firm so that was news over all these years because that's what i just found out i knew that i just found out the other day that what what dr moore is saying is that suit as that mrs d agusta's the monies rather that we still not her salary let me let me back up the monies that we see that are used for the purposes of our school board attorney is a total sum for

159the entire suite of services that her entire firm provides for us as dr moore just said you know the power the paralegals and some of the other i guess perks that you would say that we get all you know is you get an invoice every month and it comes from her law firm and the money goes to her law firm and how they use that to credit it hours or whatever their method we don't know but this is the hope the whole thing is what was interesting is that we've never had that discussion before when we went for a letter of interest in 2020 we we didn't have the discussion as to how much i mean the understanding was that that those monies the fees that we're paying in legal fees are are suzanne's personal

160salary for example no not that there was an entire city i don't know like dr jones i saw and i listened to all the noise in the community about we're paying too much or not enough or this or that well now we understand my assumption which is usually the case is we hired her firm she happens to be the person responsible but she's also got a bunch of teammates up there in atlanta she hands things off to or seeks their advice or counsel in a particular targeted fashion this is pretty standard well i think i never yeah i think as dr moore just mentioned with uh kate and katie coming in when mrs d agresto wasn't here recently is a perfect example of you know having that those supports there okay got it mrs barron

161yeah i i know we need to move on for the next topic but i do want to say even though suzanne you've been wonderful i do know you're not an expert in all types of law so thank you for um referring to your teammates and helping us i appreciate that and yes i did know that that's what we did we hired a firm and um you know i i didn't think you could do real estate law and everything else at the same time all right so so i i will work with suzanne mr carver mr fagan uh mr grass has put together the the request for proposal uh bring it back for perusal prior to sending out with that updated timeline uh to be sent out as immediate immediately following our next board meeting and

162and and again i don't want to do anything that's sunshine law related but if you you speak with each of us each week if you get that done don't wait till the next meeting to you know make sure that we each have a draft and we can respond and the sooner you get the process going the better just to address one of your previous comments sir when i do rfp timelines they're always based on boardroom dates i don't always have the flexibility to you know i have to base the timeline on that so just out of habit that's how i do that that's why they are in alignment with board meeting dates well be a little more entrepreneurial we'll figure out to adjust to a timeline that ensures behavior that we have broad reach we

163don't shortcut anything um but times money so to speak you know so understood thank you for your patience with us as we get focused on we've you know we've been spoiled and uh we like being spoiled suzanne you know my kids were spoiled and they still are and they're one of them's 50 years old so this is what you have to look forward to him dr chef is your 17 year old and you too mrs rosario no comment i don't think i'd be paying my my grandchildren's tuition though you don't think so don't bet a thousand don't bet on it get a grant well that's that's the ideal next item is the the presentation as i said the update on the safety uh health and safety mitigation strategies so what i will do is i'll

164bring the powerpoint up and looking there and i will go through the presentation i think it's important to note three weeks ago we had this very similar conversation and it was a data driven approach it was a conversation that i had with the board solely based on the data the mitigation strategies that were in place and the lack of success we were having with those particular mitigation strategies so at all times we have taken a data-driven approach to ensuring that we can provide the appropriate mitigation strategies to our students to ensure that they are healthy that they are safe they have confidence in coming to school in order to focus in on their learning so what i'd like to do today is to review where we are with the data um as a community and

165as a set of schools and provide um possible solutions and a pathway forward to us as a system so if you look at the very first slide this is kind of a picture backwards on 8 22 there were 1174 cases in a week's period of time just released on 912 688 that's almost cutting the number in half if you look at the percent positive on that date 8 22 the weekly rolling average was 27.69 and then on 9 12 it's 20.05 20.05 is significantly down from that 27. and matter of fact that 27 went up to 29 the um weekend before we went into the new uh mask requirements but 20.05 is still high in comparison to surrounding counties so we are encouraged by the reduction but we need to remain uh concerned regarding the

16620.05 uh new hospital admissions uh down almost not necessarily cut in half but very close and the percent of beds being used in ic beds both be going down in the right direction so this tells us and let me be clear these numbers aren't results solely because of our mask requirements uh we are on the back side of this delta variant what we were sawing three weeks ago was in fact the spike what you saw from us was the district's response to the mitigation strategies that we had in place were not sufficient enough in order to maintain the effective operation of schools we were not mitigating the spread with what we currently had in place so we took drastic measures in order to what i and i said at the time right the ship and

167i said at the time uh mass were not a long-term solution for us be when the data it needs to be a dr data driven approach based on what we see in our schools and what we see in our community the next slide also kind of takes you through a three week look back and where you saw three weeks ago 331 student positive cases so we're drilling down to our particular school sites 331 cases over the course of that week of school the following week 8 29 was 283 cases uh and then just last week 176 cases so drastic reduction but i'm still not 100 comfortable with 176. now going into last weekend and today and yesterday we're still seeing those numbers continuing to decline and we'll talk a little bit about that uh and

168in the new staff cases staff is key if we do not have teachers we do not have bus drivers we do not have uh individuals to serve them food we cannot operate schools 73 over the course of the week you see on the screen then a drastic reduction to 34 and then just last week 15. and you all know when you look at the dashboard because for most of you it's the first thing you do in the morning that monday morning dashboard typically is always the highest number because it captures uh the work that wasn't done over the weekend so individuals who woke up saturday or sunday as well as monday morning didn't feel good typically those monday numbers go up they're the highest of the week we only had three for our adults yesterday

169so once again very encouraging signs that uh we are seeing significantly less cases continuing to kind of drill down to school sites we've made revisions to our our dashboard we'll probably have one of the most transparent dashboards out there we're capturing all of the information that we're aware of we capture home tests we report it uh to our community we break it down by school but one of the questions we continue to have is well what's at this particular school we've now been in school for over 20 days and we're just seeing the totals so what we've done is break it down specifically by school so a little bit of a better look there we've had 900 939 students year to date halfway through the first nine weeks test positive for covet that exceeds the

170entire number of students last school year but when you look currently as of today 68 students are currently positive so that's a big difference from the 939 when you're looking at just the 68 that are actually out today because they have covey when you look at staff 188 over the course of the year that's a large number that's approximately 10 percent of the individuals who work in this school system over the course of about 25 schools day that thing was flying fast that thing being this delta variant but what is the impact as of today's date 13 and i think six of those are actually school district employees so when you look at the overall impact in schools it's significantly less this is these are data trends that we're just now seeing that are in

171fact encouraging when moving to the right direction i will point out quarantines quarantines this board has taken bold uh action regarding quarantines and we continue to be clinical and not sweeping when we do quarantine so matter of fact as a result of the cases that are positive you only see 87 quarantines 87 still high but if you're a dashboard watcher and you go and look at other counties they have wide sweeping quarantines taking place so we are doing good work between our principals and miss castafoli um really ensuring that we're taking every step necessary to keep healthy kids in school now let's look at school site levels and when i look at school site levels we have been problem solving at the district on how do we use the data to predict and make recommendations

172and change in practices or organizational behaviors to stay in front of this we understand the complexities of this we understand that we are in a spike we understand that it's going to go down we believe it's going down but if we do not act now when this happens in two more months or three more months the the land of variant miss barenborg whatever landum you alpha omega they're all coming right but if we don't have a plan in place we are going to put ourselves our community and most importantly our children in the same despicable moment that we're currently in the end fighting in the back and forth regardless of what side board members are on you all have been attacked doesn't make a difference which side you're on you're personally being attacked throw me

173in there too but we want to say hey this is what the data is telling us this is the direction in which we want to go so i have been problem solving with some very very smart people most of which are at this table and in this room as to how can we put together a formula that's school site specific we are school site experts we run school systems it's the work that we do we have come up with a formula that looks at two different variables the overall percent of students who have covet in any given day as well as the total percent of staff who have coving and we take those two numbers and we add them together to come up with our combined daily percent our combined daily percent once again is

174the sum of the total percent of staff as well as the total percent of students who have coving we looked at let's combine and make a school community one but it didn't represent the importance of that school being positive or the staff being positive that has an adverse impact on the operation of schools that percent so yes the percent of students obviously is significantly larger but if we don't have as said teachers and students we can't operate schools so we set these cutoff scores at five percent being red three to four percent being orange one to two percent being yellow and then green and we'll talk about what they mean being at one percent so these are the four bands in which we're looking at implementing mitigation strategies based on the true reality of a

175school site so when you look at the next slide here's some things there's a lot of colors up there what it does just to set it up for our school board members uh going down are the number of days of of school and going across our each of our wonderful schools and as you can see in this slide we started out green and we start out yellow with a little bit of information that we had from a few schools but going into that second week things started to change drastically we school we see schools going from green to yellow to orange and then ultimately to red and if you dig into those reds you see growing numbers of red so the numbers continue to grow but at the same time you'll see some schools that

176were never impacted if you look at osceola magnet never hit the red if you look at dodger town elementary school never hit the red if you look at sebastian rivers senior high school hit the red for just one day so we were looking at a does this formula work and we think the answer is yes it gives us a opportunity to say we need to increase or modify mitigation strategies based on what the data is saying so shifting mitigation strategies specifically to the individual needs of schools based on data versus generically saying everyone in the county has to do the same thing now this slide just kind of draws a picture uh over the course of time looking at those two different variables that come up with our our our formula number student absences versus

177staff absences and what you can see is staff grew at a much faster pace uh going all the way up to seven percent of staff and then now looking at where we're at you see both of those numbers at one percent so that is very very encouraging as to where we are but let me caution you look how fast those are days not weeks on the bottom of that graph it grows quickly and a school closure is more dependent on who the adults in the school are versus the overall percent so this is not a chart that we're showing or a prediction model on school closure this is a chart to mitigate strat implement mitigation strategies to ensure when the data is saying you need to modify we have the ability to modify this is

178another slide that really speaks through the story at um beechland elementary school and what you see here is the blue represents overall student attendance including students who had a covet 19 case an impact we're impacted by coving and what you see as covid cases go up attendance goes down the data systems that we have do not move as fast as the word on the street regarding hey do you see what's happening at abc or d uh students or i'm sorry parents are going to keep their most prized possession their children home out of an abundance of caution so having systems in place to be in front of it would be helpful but this is a slide very similar to the one you see um at treasure coast you saw the cases go up we were

179no longer able to operate and provide the school uh the closure puts us right down back in a very very safe place uh that school is back over 90 a lot of questions have been uh out there regarding attendance when you look at attendance we started attendance as you any schools typically does uh and then it it continually goes down this system uh hovers around a 92 percent uh average daily attendance uh we're right back to that 90 percent now so what we've seen in a drop so mr barrett mr behrenberg had a reference they don't want to bring their children to school that's not what we're seeing now we have children in our school uh right at the attendance marks that we had last school year it's mentioned regarding the implementation of the mass

180mandate 0.7 of those eligible students who are required to use the mask had that medical opt-out that's it principals had to report to mr bass during the first week issues concerns or what was going on with the masks he could speak to it explicitly but principals and our teachers did an absolutely wonderful job in implementation and make no mistakes about it part of the success of the implementation model that none of us really wanted to do but felt obligated to do uh was the fact that so many people in our community did in fact have cove and did in fact uh request the services or be required to have the services of a ventilator so we implemented with a high level of success the board made a commitment to implement that particular model and now

181uh once again to review appropriate steps moving forward so as discussed you know we really looked at the data trends we looked at the percents that have been observed uh starting on september 7th very specific schools in our school district have disproportionately impacted by the spread of 19. some very very high some very very very low increases of the sped uh spread of cover 19 within a school setting occur at fast paces moving um from a low spread to a high spray with a very short number of days so what we saw in this particular variant was fast moving and then rapid increases in the spread of cover 19 have a significant impact on student average daily attendance so you know when they start to see high level of cases without mitigation strategies in place

182to keep that spread at bay people are going to take you know the precaution and keep their children home we can't have that we cannot have that we started with 62 percent of our school students in school last year we struggled to get our students back we did better than most districts in the state in getting our students back but we really didn't get to 80 85 percent until january of last year and we celebrated the success that we as a system had last year in terms of improving in state rankings in reading and math but both came at declines we did good but we still declined other districts did worse we were so excited to start this school year because we knew now we got everybody right where we need them in a classroom

183so at all cost we need to keep children in our schools at all costs we need to communicate a level of comfort and confidence to our parents that in our schools your students are safe what we're looking at and what i will present now is a data-driven approach an approach that looks at data it is very specific tying various tiers of mitigation to levels of coveted spread it is responsive in nation responsive in nature it responds to the reality of individual schools and it covers the scope of all schools right now what we have in place is simply a a pre-k 8 model this model for the board to provide feedback and input on would cover all grade levels and it's time limited so one of the biggest concerns is if this not if i'm

184sorry when this happens again we can't take the appropriate action until there's a board meeting that's right or we need to wait and and drag our community and have them picketing on both sides of the street that we're going to have tonight and attacking each other on facebook and just making indian river county look bad that's not what we want but if we can have a process where we know what's going to happen and it's been effectively communicated and it makes sense based on the data uh we don't have to put our community through that that's the attempt of of what we're looking for here so what you see here is a slide that reverting back to those colors green is under one percent so face coverings and i'm going to focus in on face

185coverings face coverings would be optional so let me just back up i'm sorry the left side of the screen is the percents of positives that is once again the percent of student positive and the percent of staff positive added together and then on the opposite side the right hand side are the mitigation strategies that would be implemented so just at a first glance you see additional mitigation strategies being added as you move through higher percents of positive at school sites so obviously under one percent uh face coverings are optional for students that is where we were over the summer it's not where we were most schools were when we opened schools um although that chart may look like we just didn't have the data we didn't have the debt that's we have very rarely been

186there that one to two percent uh once again covering it on the um the face coverings face coverings would be highly recommended indoors when physical uh distancing is not possible when you get to that three to four percent now this is you know guys it's starting to rise now it's a three four three to four percent this would be the face ma required with the parental opt-out but let me pause there this would not be the highly recommended opt-out that we opened the school with this would be enforced teachers would be informed administrators would be informed uh teachers would know just as they do now with the medical opt-outs those who do not have the opt out on file file will be required to wear a mask what we did at the beginning of the

187school year was asked parents to send in that medical note we started strong for a few days and then it wasn't fully implemented with the level of fidelity in which it should have been we cannot go back to that kind of opt-out it needs to be fully informed and fully enforced and then the red is when you're over 5 that is the same criteria that we currently have that means uh with the medical opt-out you were that is the only exception now let me be clear let me be transparent uh i think we're good as a board until we get to that red that red puts us in a situation in which the department of education says we're violating the parental bill of rights that read says that we are um breaking the law one

188of which you know that's not the interpretation that we are functioning under that is not the interpretation provided by our legal counsel um but that is the rub in this particular scenario there's been conversations and debate and i'll encourage the board to engage in if we didn't say medical but restricted or on a case-by-case basis um that would be legal and and strict um we need to really ensure that we have mitigation strategies in in place i want to go back to this particular i'll go back a few slides sorry when you look at this slide here and we were to implement this when you hit a new threshold meaning i hit the red once you hit the red you would be required as it indicates on the slide we were just on to remain

189in that level of of masking for 10 consecutive days so the step down from the mitigation strategies of red to orange requires you to fall within the orange range at three to four percent for ten days until you step down same thing from going from orange to yellow that gives us enough time to stabilize in looking at the numbers uh it is 10 school days you step up quickly so what would happen um in a particular school i went from yellow to orange the following school day we would do the connect eds we would have dashboards out we would be this would be something that we would be checking and communicating each and every single day principals would have the opportunity on a daily basis to remind students of the mitigation strategies that they're currently

190implementing because no one wants to get to red no one wants to wear masks and when you look at this now we are in a good place we're moving down the level of implementation here with the exception of pelican island mask would be parental option at all particular schools and moving down those those criterias i'm going back forward now that is the that's how i did the movement of tears so i think i i've explained that uh this again is that slide right where i wanted it to be so that in fact is the the system that we have in place this is what the board currently is reviewing we put into place this um i wouldn't call policy this item to wear the mass uh until it expires tomorrow i think we're moving in

191the right direction what i'm proposing for consideration is to move to the tier approach towards the end of this month or the first week in october that gives us a window of time to implement train prepare notify our community on what would this new tiered approach would be when to mask when not to mask it also provides this board one last point of accountability when you would come together on the 28th in order to determine this is the appropriate path forward this is the data that validates it is the right thing to do or not the right thing to do based on on those particular numbers but once again this is a tiered approach it is very specific to school sites very specific to the reality at each individual schools and it is respecting uh

192the implementation of sometimes uncomfortable mitigation strategies based on that reality at that particular school so with that i will pause and answer any questions board members may have i i just have one one i have a lot of questions but i'll defer but i have one question um what i like about this is you're pushing the decision making with the some guidelines to the to the person people on the ground i.e the principles do you think that the principles are in a position that if they get challenged and i'm thinking more about having to go to red um let's face it another way they're likely to need a lot of support right now a principal can say i don't have a choice this is what's been dictated everybody all everybody's under the same guidelines all

193of a sudden they're in a position now statistically they're they're just reporting the numbers you've laid out the guidelines as to what determines what category they fall in do you think that with proper training and understanding and how to communicate when they have to go to red having been in orange or yellow that they're strong enough to deal with parental opposition which could very well take place in some schools um through the chair we just did the most extreme thing we could possibly do which was to move all of the schools some of which the data didn't even justify moving to to mass so i think the answer to that question is yes it also it's not an overnight decision so what happened two weeks ago they went to school one day the next day

194they woke up and got a team's invite for me saying this is what happened at the board meeting last night so this allows us over the course of time for principals to communicate where their school currently is to ensure that the mitigation strategies within that particular level are being implemented so i think the answer to that is yes i i also think it makes sense so it's based on the numbers whereas before why why you know i'm one of those schools that was in the yellow or or the the orange the entire time this is not the reality within my particular school site so it provides a rationale as to why you would be implement implementing mitigation strategies at certain times um it is very narrow in terms of its implementation of the highest level

195of requirements uh 10 days as soon as you you know the first day you drop down from a level and i'm speaking specifically to to the red you know it only takes 10 days for that to to fall down and i think in looking at these numbers the overwhelming majority of time uh unless the data dictates it will be in that orange or below it also gives the principles particularly thinking if we can educate the parents to periodically maybe not every morning but at least a couple of times a week check the dashboard they're going to see trends because you're giving them daily information so they're likely to be able to anticipate where you're going to end if we implement this where they're going to be on the date where this this mitigation this revised

196migration strategy goes into effect it's not as if they're going to wake up some morning and find out that they're now in a different color group right and they're going to see the trends you know and the implementation in advance and the implementation model would be the the following day if you hit red one day wouldn't be like okay all of a sudden it's red put your mask on you know we would go through the notification process the following day we would implement the requirements the mitigation strategies under the red orange um yellow well i i compliment you and your and your team for coming up with something that's uh that's pretty simple to understand whatever your point of view is on masks and uh in my opinion it's i like the idea of treating

197each school differently and and empowering the principles you know to really be able to manage their constituents so other comments uh dr schiff couple questions are you aware of any model like this in any other district in florida right now through the chair there's one that is loosely connected that would be lake county lake county has a three-tiered approach also specific to school sites their overall averages is just i'm not sure if they're looking at they're looking at the entire school community versus that it does not have the mitigation strategy of the medical opt-out uh it stops at the orange for for where we are in comparison other than that there's and everyone i've spoken to and i've spoken to a lot that's the most similar model that we have okay so what i hear

198you saying is that this is probably the most comprehensive model should we adopt this this would likely be the most comprehensive model most comprehensive data-driven school-specific narrowly tailored model in the state that would be accurate yeah and so what i hear in this is that if we had had a model like this in in that page with all the colors that had had we um that one had we had a model like this and implemented it on 8 12 13 14 15 16. we might have avoided all of that red space so through the chair there's two you see the lot a lot of the green but at the um i will i don't think you'll see drastic cuts like that moving in the future i think it'll be a slower growing pace in terms

199of more days at yellow more days at orange and then implementing the mitigation strategies that we have in place but it's also important to note the reality or the variables that were in place prior to us going to the required mass mandate we did not have staff and teachers using mass we did that one week prior to that that environment remains consistent and i think we're seeing such a reduction in that a because of that requirement and b probably even more so because we're on the downside of that actual pandemic the the high number of you know people in our organization that have had covet plus those who have chosen to be vaccinated we're in a much better place now so we're seeing significantly less cases yeah and because we really can't we can't we

200can make an assumption that we're on the backside of something but we don't actually know that it's a presumption and assumption based on data we see either in our county or elsewhere or what has happened in other countries or states but we don't actually know how that goes so this is a mitigation factor presuming that if it's delta or if it's lambda or if it's mu or whatever it is we have a structure in place because covalent 19 is covalent 19 irrespective of which variant that is right we're not on the backside of covid19 we may be we may or may not be on the backside of a particular variant as we start looking at other ones that continue to emerge as it evolves and mutates i think that's consistent i think at the foundation

201of this model is a couple driving forces a uh apply the appropriate mitigation strategies when they are appropriate uh b uh limit the use of of mass wearing based on the data and mr meyer will tell you you you rarely see mr meyer without a mask on uh but when he takes it down he's saying it it is a hundred percent factual children need to see their teachers mouths moving when they're learning how to read um and that is a strategy we want to support when it is appropriate um some of the social emotional impacts i think it pulls students in it makes them withdraw from from themselves it takes a a person who's withdrawn and intensifies it so there are some factual things that impact children um but at the same time we want

202to keep children safe and we want to be logical and we want to be data driven in when we're implementing mitigation strategies in order to keep the school safe open and as effective as possible at educating children and so in this slide you said uh when we had to shut beechland that was because that slide of staff were out was that right i think beach thing hit the 30s once it was closed so it the the very very next next day uh beechland was a aggressive in in nature um it was 30 that doesn't reflect the individuals from mr meyer's team who went there to provide quality instruction who also got copied so that number is actually a little bit higher because there's folks who are not at that assigned to that staff assigned to

203his team who also came down came down with kobe and so i know you'll be working with the union too to have mouse around how teachers implement this and so that when teachers find themselves for example in a space in a room where a school may be at let's say orange but a lot of their particular students have a parental opt-out and a teacher doesn't feel comfortable a way for that teacher to work in that classroom so that they can socially distance they can mask they can be behind like all of that to protect the teacher in that room and let me answer your question but speak directly to our teachers i don't want them to be the mass police their jobs are the most we think our jobs are hard try learning a new

204curriculum right try dealing with students coming and going um new new criteria as it relates to the planning initiatives that we have in place shifts and responsibilities there's a lot of new going on for them they don't need this thrown on their back as well so i think our principles go above and beyond they understand the role that our teachers play and we'll problem solve with individual teachers so each and every individual teacher understands their responsibility and feels safe coming to to school and so just to clarify you are not asking you're not bringing this forward tonight you'll be bringing it at the september 28th meeting for us to approve assuming that things continue on the trend that we're currently seeing is that right so this is and this would implement i'm sorry october first

205or fourth i think you said i don't remember which this is a discussion and what i'm doing is actively listening um to our board and if there is an opportunity to say uh let's continue with the current mitigation strategies that are in place to have following the board meeting and then implement this following the 28th after the next board meeting that would be my desire it gives me two weeks to operationalize it gives me opportunities to work with the high schools regarding the medical opt-outs because they haven't had that opportunity uh it allows dr mcmahon and his team to create a public-facing dashboard and let me say there we don't want dr mcmahon working on datacom dashboards i'm sorry working on covet dashboards we want them working on instructional dashboards so we've got to get

206past this so if we could put this into practice and initiate implementation the day following the next board meeting where we moved to this tiered approach it saves us the opportunity of having to come back it keeps the community out of limbo allows us to move forward now everything flips around the the data drastically changes um as i have done in the past will bring back an item that says right now now is not the time or this is the schools that would be under this particular you know mitigate level of mitigation strategies so the goal is to give answers to our community uh with the intention of ensuring or believing that we're going to be in that green and yellow and orange the overwhelming majority of time and when those mitigation strategies uh require

207the red the wearing of the mask with the medical opt out it's for a short time and it's appropriate because the numbers say it's appropriate but we think overwhelming majority of time will be in that opt-out uh parent opt-out or below and last question then i'm done um this with this dashboard the way you've got it with that that would be public facing on the website so people can track what's happening at different schools and particularly for parents to track at their own school yeah so we will shift it out we have some some prediction models as well so we we know the number of days a student is going to be out for coving so um the only thing we can't predict is someone wakes up and gets coveted so we we can make

208minor projections in in terms of this is where you're at if two more get covered or four more get covered so we can give more information this is just for for demonstration purposes we will create something that's public facing that looks at where you're at in the volume of individuals that would if unfortunately tested positive that would put you to to the next level thank you next talk tomorrow there we go um i wish that i had this um when we had this conversation the first time around um so i'm extremely grateful for the color coding charts and this is what i have been asking for per school for us to be able to make the right decision that said the tiered mitigation strategies um someone said that uh and i i can't remember exactly

209who that these mitigating strike strategies um were not in place before or in a different capacity possibly and that now we would have these mitigating these in terms of the tier process moving forward after the two weeks but these mitigating strategies minus the opt out had been in place within our safe at schools opening plan so we've always had these mitigating strategies we have always asked students and correct me if i'm wrong we have always asked students to wash hands to maximize social distancing i'm sorry to maximize fresh air uh or the district would maximize fresh air return and ventilation systems sanitizers available for students um things like um social distance when possible i know that was uh in place uh one-way hallways was something that was within or is included was included within our

210safe schools plan um and of course the virtual platform was not in place at the beginning of the school year the transitional virtual i should say not our virtual school so all of these minus the wording of the opt out including at the beginning of the year we had a parental opt-out in place so these were mitigating strategies that were in practice prior to now so the chair correct what i was referencing was the implementation so what we did very similar to a number of districts is uh allow parents the opportunity to engage with their children regarding the mass preference and if they chose to opt out they would bring the letter and put that accountability on the children and ask for them to comply with what was requested what we found quickly into the

211school year was that was not successful so as referenced at a board meeting before i think we have about 20 percent of parental opt-outs but we only saw 20 percent of mass marrying just prior to making the change so what i was referencing and you are correct these mitigation strategies were in place some we can not have to implement when it wasn't so just take that burden off of school staffs that's what we tried to do here so this which what you reference here is more of a appealing away versus an adding on um but what i was referencing is that we well you know very similar to what we're doing now and we're seeing absolute full compliance uh with the requirements that are in place do a better job of informing our administrators uh

212and to enforce when we're in that highest level or in that orange level that what parents expect their children to be doing is in fact what's happening no i appreciate the clarification on that i also appreciate um removing the board from making the decision or the superintendent for making the decision one for all um that was something that i struggled with the last time because not all schools just like not all students learn the same way we're constantly talking about differentiating instruction for students but in the in the same token we wanted to create or what was created was a blanket rule for everybody when not all schools had issues with coven and so here you have entire school buildings you know requiring students to wear a mask all day long when they didn't have

213any issues with regard to high numbers of coveted cases in their in their schools so that was always a concern for me so i appreciate that now individual schools can make individual decisions i also appreciate up until the orange i appreciate the color coding and the mitigating strategies in this tiered system i still have a concern with regard to the um with the regard to the medical opt out i still we still come to the order that has been stayed by the district court of appeal for the first district that the governor's order executive order is to remain in effect the executive order that the governor issued states that we are to work within so we go into this big circle that we are to work with the department of ed i'm sorry with the

214department of health in creating some uh protocols to um the opening of schools which we did and as a result the department of health uh brought to us suggestions on how to do that included within there were a providing parents with an opt out and the question here and i'm just kind of going through this so that the public can hear it as well the question here is that what the department of health suggested was a parental opt-out not a medical opt-out how legal counsel or other people are interpreting that is quite different and i think that's where we are getting uh the concerns from parents as it relates to the parents bill of rights where parents have the ultimate authority of to you know as to how to raise their children and make medical

215decisions and the governor the department of health i'm sorry the governor the department of ed have both confirmed in writing that the final decision with regard to even masking should be the onus of the parent not the school district and so we have all these entities involved in this kind of coming together of minds and and and this is where the conflict is so um though i and i preface that my original statement with that because the red here the highest tier of greater than five percent what you are recommending in the greater than five percent um strategy first bullet requires that students with a revised parent opt out for medical reasons document that and provide it for the school so i still have a concern about the medical opt-out it is not a requirement

216since we are still in a stay over the executive order the department of health and the uh department of education recently um mr richard concheron the department of education commissioner uh sent an email i i know that you had to respond to the commissioner in terms of why the decision was made and where we stood or how we are going to move forward uh there was an explanation that needed to be provided for him correct you did that you sent it to him um my question to you is have we heard back and what do we know of the status the chair we have not heard back um regarding that letter that was sent and you are fact you are spot on that in fact is is the dilemma the this is applying mitigation strategies

217when appropriate and as i started 100 responding to the data so when you look at the other 12 districts who made this move with the exception of lee county and when you go back and look at where their positivity rates are for their counties i wish our positivity rate was was was there it it doesn't make sense to me but when you look at where indian river county was 29 the saturday before we implemented the new mask requirement the number of staff seven percent i don't think there was another system um that was in that kind of problem for whatever reason the facts are the facts and the florida constitution provides this board the authority to respond to those local conditions that's what the board did i understand uh the position that you take uh

218more than likely the position that that miss baron board takes it is as written not kosher with the florida department of education but what i am saying is what we just experienced was severe and what we just went through was severe and when i look at the local conditions um you know we need the ability to ensure that we can keep schools open now if the board wants to entertain shifts or change in that language to fall in compliance you know i work for the willow board and that's the conversation and dialogue for for you all to have um and this is just the the i guess the starting point of the conversation um thank you uh we there are some mitigating strategies that i recommended uh for the record that have not been um

219adopted and i think that they are uh still some there's still something that even the board should pay attention to um even now i can go somewhere and they do temperature checks we're not doing temperature checks um i i understand that you are requiring teachers to wear uh staff to wear masks in the mask requirement for faculty and staff members i know that i suggested rather than paper cloth masks that we provide a good handful of n95 masks as an an example to add to the mitigating strategies there are opportunities for us to avoid the touching of things and especially in elementary schools the foot pedals there are some foot pedals that you can put on the bottom of doors to just open and close doors with the foot with feet you know and that's

220something that we can take into consideration the desk guards i know that i'm grateful that you told me today schools have are now going to get desk guards um i don't know if they're going to get one for every single student but desk guards are certainly another option um i think that there is a combination of other mitigating strategies that we have not put into place and i'd like us to consider those items if we get into the red why are we not taking temperature checks actually i think temperature check should start in the orange once you get in this uh you know cautionary phase here or this cautionary tier the the numbers start getting higher obviously so if we take temperature checks in the orange we might be able to catch some fevers before

221they enter into the school building it some i know that there's a concern with we don't have the personnel to do that but we're not going to have any personnel if we have to close an entire school so it's probably you know safer to have find a couple of extra people to stand and do temperature checks of students when they're coming into the schools to avoid closing down an entire school the other thing that we are not doing is the wellness checks a lot in the spring and last year there were wellness checks that were done which i think wellness checks take longer than a temperature check but that's another mitigating strategy that we are not implementing or that's not included within these tiers sanitizing wipes i know that we have uh sanitation um hand

222sanitizer sorry hand sanitizer available at schools and some students have them at their desk but some might argue that hand sanitizer is not as effective and that some uh disinfecting wipes if we were to provide specific disinfecting wipes so as you know there are activities they wipe down their desk and then they start a new activity however that might work there are some there's another thing that i know that we talked about i just wanted to make it public um it was brought to my attention that bringing in or possibly um talking about uh contracting with an industrial hygienist who specializes in occupational environmental toxicology i know that that conversation has already i appreciate you looking into that because those are the people who actually do the work of toxicology mitigation in specific environments such

223as hospitals what i was told is that we already have those procedures happening in our school buildings so i'll allow you some time to talk about that so i think that there are still more items that we can implement and add without the medical opt-out okay you want to respond to any of that before i continue oh no there's more no through the chair um as you mentioned we are purchasing some of the death guards that could be used by by the principals as they see a fit for the appropriate staff we looked at the temperature checks as we did last year and just operationally and consistently being done the research was relatively clear that it was an inconsistent practice the wellness checks you are correct we could definitely add that back into the orange

224and the red those were people who were at the front just looking for symptoms temperature is just one and more than likely not more than likely it's the last one but the running knows the the there's there's a number of different things in which you can look like pull pull the student um ask them how they're feeling that system we did have in place and and worked very well that's an easy one back to add to orange and red i think we're able to to do that uh the uh the purchasing of mass mr fagan did cost that out it's extensive it's extensive in in cost um you know we we have the um mou in place with our unions to mid october i want to say the end of october it end end of

225october um and quite frankly you know we will continue to evaluate this structure however it ends up uh to see when we can reduce we're we're trying to walk away from mitigation strategies when appropriate versus adding mitigation strategy so my hope is you know this becomes a a less frequent conversation but a data-driven process based on on where we are what the research is telling us to to kind of pull away some mitigation strategies to keep school as normal as possible i mean we have kids are you know they're seeing they're seniors and they haven't known normal since they were their ninth grade year the end march in the ninth grade year yeah so you know our goal is is to put something in place that is very very narrowly focused and then keep it

226there as as for limited time as as possible understanding the red because i don't want to not respond to that that is the dilemma in in which we're in and i am trying to propose something in complete transparency uh that is purely driven on the the data and what keeps school opens and um two board members are are adamant uh other three um you know interpret the implementation of this system uh legal and and non-legal um so that that that in fact is the beauty and joy of and the complexity of of a school board thank you i just have two more items that i want and need clarification on i noticed here on the bottom of the tiered mitigation strategies for those who are looking at the chart the asterix indicates that a school

227would go to the next tier i suppose um after for 10 days is that right 10 school days correct 10 school days 10 consecutive school days so what that means is if a school is above red i just want to clarify what i understand i mean above 5 5 or more sorry did i say that right right if a school goes above 5 or more than they would or rather above four percent so if a school reaches above four percent five percent or more they would fall within the highest red tier and require parental opt out for medical reasons because basically everything else remains the same for 10 consecutive days correct so i have a concern with that because a school might be at a 5 today and for the next two weeks or month

228they could be in the yellow or the green so as you brought that to and i'm sorry through the chair as you brought that to light i tend to agree with you and i think that scenario would play full in the following way so i came down with covet i was out for 10 days and i'm coming back on the 10th day and another individual came down with cobot on his first day so the reality is you may jump to a five percent on that one day just because one is on his last and the other is on his first so as you could say you know as i pointed out sebastian river high school one day so as you run and go back and dig into the data behind that it is very clear

229there was a teacher who was on covid for his or her last day and another who is on for his or her first day or two or three and the numbers change and that's how quick they change so um moving it to two days may be a more consistent implementation that you had to be in the red for for two days and then implement um for if you you know you get the you you get the pass for the one day blip which we is part of our data set uh but after that second day it becomes consistent well that makes sense because you can see here indian river academy they had a five percent on september third and then they were at one percent one percent one percent one percent one percent um the

230same thing with um osceola magnets nope sorry uh storm storm uh sebastian river middle school trying to read the acronyms five percent one day and then one percent one percent one percent one percent there's another school six percent one day and then one percent one percent one percent zero zero um there is another one here eight percent um and then they went to four percent three percent three three and then zero so there are several here's a seven percent for one two three four five six seven days they haven't had anything so i think that um again the i understand the the caution like we're now where we shouldn't be uh but i don't think that we should rush to judgment either then either you know i think we need to kind of look at

231what happens i i agree and i think i think the next 10 days would give us even a larger data set the data you see here is without the mitigation strategies being fully implemented because mass weren't being done with fidelity and 80 percent uh were not wearing masks and teachers weren't wearing masks that that first two you know 11 days of school you see a drastic increase whereas now mitigation strategies will be consistently implemented so that quick rise and significant rise when you get to double digits we don't anticipate ever seeing because it's a compounded spread you know we can offset the compounded spread with the mitigation strategies therefore this data set that we see here will not the next 25 30 days won't look nothing like this it'll be a lot less red and

232no double digits what was the date that we implemented the mass mandate i think 8 30 was the the first day of the mass mandate and 8 20 um hold on eight 25 was the first day of staff so 8 30 i mean that there were still a lot yeah too late but um okay so i'm i appreciate that you uh will what are you gonna what are you gonna do now you're gonna make those listen to the other i'm gonna listen to the rest of the board members my last point because that was my first my last point is the two weeks to the tiered plan mask uh for all you the implementation of this to begin in two weeks or the hope that you have to begin this in two weeks um keeps

233our current mask mandate in pot in in progress for the next two weeks is that correct that would be my recommendation and even though i'm very encouraged with where we currently are um i just want to see it through in an absolute abundance of caution uh to make that right decision so we can move to this and not have to go backwards so this is why i can't support this because we are currently at a one percent if we were currently following this tiered approach at a one percent there wouldn't be a mass mandate as as a system but they're still our schools right even even okay as a system i mean i just think that um i i can't i can't support a mandated mass mandate for one percent within our entire district okay

234uh next mrs barrenburg you've been patient you too thank you couple things um thank you for this data-driven approach to a big problem a couple of things i want to state before i want to say how i want to proceed with this because i do want to see us put it on tonight and i want to see a small tweak and there's and i can absolutely go for it you know what i mean all right so first of all there are two two things to consider board members one we don't know the long-term effects of cope and nobody does and we also don't know the long-term effects of prolonged mass use on children nobody does but i do know this that long beyond us and our decision parents will be dealing with the after effects

235of this parents not us that's something to consider and think about parents will have to deal with whatever decisions made knowing that mr barefoot i quoted you a couple times so i'm going to quote you here um before when we were having our long discussion at the beginning um what were you even discussing something beginning of the agenda oh we were talking about the protocols you know you said we can argue about a word here or there i want to not argue about a word but i want to talk about why that word is important okay absolutely um you stated that you want to focus on the business of the board so do i and i think this is going to help us do that because next time it flares up and it's going to

236flare up we're not going to be going again with all this we have something in place that we all agreed to and we vetted it out today and we're moving on so i can agree with that um you said that this change will take us through any legislation or court orders and won't i'm sorry you stated that you want to focus on the business of the board what i'm saying is this change is going to take us through any legislation or court orders and won't have us return back to mass discussions the reason why i say that is because right now like you mentioned with the stay this is going to be batted back and forth in the courts right we all know that right and we don't want to have to keep coming back

237to this and waffling back and forth so that's why that one word is important and i'll tell you why dr schiff you made a comment that said i'm quoting you non-biased non-political let's let's talk about that let's let's make this decision not about politics because that i've never agreed to it the vote i took was not political the vote i took was because i wanted to vote for the mass policy last time i did i waffled back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and ultimately it came down to this one word again and this one word is sticking with me and it's the word medical and i'll tell you why there's two reasons why it's sticking with me one because it's going to put us back and forth with this whole

238thing with the doe and the governor and the courts and all that the other one is this you know we're taxing we're putting another tax on our health providers in town when we did that i don't know if you guys know or you probably do because you're getting emails like i am how many people ran to their doctors and how many people are doing that sort of thing okay so look at the red i can live with all of this all the way up to the red as a principal and doc jones correct me if i'm wrong but whenever there's something that was a policy of the board right there's always an exception to the rule and when there would be something that a parent really had a problem with what did they do they

239come met with the principal and we problem-solved it together they didn't have to have a 504 they didn't have to have an iep meeting because a those take a lot of personnel that pull out of classrooms that need require us to get substitutes they take a lot of time to set up and they are also very they're determined by a committee not a parent okay whereas if a parent meets with a principal and has a discussion that's a different story than an entire committee meeting and making a decision about an iep in 504 so right now what we have in place is you can either go to a doctor which people are going to all kinds of interesting doctors to get whatever you know piece of paper they need to come tell us or they

240have to set up an iep or a 504 that's why i had the issue i don't have the issue with putting a mass policy in place absolutely let's do it the issue i have is that word medical and the reason why is because that puts us back in this whole battle that's going on across the state let's lead in that let's change that one word to strict policy or meeting with a principal or whatever and you're saying can a principal handle this i'm going to tell you i did and it wasn't this sticking point but it was a different sticking point so i think and i love the fact that it's by school because now we're not having every every principal every day dealing with this you're only dealing with it as a principal when

241your school moves to red and so if you can think about that and you can live with that people i'm asking you i'm pleading with you i will absolutely vote for this and i would like you to put it on tonight's agenda that we immediately go to this and i'll tell you with a caveat and i think this will make mrs rosario happy too we immediately go to this and stay in red for the next two weeks for all schools if we change that word medical to that now would that make all these p principals have to have those meetings maybe maybe you won't go for that but my point is that i'm okay with moving to red on this tiered mitigation strategy if that helps us move forward and put a policy in place

242but i think that word medical is the only sticking point i have and that's because it's doing two things it's taxing our health providers that are already over taxed and it's putting us in this litigation gray area whereas we could get out of this litigation gray area by making that a one-to-one meeting with a principal or making a very strict opt-out however you want the wording to be but i think that could help us that's what i want to make a comment on dr jones thank you and dr moore this plan uh what you and your staff did is excellent i'm sure a lot of districts will look at that right now we're depending on our parents to give us information on home cova test correct yes ma'am okay um talking about the court and

243so forth there's already an appeal and the parents want to go to the state supreme court and my personal response to this is this is the best and safest plan for us at this time i do not agree with taking out the word medical i do not no county has changed their plan that i know of as of yesterday the ones who are mandating the mass in fact you mentioned earlier about the positivity race rate and i've been watching that very carefully just last week we're around 30 31 we've been higher right now our positivity rate as of today was 20.6 now i'm just looking at the other counties that are doing this orange is down to 12.6 brevard is 16 hillsboro 14 broward 13.9 volusia 12. so they're lower than us and still doing

244these mandates we have a responsibility for the safety of these students and yes all of us have been receiving emails back and forth but my personal belief is i am upholding the constitution i am upholding the constitution and keeping these students safe and again the appeal is going to go back and forth we understand that i read earlier that the federal government said they would be there to support us if any money or salary is taken away the only one who could suspend a board member is governor desantis i understand that i understood there could be consequences and i said that in the last workshop we cannot we cannot play a game with this we cannot go back and forth i would certainly uh approve of you saying okay let's maintain for the next two

245weeks and then we go to this plan but not not changing the word medical i am very very glad that you are considering 912 in this now i've always been concerned about that and they're doing okay sebas river high school is doing real well fuel has had some red and so forth they're doing okay but i'm just worried about um you know the high school experience you said these seniors haven't really had a complete one from nine through 12. and i'm worried i don't want to shut them down i don't want to shut down activities you know we still have issues miss bearing board everybody's talked about the variants coming through florida seems to lead the state on where these variants start so you know while the courts battle this out okay but i want

246to make sure that we do the best for all of our students and maybe sometimes we could take a little credit that we're doing pretty well in some of these areas because they do have the mask on so that's that's how i feel about that but you know i'm very very passionate about keeping where we are for the next two weeks and and this plan is good and i think it could work the only thing is we've got to make sure our parents are very aware of this our principals have to do a good job of saying okay this is where we are look at the dashboard do the calls and so forth and i love it when the calls come home reminding us uh what the expectation is um i just you know we

247we can't play a game with this we just cannot we've got to move forward i mean i would support like i said we continue for two weeks and then we take a look at this but i do not want to take out medical thank you okay a rebuttal sure here's our bottle leave the word medical in add the word or strict conversation with the principal no i don't i i really doc i understand you're you're putting your your heels in the sand sand on this and i am too yeah but but i'm going to tell you we're not the ones that are going to deal with the after effects for this in 10 years we are the ones responsible to give these kids a safe education and i think we are with all of this

248with a strict conversation with the principal do i think it's going to be a whole bunch of kids at one school no i don't i really don't and the ones the ones that you're thinking of that are gonna um you know fight this they're already fighting it we agree to disagree i know they're already fighting it they're already running and getting those those um medical forms they're already saying you know what i'm not going to do a medical form i'm just going to send my kid without a mask on right so what is the percentage of have the opt out for the medical 20 so the the medical opt-out last time i checked was at 76 which is about 0.7 of that total population we've had about another 25 30 that mr bass is telling

249me submitted so a total of well what 131 so 1.13 of the total population um have submitted a medical opt-out that includes the 504s and the ieps which is very similar to what ms berenborg was saying that's just a meeting um with the principal with with the teacher evaluating the child and saying obviously there's a situation that would doesn't benefit the child and i think i was i was speaking so let me finish okay if you don't mind um i understand your argument we we argue it differently um i'm going to go back to if you don't we can't keep doing this oh for prolonged time who knows how long a school could stay in the red and again they're they're a parent's child so i know i'm not saying what i'm agreeing to is

250not safe i think it is what i'm agreeing to is everything here but either getting rid of the word medical or changing or adding something because there is another reason i'll tell you why i fielded a couple of calls last week with parents who was distraught that couldn't get into a doctor because they worked two jobs so they couldn't get the medical exemption they couldn't take off to go to an ip meeting they didn't know how to get an iep meeting they were they were very frustrated because there was no other option what i'm asking for is that slight other option where that type of parent can ask for that meeting with a principal could they go in before school when they have the opportunity and they're not working sure when they're dropping off their

251child that my point is there are parents that can't drop what they're doing to go make a doctor's appointment to take care of this there were parents with some interesting issues for their children that may or may not be able to get that medical um form because they're they're print you know their doctor just won't give them that form because that reason there were some that i absolutely felt horrible about that told me about their situation with their own child and they were desperate to try to help their child and for those parents which i don't think would be a huge number especially when a school is in red you know when you're talking about one or two schools being in red i don't think that's a huge number for us to adjust that little

252bit i think it's going to help those parents that are having those issues i'm not saying adjust it and open the can wide open i think that's what you're getting at and that's not what i'm asking for what i'm asking for is that little tweak to help those parents that are having those those serious issues that they can't get to a doctor that they can't get this done that they don't know how to do an iep meeting they don't know how to do a 504 they're very frustrated they're very upset it's frustrating for those parents and that's not what we're considering here i just want to add one thing i think we've all had many many emails and many many calls and that's you know that's the case for all of us and we've all

253done the research we've talked about it you know i support what the american pediatric association says kids k-12 wear mask i support what the cdc says wear your mask if you can't social distance inside wear your mask talking with three doctors of cleveland clinic they said mask they are a deterrent and at this time i'm very very as passionate as you are miss berenborg and i respect what you're saying but i'm very very passionate from the fact that no one's personal freedom supersedes the safety of all that's just been a basic foundation for me ever since it started you know i hope and pray that we can get through this and hopefully this is our last year but i have a feeling there'll be more variants and maybe another pandemic and so on and so

254on but again while the courts are battling this out i think we have a responsibility to parents and our students mr mayor i get a chat here at some point so make it quick i have a suggestion how about combining yellow and orange making that one to three percent the face covering highly recommended indoors will remain for one to three percent i'm sorry one to four percent that's what i meant combining yellow and orange right that would remain face coverings highly recommended indoors just as it says in the yellow once we get into the red add the wellness check the temperature checks the desk shields and keep face coverings required for students with parental opt-out no medical but you're replacing that with those additional mitigation strategies i could support that i don't think i understood

255here take a look so you're combining can you go to the other chart can we go oh sorry sorry sorry that's a good idea i mean for the next two weeks i mean he wants to keep but regardless of that i'm just talking about the tier so combine yellow and orange for yellow and orange that would become one tier that one tier would be face coverings highly recommended indoors with physical distancing the red would be face coverings required for students with parental opt-out in lieu of the medical we are adding in their temperature checks in the red in lieu of the medical we're adding wellness checks and in lieu of the medical we are adding um what did i say dust shields i don't see how that's going to be fair to our parents just

256just a a couple things this is a a a very thought out and thorough process um it will take two weeks to implement it will be providing the opportunity for high schools to to get the appropriate documentation for the medical opt-out with plenty of time hopefully never having to use but to have it on file i do was looking over mr mr bass's shoulder regarding 504s or parents with concerns and i'm looking from letters from each and every single principal we erred in the sight of caution to provide additional time for the requirement 504's meetings never had to be scheduled to take place it was looking at the documentation already in the 504 to to occupy so our principals um do not report that those those were issues and to be quite honest putting something

257in place without giving them clear guidance is just bad leadership from me i would need to be able to something very very specific you can't put a soldier in the war field without the appropriate tools and resources and instruction and they rely on policy and the procedures and rules that i put in place to say this is why i have to do this and saying not providing that is not a fun place for a principal to to be in um and it would it would result in inconsistent implementation from one school in this school it was okay and that school it wasn't school um so i feel the need to respect the the the job of the principleship in that aspect um i i think we implement as designed and then look at moving forward

258uh coming back to say when is understanding the points being made by miss barenborg and mrs rosario and i think the the hiccup is the the medical opt-out and i think we need to evaluate the implementation within the orange before we make any other um recommendations or shifts or modifications and i say that because as kovitz well well improve right now it will decline and i think we all are on on page with that and what we're trying to create here or i'm trying to create here is something that makes sense for all for all and when mr berenborg says i think i don't know which one of you said i i i forget that you know you're you're going to be attacked we're not going to make everybody happy we're not and it is

259flip a coin 50 50. and i made the point every single board member three voted one way two uh voted for the other three want to be recalled uh two are having some very very disgusting inappropriate inaccurate things said about them um so you can't win for losing but it doesn't mean each and every single one of you are voting your heart and you're voting what you believe is in the best interest of children and to say that each of you have not been advocating for what you honestly believe would be a drastic understatement and the pressures put on each of you regardless of the side that you fall on um in some ways how you're being treated and spoke about um it's despicable it's despicable and the impact that that has on us as

260a respectable board is what we need to proceed with caution that's true and i would this is off topic but but i'm sorry you know we're we're in a meeting with the foundation and looking at how we're we're strategizing around the jimmy graves property and one of the individuals that we're working with say are you sure people are going to you know have enough trust in you to donate to you that's what that's that's it we're the tuesday night comedy show that we're about to put on dr maura i apologize that's not who this county is oh i i i i that's not who we are we've got to get back to who we are i i agree and i i can tell you this doc jones i i don't think for one second that

261it is because i've been in every single school already this year i've walked everything at every school i've you know it's me and my wife we're we're here and we're we're all in and we're in you know multiple publics in in and around town uh and embraced in a way that you know something we've been looking for for a very very very long time so i i i don't think that's the reality but i do know the quality of teachers in our building the quality of administrators in our building um and how happy kids are from multiple backgrounds um in our schools and our spaces together and that's something we do need to get back through but to get back on on track i think this is an evolving process and you all know how

262i work i i am data driven and responsive to the particular data i think you put this plan in place you implement um and when we could see hey we're not getting to the the red my concern is without the red um we we live in it without the criteria we we live in it i think we need to hold ourselves accountable to faithfully implementing the requirements of the orange that mask opt out and really showing and setting the way i think my prediction is we won't be in red very very limited will we be in red and if we're hardly ever if at all in red i know there's schools that will never be in the red this is so narrowly focused um we may never be in the red as we implement mitigation

263strategies moving forward and we're proactive in doing so we're protecting ourselves from getting to the red which is where that rub is so we may be engaging in this discourse around the reality that may never be but i think we need to to test it in good faith uh to move this work forward we're not in the right now and you want to mat you want to continue the mask mandate i i want to ensure the effective uh operationalizing of this particular initiative and to look at it across one system we do have one school in the red we do have one school in the orange uh this is the highest level of our government the amount of time that it will take between bass mr bassari and staff to operationalize to train the principals

264it's a big lift at the high schools because this is new for them they've been living life and they've been doing it successfully so i don't think anything would change but we want to be intentional of saying hey guys you if that's a medical thing for you let's get it on file so your life doesn't have to be interrupted and that that that's work that needs to be done so taking that time hey it does allow us to hedge the bet when i say heads to bet you know labor day you know depending on who you spoke to you know here comes that spike i don't know i don't think it's going to happen based on the numbers that i'm seeing but i've given up on trying to predict covet so it is just continuing

265on operationalizing continuing with this particular data gives me accountability point to come back to the board and say in two weeks this is solid we've tested it over the course of two weeks uh we're good to go no schools have ever been in the red based on what we're seeing we always can project out three or four days this is what we're seeing or you know what we need to shift or modify we need to look at i'm comfortable with this that or the other that is the the conversation or dialogue versus in three months from now or more more than likely in january we come back instead of having our you know our winter data comes and talking about the last stretch before assessments which would be the last year of assessments governor canceled

266fsas today we haven't mentioned it um i miss mr meyer talking and everybody else i'm sorry mr i want to talk about everything i i no i i i agree sometimes with mr meyer okay so so i'm gonna um offer a couple of comments first of all um i think the the uh the uh topic that mrs rosario brought up uh one day can you know one person on one day can swing from one color to the next think about a weekend that's three days so so my suggestion wherever we end up on this in terms of this transition from one color to the next that you have to be in red more than a day before you stay in red now i don't know whether it's two days or three days because if you're

267talking about friday to monday a lot can happen over a weekend and if it's monday to tuesday doesn't matter but friday to monday does matter and i don't know what the right somewhat arbitrary i i grant it but i do think that there's some validity in you got to be in red for a day or two before you actually implement whatever the guidelines are going to be for red the 10-day window i agree so whether it's whether we merged yellow and orange or leave it the way it is to me it frankly doesn't matter i think that the the real discussion here is around when do you have to wear a mask and when don't you and it doesn't matter the only thing that matters is when you're in red you have to wear it

268under whatever conditions and when you're not read you don't so getting the the benefit of more rather than fewer is that your people that are paying attention my guess is that ninety percent of the people won't pay attention they don't pay attention before the day before they vote why would they pay attention to to something that's important is this however it there is it does provide indications of trend and then you can at least mentally if you're at home and you're a mom or a dad you begin to think about reason you know we're headed in the wrong direction or way we're headed maybe there's only another day or two before we have to put up with this mask if you're really against masks um you know this medical thing um i i get it

269i was particularly disturbed to see on we the people or moms for liberty sending people to a chiropractor in sebastian or i actually was was some of you i was actually talking to one of the people that write about us who actually goes to that chiropractor that was recommended and so he calls the guy and the guy i guess did a pretty good dance but you know when you start somebody was charging fifty dollars to give a parent the medical opt-out that they needed in order so they didn't have to wear a mess now fortunately like you told me the other day was 77 now maybe now it's 130 whatever it is it's a relatively small number but that's really disturbing when a when a parent would go to that extreme or someone who's an

270advocate for no mass would go to that extreme to get around the rules and put that that doctor who's probably not even a medical doctor in this case you could get them disbarred for falsifying and and suggesting that so and so son or daughter is entitled to a medical opt-out when in fact they're not but that in fact it was even the phone numbers were on online as to who to call you go to this medical provider or that medical provider and of course it was all quote unquote private within the little groups that you know are advocating for no masks i think if it were possible the idea that mrs rosario of temperatures i mean you walk into i i don't in vermont where i am most of the summer or even in boston

271where i've been several times here of late you walk into a restaurant you walk into almost any place and they got one of those little things they put on your forehead it's no big deal that's a pain in the butt whoever has to do it in every school but there's some validity to that i don't know about all the other stuff but but the temperature is easy it's a little gun the other possibility um and and i'll get to the bottom line my bottom line that coincides with the argument that mrs barenborg makes about the difficulty that some parents or parent or grandparent might have in actually they've got a legitimate request for a medical opt-out but can't get to the doctor for whatever reason don't have a doctor or can't afford it or can't

272afford it is there a way and it doesn't and i'm more thinking beyond the two weeks that's my dilemma is trying to figure out between dr jones and mrs barenborg and others whatever your point of view is is there a way that the district could be helpful i mean you call a helpline for a lot of things but suppose there is you know i'm i'm a mom and a dad we have a kid kid's got asthma but i don't know who to call might you know it might be a spanish-speaking family for example they understand enough to know but they don't really know how to operate within the county but they might understand that if you call this help number at the district the district can facilitate connecting that family that child with whatever it

273is they need the doctor that and i'm talking about there's a maybe you can make a a a phone call that greg rosencrantz said i mean i can if i can get somebody a cova test i guarantee you we could find some doctor at that hospital or in the wellness center that could be quickly you could connect the person that doesn't have what mrs barenborg suggested that need and at least at least make it easier for someone who's really concerned about this and and through the chair as i was strolling through that information um kind of regurgitating the information that principles shared back you sound like me when we first brief with the principles we're going to bend over backwards to be in service of our families and i would love to know which which

274principal or which staff member is saying ah too bad you know we're not going to be in service or support of you because that just violates this district's guiding principles and it's not it will not be tolerated so the adding of test centers uh for students to get a a cova test comes at the response of of that kind of problem solving are we don't always agree with our health department um but we do have a good partnership with our health department so we can coordinate those systems of support for any child that would would need them based on that information whether it comes from a health assistant whether it comes from assistant principal school counselor uh that is an expectation that i have of staff in order to ensure that we're providing that level

275of support and i i think we do but we'll circle back with administrators as we move forward to ensure um as we move to the next phase if that be the will of the board that we're being vigilant and always reminding families if you need this support we can make that connection for you in order to get uh the appropriate documentation the appropriate medical services um or anything else it may need to be as we have as we navigate this difficult time well i i think i think this doesn't get us through the next two weeks but as we tweak this assuming we're thinking that this plan gets implemented i think those kinds of dealing with these special situations uh and and you you can sort you can sort through the you know the the

276transitioning into red from from right now just in hearing the the the consent of of the board i will put an item together that implements um status quo for the next two weeks allows me to operationalize this with the one shift being two days in a higher level before the 10-day exit window would be implemented and that would be yellow to orange or orange orange to red if if it would be helpful and this weekend we can do this offline i mean i can listen i'll give you my uber account number and you can call up and get mrs smith or mr jones that can't get their son or daughter to a doctor and i'll get ahold of rosencrantz i mean i do have a little poll over there not that you don't there are

277doctors in this community the clinic just hired three more uh family docs uh and they're looking for patients and and you could say the school district of indian river county is your patient for those of our parents grandparents who have children that that need or want a medical opt-out we ought to be able to put that in place now we can't do it tomorrow but between now and the 28th i think all of these tweaks that have been suggested around the the dias here can be put in place and we can make it easier the question is between now and then and i guess uh we're so close i just you know for two weeks we're not talking about months we're talking about two weeks it doesn't make any sense to me to not to

278keep doing what we've been doing approve this mitigation plan so that you can begin to as you say uh educate all the people that need to be educated make these tweaks set in place the the exceptions how to deal with exceptions and we'll be we'll be good to go hopefully when we meet again on the 28th the next day it's it's operational unless something happens where you recommend we got more of the same which i don't think we will yes ma'am again we're saying that the only opt out is medical and let me give you one of the scenarios without trying to give away a specific um a a guardian that's all say uh called me very very upset about this mandate because um and there were a couple but let me give you the

279one that was the extreme case the child has a serious phobia about the mask wearing and because the young child went through this all last year won't go to school because this whole masking thing has taken them to a doctor the doctor doesn't agree that that's a medical issue because it's not a it's a mental health issue so now you've she's now she sorry this person has taken this child now to a mental health person who's saying that it will take several appointments and weeks to determine whether or not this is a true phobia or not so here's the dilemma we've now told the parent you can't do it without a medical excuse the parent or the guardian is trying to get that but as being told they can't have it this way they've got

280to go this way and now they have to have several months of looking at this child and their needs again that's why i'm saying there needs to be that little sliver of next to medical whatever you want to call it or conversation with the principal about a unique situation because there's always a unique situation out there not hey i don't want my kid to wear a mask it's when this person told me that one i get it that's why i have to put my heels in this thing because you see here's the problem you know putting putting eliminating medical for the world we're just adding this to it or the five or whatever the number is versus the ten thousand k through eight kids and ultimately the seventeen thousand and i don't you know every

281kid's important i mean the people that say well look at the statistics you know what if you were the only person and you argue well there's there's nothing going on in the county but it was your kid it would matter sure so i don't want to hear about the the you know you know only two people have died unless it's your kid right that's excuse my life can i make a suggestion that might result but it just it just it's just um i feel for the the parent like but isn't there no i mean listen i think dr moore you and your team have taken a i'll call it an entrepreneurial approach to solving a problem using data that people can't argue with the facts on the ground can i make a suggestion that might

282be an easy fix please i am in support of the medical opt-out i think that's been clear all along i understand and i hear your point i'm not in support of changing the language where it says medical or other however i might not object to asterisking footnoting something that says in cases where a medical opt-out is impossible to obtain please contact your principal for us to work with you bingo i could live with that i can live with that i can come to the big and those principles darn it because what i don't want is i don't want it in big block letters that says you don't have to have this but for those extreme cases where there is to have a footnote or where you can document that you can't get to a medical

283professional you need specialized attention and you're going to take the extra effort to do that i'll footnote that or i'll ask to risk it you'll have a conversation with okay let me let me just summarize what i say and when we approve the the first item it was we provided the additional time for that to go forward let me say this um for the whole world i can definitely add that language i i can read the the room um which is fine i'm not going to put that on the principles but i'll circle back with my team with the you know 30 minutes that we have to determine um how that would be appropriate in order to to put in with that without a that footnote and it is but i will say this it

284is capturing the process that was already in place and we had principals said hey it's going to going to take a week i just went over and asked you know dr jacobs can you give that child a medical note because you're licensed you can do it um and and we have those those people um but we have some of those individuals we have on on staff so as that comes to our attention that's what it means to be best by kids you know right yeah and it's obvious you know if if it's not in the best interest of the child okay we'll work with you and it's just not masked i think that's exactly right a person so they'll say contact your principal or there may be you know let's say there is a district

285you know call the ex office or call so and so at the district and we'll work with you because and i want medical to be medical yeah not going for 50 a note or whatever it is we can't determine that though well that's not ethical well that's that can be determined another way but i want medical we know there are students out there we know that we know there are true medical exemptions i want medical to be medical no i i i'm fine on on the wavering and and dr schiff you can say that one last time and then we can move on say what what did you just say the asterisks what about the asteroids if you're having problems go to the principal yeah all right okay can i add one thing about i

286want to add one thing about what she just said hold on one second though go to uh go to your principal or if we can have a designated yeah um i i am not putting out on the the i'm not putting it on the premise you can tell the principal to refer to the call this number at the district someone will will help you yeah that's the only role the principal has and here's what i want to say board number office number no here's what i want to say to that is thank you for finally understanding that there's a mental health reason why people are having a hard time with this the kids are having fun just back up for a second though thank you for finally understanding at no point have i ever not

287understood that let's not presume that because i've been hearing on the side no that's not what i meant okay well that's how it came out no that's not what i meant i didn't get to finish my sentence let me see you said thank you for finally understanding that this is not like you know can i finish my sentence thank you for finally understanding that there's a mental health aspect to this that may not be under this policy with the medical and the reason why is because the parent was frustrated or this guardian was frustrated with the fact that they couldn't find that medical help they needed fast enough for their child okay that's what i meant and there was always a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist in it which acknowledged the mental health which we all

288supported and it wasn't like a finally understood i get it i've gotten it all along and there's a public health crisis right so let's just be clear about how we work within that okay no i agree and maybe we could you know we we've got all right all right you know it's 20 after or i'm still not uh in support of the medical however the current mask requirement that you're suggesting to continue with for the next two weeks it indicates here licensed physician uh physician assistant psychiatrist or psychologist so if anything else is going to change this has got to change as well through the chat that does have and you'll see that this in in 45 minutes or so you'll see that where a physician uh we're going to modify that language so the

289the chiropractor um can't be issuing the letters but that's not what we were just talking about well the psychiat everyone else can in fact issue those particular letters and we do have those from mental health professionals all of that has to be put in this retirement if this goes through so that they understand is this for the two weeks this is for the two weeks only i was going to extenuate the the two weeks oh i'm not okay i got it i'm not in support so will this be an action item tonight yes well it's a consent item that i will pull and move to action with this updated verbiage based on uh the dialogue abortion for the two weeks and then to be followed up on the 28th by this more extended um tiered

290plan exactly and are we putting this at the beginning of the meeting yes okay that would order the idea right it's going to be you know we go from presentations i went through this i've got to look at this it goes from presentations to um first of all under orders of the day we're going to we're under orders of the day we're going to pull item 5a which is the this discussion and put it right after presentations okay all right and and just so everybody knows her guidance from our about to retire general counsel here people who came to speak to that item will be invited to speak to that item somebody wants to speak to something else they'll have to wait until public [Music] citizen input is normally on the schedule which is almost

291right after that because if it's an action item according to uh the way we should operate anyone who even though we've changed the agenda around they they should have the opportunity to speak before speaking to an action item i think you had it reversed say that again you said somebody can come and they can speak it to the action item or they're going to have to wait until citizen input citizen input happens before speaking to an action item in the we're going to we're going to work we're going to change the the agenda when we move you'll see the okay that's fine maybe i said it wrong maybe i don't understand what you said but it will be sequenced properly fine i'm i'm beyond my capacity to think anymore um having been going since nine

292o'clock so personally i'd like to take a break all right so i do have three items i know you want to take a break but i'll quickly just say them for the record we do have our assessment calendar coming up for approval and once again as discussed during individual meetings you're seeing a reduction in testing and as we learned today next year we're going to have significant reductions in testing so we're looking forward to that um unlike last year we did not buy buses we are buying our annual 10 buses for this upcoming school year uh which are very very needed based on the accidents that we've been having lately so those buses are in great need and we're contracting the renovations of the cafeteria at um glendale elementary school as you know that is

293one of the prototype buildings that we have throughout our building has a very very small cafeteria we are going to extend that cafeteria and build into that project without extending the budget a additional parking uh driveway to and increase the the flow of traffic at that particular school because it's just too small of a of a traffic item those are the items that are coming up for approval this evening with that mr chair i have no other items all right um good discussion uh nobody's everybody got a little bit of something some people got a lot and meeting adjourned you