001again hmm [Music] so uh so uh good morning morning how are you good good could you are you busy no i'm just doing the index on the um contracts okay could you by chance i already did this one i apologized yeah thank you [Music] so plus i don't know if many of my board members are going to be on hello everyone we're going to go ahead and start our meeting in just about a minute so we'll just wait another minute allow more people to sign in and we'll get the meeting started good morning it's abby can you all hear me good morning i hear you abby oh good thank you i guess we can't see everybody's faces right depends if they put their camera on i'm sorry depends whether they put their camera on okay
002oh look yeah i see durian okay a lot of people signing in right right right now so thank you yeah you're good all right happy valentine's day we're going to go ahead and get the meeting started if everyone can just put their microphones on mute for right now that'd be great except for you abby because you got to say the pledge of the pledge of allegiance so why don't you go ahead abby and start us off all right i pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america oh my gosh why am i like you guys being with stay with me please this is just like a crazy morning yes i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america to the united states and to the republic for which
003it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you uh abby and good morning everyone hope everyone had a a great weekend had a super sunday of course and uh perhaps your team won or perhaps it didn't but in any event it was a super game uh went right down to to the end so yay uh good times and here we are beautiful monday morning in central florida uh valentine's day hey what could be better right so uh once again thanks everyone for joining we have a very uh uh interesting agenda this morning so i'm looking forward to hearing from everybody as we move on through here so uh let's go ahead and get started with our first order of business which is uh always to approve the minutes from
004the previous uh couple of meetings we have approval of minutes from december the second and also from january the 10th do i have a motion someone to approve those minutes uh that was uh by abby and seconded by lynn lynn gray got that okay all those in favor of the motion say aye and the motion carries unanimously thank you very much for for that we're going to jump right in uh to our meeting like i said we have six or seven people that are standing by uh willy uh ready and willing to uh bring us up up to date on some very important issues uh danielle thomas are you out there i am here all right good good morning and uh happy valentine's day to you thank you same to you thank you and uh
005so uh you want to start us off and tell us what's the latest and greatest and things we should be worried about in tallahassee sure i'd be happy to um so a couple of things a couple of um big things since we last spoke um so of course from the school board's perspective one of the big bills that we've been watching very closely and working on quite a bit is house bill 1467 which is the k-12 education bill and its companion of senate bill 1300 so house bill 1467 is senator gruter's bill i'm sorry is um representative garrison's bill and uh this is the one that taught that uh in its original form uh was changing actually was eliminating school boards member salaries and also has some provisions in it changing some of the provisions
006around instructional materials the review of instructional materials and materials in the library uh keeping in like an on running database that um parents and really anyone could use to be able to search and find um what materials are in the library so uh that um bill was heard on the house floor last week um on second reading it was amended so all of the language around eliminating school board salaries and uh the 200 stipend that they were going to give instead was all taken out of the bill and term limits was added to the bill so now um in its current form the way that it passed off of the house floor last week school board members would be term limited after eight years so eight consecutive years matching up to what we have here
007in the legislature um their current uh the time served would not count toward those eight years so the clock on the term limits would start in november so any previous service would not count toward that um and the rest of the bill around the instructional materials and the library materials stayed the same that did pass off of the house floor um down a party line for the most part uh and did get sent over to the senate in messages uh and was picked up by the senate and was referred to the rules committee um which is exactly where it's uh companion bill which is similar but not identical um senator gruter's bill 1300 is also sitting waiting to be heard by rules as well so we're now going to be monitoring this um continue to
008monitor it very closely to see if rules uh schedules either one of these bills and if they do which one they choose to hear senator gruter's bill does continue to have school board salaries in it it adjusts school board salaries to where all school board members would make the same as legislators which is um 29 000 i forget the exact number but it's like 29 600 and change um which is an uh an increase for some of our school board members and some of our very small counties but it is also a decrease and in some cases a significant decrease for some of our other school board members there's also some slight differences around the instructional materials and library materials pieces in 1300 as compared to 1467 as well um so uh there has been
009a bill um actually a joint resolution um that was filed in the senate at the very beginning of session to um put term limits for school board members on the ballot that bill has not been heard has not been calendared um and we heard very early on that the senate was not interested in term limits um they were also not interested in eliminating salaries completely so um it's been very interesting to watch this whole thing um go and uh we are continuing to like i said monitor it very closely as well as um have some conversations with some of the key people in the senate to try to just figure out um where this might be going and uh if rules is going to pick up either one of those bills and calendar either one
010of them so um that has been a big one um the other one that i want to touch on and then i know that uh there's several others on the call who are going to probably want to touch on a couple of other pieces the other one i wanted to touch on is um the student assessment bill so um we have uh representative placencia's uh student assessment bill um i have to look at my little cheat board here to make sure i get the number right 11.93 um and then uh senate bill 1048 is senator diaz's student assessment bill um so we talked about these last month when we talked about them last month they were very different from each other in its last committee stop uh senate bill 1048 was amended to um more
011closely align to the house version there are still differences between the senate and the house version but the senate um version 1048 does now look um more similar to the house version than it did prior um so it is um adjusting and and getting into more of the specifics around what the implementation of the new test would look like it is still calling for three progress monitorings of fall a winter and a spring with the spring being what they're still referring to as a comprehensive progress monitoring um which my fsba members who were here for fsba day in the legislature uh about a week and a half ago will tell you um i always kind of make a face when i say um comprehensive progress monitoring because i'm not really sure what that means because
012progress monitoring is not designed to be comprehensive but that's another conversation um so it also uh adopted the specific language that the house had around some of the experts that would be involved in uh determining by 2025 if that third progress monitoring needed to continue to be like a comprehensive um assessment um there's still some differences between uh the two bills specifically around um uh school grading and the uh house had adopted in its last committee stop um some wording around um the automated adjustment of school grading um we've had conversations with representative placencia about our concerns um about that wording that was added i am hearing that there are a lot of others who have concerns about that wording as well um representative placencia has concerns about some of that wording as well so
013um the senate did not add that uh to 1048 in their delete everything um so that kind of tells me that the senate doesn't like that language either um so i have a feeling that adjustments are going to be made and some of that language will either be amended or may even be taken back out of the bill um because there are a lot of parties that are are not um not fans of that particular language and how it's worded so um that will continue to um move through one committee stop was um was eliminated uh in the house and so we're just it has uh i believe one more committee stop um in the house to go through so we'll just have to see what the landing point is as far as what the
014final birdman is going to going to look like but we know that you know this is part of the conversations that are happening between not only the house and senate but also uh the governor's staff and doe as well and so we can already see some of that happening with how much 1048 has been amended to come closer to the house version um but there's definitely still some pieces that that are going to need some adjustment so but we still have four weeks to go we started today starts week 6. uh looks like there may be some questions so uh before we get to wayne and others let's uh if you have questions for dr thomas go ahead and ask it uh lynn i see you have your hand and uh go ahead put your
015mic on and and good morning thanks uh dr thomas uh yeah the news i i'm trying to smile all through this but uh my question is this uh and and the familiarity of um bill making has become very real as i guess we all are getting acquainted but the um the salary uh for teacher i mean for um school board members is the likely ship could be put on a train bill at the very end or do you get a feeling of that um and and for that matter the term limits so um well first of all and i would say this it's gonna um everything that we're hearing it would be one or the other it would not so part of the reason why the salary piece was amended in the house and changed
016to term limits uh from everything that we're hearing is they were having there were members of um there were republicans and some leadership republicans who were not sold on the elimination of school board salaries um were really put were giving some pushback um on that and representative garrison term limits is really what his goal was he just didn't feel that he was going to be able to get term limits through and felt that salaries was like the next option um but he was getting um pushback from fellow republicans um especially those who are going to be going into uh bigger elections like those that are in the house that are maybe running for senate um and you know some others as well so um i believe that's why we saw the switch um on the
017house floor um to you know because that's a that's a dramatic uh change to happen um so if we were to see anything um it's gonna be one or the other i don't believe that we will see both um and a lot of it is going to come down to how much each side is going to dig their heels in each side has bugged their heels in pretty deep as of this point but we've seen a lot of things change in a short period of time um obviously ideally what we would like to see is that um you know either both bills just die or the instructional materials language which we're not thrilled with um but is um you know it i could see that getting amended out and put into um a bigger bill
018considering some of the other instructional pieces that we already have um kind of looming out there and moving through um i don't know if then you know term limits or salary then get wrapped up um into that um we're just really trying to continue our conversations with the senate because it's really all it's really in the senate's hands right now um and there's definitely you know like i said we had members of the senate tell us right from the beginning they weren't interested in term limits we'll have to see if that changes um or not we had others in the senate who did not want to hear anything about either the elimination of salary or even changing the salaries at all um and we had uh senator hudson was very vocal about that in its
019committee stop um in senate education several weeks ago so um our hope is to keep the sides as separated as possible on that particular issue and that then if we see anything it would just be the instructional and library materials portion of that well thank you thank you thank you lynn for the question thank you dr thomas i know we these are all very interesting topics uh let's just let's move on uh wayne are you there yes sir i'm here all right hey wayne good good morning to you uh uh would you go ahead and coordinate us uh through the next four or five speakers and uh i'll let you start you know what well i will uh kind of uh uh bring them here sorry um so i'm going to kind of hear this
020high level drop it down to uh to wendy and brian and kristen but uh just to give you all an idea of just real quickly the issue that we're also going to hit on we're going to hit on uh budget we want to hit on the third calc that's happening which uh wendy dodge has been uh digging into uh the last couple weeks uh we're gonna hit on the 200 million dollars uh hold back from randy fine but we're also gonna uh we're gonna hit on the um we're going to hit on the 200 million that was held back from last year we want to hit on uh school concurrency we've hit school board salaries but let's also not forget that president simpson is pushing to raise all school school district employee uh salaries to
021a minimum of 15 an hour uh we've got flvs that we're all fighting on again randy fine that popular name uh of course is trying to get rid of franchises uh and then uh we've got a couple bills out there floating around with causes of action and that's related to uh if we make johnny or susie feel uncomfortable about talking about issues that uh maybe mommy and daddy haven't uh spoken to him about that we need to hit the pause button and get permission so with that i'm going to kind of go back to the to the big budget stuff and let uh wendy dodge china in on that morning wendy good morning can everybody hear me yes okay good i uh sometimes i have audio issues so um in terms of the third calc
022that was released two weeks ago the biggest issue that is that impacts this year's budget and the biggest issue there is that this is the first calculation this year where they have included the scholarship students in the calculation and what they have done incorrectly is they have credited the districts for the base student allocation for all of their scholarship students but they have not credited us for any of the categorical workload that comes along with those scholarship students being added to our roles however when they deduct from our budgets the amount for each scholarship student they include by statute statute says that's what they ca what they get paid they are deducting the bsa plus a proportional share of all the categoricals so every district who has had an increase in scholarship students in their
023district is seeing large deductions in your budgets based on that third calc because more revenue is going out than you were credited for this is an issue because if we don't get it fixed this year that's how our budgets will be calculated for all eternity so now is the time and we are being very gracious about this with the legislature we are not characterizing this as an attack on public schools traditional public school students all we're saying is that there was an error made in the calculation and that we would like it to be corrected in the fourth calculation so that there's equity within the funding formula because as you know the fefp has been held up for 30 some years because of the equity within the formula and so when you start disequalizing what
024one student in the formula gets as opposed to another student so much in in such a blatant way then it jeopardizes the formula itself so statewide the reduction is about 52 dollars per student impacts each district differently based on whether you've had growth whether you've had not had growth and the number of scholarship students that you have participating in your district so um for my district for example it's over five million dollars and so what we're asking again is for there should be a calculation a recalculation not a recalculation but a corrected calculation made in the fourth calc to make sure that this issue is resolved this year so one thing that's kind of in the weeds and i don't mean to over complicate things but i do want to talk about it is the
025teacher salary allocation so the original year of the teacher salary cal calculation the amount of funding was 500 million dollars and all that money was required to be put onto teacher salary schedules to get them towards the 47.5 and at in the first year of its existence it was not allowed to be paid out as part of anyone's scholarship last year they changed that language to say that they would receive an amount equal to the a proportionate share of the teacher's salary allocation which is 550 million this year but only 50 million of that is new money and they have not added any money into the fefp anywhere to account for the other portion of the 500 million that is now being calculated for the scholarship students so now we have given teachers three or
026four thousand depending on what happened in your district raises last year based on that 500 million and a portion of that money is now going out the door for every scholarship student and that's money we will never you will never have enough money to pay for those raises if they're giving a portion of that original 500 million away for scholarship students it's correctable the legislature just needs to account for that in the budget so that we still receive the money we were supposed to put into those teacher salary teacher salaries and are now in part of our collective bargaining agreements and so that we can pay that amount to the scholarship students without impacting our students and our teachers so i hope that was it is a very complex problem we have dug through the
027work papers from the third calculation and we can show in the categorical pages where they say here's the esc guaranteed here's what the workload should have been and it goes up like 50 million dollars and then they adjust it back down to the original allocation so we can show where that money is supposed to come from but we have to get that information to the legislature and then we have to get agreement that they need the department to go back and calculate the fourth calculation correctly and wendy if i can jump in that's right so because one of the things too in that is that the the categoricals are statutorily capped so and then the the scholarship kids get paid based on second calc when we have that information at the beginning of the year
028when the adjustments are made those kids have already been paid you're not gonna go ask them to send a check back for five hundred dollars in some ways it makes the district pay even more if it's fifty three dollars statewide average that we've lost per public school student it it might actually be more about eighty dollars per district student i'm making up a number but it's more because a portion of those kids that it's calculated on have already gotten their scholarship money and they're out of the equation but with it being the categoricals being statutorily kept one of the other things we're looking at is because they put 465 million whatever it was in reserve and used less than 200 million of that that money's still there in reserve and if the statutes don't allow
029them to move it over for categorical costs certainly in the back of the bill we could get implementing or conform some you know get some language to get that money out to the districts because now you do have a wide disparity between what a traditional public school student receives and what an fes scholarship student receives and it's not equal and i think even with districts with charter schools you're getting other factors in there too because you've already paid you know so are you going to collect back from the charter schools there's there's you've got a history of doing things where maybe that hasn't been done in the past because the numbers were so small now that they're this big you know you're gonna have to be looking at so there's a whole lot of layers
030that as wendy said you know 30 to 40 years the fefp has worked because it treats everyone the same and now we're coming up with these wide discrepancies and so we'll have to see what happens there but that it is definitely alarming what happened and it is definitely a tightrope of not coming out and saying this is all because vouchers are terrible or vouchers are killing public schools you can't make that argument you have to talk about unintended consequences and now a lack of you know what is the fefp built on it's not accomplishing that anymore look what happened um and so in each district it'll be slightly different but it might be that an fes student is getting 8 200 and a district student is getting 7 600 it can be that wide a
031range and you know it'll be slightly varied per district but i mean it's a huge thing and i don't think too many people understand it other than a few senate and house staffers uh maybe senator diaz um and then a bunch of us that all have our hair on fire thank you brian wendy can you uh clarify uh so what is the amount of money in the budget so far this year for teacher salaries and and how is that money supposed to be dis distributed so in i'm going to have to ask my colleagues to help me i believe that it goes up to a house has more in the teacher's salary allocation than the senate does and is it's is it 150 more brian 250. similar to your point that's right go ahead and
032finish it well no that's fine i'll jump so it's the the governor and the senate asked for 50 million more that's what's in the senate so it'd be 600 million total the house has proposed 250 million more to bring it to 800 million but the house has language and so this fits in with what we were just talking about with third calc the house language says half of the allocation needs to be used for raising to 47.5 you know the old 80 20 language and the other half needs to be used for everybody else so they're actually finally going to address some of the veteran teachers who have not been able to get anything but the problem is is that they keep talking about the allocation as though it's 800 million and not 250 million
033and when they say half of the allocation you've already allocated 550 million of it half of 800 millions 400 like it doesn't work like this is the stuff where they get ahead of themselves or get confused themselves you know and and i think wendy hit it the reason this is coming up as a categorical is so that it can keep getting out the full amount can get out to those scholarship kids even though you've already bargained it this should be you know when the governor uh i can't remember when that was 2013 2014 we had everyone's going to get 500 480 million dollars put into the budget for that the very next year that was just rolled right in to the bsa yeah because it's already been spent it's recurring this keeps staying out there
034and it keeps causing these problems because they're not careful with their language um but anyhow that's a long story for all right 50 million in the house wayne i'm going to turn it back to you now who who do you have next theresa had her hand up theresa jacobs theresa i'm sorry teresa thank you chair i and and thank you brian quick question wendy um do you have a dollar amount for the impact of the teacher salary uh allocation and by the way excellent job to both of you on describing um a very technical i would call it a glitch not that it's a glitch bill but it obviously um wasn't intended uh so if you had a dollar amount that'd be helpful the other thing chair i think would be really helpful because i
035can see we have a handful of people who are really in the weeds um what we probably need is a position paper of some sort that we could get out to all the districts and see if we just can't push this um with an avalanche of emails and just get people's attention then we'll have legislators across the state asking the question i think once the question is asked the problem will be identified and it will need to be solved but without that what is disaster yeah we can do that right thank you thank you thank you and wendy do you have an idea of the value of that um i want there's so there's 98 i'm trying to do the math in my head because i had it on a work paper and i have
036it in front of me but they're 98 000 scholarship students divided by uh 550 million i think it came out to about 200 give or take one way or another per student that's going to the scholarship students um from the teacher's salary allocation wow from the original teacher salary allocation additional 50 that they were calculating that would be in total with the whole 550. thank you and not seven you know yeah not the s what is it yeah not the 750 the 550 so with the 750 and that the houses proposed that would be an even higher number got it thank you okay i'm gonna i'm gonna hand it off to kristen she's gonna uh touch on the randy fine uh money issue oh good and good morning christmas as well good morning thank you
037thank you thanks wayne thank you thank you chair purses um real quick so many of you are familiar with the um the categorical in the house education budget proposal the putting parents first adjustment that adjustment is essentially a 200 million dollar penalty to the 12 school districts who adopted mass mandates and targets as they're saying the the non-school-based district administrators in those districts so funds from the the 12 stated school districts i think many of you are familiar with them um would be taken from those districts and then distributed to the 55 districts as i guess like an award for not requiring masks um the on so that the senate doesn't have that same proposal in their version uh and then many of you may know that on friday the governor did share that um
038he he's not so much in support of that but instead would recommend that parents school school districts instead of taking this route this proposal so that's just kind of a quick high level update on that good that's good news thank you brian brian moore you want to chime in on some issues yes the the lawyer in me might say that isn't necessarily good news and even randy fine tried to spin it as potentially more costly for the districts than than 200 now i don't know how i mean logistically are they going to pass a law that says retroactively if a year ago you committed child abuse by masking your children your your subject you know like creating a separate cause of action for 12 districts i'll let them figure that out but but it's part
039of it i wanted to touch on it which is really scary trend which is turning parents loose against the districts at the local level i this is just me speaking this is not an official fad statement but my opinion is that most of these legislators and i think this goes on both sides they don't want their base bothering them because their base is very bothersome um and but they're more than happy to use all the energy that their base has to turn them loose on you as long as they're not here in tallahassee or in their office and demanding that they fix things so stop ask every time we give you what you want you want more so what they're doing instead is saying i'll tell you what you want more i'll give you the
040power to go sue those districts directly i'll give you the power to go you know demand your three minutes of finger-pointing at the board meetings luckily that language all went away but um you know they're they're i i haven't brought myself to write this in any of my updates yet but i'm i've called it weaponizing parents um and the potential cost what's that passing the buck yeah but the potential costs to that are enormous because they've also got the sovereign immunity bill which right now our limits are 200 000 per individual 300 000 per occurrence and the two bills that they have floating up here now one of them is up to a million per individual with three million dollars per occurrence the other is a million per individual individual with no cap on her
041occurrence 50 kids injured in a school bus uh accident doesn't matter if it's the bus driver's fault that's a lot of potential lawsuits and let's let's let's take a flyer on something i got 50 potential clients it's worth saying uh negligent hiring or something let's find some way that the school board can at least be partially responsible they're going to settle and now we can maybe get maybe 500 000 as an appropriate nuisance settlement for 50 kids do they really want 50 kids parading or you know this this is like trial lawyer bonanza time yeah um so with higher sovereign immunity limits on the horizon apparently uh causes of action to sue um that's i mean so that's one of the things we're talking about you know everyone focuses on don't say gay you know
042that's the buzz buzzword for for the two bills the the new parents bills but it includes a right to sue the district and so one of the things that we're trying to do a lot of is kind of nibble on the edges all right we may not be able to get into a policy discussion with you on whether this is a good or bad idea policy wise but do you really have to create lawsuit central are you really trying to make the trial lawyers rich because their eyes are lighting up the prevailing party fees it doesn't work in reserve reverse there's going to be a whole bunch of people willing to come flood our courts bring people think about all the staff members that will be doing depositions showing up in court doing hearings i
043mean it was all i could do in my previous job to keep divorce attorneys from subpoenaing our teachers to come testify in custody disputes you know like they don't need to be out of the classroom dealing being in court and yet that seems to be this big push is to stop asking me to fix things here let me just give you the tools to go sue for them and it's really scary because that there are people out in your districts that are more than happy to file a lawsuit and fight for their rights my rights you know whatever those rights that they are you know but uh so that's just something that i mean when you're talking to your delegation members and your representatives your senators and you may not be getting much headway on
044this is a good or bad policy how about the way that you're implementing it how about what the effect is on the districts we don't get to raise taxes to cover these additional costs you're putting on us our our revenue is fixed you fix it but now you're going to make us pay out millions more for insurance or in settlement claims you're opening the door for more lawsuits and legal fees um the 200 million dollars you say we can't use it can't take the money from the classroom but no district can operate without the head of hr food service transportation if you have a staff attorney they're wonderful people you can't operate without a staff attorney but you know you're going to have to have those positions that money's going to have to come from
045the classrooms so they are punishing the the classrooms through it but so those are the discussions that you can have nibbling around the edges on on that and because if you look back even to the mask debate in the fall get those districts get those districts and what did they do they withheld board member salary and people that felt you know they felt that wasn't enough they all they did is withhold some board members salaries a few thousand dollars a month um people were disappointed but they kind of realized that they don't really have many more tools than that and so but now this is the year this is they appropriate this is the body that appropriates the money this is them rattling the cage and saying we are the ones who determine how much
046you get and we are not happy but but they can't figure out yet how to punish you without punishing the students and they don't want to do that especially in an election year so messaging how this will come out of classrooms how this will i mean you've already got you know all your teacher shortages all the other issues that they are aware of and that parents do tell them about um so like connecting this to the classroom is is important in those messages if you can't get on the policy if you can at least get to the practical effects of these things that's why i will take the conversation thank you brian thank you wayne uh does uh i want to put danielle uh on the spot for just a second and maybe just give
047us give the group a quick uh a quick update on at least we've got one success that we can talk about and that was concurrency and then uh maybe if someone wants to chime in at least we've got the the two mile to one mile that issue has been kind of slowed down too i guess but but danielle if you want to update on the concurrency well sure so uh when we talked about school concurrency last month on our call we were dealing with the fact that um both of these school concurrency bills um were changing it to where they were going to look at district wide um as far as concurrency was concerned and of course we knew what an issue that would be for so many of um our districts basically saying that
048um you know if you had any space at all anywhere in the district um you know they were going to consider that um space and they were going to allow for um building of you know new neighborhoods and and those types of things even if that space was well on the other side of the district and especially for our larger districts that would be a huge issue when it comes to how far students would need to be bussed and you know all of those different things so they're um pretty early on we were able to meet with both senator perry and uh representative mclean to get that wording changed um both were uh very honest with us in saying that it was never their intention to hurt the school districts in that way and once
049they realized what that would have done to the school districts um they were already working on amending that language so in both the senate and the house bills uh that district-wide aspect has been taken out of the bill um the bills still don't quite match there's still a few little um differences between the two of them that are still being worked out um but it was a a big win for us to be able to get that district-wide piece out of the bill you know pretty early on in the process and um i've continued to just kind of do little check-ins just to make sure that we're still kind of good in that and there's um no intention of any of that language um coming back from either one of the bill sponsors nor from
050the lobbyists who's been working very closely with uh the builders which is really where the bill originated from so that was definitely um definitely a good win early on that we had to be able to get that um get that language out of there okay thank you thank you danielle wayne i think you're still on you yeah sorry about that um so the i think the last issue that we probably need to update the group on is related to flvs and i can i can kind of touch on that um early on and uh oh oh i'm sorry before i get started uh linda colbert you have a question uh thank you wayne i just wanted to comment on what brian had said about messaging on the the 200 million here in orange county that's
051going to be about a little over 16 million and the communication that we have put out both to the legislators and public is that that 16 million equates to a little over a one percent raise for our teachers so i think that puts it in perspective and that's that's where you have to go back to the legislators and say here's here is the real consequence for that so just wanted to share how we're messaging in orange yep good point yeah thank you thank you um in house bill 5101 5101 it's a conforming bill uh coming from the house it's a uh regarding education uh it contains language currently that will eliminate franchises for flvs however and and wendy dodge and i and and some of the others have been uh going back and forth with
052the stakeholders but also with flvs and flvs is of the opinion that we can get rid of franchises but we can still contract with flvs um but also we've had several conversations now with our folks in the senate and we're we're getting the the temperature that there's not an appetite to uh to take this on but with that being said we still uh still have to remain vigilant uh as we get closer to the the budget process and uh yeah mr moore do you wanna you wanna comment on the s-a-t-a-c-t you mean while i'm texting it to the group chat okay yeah yeah yeah so uh so this would be my last part last week the state board of education met here in tallahassee one of the things that they were considering was an amendment
053to the rule about uh basically graduation requirements as you know everyone has to pass the 10th grade english language arts fsa they have to pass the algebra one end of course but there's been a rule that has allowed you to demonstrate that through other means up until what was originally the 1819 ninth grade class you could do a matching pert score for math or you could score i think it's a 430 on the sat i don't remember what the s8 the act score was but they had uh concordance scores that you could hit instead of for whatever reason after five tries at the fsa it's not happening but you got a 480 on the sat hey obviously you're ready to go we're going to let you go that they had bumped that up made it
054tougher starting with the 18 19 9th graders this year's seniors they got rid of pert they made the s.a.t and the act harder what they amended the rule last week to go back give this year's seniors the old standards so this year seniors do get to use pert this year's seniors do get to use the lower s.a.t and act score that was in place for everybody up through last year's seniors because this year seniors didn't even get to take the fsa in 10th grade and really only got one year of normal high school ninth grade this year seniors only got their freshman year which was already awkward enough for them probably as it is they didn't really get much high school uh normalcy and so the school the state board can't waive everything uh but
055they can set the scores and so they've amended it to go back to the what was in place up through last year's seniors and in some districts that's doubling the number of kids that are now ready to graduate other you know there's still gpa requirements and things but a lot of kids now have already gotten a 4 30 on the s.a.t or i don't know if they've taken the pert because it hasn't been in play for several years but i'm sure there's a bunch of pert scheduling happening in districts now too to help those algebra 1 scores hey hey brian what about the the algebra do they have to have past the algebra yes they still have to pass the algebra one end of course but they have now more options for demonstrating that other
056than just the official end of course exam they can they can get a matching pert score um and i can't remember what pert stands for what the acronym is but um but that used to be a way that was a lot way a lot of kids up until a few years ago would would get their their needed scores up until last year thank you um i think the rest of my colleagues uh john boyd did you did you want john good morning everybody i just wanna add there's a couple bills related to uh employees and unions that you might want to pay attention to because they're moving through committee on at least the house side um house bill this one regards uh juice deduction which it would in the practice of school districts including that
057in their information system for employees to opt to have their dues deducted and then in addition to that they slipped in language regarding what's called automatic decertification if a union's density falls below 50 percent according to the language of this bill it would be decertified and then they would have to apply to recertify that usually will affect well in our district for example the support staff union and the uh for us it's teamsters or your bus drivers food service etc the other bills i'd point out real quickly um house bill 1203 which has the title of education i don't mean to be simplistic but could possibly become a um train bill it's the one that has language in it regarding employee evaluations returning that to management's right as we understood it because there was a
058perk ruling related to this for orange county that stated that evaluations had to be a mandatory topic of bargaining in some districts they've been bargained in whole or in part but the majority of districts especially in central florida they are considered management right until this perk ruling so the the good news is if you're on that side of the argument is it's moving through the legislature and it's on a bill that could potentially be a train bill in the end based on its title alone um also there are bills related to it on fingerprinting that i would encourage folks to watch because it would regard when we on board and hire folks sharing fingerprinting but it wouldn't be the school board necessarily that it would start with it could start with another educational entity is
059defined in those bills and that's all i have for today thank you all right who else do we have on the call here wayne what about uh jason jason jason hey jason you know what but wendy uh wendy did bring up a point to me the that everybody on the call just so that you know procedurally we are coming down to the end of committee meetings as well both the house and the senate uh this is this is this will be the first week that we start seeing at least subcommittees shutting down and while in the senate their big committees will be meeting this week next week it becomes sketchy because we start hitting the the 50-day rule where committees stop stop meeting so that means um even though bills will be dying we also
060have to be respectful of the fact that once a bill moves out of one committee it does become available to be in an amendment and as john points out um that 1203 bill had a nice long very narrow title uh when it originally came out and when they amended it and made it a cs they did change the title on that and and made that a like ron points out it it's definitely right to be a train um so you know we'll have to continue to watch those term limit and those salary amendments uh from from jumping on those and then finally um i will reiterate because i i don't think i think we caught it but maybe we didn't but there is the uh one of the top priorities of the senate president is
061uh is bringing all state employees but also district employees up to the 15 uh minimum salary and um i know brian and several of us have all already kind of doing the the calculations and what that's going to cost but also uh the the biggest concern and it's not any different than what we were all talking about the last two years on teacher calories and that what's the compression gonna look like because we're bringing employees up to fifteen dollars an hour but we've already got employees that are at fifteen or sixteen dollars an hour what's that what's those increases going to look like in you know what what type of new morale issues are we all to have to uh you know wrestle with yeah wayne and that's another one i meant that i it
062was supposed to just flow from me and i forgot it because the this senate budget proposal language includes a cause of action which i don't think they can put into a budget language but right now it does it says if anyone's not making fifteen dollars an hour uh by october first beginning on january one of next year they can sue the district over failure to be making 15 an hour we told them that it was going to cost about 400 million dollars just to get people 215 that's statewide and that was supposed to be over about five years that doesn't cover the compression those of you that are on phones i'm making a lot of hand gestures so uh just imagine that it's very informative what i'm doing um but but so you know there
063might be enough money in the senate proposal which is a 200 and almost 240 dollar raise to the bsa to get all your 11 hours up to 15 there might be but there's not enough to make sure that the 25 25-year veteran head custodian makes more than the brand new entry-level custodian who just started working at the school the same day that this head custodian supervises why why would you go from entry level administrative assistant to executives you know like they're if it's all the same pay food service manager i mean think about all the people right now in your district making between 14 50 and 16 an hour and think of them all staying going a few can go up to 15 but they're not going there's no money to get everyone else up
064but everyone else gets pushed up why would those new people want to take on a harder job for no extra pay you know all the stuff that you're dealing with with the teachers in terms of morale so we really got to try and crunch the numbers on that but that's in the senate budget right now is you will be 15 an hour by october 1st and if you're not every employee who has not has the right to bring a class action lawsuit against the district if i could uh ask either dr thomas or brian was there any talk out there about some sort of special allocation uh for bus drivers i thought i heard something about bus that category of employee being singled out uh because perhaps they've become aware of the shortage of bus
065drivers that think every district is that the senate president in his opening day remarks talked about recognizing and get helping bus drivers but he also mentioned a couple other categories of esps i think this flows from that okay thank you thank you for that uh wayne has everyone had the opportunity i don't want to shortchange anyone here i believe so i think i think everyone who has uh who wanted to say something has had an opportunity to say something am i right i'm gonna look on the screen here presenters headshotters presenters everything's good good yep good we're all dead all right thank you for that um go ahead go ahead wayne i was gonna say just uh you know everyone just keep mindful of you know paying attention to your updates from your your district
066folks um you know things will start moving but hopefully things will start dying um but we can't uh we gotta remain vigilant until march the 11th so you know thank you all for your time to to listen to all of us uh give you all an update on uh what what could be happening in tallahassee well let me uh say to each of you thank you for what you're doing all of you whatever district you represent association superintendents school board associations your your your representative uh from each of the districts uh y'all doing just awesome job and uh uh and i and i and i like the way you i think you were crafting it in that you you you gotta you gotta make it real for them in other words that the messaging about
067uh this would this is taking away 16 million dollars that's a one percent raise for our teachers if you do this this is what it's going to cost us in terms of teacher salaries i mean you have to bring it home it has to affect someone personally and and i think when when they when they're up there they just look at numbers and and it's just broad and it it's it's it's really not a person but when you bring it back and you can connect it to someone that they know someone in their district some place where they live the uh the schools that they are familiar with and say how it's going to hurt me how it's going to hurt us and this is the challenges that i have now and this is going
068to make it even harder i i think i think we have to touch them there we're going to we got to pull on those uh heart strings and we gotta we got to make it emotional and they gotta gotta understand that this that some of the things that they have out there uh would truly be painful and we just can't do all these things we we can't take money away from the districts and at the same time expect to pay everyone fifteen dollars an hour and then deal with all our veteran folks whose morale is sinking because they're not getting a whole lot more than the entry level people so i think these are issues i know that you guys say it but we got to continue to say it and and just keep just
069keep making sure that they are understanding this is not just an orange county issue or pasco county issue this is state statewide this is how it's affecting and going affect all all of us uh i think i just think that's so important hey uh i need to um jump in here a minute uh karen karen bishop can you hear me yes yes uh karen karen had the housekeeping thing we needed to do here and i'll let you speak to them yes we just need everyone to say here in the comments section for roll call thank you karen righty does anyone have questions for any member of the group that was presenting i certainly want to give everyone a chance if you have a question out there i think superintendent jenkins has her uh i think
070you do dr jenkins hey just really quickly um i put in the chat the actual statute statutory reference just in case folks were interested 1203 it seeks to reinforce what was already in statute regarding the superintendent's responsibility to evaluate staff just put it in the chat for you just in case anyone was interested it's not a new issue it's why um many believe perk got their ruling wrong thought i'd put that reference in there for you good and so am i hearing dr jenkins uh that there's a possibility that this could change is is that what we're trying to do i'm sorry i should have been clear i apologize so the reason for the attempt at legislative correction is because of belief by many that perk got the ruling wrong if you look at state
071statute 1012.34 paragraph 1a there's very clear language there that we think um should have needed no clarification nonetheless this is where we land at at this point but i wanted to give you the reference of the original language as well in case so i i got you thank you for that real quick can i jump in drill 30 seconds yeah i think there might be some messaging going on around this that uh i've already been accused by one superintendent that fads has written a letter uh trying to do away with the teacher evaluation system and signed that superintendent's name to such letter but that that's not the case this is really small this is about the evaluation procedures and something basically recognizing what was already in statute if you've got a good working relationship with
072your union over the evaluation process nothing has to change but it just recognizes it's ultimately the superintendent's call um and it's all subject to doe approval anyway why would you bargain for seven months only to have the doe disapprove and then what go back and bargain for another 13 months meanwhile you're not evaluating so anyhow uh yeah i lied it's more than 30 seconds but just be aware that there is at least some messaging going out there probably i assume from the fea that uh whether it's just the game of telephone and it's lost you know like as it gets told from one person to the next it loses what was originally said but it's expanded to something quite broad that is not the case so gotcha gotcha gotcha thank you dr jenkins did you
073want to add i'm good okay thank you um and did anyone else did i miss anyone else that had a question i'm hard for me to see phillips everybody his hand up go ahead hey there um i i just wanted to throw this out in case it becomes of interest for any superintendent or district um you know we were looking at ways to look at the evaluation system that had been approved by doe for this year because of the pandemic dle was was open receptive to some some small adjustments even in the middle of the year we just made an adjustment we met with our principal council we got together and the adjustment was that first and second year teachers could opt in to the second formal evaluation that's required under our model and what
074we did was as before we went through as brian said before we negotiated with the union we simply um sent it to doe for kind of a sniff test to make sure that it would pass muster and be fine and and it did and they allowed us to make that adjustment uh mid-year so so kind of mirroring what dr jenkins was saying before you would even sit down and negotiate with the union just get a a head nod um from from doe that it's the right direction that's it thank you dr fritz uh anyone else have a would like to make a comment or ask a question now's your time don't think i see any anyone there thank you so much uh once again uh so what do we have this this session ends march
07511th so what are we 50 what less than that it's counting down now it's counting down now uh is there any way the legislature uh they can circumvent getting a getting something to a floor vote without it being through three committees can they still work that can someone comment go ahead wendy so as long as something has been through one committee it's available to be amended onto a different bill on the floor so and then a lot of times we have seen the past few years where stuff who that didn't get through a committee somehow was deemed eligible to be amended on the floor so we are being very vigilant there's um the you know we've also seen the past few years where the senate like they're doing now there's four weeks left the senate
076is not having policy committees meet anymore so if they do have a policy committee meet it's going to be because it's going to be a signal that this is something that is a house priority that they have to get it uh moving in order to get something that they want from the house so from here from here it's it's less policy more politics but um we're watching everything um unt until something is signed by the governor it's uh it's in play yeah yeah and i guess that's what scares us about like what what john boyd said about that bill called education how everything could be tacked on and amended onto that bill i believe that's what you were implying john yes sir yeah all right thank you again uh any other comments from anyone all
077right seeing none i think they are our committee we thank you all uh thank you so much for what you do all the time for each of us and for all of our students and our in our employees uh i think i think you gave us great marching orders um i think this is just just awesome we just cannot stop we've got to just monitor everything and keep talking to them keep talking to your legislators uh we're not going to have a meeting in um in march because as it turned out it's kind of like right it would be right when many folks are having their spring breaks and so and so forth so when we meet again the session in all likelihood should be over uh will be over and uh and then it
078usually takes us a a few months to kind of figure out what what happened and and how and how are we going to be affected by it so uh i'm asking all of you who were were who are participating uh if you just just kind of keep that in your thinking that's what we really want to know next uh uh and in the mean in the meantime if anyone goes to tallahassee uh i know these folks would love to see you there and uh just let them know when you're coming and you can tag along and talk to your legislators they can open up doors for you and get you to meet your representatives uh so let's let's do it if you have any time at all get up get up to tallahassee before march
07911th i thank you all enjoy the rest of your day be good to your valentine partner and i'll see you again if not before definitely in april bye bye you