Superintendent's Workshop 12 p.m. 2-14-22

001everyone it is noon on february 14th happy valentine's day everybody i'd like to call this meeting to order and the first order of business is that i would like us to bow our heads and recognize a day of remembrance for stoneman douglas it is a day of service and love so if we'll do that at this time thank you everyone there's a day of love but it's also kind of a sad day in our history here in florida so i wanted to take that time to remember those those children that lost their lives all right so today is our superintendent's workshop and superintendent has a few items and he also due to our new protocols allowed us to put some items on there as board members so that we didn't have to have the meeting

002this afternoon so we have one meeting today instead of a few so we appreciate that dr moore so dr moore at this time i'd like to turn it over to you thank you madam chair and thank you for taking the time to recognize what is a a hard day in public education here in the state of florida although it is valentine's day we all always want to remember what happened at marjory stoneman douglas and never forget and act accordingly as we move forward we have two items on our agenda both coming from the shop of curriculum and instruction one is a simple update uh regarding the early learning programs there is no action coming towards the board uh as it relates to early morning programs but we do want to uh share some of the

003outstanding work that's being done under mr meyer and brooke flood's leadership and then review of our ell language item that comes for the board for approval at our february 28th meeting this is an item that comes every three years and as you recall our last workshop we took the time to provide a comprehensive update and this is just the actual boilerplate form that goes to the board um for approval to be sent to the state so with that i'll turn mr meyer over uh to you to have a deeper explanation and presentations for these two items thank you dr moore with the chair uh we really do appreciate uh the past few meetings where we've been able to highlight a lot of the work that staff does across the district ms malus has done a

004great job the past a couple times talking about homeless education and our sports for our english language learners and this is a wonderful opportunity for ms flood to highlight the great work that she's doing across the district as well for our youngest learners so i'm happy to turn that over to her and let her uh do the presentation in the monster any questions you may have at the end can you oh i don't think i'm on oh maybe i'm on what okay well thank you so much um as you all know my time is short but i could spend all day sharing all the amazing things that we are doing here in our early learning programs department um basically our strategic plan goal is what drives us and as you know we are a small

005but mighty little program and we rely heavily on our community to help us meet that very huge goal to ensure that the school district ranks in the top 10 florida districts as measured by kindergarten readiness where as mr meyer and i have shared is an indirect and direct correlation for all of us so the first part um as many of you are aware there are two sides to my house we have our preschool early intervention or exceptional student education side and we also have our vpk side but we'll start today with our pre-k esc so as you know families if they begin to notice any concerns maybe a pediatrician maybe if they're in the private sector grandma anybody who says you know think maybe your little one's not quite there yet they're able to give

006our office a call they make that referral to child find we run the child through a screener if they pass the screener fantastic we ask the family to continue to monitor if they continue to see anything they're always welcome to come to us again if we do find some deficiencies or areas of need we bring the child back to the office for a full evaluation with our speech and language pathologist as well as our school psychologist they run through different depending on the areas of need different assessments that they go through if the child needs eligibility then we bring the family back we share the data and let the family know that their child is eligible for certain services maybe speech language autism spectrum disorder developmental delay things of that sort then we give them

007time to digest that that is a big pill to swallow i would say for many of our families especially in the world in which we live right now and then we bring them back and we allow them the opportunity to meet with our teachers and our therapists who would be providing the services on that individualized education plan which is written once the family then determines they would like to move forward and then we get our classroom placement which i'm going to tell you we are bursting right now our numbers have increased drastically um it occurred to me not too long ago that this time next year will be our first round of our coveted little ones who were born or were in the womb at this time when we went into just prior to the

008shutdown so it's going to be an interesting world very soon yeah it slapped me upside the face i'm just going to be honest because with our c2b we are required by statute to transition those children from early steps that's our birth to just prior to age three and they have to be evaluated technically prior to their third birthday so when i started writing the 2019 birthday it occurred to me that next year would be 20 20. so this year we have our team has screened 99 students since june of last year up until present day we work collaboratively with fiddlers and they send someone a bilingual screener so which is great because she can tease out whether it's a dual language or if it's truly something going on she's fantastic so she has done 99

009up until this point we have done 78 team evaluations 49 speech and language evaluations three developmental delay only so sometimes they've got their language and their speech we've had six transfers with two pending so they've come from different areas within the state or even out of state we've had a few from new york recently and we've had 37 of our c to be evaluations with 14 more between now and very recent we have six that have been scheduled and eight that are pending and we are working collaboratively with tats through ucf which helps us with our transitions to have us get our early step numbers a little bit quicker so that we can schedule them out so we're not just one right after one another with us so that is our pre-k ese then we

010have our vpk which um our vpk students are for as of september 1st it is our free programming that is offered through on the coalition and the division of early learning we currently have 11 vpk classrooms within our school district uh eight of which are about bachelor degree or higher higher certified teachers and three are our child development associates our pre-k primary certified teachers provide those inclusionary opportunities for our little ones who are in our pre-k ese classrooms but are not using that certificate of eligibility to say they're in the vpk program so many of our students in that separate class setting will then head over if they're making enough progress to go into that gen ed to be with their neurotypical peers districts are required to offer summer vpk programs but not school year

011so it is a blessing that we do offer that here school year is technically 540 hours we do provide a six hour full day our students arrive at 8 45 and leave between 2 45 and 3 o'clock depending upon their campus and the vpk early learning coalition dell they fund three hours to to our day and the district provides the additional three so that we have them for as long as possible the minimum requirements for the vpk teacher is at 45 hours that child development associator equivalent and our summer vpk is our 300 hour program which we offer over summer days and we do them 10-hour days some of our families you know they're there most of the time but yeah they hit that 300 hours um that instruction by statute must be led by

012a bachelor degree or higher teacher it's a more intensive program so they want those higher degreed staff to be funding that and our coalition does fund that full program so then what is our classroom what do our classrooms look like well as of february 2nd we had 309 students enrolled we had 169 vpk students so those are those including the ones who have speech and language it's if they have a certificate 91 of those are um 91 of that 169 includes our vpk inclusion and our vpk students who might be receiving speech and or language we have 62 itinerant students so those are our students in both community at their preschool we provide services at some of our local preschools our head starts we're now working to get back onto our rcma campuses to provide

013direct services as well as some of our specialized outside clinics because we have our resource teacher who provides services to them at coastal for instance as well as our district pre-k campuses so if you're not in a program parent guardian can bring you to one of our sites to receive your services we have 63 esc students who are in our separate class setting and 154 esc students cumulative vpk speech and language vpk inclusion itinerant exception and submissions and on and on and on we serve a lot of students and we're not done yet so it's only february we are our screens are scheduled through mid-march so it's just an ongoing cycle they come in they leave us they come in they leave us and many of our schools have almost doubled dodger town as of

014the first day with all students combined we have increased from 33 to 61 students fellsmere has increased from 29 to 35 glendale 13 to 17 ira 13 to 18 pelican island 29 to 52 vbe 43 to 64. and our itinerants have doubled from 31 students we serve to 61. and we serve them in 11 vpk nvpk inclusion classrooms and seven which we are excited our new vbe esc classroom will be opening on tuesday next week our teacher is here our teacher assistant is starting tomorrow so she's had a chance to be in the classrooms get to know the students as well as sit in on parent conferences because it's conference week for us so she'll get to share and welcome and introduce herself to our families as we begin to move them over into her

015classroom so we're really excited for that and we are busting so mr fagan will be hearing from me soon um flickers yay that's our like our grade um as our statute we are required to adopt a statewide kindergarten screening instrument that assesses kindergarten readiness for students going into k and it must be administered to all students within the first 30 days of the school year it's also used to back check our readiness rates for our vpk program students must demonstrate a score of at least 500 on the star early literacy assessment to be considered ready for kindergarten as determined by the state board and that readiness rate then would come back to us as vpk providers to show how well we're preparing our students for kindergarten based on our early learning and developmental standards and

016as you can see in 2020 indian river did outrank the state which was fantastic we did just receive and we will share out if you have not seen our latest readiness rates they were posted just recently so we'll make sure you have a copy of that and this is where it gets kind of fun kind of tough we're a provider we have 1200 students that come into kindergarten i see 180 a little bit more if you add my my summer so i'm only touching a small portion so here's where that indirect yet direct affect on kindergarten readiness and that big strategic play and goal really moved us towards our next big initiative to move forward to begin to show that growth and continue to move us up so our new initiatives couple three really exciting

017new initiatives that have just come into place i already shared about our student allocation model we did open with both the coalition and dell and title one thank you karen we were able to fund a new vpk classroom at dodger town and she is five short of being full which is really great um and it opened a little bit later so this year moving in we'll be able to recruit a little bit more and have those classrooms full by the time school starts however we are very lucky that it was available this year because student families from other schools that did not have room those families chose to go to dodger town and we have just in the last two weeks have had three students enroll at dodger town and one will be coming to

018pelican island so we're just in this constant moving grooves so our new pre-k esc classroom is fantastic i have been in this district this is my 26th year my seventh year in this position and i must say having this allocation model made it so easy i went i said here's my numbers this is what we're looking at they're still coming please help and it was yup we've got we're able to do that you just get somebody in there and i was lucky because when i have my calls with the rest of the other me's around the state they're having a hard time finding a teacher to be able to fill that class that type of classroom so we are blessed beyond that we were not only able to get the classroom but to staff it

019and staff it appropriately so we're very glad for that um huge thank you to learning alliance csac we pushed through a grant last year for a social emotional learning coach so this coach is teacher and staff focused not so much on the behavior of the child but how our staff responds and not reacts to behavior and i shared i asked her to send me some of the things she's been doing she's providing monthly activities manipulatives moonshot collaboration she's providing books and support in the classrooms she's also managing our parent engagement which being on six campuses can be difficult because you want to make sure everybody's hearing the same message but trying to have parent nights and things like that so it's been exciting to see this come into play she was just hired in october

020and in what she has done since october it has been a godsend because our teachers are feeling it they're feeling the love they're feeling more supported they have questions if they need visual schedules if they need picture cards she's able to get those done immediately printed laminated ready to go we're also using the e-deca to measure social emotional growth so that's given three times a year this year because she started late we just completed it because we finally had a full house in february since the omicron really kind of got us in january so um our teachers looked back and did a 30 days how are you in relation to different social emotional skills both positive and negative you know are you getting angry easily or can you transition to a different activities easily so

021she has been a great asset she was one of our former pre-k esc teachers so many of our staff already were comfortable had trust in her and that made it very easy to transition for all my data people um and for me especially because now i don't have to hand do data catherine beck and dr mcmahon have been working furiously to get our power bi dashboard so this dashboard will contain our indian river kindergarten readiness assessment data that our two block and higher providers which i'll share with you in a second as as well as school district put in our data we are then able to aggregate and disaggregate data based on is it school district is it private is it both school district and private is it are we looking at just boys are

022we looking at august boys versus january boys are we looking at our students with disabilities so we will have that opportunity to really dig into the data to see how our students are doing in relation to the community um and that's yes that's that part so this is um very proud and i have to say been getting nice nudges from senior leadership and superintendent to really go forward with this crazy vision i would like to introduce to you our early learning programs department and the elc irmo community collaboration project our theme in early learning is blocks we are building learners on course to kindergarten success and how are we doing that well we have created a block designation program and basically what that is is it shows an alignment from a private preschool to the

023school district and how much they're willing to align themselves to show that they're working very hard to make sure their little ones are ready for kindergarten so our first block is our utilization of the pre-k k transition form we are very proud of that we have used that for about five years now greg in the i.t department he and his staff have created a way that as soon as that transition form is uploaded into focus it connects to that student and stays with that student as soon as the student is scheduled into a school and to a teacher that teacher has immediate access to that transition form which was that last day in vpk or whenever that teacher chose to complete that form parent give permission to have that information shared with the district and

024it gives that snapshot of april or may or whenever that student finished the vpk program so it provides us that provider to district communication with us really pushing forward with focus for kindergarten enrollment it's actually encouraging our providers to be able to push their families to create that focus id because we have included a space for those incoming case if they're not part of us where we have speech and or language an itinerant student they would be able to get that id um let's see okay so many of our providers we actually have um thanks to miss valerie back in the back she is our quality specialist here with the coalition we just came on with our just as we were walking in here two more providers came on as a one block we have

025not gotten to everybody yet we just really rolled this out about the beginning to middle of december right before break so we're just getting the word out to the community and we have many providers who have already been a transition forum provider so we wanted to recognize them as well if you're willing to share we want to make sure you are recognized so we have four preschools that are on board with that the second opportunity for those providers is to participate in the indian river kindergarten readiness benchmark assessment wall star and the vpk assessment are great they don't really give the teacher that nitty gritty how many letters does a child know are they able to pattern are they able to comprehend are they able to join and separate um can they um work through

026they're sorry are they able to work through um deleting and creating putting syllables together my brain just shot down i apologize y'all um so this really helps to support uh progress monitoring and visibility so with the irk ready if a provider chooses to do that they would participate in two to three data chats goal tracking and tracking of their student learning with myself and the coalition so their program their quality specialist comes out with us their program director if she's able to be on teams will be there we always invite marsha the ed to be on if she's able myself my resource coach quasi instructional coach and our social emotional learning coach will all be there at the table talking through their data being able to look are we all seeing the same deficits are

027we all seeing an increase in the same areas what can we do to help each other to help all of our little ones be on course for kindergarten success so if you're a two block you're doing irk ready and you're doing the transition form then we take it a step higher by utilizing what we call our high impact standards which is done through a monitoring spreadsheet which has our targeted instruction of our early learning and developmental standards it's broken down into the eight domains and it affords that vpk teacher the opportunity to look at all those standards that we say please make sure out of the hundreds that we have that you teach before kindergarten and it's broken down into assessment periods so you can put your students names right on those lists and you

028can go through and monitor oh i might need to go back i see a lot of developing in this standard i might need to go back and re reteach it reassess it and before the next assessment period if you come on as a as a three block it then also gives you that data chat you can share that spreadsheet with us and we'll be able to look forward work that work through it one of the pieces i forgot to mention with the irk ready is as that two block you are able to get exclusive access to our focus system where you're inputting your student data which is how it then gets input into power bi so that we can all see all of that community data and then what i love and if you've already

029looked through the presentation this was the big kicker and why a lot of our preschools jumped in as a full four block was the utilization of our scrc pre-k report card and parent conference summary form our staff have for at least five years been utilizing our pre-k report card it is based on our early learning and developmental standards it is done through the focus system so it's monitored those three times a year and this report card when it was given to our providers it also carries our logo our sdrc early learning logo and so many of our providers have said that gives legitimacy to what we're doing we are not just your child's babysitter we are somebody who is teaching your child we have standards that are to be met and it really that was

030the one piece and what i love is that parent communication and collaboration we are then able to say the same language we're sharing the same conference forum saying the same thing your child needs to work on this your child could work on that she's really great in this or he's working really hard in this area it also gives the data chats the tracking of the learning and the goal setting and i really have to give thanks to the coalition um and pat houston marsha power and valerie without them and without encourage them encouraging me to encourage the trust in the providers we would have never gotten to this space and the providers have said that i mean we have used to be and as naive as i was when i came into this position i

031was like oh my gosh we're going to work together all of the preschools in the school district and yeah that wasn't it it was oh you're stealing our children or oh you're opening another classroom and it's going to take away from me and now it's completely opposite now it is oh we are in alignment with the district and when our providers come on board whether they're a four block or a one block we present them with a plaque that they get to hang in their offices by their front doors that says we have aligned with the district and so many are just so proud of that and let me share so here are just a few little snippets from two of our first four block providers sally at little rising stars she has done a

032lot of m-can work with us has really been pivotal in getting that alignment together and how we could make it happen and her recognizing and waiting to be a part of that collaboration with the strategic plan made it all worthwhile for her and she really feels like she's not just that little tiny pebble anymore now i'm the stone in the road that makes the road to kindergarten much brighter and christina over at asbury tiny tiny preschool they have one classroom of vpk but they have been on board since the very very beginning and i think what was so powerful from what she said was that i didn't want to add one more thing but that one more thing gives me the language to speak to a parent it gives a parent what they need to

033hear and to show that i'm not just a babysitter you're not just dropping off your child but you are giving me the opportunity to educate your little one to get them ready for kindergarten and she said she no longer felt like a time she was in a tiny pod pond that now she's excited to collaborate with us another cool thing that the coalition is willing to do is each year they publish a list of vpk providers i think there's about 24 of us total and next to that this coming year will be our designations so if you're a four block if you're a two block a three block a one block it'll be designated next to you so that when a parent calls me and says i'd really like my child to come into your

034pelican island vpk well i don't have any room however take a look at our provider list these blocked providers are in alignment four blocks are fully aligned with the district and some of them are even using the same curriculum we have so they we are talking alignment so it just gives us the opportunity to then share our little ones that we may not have the room with with our providers and it has been very well received my next big one that we are in conversations with is our moonshot academy for emergent readers so many of you are probably aware of our moonshot academies that are in the elementary grades typically about first and second grade so we have had a need for before and or after care or extended learning for our little ones for

035many years that's why we in the district do lose a lot of our families because we we are done at three o'clock we don't have that wrap around like a private provider might so after all the years and it's difficult to be a part of our extended learning program in the schools because of the ages of our little ones so i kind of racked my brain wrecked my brain and reached out to the learning alliance and said i have this idea can you help me this is really going to help us improve kindergarten readiness and so we are working to fund this program that will start in the fall with the learning alliance marcia the executive director of the coalition we've had conversations to see is there any money that they are able to help

036us with we'll push out multiple grants it'll basically be an extended learning and literacy opportunity for our vpk students on all six campuses and it will run from three to five thirty with our three to four thirty being a that emergent literacy that immersion in literacy where they're problem solving they're writing their own stories they're creating they're playing they're engaging working with uh and debbie arsenault from the learning alliance to work on what how will that align to our curriculum what will it look like what will that day be and then our 4 30 to 5 30 would be structured play allowing the the opportunity to just enjoy one another and have that time biggest component to this is that continuous professional development and coaching for our teachers and staff our goal is to have

037our staff provide this opportunity for our students and we would follow the model that moonshot academy has in the elementary school space where the teachers are receiving pd and then pd to practice they go right into the classrooms and they practice with the students in the moonshot academy and then they bring it back to students who maybe aren't a part of it during their school day we're also looking to as we move forward eventually you know big wildly important goal i would love to see our private providers many of our private providers teachers are only working that vpk day some may only work the wrap around but they may have the opportunity to come and work in one of our schools that would then give those smaller providers that opportunity for that pd that those

038teachers would in turn bring back to their teach to their staff um and then globally would be so cool to eventually put a moonshot academy at some of our preschools in the next few years obviously not this year we want to we want to get it right with ours what this has also opened the door to is collaboration with treasure coast technical college christie and latonya and myself we have been trying to figure out how we can get our youngest learners and some of our top oldest learners together in a space and they are working to provide an early childhood dual enrollment program yes so their dual enrollment students once they hit a certain number of hours will then come into our classrooms to do their observation hours and they have to have lots it's

039like 400 hours so we're hoping with this collaboration to be able to offer an externship so if those dual students are able to join us in our moonshot academy not only are they getting more professional development getting paid but then they're also getting their observation hours at the at the other end of the day so very very excited for this our next meeting is this thursday uh to talk about staffing the cost and moving forward with our moonshot academy because the more kids we can get ready for kindergarten the better our readiness rates will be so legislatively um and yes some of this could change but here's where we are right now house bill 419 early learning and early grade success with house bill 418 they have pushed out many different components to that the

040first being an increase in emergent literacy and florida early learning and developmental standards so we have 15 hours of approved emergent literacy coursework for all lead vpk teachers as well as five additional hours of early learning and developmental standards training and that must all be done by july 2022 so you are ready to roll by january or by august in the district most of our teachers participated in the rel uh emerg early oral language and vocabulary training last school year which was 20 hours which then was part of that emergent literacy so they are ahead of the game we just trained both vpk and pre-k esc teachers our five hours of early learning and developmental standards was at our january 31st pd day new to us though not new to school readiness providers is the

041class assessment so it's the classroom assessment scoring system and it provides that metric of quality for teacher and student interactions for it will begin in july so that'll be our fall classes our fall classroom vpks so that is basically someone coming in monitoring both the teacher and the teacher assistant and how they interact with our students that will be part of our readiness rate moving forward also we have our coordinated screening and progress monitoring tool from pre-k to eighth grade so starting next year instead of our vpk assessment we will have this coordinated screen whichever it is the state determines to be that assessment it'll be computer-based and adaptive we will take it three times a year and it will then determine how our rates are and how we're performing in comparison to the rest

042of the state dell will also we will have a performance metric which will be pushed out next year where we will develop our methodology for calculating vpk performance to include both that program assessment that class and our child learning gains on that coordinated screen in progress monitoring so this year as we move out there will not be vpk provider rates for 2021-2022 we are still required to do all of our assessments but we won't be assessed until that new system comes out next year and then that new metric will be assigned in 2023 2024 based on the 2022-2023 scores which is an interesting metric so it's excellent highly proficient proficient emerging and emerging proficiency and unsatisfactory which is different than being ready or not so it's nice to have just that little bit and then

043very proud we have our transition to k best practices plan that was part of house bill 7011 um and i had the chance to share with dr moore just recently that the school district and our coalition have been designated as an exemplar partnership with all that we do by the division of early learning um pat houston and myself we got to present all about four blocks in about a 45 minute time span at two separate transition decay virtual conferences the advanced um transition decay and the advanced intermediate or intermediate emerging not emerging intermediate on the 8th and i was able to facilitate our transition to k best practices plan on february 2nd which was about an hour and a half and myself pat valerie marie from learning alliance judy from mcann judy miller from mcann

044and two of our providers rashna from learningnest and christina from asbury we were all able to start working on our plan which was really great because before house bill 7011 said you have to do these things we had already been kind of talking about them so now we're putting on paper four blocks hits a good majority of what these requests are and so it was kind of nice having that little foresight to know where to go with that so as we shared before there's a lot of documents i'd love to share with you what we're sharing with the state transition at k they've asked us for all of our four block as well as there's transcripts and the videos from our presentations that we'd like to share with you as well as our flicker score

045so that wraps it up for me yep uh thank you miss flood very comprehensive uh presentation i'm sure we'll field some questions but just to add into the results that we got uh as ms fled said we got those after uh the presentation was posted so we'll get those out to all the board members if you haven't seen them they're on the tues website um but but what's interesting for us personally is that we they the numbers do show that we hit our strategic plan metric of increasing our statewide rankings at the the target that we had set so um so we're excited about that so a good year dr moore um this is i hear myself in um the overall quality of instruction for for all students so putting the the blocks program into

046place is an opportunity for us really to serve as a organization that's evaluating the criteria of work ensuring not only are we partnering but being very public with our practice and and making sure an endorsement from the school district of indian river county uh is an endorsement of quality programming that ensures your children will be ready for kindergarten uh so that expectation that we have we know that is a big fix to any community's public school system uh i think we're probably the only ones that are doing that and doing it in a land through a lens of of partnership and really building and partnering with vbk programs because as brook said her level of influence over an indicator that is attached to her is very very very small but to have a high level

047of influence over that indicator we can do that through partnership and we can do that through development we could do it through collaboration and we can do it by being extremely public and saying community this is where you want your children because you want them to be ready and if you're not endorsed by the school district of indian river county you might want to ask yourself uh is that the best place to send your children and that's that's at the root uh some of the work that we are doing so very very very proud we'd be happy to answer any questions that the board may have as we know the level of importance the board places on this program okay first of all thank you for your presentation before my colleagues get to ask you

048questions you know this is a passion of mine having been a principal of the early learning center two things that i want to ask you to do before though we start with questions is to please explain e-l-c-i-r-m-o we use acronyms a lot and i think since this is being broadcast we need to explain our acronyms in education if you don't mind e-l-c-i-r-m-o is the early learning coalition of indian river martin and okeechobee so our coalition embodies the three districts thank you um the other thing is you mentioned that we have a new teacher and assistant here from vp would you like to introduce them they're not in here okay um you mentioned that they were coming so they were on campus but here in the world i know they are working um if i could

049please i would like to introduce marcia power she is our executive director of the early learning coalition of indian river martin okeechobee uh pat houston she is our program director and valerie powell she is our quality specialist these are my three close close pals as we roll out everything vpk and four block right and we we appreciate you being here thank you marcia the it's important that we understand what our coalition does and that they support us and they're here for us and partnering on this four block program i think is exciting so especially with some of the um the legislation that's coming um that's moving through right now is important that we're all on board with this so we appreciate that okay who would like to go first mr barefoot you're on have a

050couple of questions in a perfect world recognizing the demand far exceeds your ability to provide the constraints are correct me if i'm wrong first of all funding second of all if you don't have the funding you can't hire the professionals but are the if you had funding could the could you attract the professionals i'm going to say yes through the chair i apologize i'm going to say yes and i do believe that as we move forward especially with tctc pushing out their dual enrollment having those students out there many young people are coming through with that early learning though it is difficult this is a field that is getting increasingly hard for if you don't have a passion for early learning to be able to understand how a child between three and five years old

051acts compared to how television may portray them to look but i do believe that we would we have been blessed as i've needed teachers those teachers have been there i actually have one of my teacher assistants who is finishing up her internship this semester and is hoping to have a position in our program very soon if something opens so if um the source of funding besides the district budget you go to other organizations that apply for grants correct or not just what you let me ask you another way is what your program here would it would it be feasible to apply for grants there's plenty of not plenty but several organizations around the county that provide funding for lots of programmatic oriented activities would your program have you tried or would your program qualify the

052chair the answer is that the district will be able to apply for anything that we qualify for we have yet to do that for i guess i don't know if you're referring to regular school year uh provision and service full day services but it's not something that we could not do well it could be it could be during the school could be summer it could be you know any number of things because there's been enough conversation at least in the world that that i live in here that uh a number of things come up uh this is one of them and uh you know if you follow the learning alliance um there's plenty of demand for k through five but if you had better pre-k than the demand k through five to three and we

053could go on and add math and we could go on and on and on i'm just i'm just thinking that um and this is probably a discussion to have offline that that you know if i were starting a business and that business is a not-for-profit to provide pre-k education what would i need in a business plan to go out and get funding privately and i have the feeling that there's probably more philanthropic dollars available in order to fund something like this if you put together and i use the word business plan i apologize for the using you know the world that i came from uh i think you'd find uh i'd be surprised if there's not dollars available so maybe at some point offline we could sit down and see if if if some sort

054of a general outline of a business plan which which is consistent what you're already doing you're just expanding on it was not could not be marketed to the philanthropic community here and get some the same kind of maybe not to the same extent but some funding similar to what the learning alliance is able to get through k-3 through the chair yes very much open to that and that's why i went to the learning alliance in regards to our moonshot academy knowing that they could assist if not helping me push through to receive grants to be able to serve my students longer to be sure they are prepared and to provide that assistance for our families as well you know this asks this is really a question for for you dr moore you know grant writers

055are important and i and this is my ignorance but does the district do you rely on staff to write grants or is there someone who's really skilled at writing grants and they're not necessarily i'm not suggesting one isn't the other but through this year i think as we prepare for our reorganization next year there won't be significant amounts of of transitioning uh one of the things we did i think was when i first well when i did my initial reorganization is to put that under ms emerson's uh shop and what we have found is before you start writing grants you need to ensure that they're aligned and supporting the district's strategic plan and coordinating the the alignment so now i think we we are at a place in the in the realm of innovation to

056be very strategic and ensuring were accessing the right resources or identifying the right resources to go after and yes this district does need someone who coordinates does the the boilerplate blanket plate grant writing the research is there right now we're relying on the content experts and as we have been deploying as a result of covet and everything else in terms of our priorities uh now is the time to really consider you know how we take the next step in that particular area okay well uh let's let's uh you know sometime over the next few weeks let's have a discussion and see if you know there are and we employed this going back um when i was mayor of indian river shores we there are individuals that are professional grant writers that you could bring in

057and project by project hire them to and and know how to write a grant for specific requests so there's there's always the ability call it outsourcing if there isn't internal someone who's particularly knowledgeable of let's say education-oriented terminology as opposed to trying to get grants to repair roads or you know that sort of thing so we can talk about this offline but but nice job all right thank you board members anybody sure uh a few things um before i have my own comments so i'm gonna give a shout out to ms powers who sits on the school board in martin county as well as her early learning development we've had a couple of chats but coming to somebody else's board meeting as well as your own props to you [Laughter] um yeah ms floyd you

058mentioned there that at the moment you were bursting at the seams you had 309 enrolled can you tell me what capacity is k classrooms we limit to 20. certain classrooms are funded differently so they can hold different capacities of students we have some classrooms that are title one funded so they are just our stu rvpk students they might have speech and or language services but they're not going to be providing iep services they're going to go to one of my other classrooms i have other vpk classrooms that are inclusive settings so those vpk teachers have 12 vpk students and eight pre-k esc inclusion students dodger town has their split among four it's like yeah so so but i was really um and i understand and thank you because yes there are distinctions and capacity um

059it's clearly not a straight answer um but to give an overall capacity you said you're at 309 is there a number that's overall capacity and back to mr barefoot's comment about funding and resources so we oh i apologize through the share um i have 184 vpk seats pre-k esc is ongoing we are by required by statute to provide services to any student who is determined eligible to have an individualized education plan so if you come i provide a seat and that's where i'm thankful for our sam because we're kind of looking at 10 students in a classroom with a certain number of staff and as i've hit those markers have been able to go mr meyer is aware dr moore is aware going to then mr fagan and saying here's my numbers here's where i

060am are you able to help and he has helped in that way we also wrote on the last list when we were together when we got back in january that we were going to be watching dodger town my pre-k esc there and we are right at that capacity so i'm kind of seeing where the next round of students go i also try to be strategic in if i can move someone from if they're kind of more north vero to central can i put them at dodger town to kind of alleviate some of the heaviness on vbe but right now i'm finding that south county is where my esc students are coming from and to ask them to go to dodger town or even pelican island is a hall so that's where my numbers get but

061there's no max i've had years where i've had 18 esc students self-contained with a teacher and a ta when our new administration has come in obvious their support of early learning was like no that is not supporting it is not providing that early intervention we need to work to bring your numbers down so thank you you're welcome can you ask a simple question yeah the only thing that i would add to that um is 184 seats that's something that the district prioritizes based off our uh title one uh that allows those students to come for the full day because the vpk program only pays for half of the day there are a number of districts across the state that do not do that they do not use their their their title one to provide wrap-around

062services and they do not even provide any half-day services so it's not uncommon to travel the state of florida and see some districts with with no school year vpk they only provide it as required in statute in the summer time so this district is doing a great job of of doing that and it's preparing the students but we're of course limited in the number of seats that we can provide that goes back to maybe to mr barefoot your question of could we get additional funds to add more wrap around services with that vpk voucher and that would be an opportunity we could look to pursue yeah i appreciate also mr barefoot raising the issue of grant writing which dr moore and i have had a lot of conversations about um and i've said for a

063few years i feel like we need to fund a specific grant writer in the district i appreciate your acknowledgement that funding a grant writer without clarity on that on what exactly we need it for and how that aligns to the strategic plan is an important consideration but i do believe we're working towards that in this budget would i be right in saying that 100 thank you um the other thing is i um i am not an early education expert and i do not pretend to be i have however seen some research talking about the relationship uh that um early education is in general a good thing but depends very much how it's aligned um to necessary skills in kindergarten so i appreciate you i think what i hear through the lines is you addressing how

064we're doing that here and that it from from my extreme admittedly extremely limited research it has predominantly to do with literacy skills and how those translate not just to english learning but specifically to math and while you know clearly we're not i hope teaching math in um well teaching it in in ways that are age-appropriate of course um in early education but that that's that is apparently the thing that makes the most significant difference in future academic success and so i think what i hear you saying is that yes we are doing that and here is this block program and here's all the ways we're doing it and making sure it's happening not just in our programs but around the county am i hearing that right and is there anything you'd add through the chair

065you are hearing that correctly um we have been very it's great to be able to say to parents we do have standards and they begin at birth you can pull down our website the division of early learning you can look at the developmental milestones for a child from the womb and as we have shared through mcann and things of that it actually begins in the womb those conversations the reading and and all so yes we have worked tirelessly to align along our eight domains from physical development to social emotional to approaches to learning literacy our numeracy our standards are actually broken down into algebraic thinking geometry science and social studies is technology and engineering that's where our blocks came from our vpk program focuses on building blocks and tinkering and things of that sort so

066yes keeping while we're we're staying developmentally appropriate there does come a time where we want to know are you picking up letters our standards say you need to know some letters before you go to kindergarten there's no designation however knowing where our little ones need to go in the future we have created cut scores as to what we consider limited developing and mastering in those areas and it does include numeracy i think there's nine questions on our irk ready that are numeracy and nine areas of literacy so we're trying to keep it pretty balanced um and if you don't mind it since you said i could expound a little bit more one thing that i forgot to say was that our february 28th board meeting you will all be able to recognize our four block

067and one block providers um dr moore will be presenting and our coalition staff will be here as well we'll be recognizing all of the block providers that have come on to let them know how important their alignment with us is so thank you and then my my last question on this um you alluded to different ways that you'll be addressing outcomes not like yes no but those i think it was five different designations are you seeing yet or is it too early to ask for what outcomes we are seeing through the chair a little too early to to ask um we're kind of building the plane as we fly it great idea we have these providers that jumped on immediately unfortunately omicron kind of hit the private sectors a little bit harder than it hit

068us so they were delayed in their assessment now they're done now they're okay can you come by the preschool can you show us how we're going to put it into focus learning alliance has been wonderful to help us with a new way well it's not really a new way but it's we use the sun form program to learn sounds and letters so they're wanting data but we don't have it all yet because not everybody is done assessing because we've had kids in kids out and we want to make sure that they get everything correctly all at once so yes i anticipate the next two weeks we should be able to see that data because we want to start our data chats to give those providers that opportunity to work through the next four or five

069weeks are we seeing a change and then they have another four weeks or so before it's time to send them on to kindergarten thank you that's all my pleasure dr jones thank you thank you miss blood and mr meyer great presentation i think we all know how important early learning is for our students and ms flood thank you for growing that partnership with our programs i know four or five years ago it was not like that and we're all here for the same reason for our students so thank you one thing miss flood when you're looking at getting some services after 3 pm for the pre-k students would they then have to pay the after-school program or how would that work if we can do that that through the chair that is something we're working

070through there's kind of the pros and cons to either of it if there is a small nominal fee it provides that oh i am standing true to this i am all in but we also know that the students that we are serving it's not always possible so that's where conversations with the coalition have come in how can we assist if we do decide that there's some kind of small payment for that extended learning opportunity currently in the schools it is not but that is something as we move forward this this week those will be in discussion and when we look at our flickers results we're at 58 and the state is at 54 and i know this is done on a computer do we know those students who may have had access to a computer

071before i mean how are the results looking compared to those who have had it since birth i mean it's i'm just looking that in general is that given us a real indication of where students are who may not have been on a computer a lot before this time that question gets asked a lot and the the the research there's no conclusive research that that makes any impact and they've attempted to replicate that for a number of different products that are out there and there hasn't been anything that's definitive that you can point to an evidence-based study that okay that makes a difference okay that's good um i love the fact someone just quote we need to be a high level of influence for best practices and looking at our building blocks and so forth that

072is that is so important you're coming out of the box on things and i like that a lot because these wrap around services as you work with miss mallets and title one and what can we do where to where do we need to go i think is important and i would like to personally thank every bbk teacher i've been in a couple classrooms this year dodge a town and vbe and the sam model for working for us to provide for our students because they work every minute of that day so i appreciate that every minute again like dr schiff said that's not my expertise but i've gone in and observed it and they're they're very very hard working people keep up the good work you know the best practices working with um learning alliance and

073our moonshot school and so forth i think is key to helping our students you know we say by third grade it's a high school graduation indicator but we all know it starts earlier than that thank you brooke miss rosario hi thank you so much for the presentation i have so many um i'm excited because i have so many things that i want to acknowledge first i'd like to acknowledge all of the detail obviously the four block collaboration with local providers is genius i just wanted to know whose idea was that in the first place and if we are in this coalition are we the only county or are other counties doing the same thing through the chair so let's just say i'm very thankful to dr moore for encouraging my wild and crazy thoughts that

074come to me we had had a conversation i think a spring ago as to how can we align what can we do and i had shared with them you know our increased partnership and many of the providers i have on speed dial they can call me at any time if i need something from them they can i can call them and we started talking a little bit about a designation program but nothing big and then last year when um aaron grall came to town and she had done her she had signed the bill and then we had a little uh reception over at quail afterwards she started we started talking and i was there with dr moore and when we were leaving i said you know i i really think this four blocks that i

075had already kind of explained a little bit not fully yet i said i really think this might work and he said well you just you know go with it keep going so i was like all right well then we had some senior leadership meetings and we had to come up with our wildly important goal and that became with his push and mr marr that became my goal and how was i going to make it work and it took a lot of thinking and a lot of processing and honestly could not do it without the coalition i couldn't do it without my resource teacher jill i couldn't do it without it i mean they've built the platform in which we can input the data and then brian dr mcmahon's team has come in and he's building

076they're building that platform to be able to do it and as marcia was shaking her head behind this is why the state had had asked us to present twice was because no one is to this level yet um and i am honored i am proud to serve under folks who really encourage us to try those weird give it a try let's see what happens and it's actually gone bigger than i expected it to which is really cool and where i've met my goal um have we completed it fully no because we don't know where we're going to be next year with all the blocks in regards to being in that top ten but as far as getting our providers on board yes we are there so how many providers do we have now so currently

077we have eight that are considered four block so they are our highest and we have four which are our one block who are providing that transition form that provider to district information and we have saint peter's academy and the four head starts in the wings we were able to both head start and our cma our redland christian migrant association and our head start programs they have federal requirements that they have to participate in they have certain assessments and they have parent meetings and when we looked really closely at what forms and information they are sharing with families as well as could possibly share with us it fully aligned without changing what they're already doing they don't have to do our assessment because honestly they're doing one that's even more so than what we do here

078in the district so we were able to proclaim them just last week as four blocks so that brought three more campuses on board with us and we're in conversations with head start to do the same and those are head start is one of our biggest providers they pro they send in about 200 to 250 students roundabouts where we are and and how many other providers um are still out there approximate i know there's probably a whole maybe about 10 12. i mean we're almost there you're going one by one by one yep we've shared it out at multiple provider meetings that's been kind of our gateway is pat always invites me to speak at all of our transition at all of our provider meetings anything going on with the district when we had choice when

079we had um some of the opportunities when we used to have kindergarten roundups and the transition forms so i always get that forum so we've been sharing it out but the overwhelm as everybody has heard here in even the district this year has been the hardest coveted year than the last two years and our providers are really feeling it they're losing staff one of our directors passed away i mean it's just there's so much so for us it's more meaningful if we go out and talk to you one to one let me show you the brochure that we have that shows you the different blocks and what each and if you're only able to do a one block this year that is fantastic that's what you've done in the past next year let's see if

080we can bring in a two three or four because everything that's in two three and four actually gives you the information for the transition form so um a few other questions something that came up when we heard from the ell presentation was looking at students in cohort what would be pretty interesting right now is to kind of follow these kids through a cohort as they come into vpk so that we can see will this model actually work if this model is not working you know what because there are so many other uh because these providers are not part of the district it's not like we can actually you know supervise them or monitor their work um to ensure that they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing other than looking at the assessment and

081the results of the data that come from that which we hope that they're doing it accurately right um so looking at the cohort will kind of give us some information as to how students are how do they come in of course how are they progressing and then where are they in uh kindergarten possibly where are they up until third grade i mean just to kind of get this um i don't know if that's longevity but kind of get this long-term look at the progress over time versus someone who comes in in just kindergarten um or a cohort that comes in and this way kind of like our own in-house study and see if it's working or not through the chair that is our goal i've actually talked to mr mcdonald to see if i can

082put a little four block um because those are the ones that are fully aligned in where you were saying we don't have the oversight the coalition has the oversight so with the coalition being at the table with us as the school district in front of the director and the teachers then we lay out a plan and valerie is able to execute and make sure they are working through what they're saying that they are going to work through and we definitely want to watch that cohort yeah as we move through next year as we have more on and we have a full year of data i think will be great but we definitely want to in some way document this first this first round that would be pretty interesting to watch over time um the dual

083enrollment program at treasure coast technical college i i kind of applauded that because it's been something that even i've talked about um for quite a while since i became a board member maybe even before our technical our teaching we don't have a teaching program and i've seen st lucie county has several day care centers where their children where their kids who are getting certified in early learning i forget exactly what the certification is but i think it's certificate early learning certification or something to that effect the the teachers because one of them is located at a high school the teachers and the staff actually bring their kids to that daycare center and there's there are adults who teachers who are actually there but the kids who are seeking certification in that area are actually providing

084the services there and it's wonderful i mean it's fabulous that's something that i have always thought that we could do better on so to hear that we are moving in that direction it just makes me very very happy um i almost want to do it like tomorrow because there is a need nonetheless i mean we have teachers and family and you know educators here within our own district who um really would like something centrally located treasure coast technical college is centrally located where they could leave their kid and you know their babies um and and kind of you know pick their babies up you know again centrally located um and and i think that would be obviously um if we can if we extend it the idea is to extend it to the communities but

085um if we could open it up to our staff members that would be fantastic too so i'm excited about that i don't know when we'll be able to start that but we let's put that on the budget as a priority at at least from me because i think that's just wonderful definitely something that we that this community could use and maybe that could be a segue into teaching you know how do we get our kids certified you know or or interested in the teaching education so that when they go to college or prepare them to go to college they're going to enter into some teaching programs in the future i think that would be fantastic um vpk kids do they nap do they play through the chair yes they learn through play i do applaud

086my teachers for being very developmentally appropriate in their instruction there is a rest time i really encourage my teachers at this time of the year to really start to phase them out however vpk is an exhausting day even for the six hour day and many do need that rest opportunity um i have one staff who offers the opportunity to rest and the rest if you don't want to take that nap time you can come over and we'll do small group you can have an opportunity to work with the ta in a small group myself do other lessons so at this point i do but yes a rest is afforded i mean i personally i know nap time for little ones are s it's so critical because if without that nap time they're not going to

087be able to retain anything after the nap time it's almost as if they're on you know a sugar high the whole day long and and nothing's actually retaining so if once they nap and they wake up again you know they're kind of refreshed and they're ready to go i mean it we we just know it i mean everybody why are you smiling mr bass because he wants to take a nap [Laughter] am i right or wrong that applies to all of us but it's so critical with the little ones because they go go go go go go and they just need that time you know some kids don't know how to rest you know and and especially when you're that little you actually need to be told go to bed go to sleep even if

088it's 30 minutes you know it's still that power nap for a baby is just so important i see smiles from people who are here and shaking heads because if you're a mom you just know like that's just what everybody take two yeah yeah um and and play obviously is something that um i have been when i when we i don't even know if um dr schiff and and mrs barenborg remember when we first joined um there was this shortly after we became board members there was this wave of concern that came to us from our from some kindergarten teachers that were cons that were very upset because kitchens were removed from their classrooms and even in kindergarten right play is critical they have to learn how to socialize how to communicate with other friends how

089to pretend how to use some of the manipulatives which is one of the reasons why oh my gosh what is that program the one with all of the oh i can't even think of it right now my son went to it and i can't even montessori this is why montessori is so successful is because they use real live you know actual things in your kitchen for example to teach kids how to take a teapot and use a real cup and pour it into a real tea you know teapot all those kinds of things are so important um so i don't know if there can be with all of these assessments i mean it just seems there's flickers and the readiness benchmark and star and i heard i started writing a list in transition form and

090high impact standards and stake monitoring too there's so many assessments and tools but i didn't hear a lot of the teaching and learning and actually getting the kids involved in that so i know that this is just an overall you know overview of the structure of the program i just hope that you know in the classroom there's more creative opportunities for the kids along with nap and play and through the chair i would invite you mr rosario to come and visit with me yeah just give me a call and i'll take you over to some of my classrooms i have two classrooms that instead of a kitchen they actually have working stores or depending upon the theme of the month their dramatic play center is laid out based on that theme and it was a

091i want to say it was a hot chocolate bar uh during december or january you know if we have any oh maybe mr barefoot knows some people if we have any uh people in the community who would like to invest in our community as one of the things that i've i think that we certainly need maybe even at the mall is a children's museum where they have all of these you know opportunities for kids to walk through a you know supermarket and all the little tiny things um a little shopping cart and so on and so forth because it's just it's it's wonderful it's wonderful to see them blossom and grow especially when they have to um engage in conflict resolution with each other you know we don't have to get involved all the time

092let them work it out um i think i'm done okay thank you all right so usually i don't ask a lot of questions but you know this is a passion of mine having been a principal of an early learning school having started with one pre-k and building up to four in just two years because we saw such a need for it and you know talking about housekeeping when i walked into my school we they had removed all the kitchens from the school in the vpk in kindergarten and i actually went and got them out on a saturday and put them back in the classrooms because that's how passionate i was about kids being able to play um i think one of my great experiences of being at that school and it was an f turn

093around school so there were some stressful times i will say my best time so was having um getting tea with marcus in the in the housekeeping area when i needed it and marcus was really great about helping me de-stress with tea so i it was pretend t but it was it was cute and i think knowing that those kids are having that experience to socialize is so important and people got away from that i think we're starting to understand how important that is again so it's nice that vpk program you talked about at the high school i believe at centennial high school through the chair there's many districts that offer that for us tctc will have their students in the high school program they'll have time during their day to complete those dual courses and

094then another part of the day will be going out into one of our elementary schools but yes those high schools typically have classroom vpk classrooms on their sites that's what i'm talking about there's one example is centennial high school and it's great because the employees kids get to go to school there which is nice um so thank you for listening about the new dodgertown unit i asked for that i appreciate that i don't ask for a lot of things kind of like that but i i saw that we need to put the spots where the need is and i know that you did it mid-year which is hard to fill so i'm encouraged for next year also vbe we're seeing that we have that need and like you said we don't want to take away

095from the private providers but we also know how many people are moving here and that we need to expand the number of seats across the whole county so i appreciate the fact that the elc is helping us partner with our private providers i think that's key so thank you for doing that and helping us with the four floor four blocks program the uh four block centers you mentioned i think i counted 17 and i was going to ask how many uh providers are there and all i didn't hear child resources i know they do a lot of super things through the chair child care resources is they typically do the transition form so i anticipate that they will come on as a one block okay and um is there a list on the elc's website

096for parents to see that right now so it's already up there through the chair the list is there the block designation is not there yet okay yet okay good um and i think that's important for new parents that are moving into town i've been asked i think it was twice in the last two weeks about that people meet you and they say oh you work for the school board okay i need to know where can i put my child in a pre-k and i don't want to be the one that says you know this one's better than that one that's not my job but i think um pointing them to some place that they can look is is the best thing to do so um question who do we work with for the transitions from

097birth to five is it just fiddlers or early steps you mentioned healthy start and how are we doing on identifying all the students that have needs and i'm not talking about the fact that we we know all the time we have students moving here from all over the world and we don't know about those students coming in but how are we identifying at least the kids that are born here and or young how do those parents know where to go and how they are identified through the chair so early steps is our birth to 60 days before year three fiddlers is our three to five year olds just all those people you mentioned healthy start pediatricians teachers church members you name it if they're noticing something they're encouraging families it is a difficult process no

098mommy daddy grandma granddaddy they don't want to hear that there might be something wrong so there is a lot of hesitation we do encourage our preschools we'll recommend little ones as well i always tell a parent just please come in for a screening let us go through the screen if everything passes great we'll keep an eye on you we'll check in or you check back in with us but i would much rather a child come to me just before three than some of the students who are just now being staffed as an almost kindergartner they'll come into my classrooms roundabouts april and they're going to kindergarten in august so just all that early 2-1-1 the coalition they have their their inclusion specialists i mean they're just i feel and mr meyer if you want to

099jump in we do a really great job i want our pediatricians to push a little bit more they tend to be a little more let's wait but right now a good majority of our students who are coming in for evaluation are meeting eligibility criteria for autism a lot of physical delays occupational delays language delays and i would really highly encourage a pediatrician to say just give the district a call just get that screener yeah i was one of those parents and um you know i i wish my child had gotten that screening done earlier and you know everything worked out fine but i think had a parent know right away how important it is that they can at least go through the screener and then make a decision is important so we need to make

100sure we're staying on that that's why i ask that question because are we doing anything like giving parents packets when they're having the children at the hospital and you know letting them know what the resources are because a lot of parents don't know they're new to this area they don't know what to do yes through the chair we've had a great partnership with andrea berry with healthy start um i think when dr moore came in um we were able to create a new letter for the book that goes home that encourages that early literacy i've done a couple of videos from their baby boxes to encourage that literacy they're in connection with those new mommies for the first year and then some so they're always encouraging that have we um partnered with other groups like

101the buggy bunch and places like that that are getting out there that parents know about but they may not know about other things through the chair we have in the past but you know covid wise everybody just kind of went so yes that is someone we would definitely want to connect with again okay how many transition forms have we received this year percentage-wise of our kindergarten kids for this school through the chair we have not received them yet our vpk programs are still going so we typically get about half of our incoming kindergartners so about 300 about 600 give or take but this year having so many more on especially with the rcmas head start always does theirs so that's a good two to three hundred plus mine um miss mallet her step in the

102k group they do an additional transition form so we'll get not only the end of the vpk program because some of them end in maybe april and then we'll get an end of june to see if there was any growth so we're getting them throughout okay because i know those are really helpful for our kids and our kindergarten teachers pat and i share that at our meetings we make sure that the vpk directors and teachers know just how important those transition forms are to those kindergarten teachers okay you mentioned c to b can you explain that sure that's our um the idea so early steps is c and our fiddlers is b so my federal money for my little ones specifically on idea b we're actually um our little moniker is baby b because it's

103the smaller side um it supports a lot of our preschool evaluation team some supplies things of that sort it's a small budget compared to b the big b for k and beyond okay so you ready i think i gave you a heads up on this one so as i was in tallahassee last week and watching a lot of those bills going through that are focusing on education and specifically early education have you been looking not that they're finalized yet but have you been looking at how that's going to address concerns that you have for one thing i was thinking as i was sitting i sat in every subcommittee media i could and on the floor twice but i will say that um i think i was thinking of new residents because we have so many

104as they come in where can they go and one thing that i thought of is the tax collector's office almost everybody goes to the tax collector's office at some point when they first come here for a driver's license or whatever they need so are we giving them anything at the tax collector's office for identifying where to go for help with anything that has to do with early education or students in general through the chair i hadn't thought of that but i will and typically the first call is to me i hear you oversee pre-k will i oversee pre-k in the schools how can i help you and then it becomes is it a coalition depending upon the age or for me but yes we can get some information in places like that so what i'm

105thinking is to show true partnering with the elc and with private providers working together to come up with something to put at the track tax collector's office um i hate to say this i didn't check with carol gene jordan to see if we can do this first i should have apologized if she hears about this um i will say that um if we can do something like that work with her call her office and see if we can um work with that so it's not just talking about what's happening in the schools per se but also where can you go and what are your options in our county that would be very helpful i think for getting the word out is the tax collector's office you can tell her i sent you okay um okay

106so what do you attribute to the 2020 game on your numbers okay that's one of the asterisk years so mr meyer will be quick to point out i'm surprised i beat him to the mic um there are so many kids that did not show so the the total it's not a total data set so jumping up to 58 uh everyone regressed back down going into the upcoming school year so that it's just a that was one of the things that you you you proceed with with caution because the reality is i think we how many less students were assessed like three or four hundred less students were assessed in a previous year so you know that's not that's not a number that we we put a lot of stock in catch gotcha and you're slide

107on the uh sel coach um is that person kids that hope trained i keep bringing this up over and over again and i'm not quite sure she is trained in many other things she was a counselor at sandy hook so she's trained in many different programs i'm not quite sure about the kids at hope i can connect with her and find out it would be interesting to see because they were kids i hope well dodgertown which has the new centers as a kids of hope school and i know that she's been working there as well as other places i'm sure but the more we can get that same mantra of how we speak with children and what we do to be positive in their lives um i think is important um one thing i asked

108the superintendent for and board members i'm going to ask for this for him to do this is a report card update on all our report cards but you mentioned a pre-k report card has the board been sent that pre-k report card recently through the chair you have not but i will especially as part of the four blocks so that you can see all the different components and how they align but yes okay and also you said that we can look at the data on line is there separate data for the cohort of kids are 180 i guess you said of flickr's report that you work with so we can look at that data and compare it to the overall data through the chair i can pull that for you i have to hand aggregate it

109for you um but we are working that's okay we are and actually it was uh something i did start only because in looking at um how my students did when they left because we were we are a star pilot group of vpk so the state offered the opportunity for private providers as well as school districts to participate in the star three times a year as we move forward with coming up with that our coordinated screen and progress monitoring and we did and my score is leading out i'm very curious did those scores hold like i know that i sent 69 percent of my vpk students and pre-k esc students to kindergarten at 500 or higher and how did those scores hold when it came down to flickers i think that's important for the board to

110know because you know we ask for programs to be added or whatever and we're putting funding towards it so we want to know is it working or not so i think that's important information i want to say thank you for finally doing a dual enrollment program for your students the one thing i noticed when i walked the treasure coast technical campus a couple years ago was that you had a night program for people that were going back to get their um g um ged thank you i want to say grd and that's not right ged um and they were having a problem when the things concerned i heard was i'd love to join the program or be able to do this but i have little kids and i can't get babysitting it's too expensive and

111i thought what a great idea to have maybe even a night program there for for that need and it kind of serves two purposes one our students can get that um experience they need in day in child care and those parents who are trying to get their literacy requirements met can get child care so that was just something and i still haven't seen anything like that yet you mentioned hb 49 and hb 70 11. those were last year's bills correct through the chair yes so they're now state statutes yes so you might want to say that because if you look one up it's for substance 70 11 this year as substance abuse impaired persons so it would be helpful to maybe call it the statute now since it is statute um not criticizing just i

112do the same thing i look at bills and i talk about the bill number and then when it becomes law i forget what the law is but i know the bill number so that's just something i a little issue also thank you for teaching math and early learning we do teach math it is counting one to one correspondence patterning numeral recognition among other things and we do teach math but i know looking at our math scores maybe we need to look at that focus as well because math is is critical and it's falling behind everywhere so we need to to look at how we're addressing that and even early learning through the chair yes that is part of our second semester goals knowing where we stood with numeracy it's all over my board and reminding

113my teachers especially as we begin our data chats to see where they are in their numeracy to make sure we're keeping up and getting our little ones ready okay thank you um the reason why i had so much to say about this is because not only is a passion of mine but it's so important because if we're going to get all of our kids reading by third grade we have got to start as soon as we can with helping them address needs that they have so we appreciate all you do thank you for partnering with us thank you for being here today i know you enjoyed being at school board meetings so that's exciting this was a nice one so it's good thank you sorry yeah i had a follow-up um i've had several obviously

114you know that at home school so i've had several homeschool families come up to me throughout the years i suppose with little ones who they are choosing to keep at home at some point but once they start many of them who have noticed some developmental delays or some learning disabilities maybe or possible learning disabilities because they're not you know tested or assessed in any way they have asked if the district could they could call the district at any point in time um i've always said yes absolutely but i'm not quite sure if you have considered making it you know open uh inviting for the homeschool community with little ones for that particular purpose or and or encouraging them to enter into the vpk program you know so what are your thoughts on that area through

115the chair yes if a homeschool child does meet eligibility criteria we will provide those services typically it's done itinerantly because they're not in a program it would be up to a parent if the child met eligibility criteria for developmental delay whether they wanted to receive those services in the school and it would change kind of their trajectory but that again is a parent choice and a decision but we are always here and we explain everything to the parent and what their options are yeah so i was doing the um the numbers here and if i did it correctly with 309 vpk students in our programs right now um and about 1200 that enter kindergarten you know that that leaves us with about 891 students who are out there not to mention those who might be

116coming in new as new transplants or into our area it's a large number and so you wonder where these kids are but the assumption if they're not here uh they're they're at home with their parents um it's just it's an interesting dynamic so i i always wonder are they all homeschooled at this point you know 891 little ones are that's a lot of little ones so through the chair of the 300 or just the one the district supports the other 800 hopefully are out in our private sector or they're joining us for summer vpk or in a private faith-based preschool yeah the 300 is just school district numbers just us got it okay i got it all right well there's still there's still quite a difference between 891 and 1200. all right well i get

117it now um and i also wanted to uh follow up with the buggy bunch the buggy bunch is an amazing organization they have a brand new family center since cobit a lot of people don't know in downtown vero that is open to all families with a little play area and educational learning going on in there so i just think i think that was a brilliant idea as well to reach out to them as another resource to get the word out to parents will do miss baronborg just miss blood how many of our students are in head start programs through the chair approximately 250-ish give or take they did due to structural damages and stuff their felsmere campus is no longer in use this year those students have been moved to douglas head start but you

118can always connect with angela davis green who is the executive director of eoc thank you and she'd be able to give you a more solidified number thank you next i just want to thank miss flood and team and guests for the the work that you do it really is innovative work um and when i say innovative uh it is transforming the way in which we do the work which ultimately will have high yield returns uh on the entire system in the community uh three and four years down the road so this is not reacting to a reality and putting a band-aid on a problem uh this is addressing the current realities which are hard and complex now while at the same time creating systems in order to ensure that we are that literacy capital of

119the nation uh and i know we have a martin county board member in the room so i'll say that allowed her that indian river county is the literacy cabinet so just you know thank you keep innovating keep creating it is a joy to hear the level or the depth in which you speak um through your areas of responsibility and i hope everyone in the community has the opportunity to hear uh when it comes to this body of work uh you are well versed and you are leading from the front so thank you thank you and mr meyer will present uh our next item which is the ell plan thank you dr moore and i echo the congratulations to you ms flood thank you for all that you do so uh as previously mentioned we had

120a wonderful opportunity to present a very comprehensive listing of the services provided to our english language learners at a previous meeting and at that meeting mrs mallis did tease that we are required to submit every three years a plan to the department of education and so this is opportunity to discuss that plan what you will notice is that it is a forum template they ask a very tedious questions of course that comes from their statutes and rules and and their obligation to simply be compliance but i just i reflect back also at the level of detail that miss mallis was able to provide a month ago and how to the great links of comprehensive service we do provide assistance to our english language learners and i think this plan does speak to that but of

121course we can answer any more specific questions that you may have like i said that we only have an opportunity to cover within this plan the portions for which they've requested but we do so much more so happy to answer any questions before this may have board members anybody i have um mrs rosario yes thank you so thank you for um the changes that have been added to the plan um the parent engagement piece is definitely something that i think that you know we can probably expand upon i realize that this is just a template being sent to the board of ed um but how it's actually is implemented here in the district um is is really where i think the the the rubber meets the road obviously you know the parent uh informat parent

122access to the information parents who's let me repeat that because now i'm just parents whose first language is not english the access to the information at the school district there is that information with regard to the technology piece that the parents get is that available at all schools is it not available you know how does how do parents have access to this uh translation technology um the other thing that was um added as an update was the cohort also looking at the cohort which was just mentioned in the previous presentation and the first bullet there about listening and descriptive and listening and description of language acquisition instructional strategies um after talking with dr moore that was a piece that came out of a suggestion that we absolutely need a language program an additional language program

123so i'm hoping that we can get that that we will do the the research for a good language program i would love to see one that we can extend to our foreign language teachers because it might not cost that much more to actually get you know esl and then possibly a foreign language part so that our spanish teachers might be able to use it as supplemental in their classroom with their students so even if we were able to extend it to our parents of esau students as an option it might be a great way to increase their language acquisition at home so that they can work with their kids um and again it might not be that much more in terms of cost but i firmly firmly believe that we need to extend those services

124in that particular area but thank you thank you for that thank you so much for your work miss malletts anyone else dr johns thank you i think the most important part of this presentation for me was the instructional models and what we're doing to help the students in each of these areas through sheltered english language arts mainstream inclusion with english core basic and then the dual language i know we have the dual language program dr moore fellsmere and i've had a lot of questions from parents on that i think it'd be wonderful if we could have it in more of our elementary schools but i do know when you get to the middle or high school you then have to see where the student will go where we could give them assistance and do we

125have the personnel to give them assistance so you're looking really at individual plans for some of these students but i was very very glad to see the instructional models that we are using for our students at this time thank you okay thank you um can i say something or no oh you're good you want to say something okay anybody else you good mr barefoot nope okay first of all thank you for your hard work ms mallis we appreciate it um question uh about the language program duolingo is free do we use that at all okay i love it i don't know about you have you ever used it i've used it yeah you can only get but so far with the free right with the free access you can only go but so far you

126can't move to like those advanced levels or you know whatever it is but for the basics at least from you know from my end the reason why i bring that up is i actually went to a conference a couple of years ago when it first came out and this the the app designer was there speaking i got to speak to him it was really fun he he made money on some other thing that's very popular i can't remember which one it was which app but this he did kind of just to help give back to society so i thought that was a really great thing that he was doing for and it was for english language acquisition and countries that couldn't really get it and he was also working on trying to get those places

127the access that they needed as far as the technology to get the access so i thought that was a remarkable so that's the only reason why i bring that one up i'm not that is better than any other program out there i just knew that it was free so we appreciate all you do thank you and those those uh conclude the two items we have um and as all and maybe i'll tease you up this time okay uh the next item is the legislative update i've had the opportunity to meet miss berenborg and be previewed um but we're about to get a very very comprehensive update oh i don't know about that um it was nice that the fsba conference was great uh it was two days um seeing that i had a free place

128to stay i i was there for the whole week so i got i think a lot for our buck but i was able to meet with a lot of people that i thought were of really good to really help me understand where our platform is and where it's moving um that was what i based it on our platform and fsba's platform that's the first thing i handed people and that's the first thing we spoke about so a couple of things that i included uh one was the fefp conference calculation that you see here that's of course being batted around like crazy up there so this will probably change this is the update that we were given when we walked in um the other thing i gave you was the gray robinson budget highlights um this

129is the firm that works with uh fsba yes this was the email it was an attachment yeah um the other thing i can give you a a a really colored copy if you like that extras of that the other thing i gave you was the bills impacting school districts budgets this was from dr danielle thomas handed this out what she did is she went through every single bill and how it was going to affect schools districts of course that was changing on the minute by minute basis up there and it's still changing minute by minute because um you know i don't have a lot of um let's put it this way my husband's not home so i spent a lot of time watching subcommittee meetings and floor sessions which i know is is probably not

130the most exciting thing to watch but very interesting how things are changing by the moment the notes that i sent you and attached i'm not going to go through it in specifics unless you have a question about one but i had some really great meetings got in with some really interesting people senator gruters is the head of education for the senate i'm head of education he he leads the education committee for the senate um so i got some time with him which is nice i did meet uh jacob oliva um and he has my card and i have his cell phone number now which is nice to have but i will say that i actually specifically asked him about the math adoption books and where are we with that and what was being done with

131it and how is it progressing he did say that they are looking into concerns that people have and he is very aware of them and he had some concerns as well and that he would be um making sure that those were all looked into before those books were on the adopted list okay so i did meet with him about that just briefly um any all the math books that are on the math adoption list right now we're talking math books um what else a couple of well not just a couple but a lot of bills have gotten updates in the last couple days that we're actually voted on so i won't give you numbers unless you want them but the the bill numbers but the um interesting couple ones that i wanted to highlight is

132the personal finance bills i think are going through and that is adding a 0.5 credit for students to take a personal finance class class in high school right now they get eight credits of electives it'll back down to 7.5 because one of them will be mandatory personal finance which i think is a great thing personally apprenticeship tax credits and we're going to look into that a little more to see if that also gives a company tax credit for doing internships for students so right now it says apprenticeships we're not quite sure dr moore and i talked about whether or not that would include in internships which allows for example if we were to put a student that was in our welding program out to a welding company to work with them would they get a

133tax credit for doing so which would be very helpful for us because if a business is going to get a tax credit to work with our students they'd be more willing to do something like that i would think and if they can uh the parental rights bills are moving guidance counseling bills are moving drinking water filters we talked about this one remember how we had those drinking water filters especially when covid first started we shut off our drinking waters and the kids had to bring a bottle and we had those filtration systems but we don't have that many and we tried to do a little grant and that didn't get approved and that's being a possibly funded mandate which is kind of exciting that they might make that a mandate and then fund it so

134um that that was on the senate floor the other day and they were talking about that mandate of funding uh required history of african-american studies is going through uh it's moving on the senate side i think appropriation bills are moving some are moving some are not lots of different things you know students with epilepsy and seizure disorders required care is moving athletics requirements are moving uh individual freedoms the hb7 if you haven't looked at that bill that's an interesting one to look at that's individual freedoms uh addresses discrimination instructional materials what the requirements are for us and that includes library books and doe compliance review of professional development systems so that's an interesting bill um photo enforcement of school zone limits has moved through the senate so um that's quite interesting too whether put to

135photo cameras up at school school zones that'll be interesting to see how that's enforced and then um sb1048 which is the student assessment bill that's the one that's definitely going to be out there and it's definitely going to be it'll be interesting to see what the final bill looks like but basically right now it's got grade levels screening and monitoring for every grade level including vpk it would be one screener for the entire state in other words there's not a menu of screeners that you can choose and if we aren't using one now that's the state adopted one we would have to change to the state adopted one so that's kind of interesting how that's being talked about progress monitoring must be web-based and mobile design uh device option so in other words kids could

136take it on a phone or whatever i guess i'm not sure how that's gonna wind up coming out next year's going to be the baseline year as they always do after they change standards you get one baseline year and after that they'll use that to show comparison and progression so there's an interesting one i brought up workforce housing in every conversation i had and um the bill sb 1748 and it has a companion bill in the house is a homestead property tax exemption for classroom teachers it also includes firefighters police officers people like that but basically it would be a fifty thousand dollar tax exemption for a classroom teacher on their home on addition to their homestead so um that would help if a person has a home and they're on it their name is

137on it it does not help if they're like a newcomer coming here and renting an apartment that's the one difference in what our need is i think um there's another one that's an exemption for taxation for the district that's going through and then there's the ed certification pathway for veterans is moving through mental health there's a bill on mental health in the senate that talks about involuntary exams of students in school and that parents have to be notified so that one's moving through and um house bill 1467 which is senate bill 1300 which is the one about school board salaries and instructional materials which is pretty much a hot topic around the state that was modified in the house if you haven't seen it they took out the salary part and they replaced it with

138term limits to eight years that would not start until november so um the any board member that's sitting on the board their eight years would start in november okay uh the senate is still it hasn't gone to the senate floor i don't think and so i've lasted a couple days anyway i'm paying attention to that bill too but um anyways it passed in the house on friday thursday thursday um as far as that part goes with with the changes that were made and the changes were made in committee the early grade success bill i'm sorry um there are lots of pre-k bills that i put down there and then i've had conversations with the writers of those bills the presenters of those bills and people that sit on senate are on the committee on education

139so i was able to get in with some very interesting people and have a lot of conversations one being in an elevator so i did my best elevator pitch i could for education [Laughter] any questions on any of that that i gave you okay miss you want to start dr schiff sure um first off thank you for the notes that you took and sending those along that's really helpful as somebody who did not come into this job well versed in following legislation and understanding it i've learned an amazing amount in the last three years um three and a half whatever it is and but thank you for your summaries i appreciate that sure um a couple of questions on uh in addition well i'll i'll back up a minute the the parental rights bill there's

140a segment in that bill that's being um referred to as the don't say gay portion and it's only a segment of that bill that restricts conversation um about sexual orientation or gender or identity to those that are age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate for students while prohibiting a school district from encouraging discussions of those grades and those topics in primary grades did you have any conversations or was there any conversation about that actually there's been a lot of conversation up there about it i watched the senate session that was on thursday and that was on the floor so if you want to watch any conversation about it um you know it's really exciting stuff so watch the senate um you can look at the bill if you know how to do that go on to the bill

141tracker find the bill just type in the bill under the senate side and look at the last spot for the bill you can click on that watch your recording and it'll if you look at the agenda of the of the meeting it'll tell you about where you can look on the recording so you don't have to watch the full four hours six hours whatever it is and then you can find where that discussion is on the bill i think that um listening to that there's it's not finalized um there's going to be a lot of more discussion and stuff and i i think it's moving on the senate side i don't know what's happening on the house side on that as much i will go in and search for i actually have the bill open

142um on my computer if you have a direct link that through nancy you can pass that would be really helpful i'll be happy for that particular discussion because i'd really like to follow it um which bill number are you referring to uh bill 1557 senate bill 1834 um and and we don't know where this is this is going to go and there's been a lot of conversation about it um i just personally want to go on record as being vehemently against that particular portion of the bill um all of our students count all of our families count all of our parents count and for students who have two moms or two dads or relatives in same-sex relationships i can uh i do not want to do harm to those families by putting them in some

143category that is prejudicial that in some way discriminates against those kids and i for me just want to be on record as saying how prejudicial i think that is look at the bill language because i also know that um sometimes you look at the bill language and basically one of good things to do let me bring it up so i can say the exact term that you need to do um look at the uh that didn't work look at the staff analysis so when you look at a bill it's important to look at when it goes through committee what the committee suggestions are because as it goes through committee has voted on the committee suggestions if it's voted on that becomes the bill now so if you look at um let's just page open so

144yeah okay so if you look at that i mean judiciary committee last conversation january 25th okay so i'm going to pull up 1557. if you look at that bill that's the one i'm in yeah okay go down to where it says um staff analysis and look at the last one 121 okay that'll tell you about where it's been updated okay that's the latest update when you look at that so but you're looking at the house one you also have to look at the senate one because uh this is house bill 1557 and it and it it links right it's tied to senate bill 18 yes and if you go right if you go down to what the house um sometimes you'll look at a bill that has a companion bill and you'll see for example

145a good example of that is the um the one i was telling you about with uh hp 14 67 and 1300 on the senate side which is the one about school board salaries and instructional materials they're very different looking right now so that's why you need to look at both of those analysis to get an idea of what's happening with the bill on one side for that one the senate hasn't addressed it on the senate floor yet but the house has so it's interesting to see how bills move on one side of the building and not on the other side so that would be the same thing to do with that bill and i i think we've discussed correct me if i'm wrong but i think we discussed uh that in each of our meetings

146as as we are in session that you'll provide us with legislative updates moving forward yes right and that especially right now in the next couple that's right because right now it's also pressing and it all has um considerable bearing on how our work goes forward yeah i would really appreciate those and if anything significant happens if you can pass that information to us and nancy that would be really helpful i know we're all um doing this on our own as well but to have us at least make sure that we get the same information from you as our legislative liaison which is really helpful sure and hopefully you know i can overwhelm you with this stuff as you notice there are a lot of education pills that i'm tracking a matter of fact i get

147alerts constantly on my phone because i've set up so many alerts on bills that um i want to know when it hits a committee and a committee votes on it so i put up that alert um just so you know if you don't want to get overwhelmed one of the best things to do kind of get a general idea of what's happening with a bill that you're interested in either put in the bill number that you're extremely interested in to track that bill or and go to the senate and the house side and go to the last stop committee which is usually the education committee on both of those and that will give you where the bills are at the last pretty much last stop because they go through subcommittees and then they hit that

148as their final mostly likely their final stop as a committee not always but sometimes right and for um those of us who came in not adept at following this and have become more adept i probably still don't have and i have communication with a lot of people you know and around the state and with other school board members and with fsba and there's um the fsba update that we got on here was limited to a very small number of bills so it was nowhere near as you say all the education bills that are currently going through the legislature which to be honest i have a little concern about um because i would rather know more than less and then be able to pick and choose what i want to pay closer attention to as i

149assume we all would based on our interests yeah and i think they're doing you know there's they can be overwhelmed you can be overwhelmed i after meeting with fsb i met with danielle thomas and andrea for quite a bit those two days and it will say i'm encouraged by their energy and what they do and they also are very keen to how to speak to people and when to speak to them it's there's there's a gentle way you have to to negotiate these things up there and i think sometimes mr bass stop rolling your eyes i think one time one thing that's really important to understand is that lobbyists are there for a really good reason and sometimes they have a way of being able to speak get in to speak with somebody that we

150can and also kind of know all of the narrative behind it not just what our opinion is going in because we we look at a bill a certain way like you just brought up a bill and i i don't like this bill because it's got this nickname now but if you know the nuances of of the bill and what's happening with it that helps oh tremendously yeah and to be clear i didn't say the bit i didn't i don't like the bill i didn't say that no i said i don't like like the particular section of the bill i was i was intentionally careful so so that's why i say that's a good way to look at it is the staff analysis um because that'll tell you how it's been adjusted and changed as it

151moves through committee good to know thank you sure um last one that you didn't mention you mentioned school board salaries you did not mention anything moving forward with partisan elections for school board um that one's not moving good to know yep good to know okay thank you that's all i got for now thanks yes i'm dr john thank you miss baraborg for the detailed information um we're fortunate to have you and not have to cost the district a whole bunch of money to stay up there and get that information as most of you know i'm on the subcommittee for fsba for legislation and as dr schiff said it's not as detailed but a couple things um ms berenborg's information was much more detailed i'll be watching that bill closely 1557 1834. i've said that several

152times the most important policy we have is a non-discrimination clause so i i dealt with lobbyists and bills and working when i was at the fhsaa and meeting representatives and so forth so it's very important to continue to watch what's happening because it could change from senate to house and so forth mr meyer and one of the things ms berenborg said about the personal finance now when i was here we ended up getting financial literacy into the econ for seniors will that come out or is this going to be a separate elective or do we know yet the chair um for what's proposed currently if it modifies requirements to earn a credit or half credit then a specific course would need to be designated for that so we're not able to be part of another

153course because it becomes an additional graduation because i remember when students went for dual enrollment to irsc they didn't have the financial literacy component in the econ so they had to come back to high school just to do that class so whatever it is so the students know one thing that they did talk about was a change for seniors this year dr moore mr meyer with a concordance score and tell me a little bit about that because that did pass and that was good for our seniors the chair that was a state board rule the state board is actually able to set the state legislature such overarching graduation requirements with certain exceptions one of the exceptions is they delineated to the state board the authority to set concordance scores so they took that power and

154they extended the year for which you could use the previous cut scores and tests for this year's seniors because they were so negatively impacted by the pandemic and did not have the number of attempts that was intended uh in the initial development of the the process so we've already implemented this change within the district i got a call from i don't think i'm saying too much here this is really good news actually um call from mr cummings this morning that this opened the door for 60 something seniors immediately good which is just phenomenal i mean it's like kids were crying it was just just an amazing thing a true good news story uh that changed the lives of some of these kids so it was really really a good thing that happened last week i

155was just looking at those numbers before this change and i was concerned so i'm very very happy to add that the i think miss flood mentioned during her presentation that this is the year in which students have been impacted the most uh so the fads the the floor association of district superintendents is taking a stance at the same waivers that were in place and exceptions that were in place last year should be in place this year because these students have been impacted significantly more than those who were before them last year or even the year before so the expectation is that they uphold the same systems that were in place for the previous two years and so that was the perk for algebra is that one happening too correct so it opens up the door

156for um the previous scores and to use the perch so it's a both ela and math i we will find the students are now able to graduate the same way as their peers for both of those the last one ms bearberg you may know a little bit about this i was interested in the one where students who received a certificate of completion going into the workforce that say they didn't get the diploma because of a concordance score or a test did you hear any more about that no okay i have not i that's i don't know what bill number you're referring to i don't remember either yeah because there are so many education bills right now and some of them are very specific and some of them are very very i don't want to use

157the word fake general i just like that one for those kids so somehow with everything we could do they didn't get that test so hopefully that will move on thank you mr barefoot you have a question okay mr azaria um one you didn't bring up which i'm kind of surprised what was it um the pcp pcb pka 22-01 it's on here i wrote it on thursday february 3rd i attended the pre-k to 12 appropriation subcommittee meeting that was brought up as a proposed committee bill that's what pcp b means proposed committee bill focus is on virtual education oh okay just an interesting one to look at and um proposes a penalty for the school districts that um voted for masks so yes there are 12 districts that are in that mention and we are one

158of them yeah and that's why i thought i should at least make it that statement but um you know who knows what's going to happen so we'll see and that that's got to be one of the dumbest bills that's the the rep from palm bay brevard county yeah uh representative fine yes um he runs this the subcommittee for pre-k 12 appropriations well i i would just sit in the room when right now you know as a board member i'm always going to make my decision on the base of you know student staff and safety and and i do not run by fear or threats and i've been that way all my life and i i would be very very disappointed if that happened but um our job is to have a safe learning environment for

159staff and students and that's how i would continue to do so well if you'll notice my note at the bottom and i got this right from what his statement was which is putting parents first categorical that's what they're calling it 12 districts would have 200 million removed from their administrators salaries any administrator that receives above 100 000 sorry those funds would be spread out among the 55 districts ours being 1.3 million and to be clear the reason i didn't bring it up is because i don't believe it's going to go anywhere there's already evidence that it's not going to go anywhere and there's some suggestion that it's a red herring to get other things into the bill um other than this so at this point i think reacting to that um will shortly become irrelevant

160it is designed to get people's anger and and it's designed to produce drama and i'm not interested in producing drama what i am interested in is seeing how it turns out um and uh and what comes in its stead which i think will be more significant for us that's that's why i said you just might want to track that one in dragon that one there you go yeah and again you know when you said you're surprised none of us brought it up i for me at least that's the reason why okay this particular moment i don't think there's a reason to doesn't that don't the 12 districts represent more than 50 of the students in the state of miami you know that's a good point i don't know because i think it was as high

161as 56 percent there's 12 because you've got hillsboro you've got miami-dade you've got palm beach broward beach there's a lot of them i mean 12 12 [Music] and i recall 56 i mean that wouldn't be the most intelligent move unless there's a as you say a red herring you know um i think we're almost at the midway point of session so um there's a lot that's going to probably happen in the next couple weeks mrs rosario this is i don't understand why it's being dismissed as you know ridiculous uh it might not go anywhere but we were in violation of the order clearly if we weren't we wouldn't be on this list we were for nearly two months he uh the superintendent received notice from richard concurrent and the doe on this particular issue saying

162why are you out of compliance mr dr moore re responded on september 1st with a letter to richard cochran explaining that this school board voted for mask mandates during and of course he explained that there was an uptick and that he wanted and that the board decided which you all received the letter that the board decided on what the language would look like in our covet 19 prevention plan it wasn't until september we'll get there it wasn't until into september near the end of september when there was a hearing that dr moore notified maybe towards the end of the month of september i'm looking at another email that dr moore notified and said we are it was probably about two days before the hearing i believe it was the same week as the hearing in

163dr moore at that point we all knew that we were coming up to a hearing we all voted to remove the mask mandate and then dr moore notified and said we have this board has adjusted our stance on it and has removed the mask mandate as a result of that removing the mask mandate the week of the hearing i received a some information that came in and said why are we still you know indian river is still supposed to be on this call i forwarded that to mr to dr moore dr moore immediately reached out to the doe and the doe said no we received your memo you know we just received your memo your your school district is going to be removed from the hearing and so literally right at the last minute we

164were we decided thankfully to remove the mask mandate therefore we were not a part of that final hearing with included in and with broward and alachua and possibly some of these other counties so from august with which we have all of the the the the emails and all of the communication from august until the very end of september when that final memo was sent out we were not in compliance with the rule clearly or we would not have been in this situation or the superintendent would not have to respond you're wrong no i'm not i've got the emails right here okay board members we don't need a little yeah the history here's the thing maybe this isn't the opportunity right here to air this um the only reason why i brought that up is because

165it was in the news this is a discussion and i'm discussing um it's a one-way conversation and you're not i'm not going to sit here and listen to you or say that that masked mandate was for two our mandate was for two weeks where we said when it was passed we will review it in two weeks and two weeks later it was lifted and during that two-week period if you recall we had to close two elementary schools and two teachers died so for you to sit here and go on and on about a six week when you don't know what you're talking about it was too weak and it was very specific when we passed that thing okay on september 20th and by the way we also got advice from council that we were not

166in violation well clearly if you if you recall and shortly thereafter the new health commissioner withdrew the the the uh emergency order that was in the courts and issued a new one because the the one that was initially put out there was flawed on september 23rd dear superintendent moore and chair barefoot september 23rd this letter is to advise you of the department of health's new emergency room we all read it we all got this yeah all right hold on one second not supposed to protocols we're not supposed to interrupt yeah we're not supposed to controlling covet 19 in school settings and to provide you one more opportunity one more opportunity to come into compliance with the requirements established by the department of health a copy of the department of health's new rule 64 der 24-15

167is attached it revises the requirements for quarantining asymptomatic students who have been exposed to coven 19 and further clarifies the parental opt-out provision to foreclose the erroneous inter interpretation that a parent opt-out permits a medical only opt-out that provision now provides that the school must allow for a parent or legal guardian of the student to opt the student out of wearing a face covering and so on and so forth that it is the parent or legal guardian soul discretion and of course the letter goes on and it was shortly after this that we then responded in kind or not in kind we responded um with our with removing our mask mandate so we were not in compliance for quite a while okay all right mr barry last comment i completely disagree with your timeline i'm

168looking at the letter right here oh okay i know what the letter says we all got the letter okay okay with that we're going to take a break um let's take five minutes thank you we're reconvening this is the superintendent's workshop um the next discussion item we have is dr schiff's board protocol amendment um dr schiff is not in the room okay um i do know that she has asked the superintendent to look into i think there were some suggestions do you want to speak or do you want to wait for doctor schiff to come i i well i could preface the the conversation i think this is a a item that dr schiff to present but she did reference a producing request to board members that exceed more than an hour um and as

169this board has this conversation i don't think there would be an item that a board member requests that i couldn't reach out and obtain additional information to say what exactly is needed so it wouldn't supersede more than an hour so there was a request made it it took district staff 20 to 25 hours to complete that request uh if i would have known it was going to take 20 25 hours i'm sure i could have reached out to the board member who requested it and said hey let's problem solve this what do you what is it that you need and i know without a doubt the board member said absolutely let's do this or don't do that uh so to me this is not about the opportunity other than the board to norm on what

170that process would be in my seven years in miami and dealing with board members as well as my time here i've never had any confusion or concern regarding getting information that board members would need in order to do their fulfill their responsibilities um if the boy has the desire of creating a procedure what i did is have staff research some of the items that other districts were doing i've had the opportunities to speak with board members about those items some of them um board members opinions vary which is you know what boards do no problem there um but i think the consensus was the something similar to that of pinellas county that's kind of where i started if that's the desire of the board but as you have that conversation i just want to caution

171the board that this is specifically about adding a procedure so the board is normed regarding the amount of time staff works and i'll say it again now that dr schiff is here if i would have known that request was going to take 20 25 hours i could have intervened staff does their work uh without question they're absolutely outstanding and they facilitated the request as asked and probably didn't think twice about it to be honest with you um the board member who requested the information had no clue it took that amount of time either because i didn't know it took that amount of time either so um i want to be above the noise because that's not what this is about um this is about creating a system or process of the board can can norm

172on its expectations of each other so with that uh i think it's appropriate yeah dr schiff this is your item sorry about that i had a i issue it at home i had to take care of it god didn't go the way it was supposed to go so excuse me for being a couple minutes late um yeah we had talked in our last um because of the issue that dr moore just referred to we had realized that when we went over protocols we did not include in those procedures for board members to make requests specifically of the district for information so we agreed in our last meeting and at our last uh at our last workshop or discussion session and in our last board meeting that we would bring that back to the board for

173clarification at this time so i bring it for that reason um i'd also like us to consider if we have time and and with the will of the board um another thing i realized we did i don't believe is addressed in our protocols is how board members address citizens at citizen input and i realize that was not in the agenda for this um but i wanted to have the item be listed more broadly than only about public records for that reason we can choose to discuss that now or not again at the will of the board but we have protocols for how citizens address the board we do not have protocols i believe for how boards address citizens at that time actually actually there is an item in here um and i was looking for

174it and i found it okay i'm not clear in that can you tell me exactly where it is sure page six board meetings one two three four five six bullet down i'm sorry not the six pull it down five six just sorry i'm not it is about addressing here it is um public participation page seven page second second bullet correct um board members will not engage in direct back and forth conversation with the public we know that instead board members may speak specifically to items addressed during citizen input the end of public comments without engaging dialogue from citizens i would caution us and this is where um it's difficult at times for for people to come before us people who are not used to that environment who stand at a podium who look at us

175sitting on the deus for many people that's a really difficult and uncomfortable thing to do and it takes a lot of courage to do so especially for young people when we respond how we respond and that we do so with respect and decorum and not calling people out not um directly addressing other than specific questions that we may be asked i think we need to be particularly sensitive to i have heard from citizens who have come before us how uncomfortable they've been when they've been specifically addressed by a board member and that may caution them from ever wanting to come back again and i would hate to see that happen i personally would like to ensure that we include as many people in as many voices as possible and so that's where i am suggesting

176we may want to refine this or uh be more attentive to how we govern ourselves in respect to this and i have a third concern but it i don't know that it's specific to board protocols here but we have legal counsel for a reason it is to give us legal advice it is to give us legal interpretation and things which i'm for i'm sorry i'm not a lawyer i am not qualified to do this none of us sitting here on this deus are qualified to give legal interpretation that's why we have a general counsel if we're going to do it ourselves we don't need general counsel but i'd like us to consider how we interact with and heed that advice we express our opinion through voting we express our opinion in discussion but what we

177are not qualified to do is give legal opinion and i'd like us to be very clear about that moving forward whether or not that's an item for our protocols at this moment again is at the will of the board and i know we came specifically to address uh public records requests but as we develop protocols that will outlive any of our tenure on this board which i think is what's most significant about these and why they're so important as things come up that affect uh the conduct well-being and mutual respect of the board for each other and for our citizens i think these things are important moving forward with that we can move into a discussion about um public records requests um and dr moore has provided some information and looks like he would like

178to speak to that as well so dr moore after you're done joking thank you mr beginner cracker sorry sir um no i i just figured we would facilitate this the same way um we facilitated protocols i don't know if that's the desire of the board but i did have uh dr jacobs and myself met looked at um the feedback that i received from board members and try to craft what a a system would be or a possible recommendation would be so if the if it's okay i could present what we wrote down uh it doesn't capture the full consent of all board members but i think it it it captures the consent of most board members and this would be the appropriate form for board members to discuss um if what i captured was accurate

179or not accurate well dr morsing that it's 2 30 and this is our last item i think we have time do board members are okay with that to do now okay okay thank you to our facilitator yes in advance she's crowling kittens again nothing more than listening and receiving information and trying to put something um together it does not as i said before it does not capture the will of each individual board member so but it is a a point to start the conversation and if it completely is is um that could be an outcome as well all right would you like me to be ten years okay so um this language there's about three pages because it's written pretty large but you'll see that some of it the foundation was the pinellas procedure that

180was shared with you all as well as some of the feedback that was provided to clarify what requests actually meant what was the nature of the requests that were meant by this particular procedure so i will just read it through once and then we can go through and start getting feedback from each of the board members so request for general information and the part added not required to make informed decisions about board discussion or action items should be requested through the superintendent the board members should ask the superintendent if fulfilling the request will exceed the one-hour time limit if the information will take longer than one hour to gather and compile the superintendent will work with the board member to narrow the request so it does not exceed one hour if the request cannot be

181crafted to take less than one hour or if it will require an expenditure of funds the board member will present the request at a board meeting or workshop and then here the language is a little bit different so previously the language read that there would be a vote so because you all don't vote at workshops and it clearly says that it could be a workshop or a board meeting that language was revised to say a consensus of the board is necessary to move forward such requests and then also added the information that was requested by the board member will be provided to all board members okay so we will start miss berenborg feedback on this particular yeah i don't think any board member um has and i'm speaking for a board member and i probably

182shouldn't but yes sir can we can we ask molly oh sure i agree okay thank you i didn't really want to speak first thank you requests for information i didn't really want to start first either despite that it's my i can i reserve the right to go last because well and and here's why um because i haven't seen this before on first glance it looks fine to me but i know how i process and it it takes me a minute for it to register and i don't want to say something yet without having really had a chance to think about it would it be helpful to you all if i kind of post up this in one two three so you can see them all at one time all pieces of the language okay [Applause]

183yes um i am looking do you know the date that dr moore sent us that i do email because i'm looking for it and i can't find it pinellas and so forth yes february 2nd at 9 54 a.m second thank you wait wait wait i'm sorry january 28 12 22 my response was thank you sorry january 28 12 22. all right do we have a board member that would like to go first i'll go first all right dr jones dr moore this pinellas county this information this was in their policy correct it was not okay i believe it was okay i'm sorry okay well when dr schiff put this on the agenda i was very interested in looking at this because obviously as a school-based person for many years and a district-based person for a

184couple years i'm very protective of staff time and then i go back to you know why we were all elected in this position and i go back to the policy 124 on ethics and i come back to this quite a bit to keep my focus board members share the primary professional concern for the student and for the development of a student's potential that's our primary concern and then letter c strive to achieve and sustain the highest degree of ethical conduct to maintain the respective and confidence of our colleagues our board members our superintendent our teachers and so forth and i know in in these times you know we're going to have disagreement and that's okay and we can agree to disagree with respect but i do believe we should have something as far as a

185time limit i like the pinellas one simply because it was pretty simple okay if it takes more than an hour i mean i know that we have the opportunity to meet with dr moore at least once a week we also have the opportunity to call him or text him and i think we all have the um response that he gets back to us pretty quickly along with his cabinet members if we have any questions and whenever i email someone else other than dr moore i'll copy him so he can know what i'm i'm talking about or what i'm asking so when i look at pinellas county and then the one in wisconsin and so forth i just think they give us information as far as um what we can do as far as not taking

186up time i understand that we have the right in our policy to request information to help us do our job that that's a given um but when it takes 24 hours with email and general conversations i think we're going overboard so i would agree to move forward with this once all the board members take a look at it and we may want to shift a little bit of language but i think we need some kind of protocol so that not only are we showing i guess you could say respect to our constituents that um you know people are doing the jobs they need to do and even more so um these last couple years have been harder and we're working harder to catch up so i'm very very cognizant of that so i would just

187say i'd like to move forward with something as far as a protocol that it if it's over a certain time limit then it could come back to the board in a workshop and i think that's a good dialogue or discussion if we have it you know we can do that if we keep our focus you know with student achievement and where we want to go so that's what i have to say right now thank you thank you mr rosario oh no you can go to somebody else first i think mr barefoot wouldn't be mr barefoot perhaps information so the language that we did add regarding not required to make informed decisions about board discussion or action items would that meet that piece of feedback that you're providing or it's more explicit it's probably okay but

188you know dr morgan as long as he has the discretion making that judgment if dr moore weren't here and somebody in that seat were vacant i probably want it more specific simple is best thank you anybody else at this point you want to call me no go ahead um yeah we have uh i have an issue with the consensus of the board i have a question for legal if consensus if consensus is not given on a particular item for example for a board member to receive information would that be limiting to that board member's request if i understand your question my reading of this procedure or protocol however you want to say it is that if the consensus of the board isn't there that the staff would only spend an hour up to an hour

189of time on that request um if that answers your question yeah so if an let's say an item takes an hour and five minutes 10 minutes or 30 minutes more let's just say a request would have taken that long but consensus is not to go those five minutes or 30 minutes right that means that what would have been received for that given to that board member for that particular item would have been denied that board member would be denied an extra 5 10 20 minutes worth of information that that board member would have needed to make the right decision right to me yeah thank you um chair my reading of this protocol or procedure is that this is specifically talking about requests for general information that's not needed for a board action item so for

190a board action item this would not apply this would apply to more general information requests made by board members and yes it would be limited to an hour unless staff can figure out you know a way of narrowing the request so that it won't take longer than that or else it would go to the board for a consensus if they want that information so that they would be willing to you know have staff spend more than an hour on it because the information isn't just for that board member it would go to every member of the board but general information for what i mean someone's asking general information we don't know whether that's going to end up in a in a voting item in an action item someone may be doing research how do we

191know what a board member is requesting that won't come to the board for a vote so we are not asking according to statute according to our constitution and according to the government in the sunshine it establishes the right for all board members to be able to receive all information that they are requesting period it doesn't say whether it so long as sorry let me add so long as it is within their constitutional duties and responsibilities so if any of this information eventually winds up on an on a board agenda as a an action item for example yet there is a roadblock over here because board members said nope sorry you can't get the rest of your information then that would be limiting and that would be essentially denying a board member's full request and they

192don't get the right i don't get the right to deny anyone here i'm looking at you because you just gave the legal definition but i don't get the right and i don't want the right to deny any one of my board members my colleagues requests for information what should happen is that immediately the superintendent should call up a board member and say is this what you want is this just as he mentioned is this exactly you know whatever whatever it is it's more than an hour what could we do to kind of narrow down your request or whatever no one's ever asked for anything over an hour i certainly did not ask for anything over an hour what was presented for me in the request was way more than what i asked for so let's

193just be clear about that i also did not know that it would take 25 hours as dr moore mentioned so for the first time in three years there was a request that apparently was quite extensive so so that there aren't any you know board member board member that let's just clear that so coming back here though if anything is over an hour my concern is that we would be denying a board member's request again not knowing whether somebody is going to do research to put something on an agenda to you know for future policy change or future voting item or future charge to the superintendent we don't know that so could that be interpreted as being could that be interpreted as denying a board member's request even in part thank you a chair so the

194way that i would answer that is that if something is not currently an action item or you know on an agenda an agenda kind of item because i don't think it just has to be action i think it could be a discussion item too that that's when this would come into play and you may say it may become an action item later on then later on this would not apply you know so that's how i would say that is yes it could become an action item later on and then later on this would not be the protocol you would be looking at but this is for more general type of information requests and also i would say there is some discretion there right so when a board member brings a potential request to staff i

195think it would be incumbent on them to explain if it's more general information or if it is tied to an action item to show how it is tied to that action item i also think that you know the way this is written it has kind of a couple of safeguards in it too where you know first it happens with staff for the superintendent then as a you know final it goes to the board the board could also decide oh you know we do think that this is something that the board needs information on again board members don't act as individuals and they don't really have powers as individual board members they only have powers working as a board so we're not really talking about information that should only be interesting to one board member we're

196talking about information that the entire board should find interesting to make their decisions as a board so if the entire board thinks you know this is not information that we need to make a board action then that would be what their consensus would be but they might not think that way they might think yeah this is information that we need in which case you know take more time on it give us this information does that answer your question yeah but it's it's not really because um though i appreciate your thought on it um as we as you and i have discussed um there should be we already have a policy that states that board members would should not be denied what they are requesting and again even if this becomes a an item for the

197board to vote on at a later time that board member is still being denied information to make that judge and and and i get that we work as a as a team but several of us have to do research before possibly bringing it to the board for discussion and then possibly to obviously with the superintendent and then to uh maybe a policy change or an an adding or you know a an initiative um and that work happens individually so there's still a denial the florida public records law chapter 119 provides the right of access to the records of state and local governments as well as to private entities acting on their behalf it says that a right of access to records is also recognized in article 1 statute 24 which is the florida constitution it

198applies to virtually all state and local government entities including the legislative the legislative executive and judicial branches of government the only exceptions are in are those that are established by law and that of course would be those things that are exempt so there are quite a few um that uh language that supports more of this section 24 reads every person has the right to inspect or copy any public record or record made or received in connection with the official business of any public body officer or employee of the state or persons acting on their behalf except with the respect to records exempted which we know there are exemptions this section specifically indicates the legislative executive and judicial appearances of government and each entity or department created there under counties municipalities districts each constitutional officer board

199and commission or entity created pursuant to law on this constitution so again every person has the right to made or received to any public record connected with their official business this denies that this denies full access to what is being requested of elected officials do you want to respond uh thank you chair um i disagree um insofar as we would read this in conjunction with the public records law and the public records law certainly allows any member of the public not just board members inspection of any public records unless there's a specific exemption that applies so that would still be true for board members they would still be allowed to make public records requests on the same basis that a citizen could this is treating board members differently in so far as board members don't

200have to make a public records request they can make a request directly to staff and then you know other things that are pertaining to the public records law we wouldn't be looking at because under the public records law and under the board's policy if a request for public records takes a lot of time we charge for that additional time which we don't charge board members for so i don't see this as being at all taking anything away from anyone's rights under the public records act this would be anybody still has those rights and this is just an additional kind of protocol that would just apply to board member requests well i'll just end it here we should not have any limitations our board policy states that no member of the board shall be denied documents

201or information to which he or she is legally entitled and to which are required in the performance of his or her duties which actually goes to what mr barefoot was talking about in the beginning of requests for general information as long as they have to do with their duties and that's what our constitution is written as that's what statue says within our constitutional duties and our responsibilities so no one's going to ask dr moore for you know something for personal information everything that we ask for is regarding our work and our our duties as elected officials here so i think that beginning you know kind of with that not with the negative um not required it actually should say request for general information regarding the work of the board or anything that considers that is

202considered the responsibility of the board so if i may clarify so the reason why that particular uh phrase is in there because is because that means the information that is required for discussion action items that doesn't apply in the situation this is only for general information not for the board are not not about border action items or discussion items now if my understanding is is correct about board protocols the reason these board protocols were developed was not only for this board corporate but anticipating that in the future there are certain norms so to speak that you would hope that boards would use follow to ensure the most productive board conversations discussions work happens on behalf of students so while this particular board may not have somebody that would ask for general information that has really

203nothing to do with specific items that would be more for more than an hour i could anticipate that at some point in the future there could be a board member that would so in my mind this is really not about the denial of information for board members but more about are we being responsible with the resources that the district has allocated to ensure that we are doing our work which is uses the resources in a responsible way just as we ask district staff and school staff to do their work that in a responsible way so there may be many things that district or school staff want to do but they know you know what i've got to do it within these certain parameters and we're going to keep each other accountable to that to maximize

204the effectiveness and the and you will optimize the use of resources in the district so as i look at this it's not so much to me about this particular board or this particular superintendent you could also i could imagine that you could have a superintendent at some point that maybe did allow board members to ask staff for requests that are excessive so this is not really again about you all this is more about the future functioning the ongoing functioning of the board and how board members work together and keep each other accountable for the work of the district so those are just my thoughts as i listen to you all converse about it any other feedback at this point miss bearing board i'm ready now um if you look at member powers it's a policy

205it's zero one two two point one it says school board members as individuals do not separately possess the powers that reside to in the board board members shall have authority only when acting as a board legally in session i think that's an important one because i understand i don't want to deny a board member's request for information that's i always have a hard time with that one um but i also think that you know with that last request my question is why was it and hasn't come forward yet okay so so if that's the case like citizens do that all the time they request information because they're looking for something that they want to bring and if that's the case and it takes umpteen hours which i don't think you were aware of no um

206then that would be something that had you been made aware of that that it would you probably would have rethought that but i also think that um maybe to get around that and to stay by this member powers it says when legally when authority only when acting as a board legally in session so if we're in the sunshine and we're bringing this up at a discussion meeting right and a board member says hey i i want to a request i did a request for records and it's going to take more than an hour this is the topic that i am looking for that's all i need is a board member to know that a board member is saying hey i'm looking into vpk situations or whatever it is then i'd be like oh okay yeah

207that because we just talked about it in the sunshine we didn't talk about the specifics but we talked about what the topic was for the sunshine for for us to proceed now and mr uh or dr moore brought to us hey this is going to take 25 hours and a board's asking for vpk uh stuff you might as a board member ask me why are you asking for something that's going to take 25 hours that conversation happened already between board members no between him and i but that's my point is that's not in the sunshine that's what this says right here is that we act in the sunshine legally while legally in session so if it's something that i think as a board member we personally want information it's personal then i think there's another

208avenue to take we can we can do a request for records right that's not personal this is work i understand but my point is if it's work then why not bring it up at a board session and say i have a concern i'm not ready to talk about my concern yet but i need more information and it's going to take more than an hour of time to get that information i want my fellow board members to know that i'm looking into some concerns have been brought to me about vpk i'm just using this an example because that's the one that was brought to us today with vpk i'm not picking on vpk um but you may say to me i want more information my answer might be i can't give it to you until i

209get the information so i i'm okay in trusting my fellow board members that if they feel like it's really important to them and i don't know what it's all about yet but they want to investigate it that's one thing but i think this allows us to not have a board member go rogue and by that i mean in the past because i've been watching board meetings for many many years in this county that has happened where board members have taken a personal um they want personal information because of whatever reason vendetta in the past or whatever reason they want personal information and they're using the their board member position to get that personal information and i think that's as a board member i think that's when we step across that ethical line and i think

210to remain within the board of ethics i trust my fellow board members and mr rosario if you came to us and you said i have a problem with something i can't talk about it yet here's the topic it's going to take you know superintendent says it's going to take 10 hours to do it then then we're like oh okay we get that i don't think i would deny a board member for a reason why they need to do something but i do have concerns when a board member and i'm not specific to what you requested because i don't know what you requested but i think when a board member wants some personal reason for getting some information then to me that that might be a concern that we're not doing what we said in our

211oath of office to do which is to act on the on behalf of students and and teachers and employees but that's my own concern okay i'm ready to weigh in a bit now okay um and thank you everyone for your comments back at fsba in december there was a session on rules as board members i don't remember the exact name but the specific question the presenter asked is that in every action you take as a board member you should ask yourself is this child-centered or adult-centered is it working for the best interests of the children in your district or is it an adult issue that doesn't affect children i think to some degree that's that's a question we're asking ourselves here and that's a question that is arising with this notion of how we get

212information i agree um mrs behrenberg with how you phrased and distinguished that that if a board member has a i agree with mrs rosario i don't want to deny people information but i also agree that if it is going to take significant time and resources that we act as a board corporate which um dr jacobs brought up and mrs barenborg seconded and that we actually have a right to know that that's our job and so presumably the board member would have had a conversation with dr moore to say this is the information i want this is why i want it and dr moore would then say um would make an estimate of the time and resources it will take to provide that without having to know the specific outside of a context i'm looking into

213x i have a concern about graduation rates i have a concern about um about men student mental health and i need some information in order to present that to the board dr moore says it will take three and a half hours to get this information i would like the board's consensus to do that i think that's completely legitimate i agree um and i would be content to move forward with that because what in that conversation i would want to know is from dr moore the estimate of resources it's going to take away from him and his staff doing the work of the district which is what we charge him and his staff with i want to know how much time that's going to take away in order to fulfill this request most of us as

214board members want the work of the district to move forward as efficiently and productively as possible so that's a long-winded way of saying i agree with you um mrs behrenborg i actually agree also with mrs rosario about the word not in the first sentence there because i don't like phrasing things as a negative um so i would prefer to phrase that in the affirmative rather than in the negative um do you have a suggestion well i i kind of you know you know me with wordsmithing and it takes a minute requests for general information yeah required requests for general information required to make informed decisions about board discussion or action items everything we request is required to make informed decisions not necessarily mrs rosario not necessarily as mrs varenborg has referred to um and i

215will speak for myself we all saw the email and the amount of information that you requested on that particular request had that come to the board with the reasons for you wanting it we might have said sure fine great go for it but i have no idea why you requested that information everything that you request is regarding board work right yes okay so everything that i request is about board right but everything's united did not take the district however many successes nobody knew that it would take that long well not even then that's he wasn't having this conversation am i correct she's she's talking yeah this is actually why we're having this conversation it's doctor shifts it time to time um because we didn't know that and that's what brought it to the attention of

216dr moore and the board which is why we're now having this conversation what we are looking towards is making uh a policy moving forward that honors the work of board members honors the time and resources of the district and gets the work of the board done in the best interests of educating kids and that's all we want to know okay let me let me ask a point and i think it might help here um and i have a second if there's an item that we put on here for a workshop right let's say that there was a reason why she was asking for this information for a workshop item right okay so that workshop item has now been posted she's asking for this information and it's going to take them this many hours they know

217they're not going to have it in time for her workshop to be for her to be prepared to present it so either her item gets postponed because we have to have it now this discussion in in here to say yes go ahead or no don't go ahead according to what this says you know i do have concerns when a board member doesn't have the prep they needed for a workshop item however that would not be right there outside the limits that would be within the limits um so then that board member would make the decision of whether or not you know they need more time and put it off or they want to stick to that time and it's going to take that long but he knows he's got a deadline so i can see

218where that can be a problem too i also appreciate um hold on mrs rosario that's why i could certainly i can certainly agree up until um the second page where it says um not to exceed one hour on the bottom before the if yeah i would i would stop right there and ignore the rest because at that point that should be a one-on-one with the superintendent where the superintendent comes to the board member and says hey this is going to take more than an hour a board member is not going to tell him sure go ahead and make it you know two hours i want this no a board member is going to say of course when it was brought to my attention of how long it was post all of that other stuff i

219was like why didn't anybody come to me didn't i say that mr dr moore didn't i say why didn't anybody come to me why didn't anybody come to me so at that point there should be that's an internal i think that's an internal procedure that needs to happen between whomever is processing these requests um notifying the superintendent and saying this request is taking in this case more than an hour where the superintendent would then work with the board member to narrow the request so it does not exceed one hour beautiful period right there i'm good with that so may i just ask other things though i'm not good with because we don't know i don't know if it's going to cut maybe the the research is not going to get anywhere you know we don't

220board members don't know if everything is going to come to a vote that's what the research is for and we can't deny according to ms shattuck we cannot deny individual board members shall not be denied access to documents to which they are legally entitled such as budgetary items in accordance with section 1001.42 florida statutes and which are necessary in the performance of their duties such as supporting documentation for board action items everything else we can work with the superintendent so may i ask this if you had different players and this is just to consider and reflect on if there were different players different board members different superintendent or some combination thereof does that place the superintendent in a tricky position with board members who are his bosses and you have a board member that does

221want to say they want to do lots and lots of research so they're continuously coming and saying you know i'm interested in graduation rates i'm interested in bpk i'm interested in this yeah it'll take three hours three hours three hours three hours and then the superintendent's left to say you're taking time for my staff you're taking time for my staff instead of the board keeping each other accountable for no the use of those resources no that's not the same i think you made a good point though me too it's just something to think about um dr schiff i also think um i i really i appreciate um ms shattuck for pointing out um that policies and procedures don't don't exist in a vacuum the reason we have her here is because she knows them all

222she knows them better than we do she knows how they interact with one another and she knows how to interpret them so while one policy may say one thing another policy clarifies that or expands on it or limits it um so thank you for your guidance in that i appreciate that um i agree with yeah dr jacobs um i think what is incumbent on us here is to think about moving forward you know we will not be this bored for uh perhaps past november we don't know um but what we are trying to do is create something that works for boards that come after us because we've recognized the limitations of not having that for ourselves and so um the latter part and i'm sorry mrs barenborg your head's in the way so i can't

223quite see it um if the request cannot be crafted to take less than an hour or if it will require an expenditure of funds the board member will present the request at a board meeting or workshop a consensus of the board etc speaks to this point speaks to the point of the board operates together and wants frankly wants to honor the requests of other board members i value the expertise of everybody else here mrs barrenborg knows more about legislation than i do mr baronborg mister sorry mr barefoot this is somebody's name mr barry barefoot you know knows more about certain financial inter intricacies than i do i benefit from that knowledge i am by no means i don't want to limit it i want to learn from it i want to benefit from it and

224i and but i want to benefit it from it in a way that serves our jobs that serves our student that serves our district and i think that's what this policy is asking us to do dr jones okay just a little follow-up when i was looking at our policy 149 and miss rosario did state this earlier individual members of the school board do not possess the powers that reside in the board but no member of the board shall be denied documents or information to which he or she is legally entitled and which are required in the performance of his or her duties as a board member so when i look at the original request um i'm not going to look at three four and five because they got a little bit more specific but when

225you're requesting for all email conversations sent to all board members and district staff and cabinet dr moore from september through november three months in all email conversations from dr moore to board members from september through november for three months will we receive a follow-up since our email is part of your you know request again three four and five go into a little bit more details but if any if i made a request like this i would like to follow up with the board on what i found and what were you looking for so that we are informed of what was happening from september through november in your request for our emails so you want me to respond yes i do i do okay so let's let's start this is the financial really up to you

226because i'm facilitating and i feel like this is i just want to make sure we have a follow-up for those three months of our emails well this was follow this was financial requests as well this wasn't just about donations or anything like that there was a financial purpose for it so let me share since we're going to share here since i'm not done with my research in reading everything this came to us here not came to us this was on social media sorry could i just ask one question on this hold on hold on and i appreciate that it's just that number one and two didn't say anything about finances i'm not done okay i wasn't either with my presentation so okay you can give it to the superintendent um let's go with this um

227dr jones you were speaking about the specifics and i think she wanted to address the first one that's why she responded so do you want to say all of it first and then have her respond everything well yeah i mean i understand in her request on three four and five as far as the the information that she was requesting but one and two had said nothing about financial it said nothing about what we corner in on it was all email conversations to district staff cabinet members and dr moore from september through november if it was regarding financial i would have understood that a little bit more it was not that's all i wanted to say are you done yes ma'am okay all right so since uh you're gonna get piecemealed information because i'm not done

228with all of my research um to partly respond there was a post here that is right in front of you that says thanks to the school district of indian river for that that hundreds of thanksgiving items that your departments collected that will allow us to feed over 800 meals for those in need constituents responded to me sent this to me constituents are concerned were we spending taxpayer dollars on personal um donations according to what you see here this kind of looks like a whole lot of food that was given and so in response i had a conversation with dr moore i requested i shared this with him i got you know we'll look into it maybe some waters were donated i don't know so then therefore there were all of these requests because i needed

229to do more research on it i wasn't getting the information everything was done appropriately wasn't getting the information that was requested and so this here will will talk to the information that i was requesting to do my research and again you're gonna get piecemeal because it's not all completed number six actually talks about the finances some of the financial things might have been in the emails some of the conversations about how this actually occurred who made the request where is this money coming from would come from emails the tax forms nothing was no tax forms were were collected no itemized lists were given there's a lot of information here as you can see from all of if you all downloaded the information and read it you would see there's still information that is still missing

230that we do not have we're personal items some people were wondering why we were using our truck our truck to make a delivery to someone's personal home during our work time you want to talk about resources why are we using our workers to make deliveries to someone's personal home without board members approving a donation so we can bring this full circle we can bring this full circle but i'm not ready to make that decision yet because i haven't done all the research yet mrs rosario what i think we've learned is that it was seventy dollars worth of water the rest was all donated all of this about our emails to dr moore this is about tax forms about is a simple conversation with dr moore it did happen that simple conversation and that conversation went

231nowhere is what i just i just said that the conversation went nowhere so therefore the request was made so so it sounds to me like the request was what did we donate how was it delivered and what was the cost sounds like that the request was made but this it sounds like the request could in writing have been that same thing it could have but i guess it wasn't so yes it wasn't it took i don't know 10 hours whatever it took no the request was made it was not delivered and so therefore another request was actually in writing okay i'm going to intercede with a point maybe getting back to this because i think we're veering off topic a little bit um that if you had brought that up though maybe at a board

232discussion say hey i'm looking into a concern i have da da da da da you know i would have understood and said hey i was asked if we can donate water i just passed that on to the superintendent said are we able to donate water is it legal do we have water is it about to expire is it something that our kids need versus something that we can donate to the homeless um that's the way it was asked for that's how i asked him i said it was brought to me can the district do this as a constituent that asked me for it i said i will look into that i asked the superintendent is that something we can do legally and all those other things that i brought up and that's how it initiated

233the water so um you know i didn't want to do anything that was going to burn the taxpayers and use our finances and our our we don't know that did you see this hundreds this is how it came to us it didn't come to us before it came to us as not to you it was posted as we delivered hundreds of items to feed hundred people so clearly we have constituents who are concerned about that sure but my problem is your department's collection yeah my point is if you had a concern about it and you came up to us and discussed it like we are now and and brought this up to me like you are now i would have said yeah but but my my primary conversation is to this with the superintendent not

234with you all my primary first mrs rosario i'm going to come back to the network that we're looking at though i get that about i get that you said your primary was with him right yes but you didn't get what you wanted so instead you you did this records request right so that's where we are right now we are a board member is frustrated with the response from the superintendent what can that board member now do well i have four colleagues that i'm frustrated about something i want to discuss it on the diocese and talk to you about it and say i'm concerned about this and then we all can say i think we need to look into this for sure you know had you brought it up about that and that was the concern

235because i asked i didn't have any idea why that request was done and i couldn't know right because you can't tell me so but you can tell me in a discussion and i think to have that up here so a board member is concerned with something they didn't get what they wanted they want more information i wouldn't have denied you that not in a heartbeat i would have said yeah you need more information so so i think that's the thing is coming back to this not let's not use this item but let's go on to the future you know to get away from that if we will have a board member that's frustrated and asked for information i'm going to tell you i was frustrated in the past and after ask for information that i

236didn't get and it's like oh okay what can i do about that i can bring it up to my fellow board members well and i think the point here which is important is that the reason we're doing this is because we've learned and this came up numerous times as we were discussing discussing protocols many of us in in our short tenure here have experienced um have had the experience where we didn't have a rule about something where things occurred in the past and we didn't have a structure for how to respond the only way we excuse me one second we did mention in our protocols that we're going to actively listen did i miss something no i'm i am actively listening i can repeat everything that she's saying okay i'm just i don't text him

237i find well in another board but my point is um the way we move forward as a board both for this board and for boards in the future is that we learn from our experiences we learn from what's happened in the past so we develop strategies criteria policies protocol in order to avoid it in the future that's all we're doing that's the point of what we're doing here um to your point mrs barron board can we like move on and have something so that this won't come up again in the future that's what we have learned from this experience and what we hope to take forward to prevent future boards from struggling over and spending this much time on i agree get back to the point there all right so i'm going to suggest that

238we start going through this line by line to see if we can come to some consensus on a process um i did hear your feedback loud and clear about the knot so i have taken the knot out so it would read now is request for general information outside of the information which is required to make informed decisions about board discussion or action items should be requested through the superintendent period okay so i'm i'm sorry dr jacob sure to be a that's okay the only thing that challenges me about this and to this discussion is that we don't always know that when the information is being requested it may be with the intent to bring something forward in the future okay that may or may not result in it in a discussion or action item coming

239forward that's my only concern about how we structure this okay so but i don't disagree one thought is i can live with it i think that's in in looking in through the different protocols from different districts i think what theme i kept seeing it was not that the individuals developing it don't want board members to have the information they need for even potential items coming it's more of can we make sure that those requests are reasonable so there's a certain time limit on those requests that aren't actively so if there is an action item or a discussion item this doesn't even apply correct the one hour doesn't even apply that's action right there right if they're outside the information which is an action or discussion item so if it's an action or discussion item then

240if it takes so for example we just had a presentation on early learning and so that probably took miss flood five or more hours to create that there's no time limit on that so somebody requested says i want to know more about that one of the board members early learning okay it's going to be a discussion item or whatever it's going to be a presentation it took her five hours it doesn't have to come to this process the only thing that would come to this process is general information that is outside those action or discussion items and then it doesn't mean you can't request the information it's just a time limit now it could be that the other thing is that the board discusses this at a workshop or a business meeting and somebody says

241well you know what i've had this concern about whatever it might be i don't want to tag it on one thing it is going to take two hours but here's the rationale or it's going to take three hours or four hours but i see this coming down the pipe and i really think we need to get in front of this the board can then just say yes yeah even though it's not an active item i those hours are probably well spent for us as a board to be informed about that so that's something to think about but and i hope that distinction is clear here that this isn't for action or discussion items or presentations those types of things this is just for general information that has nothing to do with it general information to

242make informed decisions about board discussion or action items board discussion or action items is right there well she says requests for general information outside of the information which is outside of the information which is to make decisions which is needed to make informed decisions i don't that doesn't sound everything that i have requested is within but we're not i don't like the way that's worded it doesn't sound i think outside of the information which is required let's take a vote on how it's worded it doesn't make sense so we can do not i can work on it more to get the language a little bit tighter um if that's the case if it's it is reading a little awkward but requests for general information not that it's not needed it's not informed let's just required

243decisions because it's not the general information required you you that information is given so if it's discussion action items this does not apply to that that's what we're trying to do it says discussion and action items but you've got to read this language up here i'm reading it i'm reading it i i just think wordsmithing and see if i can come up with something that is a little clearer okay okay i will do that all right then the next sentence the board member should ask the superintendent if fulfilling the request will exceed one the one hour time limit feedback on that is one hour sufficient with everybody frankly i'd be willing to go too but um i have less of a overview of how staff time is allocated than the superintendent does so i would

244um want his input on that dr mora fine there's i i've worked with every single board member here on items that they have put together which have taken multiple hours that's not general information uh i've worked with our board members with areas or committees that they're on that exceeds one hour that's not part of this this would be a request not not aligned to items or committees that you're serving on um within your responsibilities that are are coming for for a vote so one hour or two two hours is fine as i actually i'm trying to speak too much because i'm gonna i'm gonna lose it um but either as i said before there's not an item in which when the question comes or proffered um i'll have this issue in miami board members had

245staffs staffs this was never a problem this was never a problem so when it comes as a genuine request we can put this in place but as long as i am here i don't think it's going to be an issue but as you said it supersedes uh me and in terms of i will not be here forever nor will these board members i'm okay with the one or two hours but i just think getting this again wordsmithing will probably help because it's kind of hard to do it you know right on your feet like that but um just i think we all acknowledge the fact that we don't want to take up a lot of time with staff members 98 of the time probably dr moore answers us you know we might have a little

246bit of follow-up we just we just want to continue to protect staff time all right so i'm hearing one or two hours mr barefoot do you have any feedback about that i said in the beginning less is more okay i mean this whole this whole conversation is well never mind miss rosario one or two hours do you have a thought either one okay what i was baring sorry what i would add is what dr moore just said that none of this then what what um i guess a caveat or how do not how you want to add it in there is that this does not um what did you say this is not uh this is not with regard to items that we are voting on right so i have we don't have i'm trying

247to capture it we're trying to wordsmith it i thought action items we we have we work on we vote on all action items right and that's exclusive so it's saying you have the information you can have the information for action or discussion items that's not this does not apply so what i thought in listening to dr moore say so request for general information not aligned to board discussion or action items that's fine that's good it's more simple okay i got i got a closing statement too not aligned to board discussion or action items should be requested through the superintendent yeah that should be that sound better more simple simple okay mr barefoot's right simple so it sounds like if there's no um real strong feeling either way with the one hour we can leave it

248like that because this is really just for the general information if the information will take longer than one hour to gather and compile the superintendent will work with the board member to narrow the request so it does not exceed one hour which is kind of like that next step of problem solving right of you know we might be able to get into the hour and i'm sure if it was just a few minutes over an hour it would you know that could be problem solved through any thoughts changes to that piece okay if the request cannot be crafted to take less than one hour or if it will require an expenditure of funds the war member will request at a board meeting or workshop and so because it said both board meeting and workshop and

249again we use pinellas county as kind of that foundation that's why consensus is in there and not a vote and it i think it lends itself a little bit more to discussion and allowing the requesting board member to essentially say this is why you know i want to request this information and i think you know board members can ask questions so that they feel comfortable that they're understanding that any recommendations on that okay and then a consensus of the board is necessary to move forward such requests and the information that was requested by the board member will be provided to all board members which he doesn't know i think we've heard that loud and clear um for feedback i think we already have that in place anything doesn't work board members given to all but

250it's nice to have in there yeah okay any other questions okay i think we're good okay uh i will do the chair i'll work smith that we'll we'll put it back out send it out to board members and then we'll bring it back to our upcoming board meeting and that exhausts our agenda okay um one quick second i'm sorry go ahead doctor jacobs um no now i can't see it because i saw it like half an hour ago there's a typo oh on page seven around public participation a bullet that starts board members will not engage in direct back and forth and should say citizen input input should not be capitalized at the end public comments without engaging in dialogue so just a quick read without engaging it says without engage in dialogue it's just

251a typo but i do you know i huh no no no no no no not that no different thing but i wonder and i asked my fellow board members if we want anything in there about how we uh not um like yes we won't engage in back and forth but i have seen it in the past prior to when i was a board member that ways that board members have sometimes engaged with people in the public has been really inappropriate they've been made fun of they've been maligned they've been spoken down to i would like it to be really clear that is not what we do and we don't if a if a citizen has a particular experience we don't get to tell them that experience is wrong or if they have expertise in a

252particular area until we are clear that we have greater expertise we don't get to tell them they're wrong we get to listen that's our job and i'm wondering if we want to add anything in in that um further than we'll not engage in direct back and forth but something about i don't i don't have it wordsmith i suppose i should have thought of that before um but something that acknowledges how we respect the voice of those who take the the time make the effort and have the courage to come speak to us and we will engage with them with deep respect basically under meeting expectations we have school board members are expected to model appropriate behavior including courtesy active listening and respect do we need more dr schiff i don't think so i don't think

253so all right i guess not um although i would like us to hold each other accountable for that when we're not doing it i just i want to make a statement you know i've been on the board about a year 14 months something like that you know we've done a lot master board training protocols what we did today not easy i'm telling you not easy but i think when you look across the five of us we complement each other pretty well with our expertise so um these are the kind of things that we keep our focus on with student achievement and honor our protocols and masterboard training and respect i i think that we'll just continue to move forward this kind of dialogue is not easy but i respect us for doing it thank you

254all right um with that i have a couple of things to just um let you know about um i sit on zoning planning and there is going to be an interesting workshop coming up that board members might be very interested in looking on you it'll be televised but you can also attend and speak if you'd like it's the county visioning workshop and what that is it's on february 24th is um this lateral line west of i think 66th right here is zoned agricultural there is a push to change that for more construction and so that discussion will happen on the 24th at the indian river county commissioners chambers so if you're interested in either going and speaking as a citizen or you want to watch it or pay attention to that that's going to happen

255on the 24th of this month february 24th at 7 o'clock at the indian river county planning zone if that changes or whatever i'll get information to nancy so that you're all aware and that's part of why on i don't know if you noticed but on the agenda for business meetings i actually put in a subject line there for added committee reports and that's where we can put that kind of stuff in there we all attend different committees we all sit on them sometimes nothing happens or whatever is nothing to report but at least those placeholders are going to be there because i don't think the public is aware that sometimes we do sit on all these other things and i had somebody actually saw me at indian river um zoning planning and saw was sitting

256up on the dice and said why do you do that i thought you were on the school board so i think it's important that we put that in there too as a placeholder for all of us to be able to give a report on what's happening with the different committees um jerry yes just on that envisioning they had one on february 3rd and uh yes that was the first one and there are 107 people in attendance and somewhere between 50 and 60 online so there's a lot and this is this the topic's a little different as you point out because because i go to all those meetings and um there is there is a lot more than usual interest in these discussions so you might find it particularly interesting as they talk about and it's

257not unrelated to the school district as it looks at the demographic trends and some of the discussions and the studies that are being done as to what uh the impact might be is what has traditionally been agricultural land has turned into either commercial or more residential exactly um so that's going to be an interesting look at how our county might shift in its thinking so the other thing is just in retrospect of what we discussed today i'm letting you know that i had requested this superintendent to put report cards on a future discussion for us i don't think we've looked at report cards in a while and i think that we need to for this next year i'm not talking about report cards this year i'm talking about with the new standards and the new

258assessments that are coming we probably need to ask him to revisit that and bring a report to the board can i clarify that you're asking for school report cards right not individual student we don't really do cards anymore it's all online but well but we need a report as to what's happening with report cards for schools report cards how we do it with students that needs to be made aware we have new people that move into our county all the time and it would be nice to make sure that we've updated what we do out there because i've had lots of people ask me for that so i think that's an item that we need to revisit so superintendent you're hearing me loud and clear on that one the other thing i asked for is

259um we've had some athletes for many many years go to state and get really cool um state finishes we just had the weightlifting team the girls weightlifting team from vero beach high school and a wrestler girl from sebastian river win at the state level and i think you know there are lots of athletes that go to states i i when i was a coach we went four times that was awesome and it was the first time in i think that's that program that we went to state now did we win it no um but i i think as a board it would be kind of similar to like an olympic athlete being invited to the white house i think we should be inviting our students that win awards at state levels to board meetings to

260be recognized that's just one thing i mean because we do it for science fair kids that go to state and um and so on we do it for other things and i'm sure there are other things out there that we haven't considered that we need to consider but that was one that just kind of came to light to me recently yes doctor on that note um i want to acknowledge that february is career and technical education month we have one of the best career technical education sites uh in the treasure coast our treasure coast technical college um and so i would love to honor them at our next board meeting in february during um you hear that whatever it's called yeah the technical education month i'd like to invite them in and highlight some of

261what they do i um i think it'd be nice time to do that that might be a long meeting because you've got some others too correct it just we could just do a short presentation on acknowledging the work that they did to in response to that keep in mind we we start earlier for for that very same reason so we will have a number of of presentations but we do i think it's february 24th we are having a cte symposium which is going to focus in on entrepreneurship so we're bringing a number of key individuals who went through our schools who are entrepreneurs themselves in addition to hearing those individuals who created startups or understand that the depth of what entrepreneurship is mr barefoot will be sharing some of his stories and the impact he

262has had we will have cte programming from each of our two high schools here uh really marketing their programs and i mentioned it a number of times one of which is on bob seuss talking through our target audience which is eighth grade students to come in and see the depth of programming that we have to meet the needs of all students so we're going to bring out all the bells and whistles really to highlight the programs the certifications the endorsements that are available in our cte programming so that will be one way of acknowledging and celebrating uh some of the innovative things and some of the programmings that are in our school are just never spoken about we always talk about the advanced academics ap dual enrollment cambridge ib we need to highlight some things

263that have been in this district for a very long time and things that are continuing to be refined so our community knows the depth of what we're offering um to that if i can oh sure you know a um to that end dr moore uh i find myself in a place i never expected to find myself as a career academic and educator who always assumed that my son would choose academics and would choose college he's actually choosing cte he's now enrolled in a technical school after high school he's it's great but i find myself aware of and advocating for that and recognizing as you mentioned the deficiencies in how we promote that how we promote our dual enrollment programs how we promote some of the great technical centers around the state we have one of

264the best in the country up in jacksonville tulsa welding school um and we don't i don't know how much we promote that so i really appreciate your comments that we will be highlighting promoting um and and uh disseminating more information about that moving forward yeah um hold on two other things um not to add more time to that meeting but uh we're only meeting once a month dr moore so um black history month right are we going to be recognizing that as well and school counselor week okay because i know in the past we've been able to do that because we meet more often but now that we only meet once a month we need to start keenly aware of what all recognitions are coming up that month so we can add those mr seymour

265and i were at it eighth grade career fair with miss peterson a couple weeks ago and she probably had 30 booths there not only with cte um but with all of the businesses in our our county and that's really cool because that's eighth graders getting them interested and what ms berenberg said about black history month i think i asked dr moore i had the privilege of speaking at the oslo presentation of vero beach high school with our african-american police officers and it was absolutely outstanding so we've had some good things going on with that i am sorry to further prolong this um but you uh you mentioned that we're starting earlier on the 28th um nancy that's not on our calendar i have six o'clock yeah it's on there six o'clock it's six we're now

266starting to begin our meetings earlier and so that uh i don't recall that and should update the calendars but we approved a a policy where the presentations will begin at 5 30. um it's fine i just want to make sure that it gets on our calendars so that we're since we're we won't be here well we won't be here in the afternoon necessarily that day we don't have a workshop or a so we're used to being here in the day and going straight through but on the 28th we're not necessarily so just to clarify okay any other last comments yes yeah the i think that was taken off and then what was left on was the um citizens could submit their form as early as 5 45. right so that was put on i think

267with the change when mrs mata came on there was a policy that i think mr barefoot proposed and then at some point that was taken off let's remove it because we're not going to move forward with that we'll keep our time the same because if we move it earlier we're still going to be here the same amount of time mr barefoot do you remember that i remember that that no miss us when you can you should i mean i remember what i remember but it isn't necessarily when somebody else remembers but i thought we took off the idea of starting citizen input because it was going to take the same amount of time anyways but we did agree to start the meetings earlier yeah i'm looking at it now it's not in there i'll look

268at the policy i don't think that's what we okay so um nancy will send us a calendar invitation if it's updated otherwise it stays at six o'clock okay all right anything else for the good of the board anyone mind if i gavel and we're done 3 50. our meeting is concluded thank you all thank you enjoy your valentine's evening thank you 353. thank you you