001really time. I'm not apparently. Good morning and welcome to the Valuchia County School Board workshop. Today is Tuesday, April the 8th, 2025, and it is 10:04 a.m. At this time, I'm going to call the meeting to order. In just a moment, I'm going to ask that you please join me um by standing for the pledge of allegiance followed by a moment of silence and reflection. So, at this time, will you please join me? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. You may be seated. At this time, I'd like to introduce those that are here at the front with me. On my far left, I have Mrs. Donna Bromer representing
002district 4. Next to her is Mrs. Christa Goodrich representing district 2. Our school board attorney, Dr. Gilbert Evans. On my far left, we have Mrs. Celeste Gilmore represent She's our agency clerk. She represents all of us. Then we have Mrs. Jesse Thompson representing district three. Mr. Ruben Cologne who represents district five and is our vice chair should be arriving um in just a few minutes. Then we have Dr. Carmen Balgaban our superintendent. And I am Miss Jamie Haynes. I represent district 1 and I'm your chair at this time. So today we have three main items that we're going to actually four that we're going to be addressing during the workshop. The first item is going to be um the preliminary part for the 2025 budget. And then following that because that's a 2hour time period,
003we will then take a short 30 minute break and be back in here for the next three items where we're going to address address academics, operations, human resources with technology services. So Dr. Bagaban. Thank you, Madam Chair. Board members, good morning. Those of you in the audience, thank you for joining us. As requested by the board, we're here today. We have our team that's prepared to provide to you a 2526 budget update. We have our chief financial officer, um, Mr. Todd CE. Um, he will be joining us at the DAS and also we have our chief of staff, Mr. John Cash. We have our chief operating officer, Miss Patty Core, and our um chief academic officer, Dr. Julian Nazario Vay. Welcome. Good morning. Good morning, Chair Haynes. Good morning, board members, Superintendent Balgabim. Uh thanks
004for this opportunity to be in front of you this morning. As the superintendent alluded to, the genesis for this workshop came from some board members asking for this information. And how that happened was we simply met with you one-on-one, superintendent, the CFO, the executive director of HR, Miss Workman, and myself. We're getting ready to do budget allocations with our principles for their uh units. And every time we do that, you know, and I want to say publicly, our principles allocation plans, they worked diligently on them. They took great care in making the best decisions for their schools. Not always a difficult uh process when we have some challenges ahead of us financially, which is why we're here today. So, I also wanted to share with you that we look at everything before we want to
005touch the classroom with cuts. We look at the district particularly and one area I want to share with you a couple things and the CFO will go in much more detail with this. This is just a very general approach is we were able to save about two $2.4 $4 million from our general fund to help protect our classrooms. That was important to us through cuts at the district level in different departments in addition to some funding issues where we move some funding around to do that as well. Also, we looked very closely at our admins uh at administrative costs at the district level. And just so you're aware, over the 10-year period, we've went from 36 to about 40 units at the assistant director or above level. But that's for a variety of reasons. It's
006because of some legislative mandates quite uh literally safety and security is one of them. After Marjorie Stoman Douglas in 2018, we had to increase some of our areas there. In addition, we brought our uh custodial services back in house as well, which also we need uh some additional support there. The other thing I'd like to share with you too because we look at other districts that surround us is that when we look at those administrative levels at the district level of assistant director and above and we look at surrounding counties, we are one of the lowest by far. There are some that have same enrollment as we do, if not um um less or more, and they have 10 or 15 more positions at that level than we do. But how did we get here?
007Well, the challenges were facing uh you might recall our third calculation, I know the CFO knows this very well, we didn't receive our third calculation from the state in order to do the budget process till very very late. And when we looked at that, some of you probably are aware, 46 districts, including Valuchia being one of them, did not meet their enrollment projections from the state. So this is not a Valuchia County issue. This is a systematic issue across our state where we have these challenges with enrollment trends. So the purpose today is to share this information with you, answer any questions you may have, and tap into our CFO's expertise. So thank you. Good morning everyone. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and um thank you for the feedback I got from Can
008you hear me? Okay. Well, just a little bit more. Okay. Um um thank you for the feedback to to those um board members that reached out to me regarding that um initial um budget workshop presentation. I did make some changes to accommodate some of those additional things that some of the board members wanted to see in in the presentation. I hope I captured the spirit of those requests. Okay. Okay, I might have you help me along with the with the little slide there. Absolutely. Happy to help. Okay, thank you. Okay, this this presentation we have to go back to board policy, what drives fund balance and the presentation fully align with um policy 722 regarding fund balance management and with our strate strategic planning goals and guard rails. Our work ties directly to student learning
009here. Supporting high quality staff and improving operating efficiency. Thanks. Okay, we can skip the next one. Okay, I mean why why are we here? And it's really to the introduction for today is really get a better understanding of how we budget in a government and in a general operating fund. So, so what does that mean? Um, the legislature, I just want to high level here real quick and I'm going to go in more depth in it. The legislature, and this is for the public's knowledge, too, the legislature drives about 99% of all the funds you receive for your general operating fund. They're the ones that dictate dictate how much money that you'll have to operate next year. They'll also dictate as far as you know if there's a a salary increase that they want to
010pass on to the instructional that will be all published in those bills. So today we're going to go walk through that budget update for the 20256 our goals to give you a full view of the current um financial landscape the decisions we made to align with our strategic priorities and the challenges we face especially with declining enrollment and underenrolled schools. A budget is a numeric representation of the resources that are needed to realize your strategic plan which is a large part required by state accountability system. Next slide please. Skip to the next one for me. I'm going to jump one more for me. This one. Yeah, let's go. Okay. Um I apologize about that. Um, there's a slide that I really wanted you to see here and it was related to it's included in your
011budget and for those that I know the board members studied my budget in depth. Um, they and they improved it on the front of your budget book. I put like a little seduko puzzle I call it. That's what I call it in there. It shows you a diagram of all the funds that you actually have under your umbrella. Thank you. and it's called the inter interdependent relationship between funds. What sits right in the middle of this is your general operating fund. You can't go outside of that. So if you're if you if you don't have enough resources in your general fund, you can see if there's any grants that could help you subsidize the program that you want to implement. Um but you can't spend outside of that. you can't go um in the red.
012Okay? So, you have to live within the boundaries that are defined here on on the little puzzle. So, when I was when I'm talking about the um suduku puzzle, it's it's a looking at all of our it's a holistic approach looking at all of our financial resources and then managing you know what can what can the um what can we cover with grants this year? what what's um our maintenance costs are going to be for this year. So, you have to look at each fund and the anticipated expenditures that you're going to have and the anticipated revenues that you're most likely going to have as well for for capital would be a good example. Mr. CE, yes. Can I just ask a question to make sure um that I understand this page correctly? Yes, ma'am.
013All right. So, this is what we received for the general operating funds and that is the first number that's listed there, the 588.1 million. Miss Haynes, I'm sorry, chair. Um, I haven't I we're I'm missing that slides for some reason that this one here. Oh, that's Oh, okay. That's that's all right. That's all right. Yeah, let me talk about this slide here real quick. I haven't really talked about this one yet, even though it's up. Okay. Yeah. I I apologize about that. I yeah I don't know what happened there but let me um go ahead on to this this slide here real quick just to give you an idea really what I want to just say is I have we have to live within a general fund and that's what this representation shows and it's
014also in your budget book in the front. Okay. So on the fund on on the slide that's up right now and the slide shows how we calculate and maintain fiscal stability here in the district. Our reoccurring expenditures are approximately 588.1 million. So you have reoccurring expenditures and you have role for expenditures that are reappropriated. So for example, if we have excuse me if we have like textbook adoption where we um are we we put it in a project if we don't fully um spend it those funds roll forward so that the expenditures can take place in the next year. So that's what you call is a non-reoccurring roll forward budget. So a reoccurring to us is new money that comes in from the state and we have to live within that amount of money that
015we receive to pay for your reoccurring salaries every year and your reoccurring supplies, materials, all of those expenditures that you normally have um in any business organization. So with this slide, if you take the 588.1 million of reoccurring expenditures and you divide that by 12 months, that gives you about $49 million per month in spending. And this is just in your general operating fund. Our unassigned fund balance that we have right now is roughly $28 million. So from this lens that you're looking at right now on this slide, we conclude that 5% unassigned fund balance, unassigned fund balance only covers a little over half a month of projected reoccurring expenditures. Our goal is to remain diligent in maintaining this policy driven even when faced with unknown state funding adjustments and I'll talk about those a
016little bit later. that happened to us in the third FPF calculation. This district has made deliberate decisions to spend down the reserves right now that we have um over a two-year process while um aligning staffing and programs with the current revenues that we're currently receiving. So, um M chair, I'm sorry to inter have interrupted you on that question. No, that's exactly what I wanted you to clarify because that was one of the questions that I had posed to you because lots of times we have individuals that come and speak publicly and they throw out a number. And so if you, you know, if you ignored everything on that page except where it says 28 million, 28 million seems like an overwhelming large amount of money, but the reality is 28 million would only cover about
017half of a month of expenses. I mean, we're all, or at least I was taught, you should always have like a six-month um savings account to get you through in the event something happens. And yet, you know, our policy says we must maintain at 5% based on what the policy is for the state. And we've done our best to stay at 5% as we are currently even watching some districts that have dipped below that because if you get to 3%, the state comes in and takes you over. And I know that I shared an article with several of you um during spring break or recently that came out about Duval County um and where they're at. And one of their board members said, "I kept saying this is what was going to happen to us
018if we were not careful. And once the state takes you over, it's really difficult to ever come back." Correct. We don't we we'd never want to be in that um situation. Um again we're d we drive expenditures are driven by the amount of revenue that the state sends to us. So if the state doesn't want to send us any money next year which is what I'm seeing but I'll talk about that later. Um we then now have the only option is you can't um increase you're going to have to decrease. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. So what this what this slide's actually showing is your general operating fund reoccurring budget what I submitted at the beginning of the year. So we adopted the budget with a spendown of fund balance of
01925.8 million and um it's a controlled spendown and we want to do that over a two-year period. I had $10 million um budgeted assigned remaining to spend down. So that's what we need to make sure for this year. Um that's coming up for the 2025 26 school year. Uh we had several adjustments that occurred from the beginning budget to now. What some of those are looking at our ESSE programs and making sure that the students level of service that they're receiving is properly aligning with how we're coding them in the system. So we did that through um a due diligence exercise this year that took place under Dr. Belgamin's leadership there to make sure that um putting the right resources in the right position to be able to do this and identify that really aided
020us. And um what I also want to say too, another thing that really affected our budget this year um as of January was the results of the third FFP calculation. We got hit with a $4.1 million prorations to funds available. So, what does that mean? The state appropriates so much at the beginning of the year. Um, I'm I'm not I don't know if I have to be careful what I say. I don't know if I do or not, but anyways, there was an issue with the Department of Education and how they were calculating the anticipated amount of students that we were going to have in the scholarship program. They overspent. So, what happens is they overspent and already handed out the money for the scholarship PEP programs. So what happens is well we don't have
021any extra money because the state only appropriated so much. So who feels the brunt and pain of that? We do the traditional schools. So they got all their money and we didn't. So basically that's all I want to say there. Um and we had to absorb some of those costs moving forward for next year because we didn't get to keep that money. That impacted allocation meetings as well. And we shared all this information with principles. So I mean we were very transparent with principles when we met with them so they had a firm understanding of why their allocations were where they were. So to add to that last year after the third calculation which was later it was not on time last year if I remember correctly we had to return between seven and $8
022million. I'm trying to remember off the top of my head how much that um when you talk about return well adjustment we had to adjust I I want to yeah and and for everyone's um for purpose of clarification here I want to explain one thing that I wasn't really going to touch on here is we have what is called um at the beginning of the year I budget for undistributed FTE so when we work with the department of education to project our FTE in December for this upcoming school year in 2025 26 year where we're we rely heavily on the Department of Education to let us know how the scholarship programs are growing because we we have a pretty good idea how we're growing here on our traditional schools and virtual program. So when uh
023when we when they allocate when we work and they allocate more FTE than we can account for where they're going to be placed here in the traditional setting, I put that aside in our budget and it's called undistributed FTE. So when the calculation comes in and it looks like we're reducing revenues, part of it, it could be related to the undistributed money that I then had to turn back in that turned into scholarships. So that's actually what happened this year. um chair. Um exactly. Thank you for bringing that up. Is because we I had an undistributed amount of students that I didn't know where they were going to land and we were budgeted really high on unweighted FTE with the Department of Education. So I'm just grateful that we had that. What I did was
024since I didn't know exactly where they were going to end up, I take all the revenues I received from that and I fully appropriated them and lock them up. You no one can touch those funds. So what happens when the third FFP calculation came in what all of those students ended up in scholarship. So that's what happened. So the state actually underp projected the scholarships but since we had that huge undistributed FD they basically ended up in the scholarship program. So the account this is where the accounting gets fun with this. So, and I'll explain that a little bit later and I don't want to go in too much depth here, but I basically moved the money from the undistributed into the scholarship programs and it's really a reduction of our revenues. Did that make
025sense? Does that make Okay. And CFO, may I since you touched on scholarships, I think the numbers important. So, the amount you had to set aside last year and then the amount the state is requiring you to set aside this year was quite alarming to me or quite an aha moment from that 8 to 10. Could you touch on that briefly? for the upcoming year for the um FTE projection. Um we are growing in a scholarship program. We're going from 8 to 10 10 um thousand students that will be attending scholarship. That's their projection. I hope they hit their projection this year correctly and don't take any more money from us. Okay. So I'm I'm sorry. I'm I'm get frustrated with them. Um can can we Yeah. Yeah, please. Thank you. Oh, there there is
026no seduka. This is what he wanted. Oh, okay. Thank you. Thank you. So, this this is the slide I was talking about. It was this seduka puzzle that I I that I really want the public to really understand too. Um is that we had to just live within that box. So, I I won't go into too much depth on that because I think I beat it up pretty good. And then um Okay, so we talked about that one. And then for um budgeting for other districts, not so what I want to explain because I don't think people realize this and this is really not for the board's interjection is really for the public again. So when they look at our financial statements and our budget, when we're budgeting for for scholarship programs, the state again
027says where you're going to have the district, you are the district of Valuchia County, which includes scholarships, charter schools, virtual schools, um, and your traditional students. they they report on their FFP revenue sheet by district um how much money is going to be handed down to that district. So included in there is the scholarships. So the scholarships um they it's basically an in and out. So they budget all the re they tell you how much revenue you're going to get for the whole district. But then they put have a line item now. They didn't do this before, but they do have it where they said then you need to um reduce the amount of revenues you have related to scholarships by X. So, it's right $40,000 or something this year. I don't have it right
028off the top of my head. $40 million, I'm sorry, off the top of my head. I know you looked at me. No. And and in PEP, just just as an aside for a point of reference, when the state rolled out PEP three years ago, they started with 20,000 scholarships. Then the following year they went to 40,000 scholarships. And this year they're at 60,000 scholarships and every one of those scholarships is being utilized. So in that s that's the money that we're talking about. So basically in your budget book, if you're looking at your budget, you'll see I I have two different pages in there. One showing you all the FIP revenues that the state allocates. The next page shows the actual revenues that we're going to be recording on our books. So for scholarships, it's
029a reduction of revenue. Okay. So if I can clarify on that for anyone that goes back and listens to this at home, all of the revenue for the students that live within Valuchia County comes to Valuchia County schools then at so when everybody looks at the total amount that comes and they're like, "Oh, you had $1.3 billion." The true story of that is yes, that's the piece that comes, but then all of the scholarship pieces, the virtual, like even if they go to Florida virtual, all of the the private schools, the homeschooling, all that that is now happening, the money comes to us, but then we just release it to all of those entities. Okay. Can I put a clarifier on there, Miss Chair? Okay. For scholarships, we reduce our revenue that we have in
030our budget. So yes, they're showing us all the revenue for the scholarships, but now I have to reduce our revenue. So when you look at your budget book and it looks at total revenues that we have available, it's reduced for the scholarships. They're not included in that revenue. Okay. All right. So they're reducing that piece. Even though they're listing this is the amount I'm reducing it. Yes. Correct. Yes. But then we are still feeding the money to the charter schools. Okay. So this is how charter school accounting goes in the next part of this. So we bring in the estimated revenues for it. It goes on your book. So you'll see that in revenues, but then it's an immediate appropriation down below. So that's distributed to the charter school. So it's in and it's appropriated
031out. So the total amount of revenue that it originally list is not actually all of ours to spend. It it's it's all of Correct. It's it's the charter school component share of that. Um for virtual schools it's the same thing. So virtual it's you record the revenue and it's appropriated for your virtual program and then your bonus FTE program it's additional revenue that comes in and those that appropriation is allocated out to the schools. Okay. But to your point, chair, in simplistic terms, correct, he has to make those adjustments. And of course, the CFO thinks of it from that lens, but the general public sees that figure that you alluded to and thinks that we have all of that money at our disposal when we do not, which is what he just articulated. Well, and
032to add to that, and I know that we're talking predominantly about the general operating budget today under the federal grant piece, there are set aides under all of the federal grants, right? And also those entities, the charter schools and even the private schools are set aides under our federal grants. So if we have 18 million come in under say title one part A, we don't get the entire 18 million because we have to set aside an appropriate proportion for charter schools and private schools that go out of the federal grants also into those along with indirect costs which people don't seem to understand. Yeah. Yeah, that's a 100% correct statement. Thank you, chair, for clarifying the federal programs and how that works because we all the money comes in that is in your budget and
033then we have to distribute out the private school share in the f the federal program. But you're right, I'm just talking about the general fund right now. Go ahead, M. Just have a really quick question while we're on the topic. Is there an admin fee that we charge for processing the vouchers? It's called an indirect. What does that amount to? Yeah. Um, Dedro, what was the Do you remember? I'm just curious like how much since we're spending energy on processing this, are we being We'll pull it. Yeah, I I I'll pull the exact percent. We already calculated the percent for next year or two, so I'll share that with takeaway is fine. I don't need it right now. Thank you. Yep. Thank you. Okay. Again, we're I I just want to focus just on a
034general operating fund because that's that's the main source of funds that we have to pay for salary enhancements and which is about 80% of your budget. We we follow on for for budgeting for the school staffing models, we follow um the DOE's um program cost accounting um methodology. At the end of the year, we're required to f file with the department of education. It's called a cost report. And what it does is it breaks it down by you know what are those indirect charges variable indirect charge um charges that come in from the district that can't be exactly charged there. So on the revenues all the revenues are basically derived from in your general fund from the Florida um um education finance program. So it's the stu the individual student and their actual pro their
035needs um dictates how much money that you'll actually receive because we call them gen for a gen ed students just a basic student would generate a certain amount. If you have a student that has a special needs um and level of service you'll get a little additional money to pay help pay for those services. And then for let's just for how the staffing model works. You have a fixed component with that. And the fixed component is just related to if you have a school and it doesn't matter the size of the school. You're basically going to have certain costs associated with the school. You know, you have um and you have just maintenance of that particular facility. You have to keep electricity on um at a minimum. So there's a principal you'll need at each
036school. Well, that's like a variable fix and I was gonna kind of straddle that fence here just a little bit. I'm just playing in your world. This your expertise. Yes. So, um but but thank you Mr. Cash. Yes. Um so if the this you have staffing minimums really unfixed. a staffing minimum to me if you just had a school just sitting there um empty, you still have to have someone responsible to go around and check on that facility just to make sure. So that you have a minimum staffing, minimum maintenance with it and a little bit of utilities and security that would be related to as well because we want to make sure that we secure our infrastructure why it's not being utilized. um we don't particularly have that situation going on here, but um
037I just wanted to say that's kind of what makes up that fixed component. Then you have like a a variable cost and then I'll talk about the variable fix in a little bit. So variable cost is you add one student now you add a principal you add um um counselor counselor nurse media specialist media specialist media cafe you can okay that's that's yes that's that's food service fun I understand but you have to add them that's that's correct so so you have as you keep adding students now and don't forget about our our wonderful instructional team too so that very you add one student, you have to have an instructional um personnel there. So, as that grows, you add more bit more instructional faster than you would your admin. It balances out. So you you
038you start with an initial but as you keep adding students now your initial fixed or variable fix I like to call them because it's like your principal your like we were just talking about your counselor your nurse those positions kind of like a variable fix where it it stays pretty stagnant as as at no matter how many students you have in up to a certain point then you start adding more administration to actually accommodate acccomodate the growth of the student population. But the variable the big variable there is really your your instructional staff. You need to make sure that we meet the needs of those students and the supplies and materials associated with that and computers and technology. So all that's that that variable component and really this exercise is try to help um get
039the public to understand. We have some board members that own their own business so they understand this this structure really well. And um but I just wanted to make sure that the public understands how we budget here. So Mrs. Goodrich has a question now. Yeah, just a quick clarification for the public. So you hear in the you know that we have a over billion dollar budget. So we're talking about 588 million being in the general fund. Can you explain what the other 600 million is just briefly so that people have an understanding of where the rest of that money is and what is going forward? Okay. So for the for the 588 that's that was just recurring. That's not your that's your non that does not include your non-reoccurrence. So it's more that more than
040that in your general fund. And I'm just talking about your general operating fund. You have four general funds that consolidate together. So you have a prek VPK, you have program, you have your maintenance of plant um and you also have extended day program. All of those have their um individual those three have their individual funds. So when we because we don't want to um get those when we're looking at salary enhancements, we just want to focus really on the general operating fund. So the additional funds that we're talking about is coming a little bit coming from those funds. And uh also and it's in the budget book if anyone wants to pull this down. I published this information and I expect people to read it and look at it. So in your in your budget
041book and um that was adopted. If we go to page uh 13 and 14 of this, you can see in general fund consolidated what we budgeted at the beginning of the year was about $719 million for the special revenue fund. Your special revenue fund would include your um grants and special programs and also your food service that gets all rolled up together consolidated of 150.7 million. Your debt service we have about 48.1 capital projects I'll just say 600 million. I'm just going to roll it up there. Um your internal service funds um are part of that but your internal service funds actually support your other funds. So that would be like your print shop. So you would have printing so that you can build the uh federal programs fund back. It it's it's accounting net.
042It's fast and I I could go into depth in this and I'm not going to torture everyone but that's the breakdown. Did that did that help? Yeah, just wanted to clarify because the numbers okay could confuse people. Okay. And and then let's see here. Where did we leave off here? So, we had we talked about the variable and then I'm going to talk about um the schools um cost. Okay. Sorry, lost my footing just a little bit here. Are you ready for the next slide? Possibly. No, I'm just I'm sorry, chair. Just give me a minute. I lost my place here when I when I flipped my pages. So um okay, so on the indirect costs that we're talking about is really um those costs are at this level right here. So um part of
043it your salaries are an indirect cost to all the schools. Um um we have services. If you have a teacher, you're going to have payroll and HR now. If you you have fi if you have a student, you're going to have finance now because you have transparency. So there's trim requirements that we have to follow. There's financial reporting that we have to recall cost reporting back to the state. All of that all that reporting. So you have a finance operations there. And then also if you have charter schools you can have finance operations because the money flow in they have to flow it back out to the and pay the charter schools their share of the funds. So that's kind of the indirect cost associated that gets charged back to the schools uh model that
044um because how this funding works is when I'm budgeting for the schools to show a true um financial report for the school. They get all of the FFP revenue. I distribute it all to them based on their student needs. Then they have their I'm going to regurgitate just just a little bit. Then you they have their fixed cost that we talked about. Then they have all their instructional cost, all those things it takes to run a school. Then they have that indirect cost like the board of governance that gets charged on the back end because they have the money to pay for it. So we have to do it as a indirect back to them. We don't keep any of the money here through for the FFP. And what you'll see in just a moment,
045a couple slides. I think this is important that the public understands what the CFO is saying here about how those indirect costs are charged back to the schools. In a couple slides, he has a nice breakdown in the percentages. Okay. So, so um I I hope that helped clarify. Did Did that Okay. I'm looking for your guidance, too, because you're you're my my business owner here that you know this stuff. So, I just want to make sure I I clearly um stated Um, yes, please. Thank you. So, so in those variable costs, again, you can see the positions that would be associated with is really is your your wonderful instructional staff that we have here um that make that up. You have your core immediate specialist, pair professionals, student support services. you have in your
046admin, you have principles, assistant principles, you know, um um operational support, um office specialists that help support the overall school there. And then um you would have some of your non- salary. That's all that variable that we're talking about as as you add growth at a school, you're going to have increased cost in these areas. Next slide. But this is the slide that I think is important for the public to understand. CFO. Yeah. So for I think um Yeah. So for indirect cost these these are the things that are on the that get charged here at the district office but remember the schools have all the money so we have to get the money back from so this is how it works and for the public's knowledge. So when you see like an indirect charge
047below the line there's textbook adoptions that's a big one. If I'm buying $8 million worth of textbooks here at the district office for the schools that have to go back to the schools, um we charge it here and then it gets distributed back down to the schools. Okay. You have um other things that make up your in direct instructional um like substitute teachers um exceptional additional exceptional need services here that are kind of like allocated back to the schools and they go based on where they're needed in in the district at those schools. Then you have instructional support. So that's where you see um the exceptional needs as part of that too. you have a six,000 function related to that and that would be um you a five I don't know if I should go
048into this level of detail you just tell me keep me back on track here but um I'm so a 5,000's direct okay you have you don't have 5,000 um expenditures function 5,000 charged at a district level they have to go back down to the schools that's you have 6,000 can be charged here But then it's the sole purpose of a um instructional support is to support your 5,000 function. That's the sole purpose of a 6,000 function. So that's most most of all the curriculum team is all 6,000 function. So when he speaks of those functions, I'm sure you see it there. You see the first digit there and it's just xed out. That's what he's referring to just so the public would see that as well. In his mind, it's those numeric, but that's what
049it equates to. Yeah, it's a it's it's a function. I should have put function on here. So my my apologies. Then you have your support services. That's the like the board of governance. That's that's me. Human resources, information, technology, legal sitting over there. Um um and also transportation. Let me talk about transportation just for a minute. The state doesn't fully fund us for transportation. Okay? So what happens is the additional cost that's not covered by the revenues that we get from the state for transportation has to be allocated back down to the schools because remember the schools have all of the money. I distributed all the money to schools. And then the next thing is your operations like you have your custodian um charges that are like cover your district buildings um ground maintenance um
050for your district buildings uh utilities for your district buildings um actually get charged back to the schools because we don't have any money here. The schools have the money but they're paying for these services. Okay. Did that make sense? Okay. Okay. Um key key budgeting factors optimal use. So this is a fun topic for be before the CFO shares this slide in simplistic terms many people look at a school and they look at the population of a school and they might do a simple equation and say well if they've got X number of students at this school and they generate that times the FTE that's the amount of money that school earns. But the whole point of what the CFO shared prior to this is those costs that are applied back to the schools to
051cover all the things that he said. That's the key component that I think most individuals don't quite grasp and that's kind of where this slide will lead us into. Okay. Yeah, I like that later in. Thank you, sir. Um um the key so the there are some of the major factors we evaluate when making strategic budget decisions. Okay. So you have student enrollment. Where's the growth actually happening? You know, I'm going to say the nasty word here, and I know no one likes it, but this is just the CFO talking as your financial advisor. Sometimes you have growth is growing so fast where you might have to and you don't have a school yet ready for it. And this is what happened to me in another county where you had you had to rely on
052resoning to kind of shift it. But all school districts have that. So, it's a mechanism that you use. And not saying that we're doing it here, but that's a mechanism that school districts use. So what I'm saying here does apply to all the other school districts across the state. Okay. Um you also have so enrollment drives the funding but it also affects school level staffing. So there's transportation considerations now depending on um the migration of students and how they're moving around. Um as enrollment really declines or shifts we must consider boundary adjustments to optimize schools utilization. So I'm getting somewhere here. So our schools are driven by what CT programs do we have there is what what's the exceptional needs students population that we have our particular school. So um these these offerings that we
053have kind of drive um uh we look and continually evaluate I guess is the best way to say this um the enrollment at that particular facility based on the program needs and then what cost effective measures can we can we look at to make sure that they're getting the level of services that they need. But first, we got to get them there, too, and make sure that we get them in to a school that's that's um closely zoned or close to where they live. So, there's sometimes we offer and I can you help me out with this on the CTE programs. We offer a CTE program, but we do allow um out of out of zone. Is that correct, Mr. Cash? For some of these, it is correct. We call it the choice variance program.
054Different words we utilize for it. So yes, students are able to choose those schools where there's a unique program offering. Okay. So that's really what I wanted to talk to you about that on the educational programs offered. So it really depends and there is the there is a um you know students have that flexibility to to go to these and um go to these different programs and these schools that offer them. So what are cost containment? Um, we have the what drives and this is where I'm going to start getting a little bit right in the face with you. You you have to res your you have to receive funding at a level that at least um reported the cost of goods and services going up. So, what does that mean? Let me let me
055break that down again. Let me say that again for the public because I want to make sure I get this right. You you your your business if if one of the things that we're faced with and I'm just going to say it. I'm going to um put myself out there is that sometimes it for the business leaders that actually ran a business, they understand, hey, you know, the successes of those businesses, but also, you know, the problems that you inherit as you're going through the business cycle. maybe staffing issues to outfit their business. Um, but you can't continue to operate a business and you because you have to look at inflationary factor, the cost of goods and services that you're purchasing and then the employees that you're hiring. You want to be able to offer
056them a competitive wage to compete with other businesses. It doesn't seem to work that way in in K12 for some reason in the traditional sense. So where I'm going with this is that inflation is a guide that's used by our legislatures to drive how much money that they really should be looking at and allocating to the K12 um um public education system. May I ask would that come through the BSA? Is that where that increase could be offset? that that's that's the the BSA is the big driver and I have a slide that will show show that and did you hear what they're predicting this year the percentage of the BSA increase I have a slide I'm leading up to it I I want to probably leave it for that slide okay so um so
057you can't you can't continue to operate effectively because over a decade's period of time and I'm getting on a bandwagon so keep me on track here you guys Okay. Okay. We're focused on the CPI and the cost of goods and services going up as well. That's that's a factor that concerns all of us. Would it be appropriate for me to ask a question about one of the things you have on this slide that is currently up? So on the second line where it says educational programs offered such as AP, IB, and CTE, I want to thank you for giving me the additional information because we've got a bill in this um House and a bill in the Senate right now that is looking at cutting that funding by 50%. Yes, ma'am. And also included um
058in that funding is our dual enrollment, our um early graduation pieces and our ACE and other programs. And so I had conversation with people at the state level and came back to um Mr. who um graciously shared with me that in October all districts received a survey that they had to complete and um I got permission to share that survey you know so that they could use Valuchia survey also in Tallahassee along they collected from some other districts and so if you guys haven't seen the survey yet it was a survey that came out that was asked to be filled out by each district and it's a chart and so it listed each program it listed dual enrollment AAP IB, ACE, um, early graduation, the CT and CAPE funds, but it had a column that
059said other, and this is where I tend to want to give the benefit of the doubt and say, "Oh, there should have been another column prior to other and we maybe would not be having this discussion in Tallahassee right now." Well, the other column when they collected all the data because I looked at our chart. Our chart was submitted correctly. But under other, that's where the charter so charter schools are included in this piece. This is where funding for charters slides through, but they didn't put a charter school column where you could report the funding out of that that was going directly to charter schools. It falls under other. So other looked larger than where the money was in our other columns because of course more money is going from that fund source to charter
060than what's staying in Valuchia for these programs. So the statement was made well if they're not spending it on these programs and they're spending it on other then they don't need all of that. So we could reduce it by 50%. So, we're we're in a situation right now that we have worked so hard in Valuchia County to come back by bringing back programs and industry certifications and all of the things that our students need because not every child is going to choose to go to a college or university. A lot of them want to come out ready to be able to work and have an apprenticeship and things like that. And and this is also including some of our brightest students that are going to earn an international balorate, you know, diploma. And I don't
061think everyone realizes how we got here. We got here based on a survey that I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. But the reality is had they added a charter column and reported that money instead of under other under charter, I don't think the other column would have had much money in it. And so this is why our some of you probably have received emails like I have. I have been responding and asking parents to write to our to our local representatives as well as the representatives that are sitting on the budget, the ones that have brought this bill forward. And I've tried to explain to them how we got here. And I've asked students to write and former students that have recently graduated that went through these programs to write about
062the benefits. The loss of funding here is a direct impact on our students. It's not a positive impact on our students. It's a negative impact on our students. And so I think whatever we can do to get our legislators to listen and as I've told them, it's a whole lot harder to hear a story from a kid and still go make those cuts versus hearing it just from us. But that is heartbreaking to me right now. So So um thank you chair for letting me regroup here. I was getting a little frustrated. Miss Goodrich does have a question. Okay. Yeah. H how much steam does this bill actually have? Um, it has already made it all the way through the House into the budget. We were hoping the Senate wasn't going and then the Senate
063jumped right on in and it is gone. I think the Senate is much more reasonable on it right now. Um, but the House is at cutting 50%. And so I can tell you I have talked to some of the principles, you know, there's only two that have the IB program and that's Spruce Creek High and Dan. So I even talked to the delay principal and said, "What would this do to your IB program?" Because I was hearing from a lot of IB parents as well as a lot of our CTE and Kate parents and he said, "I'll lose this many teaching units that are funded through that." And picking up the test cost for these kids to be tested, we're going to lose our testing cost. And because this is the money where even in
064our CT and cape we've been able to afford the tests for the kids to have the certification walking out. This to me is will be one of the biggest hits we will take financially if this goes through. Thank you for that explanation. So so moving moving on a little bit here. So what's driving you can't continue to effectively operate and I'm just going to talk about a business now because that's what but what we are but from a business if the cost of goods and services um and labor are going up at a a CPI so it's 2.9 for this last year but you're they're only you're only you only have revenues coming in that are at less than 1%. % over a period of you can sustain yourself if you have a nice level
065savings account built up in a business. So, and most business owners will appreciate this and know this. You can't continue to operate like that over a decade worth of time where you haven't been keeping up with at least the cost of goods and services going up um to um promote your business. any successful business. So um on NIST what happens here on a school type approximate break even point. So there's drivers in here. The driver the main driver is really your revenue. If you if your revenues are not keeping up that that break even point actually gets a little worse. So because you have what's your biggest driver in your budget is the salaries. Teacher salaries. it's your biggest driver in there. So for right now the the estimate and remember this is a this
066is kind of dynamic. You know I'm I'm running different scenarios. So I'm running scenarios for a house proposed budget. I'm running a scenario for a senate proposed budget. You know the governor issued his proposed budget. You know what does that look like? So I'm making these adjustments trying to get it into their head. Well that's impossible. I don't want to think like some of them. But um um if you know what is the current break even right now and it's right at that 750 for an elementary middle school's 1150 and a high school is above 1850 and that's kind of the break even point right now. But again, you know, revenues help help with that and because you want to be able to also salaries go up every year, you need the revenues in order
067to be able to sustain yourself. May I ask a clarifying question, CFO? So that that number 750, let's just use that. We've heard different numbers utilized at different periods in time. Could you clarify that? Yeah. One thing and and I want to and there was a comment that was made. I was in I think it was a board workshop setting when they were with facilities team was actually here and I believe the prototype that um um was introduced was a 650 for an elementary school. Believe me, that's really that is a sweet spot for an elementary school. But the problem is that the on on your legislature doesn't fund you in order to have a school that small. Okay? Your your legislature funds you at the 750 sweet spot because remember again, it's revenues that
068are driving this. So, um um is that fixed or will that ever fluctuate? Well, it does fluctuate. It all depends on on if your revenues go up, revenues go down. If your revenues go down, it's going to get worse. Um, if you're if you give out more in salary enhancement packages, the cost of goods and services is going up. But again, 80% of that's driven by your salaries. So, okay, next one. Yeah, please. Thank you. So, I I have to show this. I have to Thank you. Um Um before I jump on that slide, Mr. And just getting back to you real quick on your indirect cost for federal programs since we have to manage it. Um we do charge a restricted rate um for this upcoming year. It's going to be 4.81%. Okay. That
069includes the vouchers. No, it does not. It's just for your federal program. So um title one um IDA since we're managing that for voucher students the money comes to the school district then we have to forward that. No no we don't we don't receive any we don't manage the voucher program at all. Okay. Yeah. We don't have anything to do with that. State handles that. So what's the amount you're charging federal programs for indirect this year? For the for this year it is 3.21%. So it is going up. It's going up. Yeah it's going up to what percentage? uh um to 4.81% for this upcoming year. Okay, thank you. So, moving on to this, I have to show this slide because this is this is what I was alluding to in my presentation. You know,
070what the most frustrating thing is what came I heard come out of the legislature this year is the the school districts are just have to live with less. They're going to they're basically going to do us. Is that what the word is? The phrase. So, well, you've been doing that over the last decade or more. You look I mean this these are the numbers that are coming from the numbers they publish at the Department of Education that they know um with the CPI increase every year. So that's that orange solid line that's draw that's a CPI increase that's published by the by the um um Florida Department of Revenue because that's the amount that they use to assess the increases on what they charge for property tax in the state. So but there is a
071if you have homestead exemption it can't exceed 3%. So if you see I use 201617 as my baseline year. So that's why it's zero. But the change in the CPI over over the prior year and a ch the percentage change in the BSA over the prior year it's just not keeping up. It's it's just not keeping up. The red the red is it's really it's 2.4 was the really increase there. But what they did in that year they consolidated several programs into the BSA and eliminated them. Now, from an accounting perspective, I loved it. So, thank you for dep Thank you for legislature for doing that. I really appreciate it that because it makes my life a little bit easier because what it was, it was for your um and teacher um salary increase was
072broken out separately. You had instructional materials. Um you also had um reading was broken out to its own. Um classroom supply assistance. They used to give us a separate allocation line item for it, but basically they collapsed all of those and just moved them into the BSA. From accounting perspective, I I love it, you know. So, if someone asked me my opinion, I thought it was great. But the real increase that year, it's kind of mis misstates the really increase. Whoops, I sorry. The the the real increase was about two four 2.4% um that they gave us in BSA. And you can see the inflation. So that's what's hurting us here. It's the inflation and them not funding us. Remember, you you don't for the public's sake is this board does not control the amount
073of money that they receive from the state. The state legislature, the one that gives you the money, but you have to live within that. So the only way that you can live within it now, and they're not funding you at the cost of goods and services going up, you have to keep cutting and cutting and cutting. Well, you know, this this extends over a decade. these these these the way they've been funding you in prior administrations in the good old days you know they were actually funding you more than um CPI which was was brilliant and you could you were running a really robust educational program but this is if you if you I just want to say this if you just ran this through like a chat PT model and you just basically stated
074you know funding and you compared it is this sustainable I might have a I have a unique answer for you. So, you can do that exercise on your own. So, I'm going to um I think Dr. Balamin has I'm not going to share that. I want the public to do their own exercise on that. Mr. C, Dr. Balgamin has something. Oh, I'm sorry. So, team, can you clarify? You talked a little bit about the elementary schools and that sweet spot with the number versus truly what we received for a balancing budget, right, which is at 750. talk a little bit about high school because some and this is just for clarification purposes. You may have um 1,850 students enrolled into a high school, but not 8,850 students are receiving fulltime full-time equivalency. Talk about that
075for a second. That's Thank you, Superintendent. That also is a point that I do not believe that the public clearly understands. So take a high school and I'll use this number just for simplicity sake. Let's say you had a thousand students at that high school. You are not receiving FTE for a thousand students. You're receiving FTE for about 940 students because that's a factor that's applied to those high schools because not all of those students attend class every day. There's other variables that impact that. You go down to middle school, it's about 98.8 something. And he'll correct me if I'm wrong. And then um on the elementary it's almost one to one because typically the little ones stay there all day. So um even for a high school principal's perspective when he looks as a
076campus on a day and he's got a thousand students there he's got to create a master schedule for a thousand students. He's got to supervise a thousand students yet they're not earning the FTE for a thousand students. Thank you. Okay. Um so what are your challenges on the break even? Um schools less than the optimal size present unique challenges. You know your fixed costs per student go up as enrollment decreases. So if you're losing students, your fixed costs are inherently going up because you have if you just take your total cost for your fix and divide it by the number of your students there you you can you can we all have basic math. So we you know you take it by divide it by one student that's the cause 100 students the cost is
077less. Okay. So things um so you have things like maintenance, utilities, you know, your security, it's really your infrastructure are constant regardless really of the your enrollment. So the next one in limited economies of scale is if you have what we were talking about before, if you have a a school that has maybe 200 students in it, you have a principal um counselor nurse counselor nurse media specialist. Okay. But you still have you still have if you have a school at 750 sites you still have one principal a nurse counselor. You see that's the that's that limited economies the scales that I'm talking about there. Did that make sense everyone? Yes. Okay. Okay. So for ongoing evaluation and adjustments of staffing ratios. So the the the goal this year is was it was to we
078always start with our educational programs you know and I poor Dr. I had to I said, "Okay, what programs are you going to have? Where is there any changes in your the ES patterns?" And um all of that information we need in order to look at how we're going to project student enrollment at a particular school. So once we understand his educational program and what he wants to do for this upcoming year to mitigate any um you know schools that are not operating at full um efficiency, I'm just going to say it that way. We may have to make adjustments. So we're constantly making adjustments, but your budget has to kind of support that. So you need to make sure that you have the funds in the proper place in order to do that. So
079it's it's that constant evaluation and adjustments of your staffing ratios. So a good example of that is even through the course of the year we we project at the beginning of the year based on an enrollment number or projection that's kind of starts in December remember with the department of education and we we start the process for allocating units out here in March and we're working with the principles to do that and then we're doing we're comparing how is enrollment we we're constantly monitoring the enrollment system how's this how's the students enrollments for next year and we have reports that help us with that. And and then are we hitting our target? Are we exceeding our target? Do do we need more um instructional support at that school now because we're growing a little bit
080faster than anticipated or are we reducing? We're not seeing the growth necessarily at that school um this year. So should can something come cut back? Can we maybe um during a certain time of the year move an in at the beginning of the year? do we have a time where we can move instructional units around where they're actually needed because they don't have the student growth over here but they do over here. So those are all the things that we constantly are doing here in this district. But one of the things is that um um Dr. BIA's group is brilliant um and and and working on is that the REA department you know they they're looking at you know um what are the are the students successfully meeting what we've we um their learning objectives.
081So we if we identify that there's a need, you know, we'll we'll have to move um additional support in there to help meet those learning needs. You know, not all students learn at the same. And um so that's the adjustments. We always have to keep that in mind because we have to make sure that we meet that individual students learning goods and gains. So, and if I may to bring it back to the reality of what we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis, that's what principles are doing right now based on their staffing allocations, looking at enrollment trends. That's where all these adjustments have to occur based on everything that has come previously in this presentation impacts all of those decisions. So, we we start with a baseline staffing model and that's where we're doing
082full circle now. you heard kind of everything and what we're looking at, but then we start with the basic staffing man model because we want to make sure that we meet those mandates as are imposed by us by our legislative body and um for class size. So, we want to make sure we have, you know, those things that are required and make sure that we outfit our classrooms to to make sure that we stay within class size mandates. So, I'm going to stop on there. But then the next one here is really the you know, we're working hard to um um what is our enrollment CA campaign? And Mr. Cash, I'm going to kind of stop right now and turn it back over to you and kind of what I would simply say with all
083of the things that have been shared in this workshop today is that you will not hear anyone on the superintendent staff speak disparagingly about any charter school or choice school or private school or any choices that parents make. But what we will say is that we think that we are the best game in town and we offer the best product. And we know that if we get our students into our schools, they tend to stay and be and be successful. So that is the challenge to make sure that we highlight the successes in Valuchia County School. We are three points away from being an A-rated district. If you look back historically, I think it's been 16 years, I might be wrong in my math, since Valuchia was an A-rated district, and we are very close
084to achieving that even given all the parameters and things that you've heard the CFO talk about that are challenges. So to me that's a testament of the teaching talent we have in Valuchia County schools, the administrative talent, the district talent, the board, everybody contributes to that. So we will continue to get the message out that Valuchia County Schools is the best game in town. And and then so even our business owners too because um you know I had the privilege to work with a a neighboring school district which was an a school district. I saw what the business the business owners really thrived on that because you you just you know there's nothing about stating that you know we're in an a a rated school district our schools are operating at you know the efficiency
085that we need to be able to support produce that talent that we need for our businesses. Next slide. So um I'm I'm going to harp one more time back on this. We have to make sure to sustain our operations since the state's not doing their job. of the fundness as you can as as we can I'll show in here just a little bit. We have to make sure that we operate our schools um optimally. So we we need to we need to make sure that we have a school that's sitting at the 750 sweet spot. If if it's not then it actually costs more money than we actually receive to run that school. So it's a balancing act. So when you're when you're doing a budget on a mass scale like that, we're talking about
086all these schools, you know, you have to balance um the budget to try to accommodate these situations. So, you know, there's we have to make sure that we're fully utilizing our capacity where we have it built. And then um the community impacts. I'm going to come back to this slide real quick because I there's a there's a slide here I want to show you. And this is what Mr. Cash stated at the at at the beginning. This is this is a it's it's really kind of a I'm going to call it for what it is. It's attack on the traditional education system. And I I don't know why because the the I I work with some brilliant people. I worked with many superintendants. I worked with many um school district leaders. Um I'm blessed here.
087As you can see, this slide shows that we keep growing for the whole district. I'm talk about the whole district again. It includes all your scholarships and charter schools, virtual um traditional students. We are growing. Um every district for the most part or at least these select are growing across the state and these are the percentage growth that they're experiencing every year. But this is what's happening on the traditional uh it's based on a coffee report. So coffee is really those traditional students that sit in the classroom. So it doesn't include your virtual it doesn't include charter schools. It's just your traditional students. So I have to use the coffee numbers because that's the only way I can um um um pull out these numbers because it's not disclosed 100% in the FFP funding for
088me that way. So if anyone had ever wanted from the public's perspective to pull it down, just type in, you know, um, Kofi DOE and they'll be able to get those numbers. But as you can see, you know, comparison to Bvard, they're they're losing traditional students. They're projected to lose for this upcoming year. Um, it keeps touching it. Seinal issued to lose, you know, and seminals and a rate school district. Valuchia were projected predicted to lose on the Kofi report. these projections. This the data of this publication was last year July. We we DOE hasn't updated this yet. So um um so that's what I just really wanted to show you in in the state overall too. The state is declining in your traditional program. So it's really a state it's a state um issue
089with your traditional program and it's really just the um really I you know I don't understand it. Um I've I've you know I worked in the business sector. Um I I feel that we we offer a great um program here and and I'm just not understanding why it's not being fully utilized. But even furthermore than the examples the CFO gave you here, just for a frame of reference, Seminal has declined for three years in a row. Um Bvard has declined for three years in a row. Um, our large district of Broward has gone from 254,000 students down to 243,000 students. So, as we alluded to, this is not a Valuchia County issue. This is systematic across the state and the examples are plentiful. So, so we so we need a community impact and we we
090need stakeholder engagement. Stakeholder engagement is like um calling our legislature. The community needs to get involved. Um and um if they believe in this program, they need to be involved. And that's and it's going to take them all of us to call our legislature and advocate for, you know, some funding here. That makes sense because I'm not these are their numbers. I'm just showing their numbers and um um and how they're funding K12 traditional public education and charter schools because charter schools are affected by this as well. So, it's just really interesting um on how I you see and I'm going to go back to my comment. It would be nice to see if we had more business owners actually that understand how as from a CEO perspective that are running businesses um you know
091running some of our legislative programs up there at least on the um the fiscal oversight and budget because they really have a good understanding what it takes to operate a business. We are a business if you think of it in that sense. So like we said it's a one point $ 1.5 billion budget. So, you know, we are a business. So, that's that's all my presentation for right now. And so, I open open it up for any comments, questions. Mr. Cologne. So, first of all, thank you for that uh very animated uh presentation of the budget. Uh Mr. Cash for being the translator. Appreciate it. You know, we were trying to figure out what's in his head and so of course he sees all these numbers and so thank you. You know, one of the
092things that we do in our district that I'm very proud of is we put kids first. And we know that there are things that don't play in our favor. For example, you know, we talked about IB. Well, if we didn't offer IB, we wouldn't have that expense. Dual enrollment, we encourage our students to go be dual enrolled. You mentioned that with the high school that student may not even be taking any classes in the high school and so for that reason many school districts don't push dual enrollment because they don't have that student in a chair but we know that is good for kidsmies programs again that costs money however we are continuing to grow these because we know that they are good for kids. So despite the challenges that we face that are outside
093of our control, you know, and and I appreciate Dr. B and and the admin team for always keeping focus of that because the reality is we could get lost in the legislation, how fair it is, how unfair it is. Um, you know, I trust my colleagues will call their friends and say this is not good. And so I appreciate you all who are able to do that and I do the same as well with those that I have a relationship with. Um, however, a lot of this is out of our control and so we could spend from now till forever and probably all agree that, you know, this is rough, but I I just want to say thank you for always keeping focus on the things that are within our control. um budgetary wise and
094I'll share with you all I've shared with the superintendent as well as the admin team um year after year after year this is typically when we start the conversation uh what it sounds like doomsday every year every year makes the news they have a deficit and this is actually and it takes a little while to realize this is part of the process and So, um, in the end, I don't think in the time that I've been here, we've had one year that we finished in the red. We just don't we have to make the changes that we do. And, and you know, it it sounds really bad because you're using projections. You're using projections in a an environment that's moving very rapidly. The amount of parents that are taking advantage of vouchers and and and
095don't get me wrong, I'm I am a fan of school choice. I think there is a place for it. Um, however, the reality is that whether you have 75 kids or you have 100 kids, you still have to turn on the lights. You still need to run the AC. The cold water still has to run across the entire building, even if those classrooms are empty, in order to chill the the AC. I'm learning. Where's uh there? See, Ron, I can be taught. And so I think it's it's just important that we keep focus on what we can control. Um, one last thing again, you know, part of the reason why we're starting with 25 and not 44 is because last year we made some tough decisions. And so, you know, again, just like any family,
096you would take your budget and balance it and figure out what what you can afford and what you can't. That's where we're at right now. And I want to be clear, this is the first conversation on the budget as a board that we've had. So, this is kind of like a scrap piece of paper, per se. Mind you, you've done a lot of work to get it to an understandable uh scrap piece of paper, but right now we are working on that scrap piece of paper of of what's important. Uh I will share the things I've shared with the superintendent and team regarding the arts. Uh I'd like to, you know, I I'd like to see a better alignment of the arts. I've got high schools that have amazing drama programs and middle schools that
097have no drama program and so they don't feed into each other. I think there's an opportunity there. Uh and of course, you know, we talked about growing the arts and I think that um our teams have taken a systematic approach of starting to uh do that and I've seen it this year. So, thank you. Um, but that that is probably my aside from the the three Rs, writing, reading, writing, arithmetic, which I never figured out how that writing was a three R, but um it sounds right. Um, you know, the art the arts I think if we are able to align those and I've had those conversations with the superintendent, of course, they'll be ongoing. Um, and and I want to channel my u Mr. purses is, you know, if if we can have an
098art, you know, we want to make sure we have a media specialist and an art teacher at every school. I that for me is a priority and I realize that our principles are left to make that decision um as they look at their budgets, but um that is something that I think is important to me as to me as a board member. Mind you, I'm one of five. And so I just wanted to say that and these are things that I've already discussed with the superintendent and with the team. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Miss Goodri, I've saved up all my time for today. Okay, I'm going to be all over the place, but I have a lot. All right, my first question is, explain the charter school revenue to me. When the charter
099school revenue comes in the way I understand it, it comes into us and then we give it back to the school and the school then runs their entire budget for it. So they are then in charge of their administration, their nurse, their guardian. They handle all of that and it doesn't have to come out of our funds any longer. Correct. That's a correct statement. That is a correct statement. That is a correct statement. Okay. And then do we get any fee for managing that? Yes, we we there's a um the state law requires or doesn't require it. allows you to do a holdback from that to administer the processing of calculating what the revenue that they earned um based on the student program that they're in. So that that revenue then goes to we funnel
100it to the charter school but we can hold back a little bit for administering that because we also have to monitor their like P&Ls and um um work with them at the end of the year because they consolidate into your district's financial statement. They're part of your financial statement. Okay. Um, and I know this is just our initial conversation. So, this is a jot list for the public. This is not this is what we're doing. This is we are we have to make some choices. And I hear you say we end up in the red every year or we don't end up in the red every year, but we we have to have a goal of doing better, right? And so sometimes that involves difficult decisions and um making big moves if we want to
101continue to be a great public school district. So that being said, um how what would it look like for schools that aren't being optimized um to consider that kind of option? Okay. And isn't isn't that being promoted in the state legislation right now? That is correct. So yeah, I mean there's always an option. um for a charter school um applicant to apply within the school district and get approved and then go ahead. Um um um I'll say state it that way. And there's another thing in the legislature right now that they're working on I believe is um conversion charter schools and making the law a little bit easier there. So that's currently what's in the legislative um on their platform right now. So, um, but, um, I do have to go back and can I
102say a clarifying that kind of blends the comment real quick, Mr. Cologne. So, yes, I agree with you that we we were able we were successful at operating in a black, but this year we will we are projected to operate in a red. We we most likely will be in a red this year. And the reason for it is in the in the past we had the ESR funds that kind of helped us through those years and those tight years. So, um, but this year we're just living off of, um, fund B our fund balance reserve, which is a two-year spend down of it. Um, um, we will be eating into our reserve this year for sure. So, it will show in the red a little bit this year. Okay. So, to use the um,
103business model behind it, we'll talk about McDonald's. We'll use them as a great example because everyone can understand that. So McDonald's corporate headquarters, which is basically what we are, they have the expense of quality control, testing the products, deciding which products are going to be put into the McDonald's. They have the um role of creating the logo, of creating the standard design of the buildings, things that we're looking towards moving forward towards here as well. Then they have their franchises, which would be our schools. Correct. And within the schools, they're responsible for advertising, getting people to come into their correct McDonald's. Correct. And if that McDonald's was not profitable enough to pay for itself, they would have to make some decisions. And that doesn't mean stopping right then. That's not so I don't want anyone
104to hear it as that. That's not what I'm saying at all. The decision might be to ramp up the advertising, which we're looking at doing, of hey, let's bring some kids back into these schools. And so for the public that's been worried about our school district, we've made massive achievements in the right direction to hopefully welcome them to come back in. So it's imperative that we're spreading that positive message of hey by negatively saying and doing things against our schools. It's going to create a bigger problem for us, right? So option one would be let's get the good word out and let everyone know all these things are that are going on. Um there's other options that no one wants to discuss and I understand that and I don't want to create a you know
105any fear but these are real discussions that have to happen. I happen to be someone that grew up in large schools and in my elementary school it still to this day has over 800 kids and it did back then and we always we never questioned having art and PE and music and all kinds of different things that were offered to us. my high school back in we won't say when but whenever that was u 30 years ago we had the top rated drama program in the state all of the best sports facilities every one of our teams was a top school in the state still is to this day people move there to go to that school they want to be at that school the middle school you could have any club that you imagined
106having it was there because we had enough students to support that so I think sometimes there's a fear of a high um enrollment But there's major benefits. High enrollment doesn't mean large class sizes. Smaller classes can still happen in large schools. Correct. Correct. Right. So at the elementary school level, I think people worry, well, you know, we we want our the ratio of students to teachers doesn't have to change. Is that correct? Correct. So it just the size of the school could be in it could be bigger. Okay. Um, so in the McDonald's operation, if you have a McDonald's on Dunlot and a McDonald's on Nova and a McDonald's on US1 and one of them's underperforming, you might have to, not that you're going to start looking at, but you might have to start having
107those conversations. All right, so I just wanted to point that out. Um, I know there's some bad words, consolidation and reszoning are bad words, but this is our job as a board to make decisions like that. And so I I wish that um we could operate on emotion only, but that's just not how it works in the stock market. you presented what you just presented, you get really rewarded, the stockholders reward you for great financial practices. What we're fearful for for in schools is that if we make great financial decisions that will in turn lead to all those other things we're asking for such as better teacher salaries, right? So, we're in uh we talk about St. John's County paying better than us. Well, St. John's County has 50,000 students about enrolled. We have around
10860. They have 32 elementary schools. We have 46. They have seven middle schools. We have 14. Of course, they can pay their teachers better. Right? So, here in Valuchia, we we want the best teacher salaries. We want to have small schools. We want the lowest taxes. We don't want to make any hard decisions. Right? And that's what continues to lead us into this financial situation. Um, and then you talked about inflation. Um, our entire goal with retirement planning is to beat inflation, to maintain your quality. It's not to have a ton of money. That's great if you do, but it's to maintain your standard of living by beating inflation over the next 30 years. And we're not able to do that right now with the state. So, for anyone that's listening, I beg you to
109reach out to them and share this knowledge and share what you've learned today and how it impacts you. Um, okay. So, I didn't take as long as I thought I was going to take, but those are my main points that I wanted to um make. I did want to ask you, and this is a hard question. I have two things before I ask you this question. Um, speaking of the arts, because as everyone knows, I'm a major uh fan of art, music, drama, and PE. And, um, I understand from visual arts, we are getting visual arts in every school this upcoming year. Is that still correct? We have arts in our schools. We have visual and performing. Okay. Um, because there's some rumors about that right now. So, I just wanted to have that out
110there. Okay. So, we talked about the 750 number and and I understand. Thank you for sharing this because you are just sharing the information. You did not make these numbers. It's not because of you that these numbers exist. You just have them and you decipher them and share them with us. So that 750 number, that's not a concrete we must be 750. No one's saying that. We don't necessarily want that. But um how long can we reasonably sustain at the level that we're at right now? Well, um we're we're eating up fund balance. Um this year it was a two-year correction. So um I had 10 million set aside again for this upcoming year which we'll have to fully utilize since the state is not the house bill and I didn't really talk about that
111too much is that there's really no new money at all because um if you allow me to just to share real quick their proposes to give us on the BSA a 0.95% increase in inflation is 2.9%. But of that n of that 53% of that is going to teacher salary increase which is 2 million and something but the FRS rate increase is eating up the rest of it. So there's no money for anything else. It's there's we we're not it's just kind of a wash. We we don't have any extra money. So we have textbook adoptions we have to do. you know all these things that you have to do but um so um I'll go back and ask what your question how you want me to the question again realistically how long we can
112we sustain status quo I it's it's such a this it's a tough question I don't need an exact number yeah this is my frustration it's it's I really thought and I was just I guess I was I don't want to say I was naive I was optimistic I'm always optimistic And I always wanted to say, you know, that the legislature will see what's happening and fund public education. Um because they just But they're I don't know. I can't predict what they're going to do next year. I'm really surprised that there is no increase proposed increase by the House, at least really that small amount. But, you know, I'm I'm concerned about I'm I'm concerned that we I know we have the team or the talent cuz we're going to live within what they give us.
113If they don't want to give us any money, then we're going to have to make cuts. We're going to make sure that we do that. But I I it's like a crystal ball. It's like the stock market. You know what I'm saying? And investments. You never know what the legislator are going to do one year from the next. It's it's it's really interesting. You figure that they would follow at least a baseline of CPI. I mean, come on. You know, common sense. I'm sorry, but I I don't know. I'm I'm I'm optimistic. We're going to definitely be hope we're going to be okay for this next year because we're going to make sure that we are um for the next year. I'm not sure what the legislaturator is going to do on funding. That's the
114thing about it. I I don't know. I just don't know. I would just ask my fellow board members since this is where I can ask you all this. Um, when you're out there, we know we have a problem. That is we're aware of that. We don't like what the solutions may be and I understand that as well. So, if you don't like what the solutions will be, let's find out from the community and from ourselves what solutions can be brought to the table that are better solutions because we have to have some solutions. And that is all I have. Thank you, Member Goodrich. Um, and just to re-emphasize what um, our CFO was saying and although he could not provide um, you know, how many years can we the fact that we've had to use
115the revenue um that we have um, the the savings account basically the fund balance that's not a good sign. Yeah, that's mean you're drawing from your just reiterating that for the public. Um, so he can't give you a a a a number of years, but um it's it's the writing is on the wall and at some point if we deplete enough then the state will come in and take over. Correct. I think that's what their intent is. Yeah. So you have to keep that fund balance a minimum of a three but board policy is five. Right. So my plea to the public then would be understand this board didn't create this. Yeah, this board is trying to resolve this to the best way we can for all students of Valuchia County and all of our
116educators and that that can be difficult at times. It's difficult in business and it's going to be difficult here, but we need your help. We need your support and so that's all. Dr. about I'm listening to you um board member Goodrich and you made some really good points in regard to some of the business principles that you've discussed. They always say that you look at your organization and you do an assessment based on what are the system structures and processes that are in place and some of the things that you're talking about. Obviously when this administration started here one of the first analysis that we had to look at it's those processes that were in place or not in place and ensuring that that systematically we have processes for outcomes that were outlined. What you're
117delineating now is a structural issue and obviously we need to look you know this is the first step right educating everyone so that they have a full-blown understanding of how our dollars are utilized and what it looks like in translation right in into our system but most importantly going back to what John stated listen my life has been education And I'm now going to be humble about this part because I know it and I know it pretty pretty decently. And I'm going to share with you that here in Valuchia County, our team, and I mean everyone, the grassroot operation and in our in our schools, everyone has been working really really hard to deliver a superior product despite the ongoing challenges that we encounter. Can you share what we you and I talked about about
118the 700 uh,000 that was or what was the number that was saved? So, going back to I was sharing with board member Goodrich and and those of you who've been on the board for a while, you do know this that four and a half years ago when we started here and this is state law. This is legislation. If you have a school that's that continuously after 3 years receives a failing um letter grade D or F, you don't have an excuse for this. You are obligated to hire an external operator from a list that's given to you of approved external operators. We were paying for three schools alone. I know one year close to $700,000 in external operator fees. The restructuring that took place and it's not about necessarily adding position but the restructuring that
119took place in the teaching and learning division transpired as a result of our strategic plan. meaning specifically what does our district need and how do we align resources to achieve those outcomes. That's what organizational chart does. And I think it's imperative now because as we all know public education is always under many many challenges year. Listen, I've been doing it for 26 years. I couldn't tell you for a year that we didn't have challenges. It's every year. But if we're going to be good servants and advocates for that great equalizer, which is a sound public education um provided for every learner, right? It's important especially now that as we listen to rhetoric out there because they've always existed and they always will exist. Part of organizational dynamics is that it will continue to exist. But
120morally and responsibly, the important thing to do before we respond or not respond to some of these rhetorics is to inform oursel accordingly so that we will know when to respond, when not to respond, and what we should be advocating for. You know, some folks out there, they like to speak like their authority on certain subject matters when the reality is that they're not. So, I will welcome any day experts that understands this field to come and share with us their ideas, thoughts, solutions or areas for improvement. I would listen to those individuals day in and day out. But if you're not an authority in this in this field, but you like to speak like you are, that could be a detriment to the success of our students. So as a board and as a
121leadership team, it's imperative that areas that we might be unaware of that we seek an understanding first and foremost because we're morally and ethically obligated each and every day to do what's right for students. And as Mr. Cologne outlined, we will always put children first. Thank you. Miss Thompson, do you have anything you'd like to add? Miss Brosmer, do you have anything you'd like to add? Okay. All right, then. I have a few things that I'd like to say. What we're facing isn't anything new. I Because any of you that were here in 2007, 2008, and a lot of us were, we lived through the recession piece. Here are things that happened during that time. We actually closed schools. We closed some of our school buildings here in Valuchia County because they were under capacity
122and we merged schools. Unfortunately, at that time, which I hope we never see again, we pink slipped almost every instructional teacher that was three years or less. We lost some outstanding teachers during that time. They went to other states. Some of them came back as we came out of the recession. Others did not return. I've stayed in touch with a lot of them. But even prior to that, when I started in Valuchia County over 38 years ago, Deltona was just starting to come alive and not just be phase one of a retirement community. And we started at that point a resoning process in Deltona. There was not a single school in Deltona. The first one that opened up was Deltona Lakes Elementary, followed quickly by Discovery Elementary. At one time, I could tell you the
123exact order they built each of those schools in the year that they built them in. Every time they built a school, they resoned. Reszoning at that time didn't meet with the opposition that we now meet with at times. Why? Because parents were happy that schools were being built because we opened them at capacity or over every time we built one. I remember running into a young lady in high school who I had actually taught one year at Enterprise. She said, "Miss Haynes, I ended up at four different elementary schools during my elementary career because of where I lived. I started with you at Enterprise. I went to Discovery." Then she went on and told me the next two. And she said, "Here I am now at Pineriidge High because I was teaching there." And I
124said, "And how did you do?" She said, "I was fine. All the kids in my neighborhood just kept going with me. We just kept getting ressoned." But we didn't have the opposition from parents or outside community members like, "Oh, no, you can't reszone." At that time, the administration, the district leadership, and the school board did and made tough decisions of what they had to do to be able to operate under the finances they had. I look back and I can't imagine in 2008 serving on a board when so many teachers lost their jobs andor closing those schools. But prior to that they made tough decisions every day on resoning and reszoning schools. I mean every student went to Dand High. We opened Deltona High that changed the world. We opened Pineriidge High. We opened University
125High. I mean, and every time they got reszoned. So, I approached these things in a different mindset. I did not run for this position to make friends. I did not run for this position to have dinner with someone or any of for it to be political. I'm here because in 2018 a disservice was being done to our children and it was one of the primary things I ran on and that disservice at that time was we had stopped purchasing any textbooks and resource materials for our teachers to have to teach with and from and for our students to have access to. And it had been going on for several years. Where was the money going? You ask. I don't know. That was one of my questions. But I ran to ensure that teachers and students
126had the resources and materials they needed to get the best education possible. I have stayed true to why I'm here and that is for children and no other purpose or reason. So I'm telling you, we're in a situation right now. I am the one person sitting up here that has talked about the school size piece. We cannot continue to fund small schools when what is brought in is not covering the cost and the money's coming from somewhere else. You have to wonder why why couldn't like Dand University and Spruce Creek High have everything possible for those high schools for the sizes they are and the amount of money they bring in. They can't because part of their funding every year is going out to sustain schools that cannot fund themselves. I have brought this up
127previously for the last two years and I'm met with nobody wants to take a stand on this. We took an oath to follow the laws. The laws are made by our legislators. The legislators determine the amount of funding that we receive. A lot of it is categorized and we can't move it from one category to another category. But we are supposed to be supportive of the superintendent, our chief financial officer, and support them and make the decisions needed to run a financially fiscally responsible school district where our children receive the best education that they can receive. And that means we're going to have to take the stand to make some very tough decisions. I'm prepared to make those tough decisions. Why? Because in the long run, those decisions and and I never had the in
128all the years I taught here and all the schools I taught in, I never had the luxury of teaching in a small school. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I'm telling you, when you have 700 kids on campus or 800 kids in an elementary school, there's so many more things you can do. Your PTA is more powerful and strong because you have more parents. Your community gets behind that school and gives more support. Instead of having to divide themselves between five smaller schools, they can get on board and they can be your partners and things can happen at those schools. And no child is left behind at one of those schools. You know, I taught before class-size amendment came around. And I am thankful for class size amendment. I will support class- size amendment.
129Give me 18 kindergarteners versus 33 any day. You know, get give me 25 kids in algebra 1 versus 42 any day. It's amazing what a teacher can accomplish with those types of numbers. So I want to thank you Mr. CE. I want to thank you for showing that in our fund balance and my question is that's at 5% right. If if we hold our fund balance at 5% basically what's in there covers a half a month of expenses. That's correct. Okay. Reoccurring yes reoccurring expenses. So I will tell you the article that I sent to all of them. This is the title of it. We are overspending up the wazoo. Not the way I would title an article. School board is skating a razor's edge after learning they will receive a $6.5 million less than
130anticipated this fiscal year due to overestimation of student counts. The overestimation came from the state. Uh it's Elatchua and the Elatchua Chronicle. And I'm happy if Dr. Trevan says, "I'll just send all of you the link to read it." It's the most lengthy article I've ever seen, news reporters cover, and they covered it realistically. There is a board member on that board who is an accountant who has an entire financial background. And when you read the things she has stated and she said, "I have been raising the alarm basically for 2 to 3 years about this that this is where we're headed and no one wants to agree with me because you may not want to make someone angry every day. We're not going to make everyone agree. That's the way the world is. But
131we're here to ensure that the students get what they need." And so I support which I you you brought us the information. So I'm going to turn to you. I support you. Here's what I need to see happen. I don't want to be in the situation that other districts are in right now that they've gone below their policies of 5% and 5% in Valuchia County only gives us a half a month of reoccurring expenses. Guys, that can be wiped out in a moment. All right. I support the fact we haven't hit the 3% mark as we're starting to see some other districts hit that mark. I do not ever want to hit the 3% mark. I do not want to be taken over by the state because that says then the five of us could
132not make the best financial decisions for this county. And I'm not going to be in a situation as a board member that I could not financially and fiscally do what is the most important for our children. I don't want us to see a point where we're pink slipping teachers like we did in 2008. I want us to be able to maintain the facilities we have. And I appreciate you sharing the information about St. John's County. The reality is the difference between our students but is not that much. But the difference between the buildings that we're maintaining and every building costs money and some of them are just like a money pit that we just keep pouring money into that I don't understand and I've brought that up. What I'm challenging as the the rest of
133the board members here is put aside any emotions, go back to where I was. I never thought resoning was a bad thing because we just did it. We did it every year for I don't know how many years. Um, other districts have been doing it. When you look at Oyola, Oyola when I came here had nothing. Look at all the schools Oyola has built in the last how many years? Those kids have been reszoned nonstop. Reszoning is not bad. Reszoning is about us using our buildings to the best potential, staffing our schools with what is needed, not overstaffing in areas just to say, "But I like this or my community will be upset about it." Well, the bottom line is if we go below, if we hit the 3% and the state comes in, I
134got news for you. Community is going to kill us all. They'll take all our heads off because we won't have done what we were set we took an oath to do here. Communities don't like it when you fall apart financially. And we're not there yet. And we need to stay strong. But in order to do that, we have to support the decisions that Dr. Balaban and the leadership team are making and we have to take the hit. I'm prepared to take the hit. I hope the rest of you are prepared to take the hit. Where I won't take the hit and where I will continue to advocate for our students, I won't take hits that directly impact student learning programs. So that's why I brought it up when he put up the slide about our
135dual enrollment API AC CTE and CAP programs. Guys, that should be a primary focus for right now because if we lose 50% of that funding this year based on how a chart was filled out, then we're negatively we're part of the problem of negatively impacting our children. And so I won't take a hit there, but I want to thank you. I want to thank you for all the time that you took today because really you're just the messenger. You just have to share with us us the information of where we're at based on the laws we have to follow based on the funding. And I will tell you funding is a little interesting this year. And there doesn't seem to be an agreement up there. We've got one set of funding way down here. We've
136got a middle set of funding and we've got a set up here. And I actually, for lack of a better thing, I think the group up here right now has more common sense than the group that's down here. Um, I think there it maybe the leadership at that end has is taking a calmer approach, but I will tell you as I said last week and I or two weeks ago, and I know I upset some people, I stepped on some toes. what we say on social media when we when a parent is upset about something and we immediately say to them, "Well, take your kid home and homeschool them." We are destroying public education. I don't do that. That's why you don't see me on social media. You don't see me react negatively to parents.
137I don't put out anything negatively. I believe in parent choice but I also believe you do not destroy yourself from within. You have to be a positive about the great things happening. When an issue comes up, you talk about a solution. And so I would encourage all of you and that's even people listening at home if you work for Valuchia County Schools the answer to keeping our enrollment where it's at and ensuring these kids get an education and a lot of opportunities. even if you get upset with a parent is to remain positive, hear them out and try to come to a happy point with a solution for their child versus saying to them, "Well, then just homeschool." Because now when they homeschool, they take the money with them. And if we lose, which were
138predicted for next year to have 10,000 students less in Valuchia County public schools because they'll be homeschooling or there'll be a private or charter. They're not walking out of one school, guys. There's a handful walking out of every school. And so to continue to maintain that school is going to become even more difficult. So, I I encourage you to look at the numbers of what Todd needs in order to sustain the schools. And I think now is the time to start having honest conversations. What has happened the last couple years, we've continued to kick this topic down the road and not address it. And we're here to address things, not to kick it down the road and say it's someone else's problem. And that's all I have to say for today. So if there's no
139other questions at this time it is 11 59 and this meeting is adjourned. My back is killing me. Yes. Sorry. I apologize. It's a 30 minute break and we'll be back in here at 12:30. I did say that at the beginning. files on place I live in. Good afternoon. Welcome back. We're going to continue the Valuchia County School Board workshop meeting at this time. It is now 12:36 p.m. and we're moving right along to item 3.01. 01, our Advent Health Partnership Update. Dr. Balgabin. Thank you, Madam Chair, board members, members of the audience. We're very excited about this uh our partnership update from Advent Health. Um I'd like to ask Dr. Kristen Pierce, our CTE facilitator, to join to join us, coordinator, to join us along with Denise Ribero is here. I see her. Um,
140our specialist for business partnership and and there are several members here from Advent Health and I'd like to recognize them because I will tell you that our partnership through Advent Health has really been making a difference for our students. This is a group or this is a team that we've been very privileged to work with that I can't tell you of a time that we had a need picked up the phone and call this organization and their answer was not yes. So I want to say thank you to David Weise who is our Advent Health East Florida Division regional president and CEO. Joanie Hunt our vice president for strategic partnership. Anna Lman, she is our executive director for strategic partnership. Debbie McNab, executive director for community advocacy. Eric Nason, director for strategic partnership and operations.
141Josh Gorgon, manager for government and government advocacy. And Kelsey Bower, president CEO Advent Health the Land. I think I've covered everyone, but I just want to say on behalf of our students here and our board and our entire team, thank you so very much for this partnership and always for having that answer for us, which is yes for any need that we may have. So, thank you again and team, take it away. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair Haynes, school board members, Superintendent Balagan. Since its inception, the Advent Health health healthy futures program has provided essential health services, enhanced athletic safety, and open pathways for our students to high-skll, high demand careers in the healthcare industry. This partnership stands as a model for how education and industry can come together to support the whole student while
142also preparing them and our our students for um healthcare careers in the future. Please join me in welcoming David Weiss, the East Coast Florida Division Regional President and CEO of Advent Health. David is here to share partnership updates with the board. David, good afternoon. Thank you so much for having us. Um, thank you, Chair Haynes. Very much appreciate the opportunity. Dr. Dr. Balgaban, thank you um very much for the chance to come and to all the school board members to really discuss the partnership work that we do from an Advent Health and Valuchia County school perspective. Um we're very excited to share some updates on the collaboration and work we have done together around that. And while I have the privilege of serving as the executive champion for our partnership with Valuchia County Schools, it's
143important for all of our CEOs within Advent Health. That's exemplified by um Kelsey Bower who's joining me here today, our new CEO here in Dand who's excited to continue to build on the work that we're doing here with our West Felia schools. And it's an important priority for us as an organization. And I really want to um just um thank our team for the work that they do every single day um to make this partnership a reality and to make a difference in the the lives of the young people here in Valuchia County. So, I'm going to turn it over to Anna and Eric who will lead um the primary updates and then I will be here um for part of the discussion um as needed throughout. So, thank you very much. Yes, to echo
144um David sentiments, thank you so much for having us here today. Um for those that are new, we wanted to first take a moment just kind of to remind everyone of of what is in our actual partnership. So, our partnership is a five-year partnership. We're in our second term of that agreement. Um so, it expires in 2028. It does represent a $2.5 million investment over those five years. Um, and it's really meant to focus on three main areas. So, the first is around reducing chronic absenteeism. The second is around partnering with our healthmies and then finally deploying an athlete ecosystem. Um, one of the things I did want to share with you is that we've put a lot of intentionality into how we structure a team that manages this partnership. So, it's not just myself
145and Eric. We have a whole team behind the scenes that is helping to make sure that this partnership is successful. The first being with David as our executive champion. Um but we have a VP of partnerships with Joanie um myself as the executive director, Eric who oversees the athlete health and safety um component of our partnership. Um Debbie McNam who's here. She is um our executive director of community advocacy and she's really leaning into the um absenteeism. And then we are hiring a new FTE which I'll talk about in a moment that is really going to oversee all of the health academy activation. So the first pillar is chronic absenteeism. And this is not representative of um all the work that we've done but just some of the work we've been able to accomplish over
146the last eight months. So we've really enjoyed our partnership with Mike um Malliff. I work with a Mike Metaf and I always screw that one up. Mike McAlliff um he is just on fire for um reducing absenteeism and um to Dr. Balgamin's point, he comes to us with lots of ideas and we almost always say yes. In fact, I can't think of a time when we've said no. Okay. Um but one of the things that's really been successful over the last eight months is our absenteeism rewards program. So, not only are we providing dollars through our partnership, we've been providing additional dollars on top of our cash contribution to award schools that are reducing chron chronic absenteeism. And it's working. You can see on these banners, 22% reduction, 16%. Um, so this is a program
147that we feel like is really helping to move the needle. [Music] Heat. [Music] So, one of the things we were able to do this year um with Mike was we donated 168 bicycles um to students that live within the 2-m radius of our schools so they don't get to ride the bus, but we're having transportation issues um and were chronically absent. And so excited to see how those bicycles um and bike helmets and bike locks that we also purchased um are really helping to move the needle. And that's something that Debbie's team is doing. They really leaned into the schools to say, "How can we track to ensure that the things that we're doing are actually making a difference?" Because if the solution is bicycles, we're going to buy more bicycles. And you you can
148hear that today from us. Um the other thing that we've done is we've donated a total of three book vending machines um to Valuchia County schools. Um this one was Discovery, we've done Blue Lake, and we have also done FISM. Yes, sorry, my notes didn't show up here. Um, and those are um not only book vending machines that are rewarding students for um positive um coming to school and being um on time and in school, but we've also made the commitment of $5,000 per school to ensure that these book machines are staying um stocked with books. Um and again, Debbie's team is really working to ensure that these are moving the needle because if this is a solution, we want to buy more of these and we want to invest and put them in the
149schools. The other thing that you'll see throughout this presentation is we've really tried to leverage um our other partnerships to provide value to the school district. So in this picture you see Eric Jones. He is the driver of the number 43 Advent Health Toyota for Legacy Motor Club. Um he has a foundation and a passion for reading. So anytime he is in town, we are bringing him to Valuchia County schools to read to books to kids, to meet with kids. We brought out his race car to get kids excited. um and he's talking to them about the importance of being in school. Gonna turn it over to Eric to talk a little bit about athlete health and safety. Well, thank you very much. It's a it's a joy to be here honestly to to share
150some of the great wins that we have because we work uh with these schools. We work with your leadership. We work with the school board. Uh and uh we always are taking notes uh speaking with uh uh Debbie and and and our team and and Mike and and just highlighting all the successes would take hours for us to go through because just some of the feedback we have from families. And so I want to thank you as a board and and our your leadership that work with us on a weekly basis to make this happen. There's um it's it's doesn't seem like work. It seems like joy because these kids, I have kids in in in our schools and and and you know the response of the community when they step up and kind of
151fill the voids where there's needs. And so my history and my background clinically is as an athletic trainer and I was actually a result of the initial partnership here is to hire an athletic trainer to help oversee and support the athletic trainers in the sports medicine programs to help develop that athlete ecosystem. And so from the very beginning, I was able to engage with our athletic uh trainers, our athletic directors, and Larry Beal. Larry Beal has been a great resource for us to connect and to build and establish some really great programs. And so I remember walking through uh the athletic training rooms initially and over the years, I always had it in my mind, we need to do something to help these athletic trainers. And one of the pain points that the original board
152brought to us initially was how can we improve athletic trainer retention in our sports programs. There is a turnover of three to four schools a year where having athletic trainers leave Valuchia County schools for uh another uh career or another location. And one of the things that really hit home was the environment that the athletic trainers were working in. And we all know if we go to an environment that doesn't have the supplies or or a professional look or feel, uh it kind of uh hinders and barrier a little barrier to our success. And so we wanted to do an athletic training room makeover. And you know, if you had your bathroom or your living room or something done in your home, you feel fresh, you feel renewed. And that's what we wanted. We picked
153two schools. And these two schools had the highest rate of turnover from athletic trainers. And and in fact, they were they're what? Sister schools. They're they're mirrored and built the same exact way. So, Pineriidge and uh Atlantic High School, Atlantic High School last year was without an athletic trainer for the full year. And we did a makeover and over the summer they were able to hire a young student graduating from UCF to go into that school and one of the big things she noticed was, "Wow, I've got a brand new athletic training room." And now we have a vacancy at Pineriidge or had a vacancy at Pineriidge and they have since filled that. And I would hope to say that the the the environment that we helped create with Larry and this in the school
154district uh is what really uh attracted those those new athletic trainers. We provided over $10,000 in medical supplies from modalities like electric stim um whirlpools. Uh we had the room painted, new floors, new new ceiling, new cabinets and sink. Really put some love and attention to it. And a lot of you joined us on those ribbon cutings and it was very special. So really excited to how do we take that to the next level? How do we continue to serve our athletic training rooms uh through future makeovers and [Music] athletes, um the athletic training student aids. Uh this is a bright future for you and so I'm excited to be a part. So on behalf of Advent Health, we're honored today to be your healthcare champion and stand behind this athletic training room makeover. Thank
155you so much. [Applause] One of our other deliverables which you are all very familiar with and we've been doing it ever since the inception of our partnership was our annual pre-participation sports physicals and uh this is something that we are very passionate about. is it is an an opportunity for us to deliver health care services to uh your student athletes but also to uh their families because when we have our physicals it's not only the athlete that comes it brings in thousands of family members and that we have an opportunity to engage in. And so when we look at last week's we just finished last week four days of our physicals. When we first started, we had two days of physicals, then it went to three days, and then it went four days because of
156the demand. And we're really excited about how we are able to serve these students. Yes. Uh this past week or this past year, we had uh over 1,600 registered student athletes. So, we have a platform where they need to register to secure a spot so we can control the flow of students through there so that the wait period and the and the ease of service is is um obtained. And so we had over 1,600 students um register. We served over,00 students in the last four days that came through and and for those that don't know and I apologize this is held at the Dayton International Speedway. So as Anna said we partner with our other partners and so together they provided us a secure environment that allowed us to uh manage that many people each
157evening and it was uh it's always uh very well appreciated by uh the parents and students. On top of the the physicals, we had 960 ECG uh performed in Valuchia County. It is not, as you know, is not required for ECGs. Uh but we still offer it and we we fund it. And so our partners at who we play for come on board and uh we encourage them, the doctors encourage them that if they would like to take part of this free service, we want them to be included. And so we're proud to see that um you know around 95% of those that came were able to receive that ECG. 97% of the uh individuals that responded to our survey also said that they felt that ECGs were a vital part of our physicals. uh
158and even though it's not required, we do feel that it's important and it is of their best interest to at least once in their high school career have that exposure to a pediatric cardiologist through this this screening. Um we have about 16.25% of our individuals upon registration claim that they do not have a PCP or a primary care network that they or their family are involved with. And I've when I was looking at these numbers, I see these numbers drop over the last few years from 30% to 20% to 16. And this isn't a number I'm trying or we are trying to win. We don't want it to be high. And in fact, when we look at this number and see it going down, I would have to say, and I would probably be a
159little biased, but that our programs are are actually engaging families and drawing families to that health care provider or at least uh allowing them to think outside of um the norm and what should we do uh for our family and our children. So, just providing those pathways. Um our our surveyed results are 4.9 out of five for uh just those that received this event as as helpful and enjoyable uh and that they would return again. Uh I think 94% said that they would return. The other 5% that that isn't on here are those that are graduating. So it's even higher. So they can come back if they want. We we'll we'll take care of them. Um and 95% said that the location was um they were satisfied with it and they enjoyed it. We had
160taken this one more step further. We don't want to just serve the students, but we created a a vendor interaction activation area so that when they check out, uh we have service lines that are there with primary care and sports med and rehab, our cancer screening, our concussion program. Our cardiac program was actually there doing vitals for parents to get to know your numbers, your blood pressure, and what that means. Uh we even had our wellness program there doing chair massages for parents. And so, um, the kids were a little jealous by it. Some of my volunteers were, but, uh, it was it was a great time. So, in total, we we've served, uh, we provided over 16 hours a week on on the total physicals, and it takes about 75 volunteers per evening to
161make it happen. And so, thanks to um some of your student uh student aids in their athletic training programs, your athletic trainers, um, Denise uh, and Larry who really gave of themselves. uh that's just been uh a big benefit for us to be able to deliver those. Um and I would just give this a shout out as I finish up on physicals is um the top schools that have been engaged with um our physicals from a registration standpoint seem to be consistent across the board. So number one was Spruce Creek with 329 that reg registered uh and approximately 236 of them actually attended. So about a 30% no-show, but they were they were very engaged. Not only did uh the they have high registration, but their athletic trainer and about 20 of their student aids
162came and helped volunteers. So it's a school that's involved at all aspects. Dand comes in at number two with 214 registered uh athletes uh with about 140 individuals actually attending and Seabbze uh in Mainland very close and third and fourth with 185 registrations at Seabbze and 131 with Mainland. And so we see this continue to grow uh and involved and we're we're happy to see the these numbers are where they're at and how we can improve them. And uh so uh if you haven't been to a physical event when it comes around you got to come check it out because it's it's a lot of fun. Yeah. And so that was that was the other aspect is uh we offer as Advent Health offer all the schools and I communicate this with Larry and Larry
163speaks with all the the athletic directors that we offer to fund bus transportation to and from every school uh to the speedway. It can be a one round trip. It can be multiple round trips, whatever works for the school that we will fund the buses and the driver. And so this year we had three schools. I will say it was Dand um and Spruce Creek. I want to say it was those were the three and I can confirm that. But we only had three. And so we want to in we want to increase that and improve that and start early on that communication because it's a great pathway uh to get those kids to our our facilities. So, yep. And one of one big thing is communication and how do we market this? How do
164we how do we tell this story? How do we get kids and families to be aware of these physicals? And as you can see here, there's, you know, seven, eight different pathways from social media and yard signs and and uh uh just communication from friends and teammate. But the three elements that really stand out here are coming from the school district. They're coming from the school website, school communications, and from their coach and athletic director. And speaking with some of the parents and some of our volunteers, uh they really relied on school communication. And so, uh near maybe about three weeks out, uh working with Denise, she really helped uh elevate the need to communicate information about the physicals through the principal's weekly uh emails and communications. And so, we really see that this is
165a strong point. And so it's not to abandon the rest, but we're eager to partner with the school district in a in an even more productive way of how we can share this information and put this information into the families and and that that are in need and can benefit from this. I going to show a video here because I just want to highlight kind of summarize uh the importance of our physicals. We are asked as a partner to come in and provide these physicals and it's not just so the kids can play a sport that they love but it's to uh provide a healthy environment to educate them about their health and wellness and ultimately in this scenario to save lives and through our ECG screening program we have four to five individuals on
166average a year that are red flagged and at least one individual that requires some kind of life-saving surgery. And we have multiple stories along that line, but this is one story that really hit home and I want to share it. Growing up, I didn't really have any break years from soccer. It was mainly just soccer, soccer, soccer. Just year after year. This is my first game back. Cardiac health and student athletes is something I never really gave much thought to. My kids were healthy. Advent Health was sponsoring the sports physicals at the speedway and they were offering optional ECG screenings. I went into it really just thinking we were checking a box and just making sure that our kids were good to go and and we'd move on from there. It was really easy process.
167You know, they just put the electrodes on you, take a test, and you walk out. A couple days later, I got a phone call and an email that he had screened positive for Wolf Parkinson White syndrome, which is a congenital arrhythmia of the heart that he has had since birth. And we never knew. That was just a big shock, especially because I've been playing soccer and sports for so long and had to go through a cardiac ablation to get that healed. And unfortunately, some other families have had children with undiagnosed heart conditions that had tragic outcomes because they didn't know. So, as I learned about that and what could have happened to us, it just became personally really important to me to give back and help create that awareness. And now I plan on giving
168back for the next years in the screenings. Ethan's volunteered twice with me and I've I've volunteered three times. It's always a very rewarding and heartwarming experience when we go. It's a 10-minute process and it's a potential life-saving procedure. Finally, we wanted to talk a little bit about our medical futures program and creating pathways for our students to access um careers in healthcare. Um, so the first thing that I wanted to share is we are in the process of hiring a workforce development specialist. This person will be solely dedicated to our partnership with Valuchia County Schools. Um, I did include the QR code um for you to be able to access the job posting. Um, but this person's role will really be coordinating speaking engagements, tours, internships and job shadowing, being a representative at job fairs,
169hosting our own job fairs, um, and creating employment opportunities. You know, this is something that we have been doing at all of our hospitals for many years, but we recognize that with Advent Health being a national healthc care organization, there are students that don't necessarily want to stay just in Daytona or Dand. They want to have options to um work at different facilities within the Advent Health network. And so, we wanted to make it easy. That's one of our service standards for these students um to get introduced at a very um young age starting as freshmen or even some of our middle school students to what um careers in healthcare could look like. And they're not all clinical. Um I can tell you from experience, I never would have thought I would be working in
170healthcare because I had no desire to be a nurse or a doctor. Um but coming to work in healthcare was one of the best decisions I've ever made. And so we want our students to know that even if you aren't a nurse or a doctor, there are opportunities for you at Advent Health. And we have so many wonderful programs where we will pay for your college education. We will reimburse you for your college debt. Um all the benefits you get starting day one. Um we will truly help grow you. And so how do we get these students in day one? I will tell you our um division CEO, Dr. Audrey Gregory, her goal is that every student that goes through a health academy be offered a job at the end with Advent Health. And so
171in order to do that, we felt like we really needed a dedicated um FTE or a full-time employee um that could help manage the relationship and create these opportunities. So we have had this job posted. Um we've interviewed a few individuals. One was actually a graduate of Valuchia County Schools. Um and so we're excited about those candidates, but we wanted to make this um posting available to you because you know who um you would want to represent your school district. So, if you have any candidates that come to mind um or referrals, please share them with myself, Eric, David, Kelsey um and we'll make sure that they get passed on to the hiring manager. Um the other thing, and we talked about kind of our um work that we're doing to leverage some of our
172other partnership assets, for the last several years, we have been hosting health academy students at the Daytona International Speedways for some of the races that take place either during Speed Weeks or the Coke Zero Sugar 400. And it's an opportunity for us to engage with the health academy students. We bring in all of our health care professionals from leadership to nurse managers to HR to talent acquisition. Uh we get to meet with these students on a one-on-one personal basis. We get to educate them about careers at Advent Health. We get to learn about what they're interested in and we get to highlight some of the unique professions that we have at Advent Health. From running our care centers at Daytona International Speedway to our athletic trainer that works with the NASCAR teams. Oh, and by
173the way, these students get to watch a NASCAR race at the end. So, here's a little um example of [Applause] that. We are here at the Daytona International Speedway hosting 50 Mainland High School students. They're here in our suite and we're super excited because we're going to take them down to our infield care center. They're going to get a chance to tour and meet some of our nurses and physicians and then we're going to go into the garages and then have a dinner back in the suite and really feel immersed in the Advent Health brand. We have people here to talk about career pathways. We want to talk to them about the benefits that they can receive as Advent Health employees, specifically our education benefits because that really will encourage them to join our team
174and to take advantage of that to help them become the future of Advent Health. So many students in high school, you know, think they know what they want to do without any experience in it and they choose wrong and waste their time and and their parents' money. So, we're trying to help them, you know, show what kind of opportunities there are and that we're willing to help them not only advise what the right path is, but also in some cases pay for it and then they can be successful uh employees with us for years to come. At Advent Health, it's really important for us to engage with students at an early age um because they're our future, right? So, we're working to create more access points into healthcare, whether that's internships, speaking engagements in our
175schools, tours of our facilities, whatever we can do to educate students early about opportunities within healthcare is important as we look at our future workforce down the line. This entire event um tells us from Advent that they are communitybased. They're wanting to do community outreach to involve the schools. They offer job shadowing for our students. They're offering this, I mean, amazing experience for our kids. Today, we are here to be educated by the Advent Health team and their healthc care professionals. A panel came in and they taught us about what their career is like, what their daily life is like, and also what it's like to be a health care professional, but not always in the medical field. When I was told about the field trip and what we were going to do here, I
176was expecting like kind of a kind of a boring tour. Honestly, I wasn't expecting a whole lot, but upon coming here, my expectations were pretty shattered. Honestly, it was a lot of fun. It was definitely definitely above my expectations. I really think Aan Health is like an organization who will actually help people out in the future and like they're out here taking their time to see high school students and help them choose what their career they want to be in the future and actually give them the chance to see how everything is going. I just want to give a great big thank you to Advent Health for inviting us and hosting us this evening for the NASCAR race and allowing my students to have such a wonderful opportunity right here in our own [Applause] backyard.
177Have some upcoming races coming in August. Um and then again we'll have speed weeks in February. So we'll work with Denise and Cecile on um making sure that we select the next healthmies um to be part of that experience. Um the other thing that I'm excited to share is that Advent Health is offering 10 full ride full tuition scholarships to Advent Health University. This is something we've been promoting within our healthmies. Um all it requires is that uh the high school senior live in Valuchia County and they have a GPA of 2.7 or higher. Um there is an opportunity uh the link for the registration. Our application deadline does close April 11th, but this is something we plan to do each year um to encourage students to pursue careers in healthcare that maybe could not
178afford um to be able to go to school for that. So really excited. This is something in addition to the scholarships that we already provide each of our healthmies to scholarships per health academy that are awarded each year. So something new we've offered this year. And then lastly, I wanted to highlight a few things that we have been doing um outside of the scope of our partnership. So, we talked about those three pillars, but we've really tried to lean in with the work that our community advocacy team is doing um on some ways that we can further engage our our teachers. Um and so, I wanted to share some of that work. Um first and foremost, we have been the teacher of the the presenting sponsor of the teacher of the year celebration that happens
179um annually. We've been that sponsor since the inception of our partnership. So, we wanted to our partnership is really focused on students, but we wanted to make sure that we were also honoring the teachers who make all of this work possible. So, um really excited about this past year celebration in January and looking forward to the years to come. Um the other thing that I think has really touched my heart and I know Eric's as well is when we talked to Denise and Cecilele um and Mike about just needs in schools beyond our partnership is something that stood out has been the hunger need, right? these kids going home without food. They're going home over the summer without food. And so we support a ton of organizations within Valuchia County that directly impact Valuchia County
180schools by providing meals. So that's Backpack Buddies, Provision Packs, Food Brings Hope, Hunger Fight, um and Valuchia Food Fuel. Um just with Hunger Fight alone, this this past school year over the last eight months, we've been able to provide 42,000 meals to 28 schools. So, um, those 48,000 or 42,000 meals were packed up as part of Advent Health's, um, 2024 week of caring, and it's something that will continue. I actually just got an email about ramping up for our May food drive. Um, so it's something that, um, we feel is is really important as we think about what the actual needs are of our students. And then lastly, um, again, not something that's directly a partnership with Valuchia County Schools, but Advent Health has partnered with One Voice of for Valuchia and Flaggler Care and
181Aheek on a youth vaping program. So I know in my kids schools, they're middle schoolers. Vaping is a major problem and I would imagine that's something across Valuchia County schools. And so this is a free program for students and their families that they can sign up for. Um, I provided the QR code here, but it directly impacts Valuchia County schools and students, and we would love to figure out how we partner even deeper to spread this message throughout the school district. That is it. I would love to kind of open it up for any questions or feedback. Miss Thompson. Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, I I just have to say thank you. I mean, Advent Health, I feel, is at every single event that we do. And I mean, I don't even know where to
182start. The bicycle program was fantastic. The um book machines, those kids at Chisum, I mean, loved it. And I know you mentioned like them wanting to come to school, but them wanting to read. And so it really ties into what the school needs are, not just what Advent thinks they are. And I appreciate so much the collaboration with our team as well to figure out, okay, what do you need? Where can we help? And then you take it 10 steps further, if not more. Um the athletic training rooms, those are beautiful. absolutely stunning. I don't think you left a stone unturned with those. I mean, everything was new and beautiful. So, just thank you guys so much for your um your partnership with Felia County Schools because like I said, I if I don't see
183you guys at something, I'm like, is this even a Valuchia County Schools event anymore? Because at least one, two, or 10 of you are at everything. So, thank you guys so much for your continued um support of our schools. This is good. Rich, also just a giant thank you. If this doesn't exemplify what a community partnership should be, I don't know what does. Um, you there's everything you covered is so much more than I think we ever anticipated. So, thank you guys for your continued support and for believing in our kids and our schools and our teachers, too. Mrs. Brosmer. Oh, I I'm sorry. I thought Mr. Cologne was next. Um, I just wanted to say thank you also. This was a a wonderful presentation. And to your point about uh the you call them
184ECGs, I think we I typically call it an EKG. Uh they haven't previously been required by the state, but there is a bill pending that will require it. So I want to thank you for being ahead of the curve because it clearly is necessary if our kids are going to be playing sports. So thank you for that, Mr. Cologne. So I may be a little biased. However, thank you. Um, Advent Health more than what you see here, they have never said no to me. And I ask for a lot of things. We have lots of needs. And one thing I will tell you about our leadership is that they care about kids. And I just had a few questions for you. So, how many providers did it take to put together the sports physical? So,
185PAS, nurse practitioners, and doctors that just that group right there. Yeah. Um, in the muscularkeeletal screening, uh, it takes at least 10 individuals. So, our PT, AT, and orthos that cover the muscular skeletal. Uh, in the vitals, it takes 13 individuals minimal for nurses and MAS. And then from the medical screening, it takes at least 13 providers. So MDs, PAs, or nurse practitioners. That's on one day. That's per shift. Yeah. Per shift. And so I I I appreciate the way Advent Health uses its network because in order to get these folks to and and you know, folks don't understand because oftentimes people say, "Why don't we have one on the west side?" Well, it it's a production. You're taking folks away who are going to maybe close their office early to come and see our
186students at the speedway. This is starts at 3 3:00. Uh it starts at 5:00, but free dinner at 4 for our volunteers. So, got to note that everybody doctors don't come for the food. I promise you they don't. Now, Speedway Food, it's great. But, uh but you know, it it's it's a production and if you've never been there, it's quite the production. Uh, so again, thank you. I didn't make it this year because I was at the HOSA competition, but um there's someone sitting in the back. She usually hides in the shadows. Debbie McNab. And so Debbie is our what's your formal title? Community Advocacy. And how do I say this nicely? Debbie's got the money. When we were doing the uh the bicycle roll out, the question came up. We had helmets, but we
187forgot locks. Like these kids need locks for these bikes. And I'll never forget, it was kind of like mentioned and Debbie's like, "We'll get them, Reuben. Get with Kenneth who's our supply chain guy. Order them." Before I know it, I've got boxes and boxes showing up to my office with But you know, one of our service standards is make it easy. Yes, we could have taken that through a 10p part form or you could have Kenneth order it from Amazon and it shows up in a few days, which then I dropped them off at Mike's office and he's probably got locks everywhere. And while we were there, I mentioned to Debbie, I said, you know, at Deltona High, our special needs kids, their washer and dryer needs some help. You know, it's old. And we
188try to teach them the skills so that they can and Debbie said, "Get with Kenneth. Kenneth will order it and have it delivered." And it was yes. Yes. And amen is what I'll call it. So, thank you, Debbie, and and of course to everyone at Advent Health because you really made it easy, which is going to make an impact for our kids forever. Um, Cody Powell was this young man with the crown in the Pineriidge video. He's actually uh one of our state champions over the weekend uh for athletic training at the HOSA competition and will be going to nationals uh for athletic training. And then the other part that really stood out to me in that presentation is that 16% of the kids you saw don't have a PCP. And I'm glad to see
189that that number has gone down, but this may be the only health care they get all year long. They're young, they're healthy, they don't I don't know about you all, but when you're young and healthy, you don't go to the doctor. And so, you know, thank you for offering that opportunity for our students and shout out to who we play for for also being there and and uh I appreciate that we partner with who we play for to provide that for our students. So, uh in summary, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because it's not just, you know, as you mentioned, you see the things that you do that we do see that we present here, but there is so much more in the background from furniture being delivered to schools to just it's all
190year long. And so we appreciate that partnership and more importantly, we appreciate you joining us in caring for children. Thank you, Dr. Balabin. Once again, I just want to thank Advent Health for having such a compelling vision. I've learned a lot about Advent Health. Not only do you you are a community organization throughout and and nationally here in the US, but also the work that you do internationally. I learned quite a bit about that. And I think it's about having a vision that truly propels you and you see yourself as part of a community, part of a whole. and to David Weiss and the entire team for the most recent yes. I like to thank you because when we were at Chisum, we had a conversation with David and I said, "David, I really want
191to do something for our district when it comes to reading for the next three years. And I need a sponsor for the next three years to encourage, motivate, and recognize students and their families for and the importance of reading, right?" in engaging our learners and without any hesitation he said yes. So David what you don't know it's about two days later I ran into Audrey Gregory at the NASCAR the the event there and I said to her we want to put together something for the next three years for reading and I spoke to David and before I could get to the next sentence I go she says and I hope he said yes. I said of course he did. So again, I want to thank you for that because I did share with our board
192members individually that we're working on this plan and I'm I'm very excited to be launching that and having your names along our side as we are promoting one of the most important skill set that every learner needs to have that is to be a good reader. So thank you. Thank you. And so I'll close it up by saying thank you so very much. And I have um been able to attend some of the events. Um when you pull the um curtain off of the first book vending machine at Blue Lake Elementary, the kids there, it's just watching kids' faces. I mean, that's what gives every one of us happiness because their eyes got so big and the fact that they could be given a coin and place it into the machine and they could select
193their own book. I don't think people realize sometimes our children don't necessarily have books at home. And when you give them an opportunity to select a book and they get to take that book home and it is their book, you've given them a gift that they may not otherwise have access to. And I also was at the bike thing. And you know, we handed out the first two bikes at Blue Lake. And both of those young ladies that got those bikes, not only were they so excited, but their parents, the one mom talked about the fact how she struggles because she's got three other little ones at home to get her daughter there. And what was really neat was at the end of the event, both of them said, "We're going to be at school
194on time tomorrow." Because they had their own way to get to school because they were under the two-mile radius. So, thank you very much for your support. Thank you for seeing the needs for our children and stepping up to assist us with that because there's no greater thing that any one of us can do than to make a difference in the life of a child. Every one of those children that we touch every day, whether they get a book to take home, they are able to have a physical that they may not have been able to have, they're able to get to school on time, you don't realize the impact, but they are our future. And one day they will be the adults that'll be making the decisions and those positive things that happen for
195them, they will then want to carry those positive things on for other students. So, thank you. Thank you. [Applause] Can Can you join us? I'm sorry. Can you join us so we can take a pick with you guys? We're going to be putting out a brief um about this presentation today. [Applause] Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. No, I'd like to What about you? Appreciate it. Yeah, I know. I'm just trying to Where do you need people on this side? We need two rows. Dr. Evans, you don't want to get in on this. He's gonna be my roommate. I think I'm now turn. Thanks a million. All right. Good to see you. Those are huge. I like this height. Thank you. Sure. Go ahead. At this time, we're moving on to
196item 4.01, 01 our Dan Police Athletic League. Welcome, Dr. Balgaban. Yeah. Thank you, Madam Chair, board members. Um I would like to ask Miss Patty Core, our chief operating officer, along with Mr. BJ Vogus, Robert Robert Vogus, our coordinator for planning and development. they will both join us as as they will introduce our guest today and share with us a presentation regarding the the land police athlete athlete athletic why did I say athlete athletic league presentation for us today um Patty do you need more chair uh I'm going to move back here and let them come up in just a minute yes because it's amazing so thank you good afternoon uh Dr. Mr. Baggabin, chair and school board members. Thank you for letting us come today. And sometimes things Mr. Vogus just work out serendip
197serendipitously. Thank you. Um because we're keeping in the theme of what our community does for our students. And so um building on what we just heard from Evan Health. You're going to hear some and and see a great video of what our Dan Police Athletic League does for our students every single day. And we've been working with them and they've been working with our students for a very long time. Um, we also have director Ron Young here with us as well, but I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Vogus who's been working with the team and and they're all behind us here. So, thank you all for being here and uh take it away. Awesome. Thank you, Miss Core. Um, I'm excited today. This brings my head, heart, and tummy a lot of joy
198um to have another group with us who is a community partner and in their own unique way helps us achieve our mission. And I think it's going to be a great opportunity for everyone to learn more about them. Um, I thought I knew what a police athletic league was until I did a little research and then had the opportunity to chat with the amazing Mr. Al Buouie. Um, and I got schooled, so to speak. Um, I think you guys are going to learn a lot from this presentation. I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Buoie and get out of the way. But let me just let everybody know and remind you that the mission of the Dand Police Athletic League is to provide quality athletic and educational activities for asisk children in the greater
199Dand area at low or no cost. Their kids are our kids and it's a beautiful partnership. And I'm going to get out of the way and introduce a legend in Valuchia County Schools in his own right, the one and only the amazing Mr. Al Buouie. I don't even know how to follow that, but thank you BJ. uh to uh Superintendent Belan and Board Chair Haynes, we are absolutely excited and delighted to be here today to share with you this awesome program that runs uh in its effect and what it does for children parallel to the mission of Valuchia County Schools. I am a very proud employee, former employee. Sometimes I feel like I'm still there but uh of Valuchia County Schools and so I'm deeply invested in what this district is all about for children.
200Uh what it has been and what it is going to be and what it is now. Thank you Dr. Balgaban and board. Um we are here to share with you today uh a program that is just awesome and it does a lot for children. That's what attracted me to it. uh because we all know learning does not end at the end of the school day at the last bell. These children have to go home or they have to go to some place and we want those experiences they have in those places to be just as wholesome, just as nurturing as they have uh during the school day. Now, we can't duplicate schools. We're not trying to do that. We're not trying to duplicate families. We're trying to serve the children as they interact in these
201environments. and our program. We believe uh all of the programs provide and invest in that future. We have some awful awesome people working in this program and I'd like to introduce them to you right now. Uh um our board chairman, Miss Jennifer Nadavkco, is seated to my right and um she is uh guiding and directing us as we work uh as volunteers in this program to make sure the program is comprehensive and is serving as our mission requires. Also, uh to her right is our chief of police, uh Chief Jason Umbberger, who has been an outstanding supporter of everything that we do. uh we go to him and we have a need, he's going to try and make sure his staff and his uh facilities are made available to us. I can't say enough about
202him. He he's just a great guy. Um he means it. It's in his heart. He is for children and development. He understands if we can do what we do right now to prevent them from having to go through his office and his department, we're doing a good thing. So, so he certainly supports us. And to his right is Mr. Willie Johnson um whose love for children I must say and his desire and enjoyment he gets in working with children and providing all these variety of experiences is what make this program go and we're here today to share with you some of those experiences. We have some Ozos uh who is seated behind us. Um I want to uh introduce uh I believe Carrie McDonald is here. Um okay. And um we also have um a
203gentleman who's here who has been with this program for more than 30 years. He was chair of it. Uh he is a businessman here in Dan. He pours a lot of his time, energy, and funds into making this community a better place. Mr. Rocky Kaiser, I just wanted to uh he's sitting here with the red shirt on. You can't miss him. um uh he has been the chair of our um board for more than 30 years. Just released it to this young lady seated to my right who's doing an awesome job. And also I must say um uh Miss Sher Akens uh of Akens Law Firm. She has dedicated and committed her firm to doing the legal ease for us to hopefully get your approval to do a transfer and uh has been uh invested
204in this program because she realizes the value of it. I think I have everyone. Kevin, uh Kevin Reed Kevin uh Kevin is a Dan city commissioner who is on the board and he actually participates. He's not there just you know in name uh who is also supporting this program and uh I think we are uh comprehensive in what we do. We're comprehensive in our board members. Uh we we we know that although we may not have all of the financial resources that we may need and the city has been outstanding and helping us getting volunteer help and whatnot, you know, there's more to be done. And with our presentation today to share with you the depth and breadth of this program that works with children after the school day, we're hoping that you'll see the
205value in it and uh vote in the affirmative. some things that can really allow us to expand this program and do even more. We have a tremendous potential here and uh we want to share right now what is happening in the program with you. So I'm going to turn it over to Jennifer and and let her walk you through the uh presentation. Do you have uh Chief I know we have two of our participating officers here. If you could please introduce them. Yes. Uh I have uh Captain Juan Milan who oversees our community engagement division and Lieutenant Mike Stacy who is the commander of our community engagement division. Uh the division with with which uh Willie works uh out of our uh police department from and these two gentlemen are very supportive of the police
206athletic league and you will see them at many different community events in our city. So again, I'm Jennifer Nadulko. I serve as chair for the Dan Police Athletic League. I also serve I'm coming here today in two roles. I serve as the CEO for the House Next Door, which is an outpatient mental health facility here in Valuchia County. We've been in the Valuchia County schools now for almost 30 years. Um so I'm going to kind of talk to you about the partnership and how uh that organization um also benefits from the work that PAL does. Um, so just a little bit about um, PAL, we're a very unique nonprofit because we work strongly on collaborations. Um, so things happen and things work because of our partnerships with other community members. Um, our mission is to
207provide young people in our community. We do elementary, middle school, some high school positive role models. We want that safe environment. Um, similar, as I was saying, to what's provided in the school system. um wholesome activity, physical, social, emotional, the whole development of a student. That's what we're about. Um we got very lucky when we uh hired Willie for that um because he came to us with a lifetime of already um really strongly believing in that value system. So our mission um education, personal growth, citizenship, social development, um the future readiness and stability. What's so interesting is that the partnership with the school system and Rocky could definitely tell this story better than I um but so many years ago um when we were founding here in the land the the vision the mission of
208the school board so closely aligned with what we were doing um it didn't take a whole lot outside of a handshake um now this a long time ago today we need contracts andus to make those sort of things happen um but that mission and value they still go hand inand today um and so when we look at at a lot of the statist statistics um with juvenile delinquency and some of those things that there's opportunities for in those after school hours. PAL is one of those programs that is helping prevent that and we're going to talk more about that as we go through. Um we see definitely see ourselves as a complimentary support system. So as Al said, we're not trying to replace the family system. We're not trying to replace the school system. We're
209sort of that filler in between. We want to help the uh support the families. Some of our families don't necessarily have the resources, the time um or the ability to even get their children to these after school events. Um PAL has a couple of unique opportunities and partnerships were able to do that. We have one really creative uh partnership that came about through a handshake. Um and then you know nowadays we had to get the contracts and theus. Um but we have some of our kiddos um who couldn't get to from their home to the activity that was being provided. Um so there's a money of a matter of money. How do we get the transportation right? Um who's going to maintain that? Um you got to put oil in, you know, vehicles. You got
210to change the tires. Those types of things. Um and then who's going to drive? Who's who's going to be responsible for that? And so the house next door, city of Dan Police Department and PAL, the house next door said, "Okay, we have the funds to buy the van, but our contracts don't allow us. We can't drive." Uh Pal said, "Okay, we can provide the driver." And the police department said, "We'll provide the maintenance." And so we have an eight passenger van that now can pick kids up and get them to these activities. And just removing that barrier of transportation, it just so closely um aligns. you know, unfortunately for us, we're following Advent who wow, that's amazing, right? Wow, our budget's a little bit smaller. Um, but what, you know, we're wanting to do um
211and providing those opportunities for kids so closely aligns with what your other community partners are doing. Um, so we were formed in 1992. Uh, Mr. Kaiser was around back then. Um, recently in 2021, we did rebrand, rechange our name. Um, we were formerly known as West Valicia. uh police athletic league. In '92, the board voted we changed the name to Dand Police Athletic League. So, it's just to reaffirm our commitment um mission of our organization and our police department to our community's children and just to continue to serve um all youth in West Valuchia. Here are some of our uh programs and I'm going to have Willie go more into uh the programs since he's at all of them. As a board member, something that I'm so proud of is if you even look at
212these uh pictures, just the diversity that's offered in our programming. You don't necessarily have to be an athlete to participate in Dand Police Athletic League. And I think that's really unique to us compared to u other PALS throughout the nation. Okay. So, impact. So, this is my this is my data piece. Um, so as a as a community partner and we're we're talking about um even furthering potentially um based on what you decide um and really cementing that partnership with this property. Um what is the impact that this program has in the community? What are some of the successes? How do we measure that? Uh we definitely look at engagement with our stakeholders. Uh we have some data tracking methods. We have one program in particular um the the homework club which is an afterchool
213program there at the the PAL center. Um those 40 children get to use that van which was a partnership between the the three programs. Um and with those 40 youth we track their behavior and academics. Um we also do attendance monitoring for all of our PAL kids. Um those those homework club kids are all also enrolled in PAL. those children at 150% poverty level. All of them um all with um addresses in the Spring Hill community. Um all of those children get an opportunity through their enrollment with PAL to participate in all the programs that Willie is going to tell you about. Definitely an opportunity that they would not otherwise have. Um we we definitely look at um the schools. We look at academics as much as we look at behaviors. You know, we're very
214aware and this is something that Willie does very well as our director. the behaviors when they improve that's when our interventions with improving academics can really be the most impactful. Um definitely positive uh participation and the safe environment. So during the school day we have a lot of structure, a lot of safety. It's those after school hours where things can get concerning. The more freedom someone has, the more opportunity they have to make maybe not so great choices. So, by providing these safe, structured um environments, we're able to deter from some of those maybe not so great choices that our youth make. You know, we know that um youth adolescent brains, they're they're they're plastic, right? Um with that plasticity, what's awesome is that we know they're impacted so much by their social and by
215their environment. If we provide that positive, we can go this way. If it's negative, it can go this way. And when we're going this way, we're talking about the juvenile delinquency involvement, right? Whereas with PAL, we're providing the the positive social environment. So there's opportunities to have healthy peer relationships. When you're playing basketball and your coach is Lieutenant Stacy, um, you're now having that opportunity to see law enforcement in a very different way. Some of our children have only had interaction with law enforcement officers, maybe as a school resource officer. So maybe that was positive, but more often than not it was mom or dad being arrested or auntie being arrested and now we have an opportunity where they're getting to experience law enforcement in a positive way. Um wanted to share with you I
216am a data person so I will make this brief in Willy's way more interesting with the programs. Um but I think data is important and as a board member why I volunteer my time and why I think it's important um to be a part of PAL. I wanted to look at some stats just right here in Valuchia County. Um, and 2022 was the the most recent stats that were posted. Um, but the Florida Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey said, so they basically interviewed our middle school kids. 29% of our students here in Valuchia County, middle school students, identified that they've used alcohol. Now, the state average is 21%. So, we're obviously higher than the state average. 17.8% of them acknowledged having used elicit drugs. State average is 16.7. So, we're still we're still higher. Um,
217on the st on that same survey, 13.2% of the children acknowledged being suspended, 10.6 reported carrying a handgun at some point in their life, which is terrifying. I'm going to say that number again. 10.6% of the children surveyed identified holding a handgun at some point in their life. 12.5 acknowledged attacking someone with intent to cause harm. 53% reported being kicked or shoved by a peer. For me, this was most one of the most alarming statistics. 27.8 of those middle school students right here in Valuchia County acknowledged they had physically bullied another student. All right? So, if if if that many are acknowledging it, how many more are there? Um, again, I think this is why it's so important that we have prevention programs, we have programs like PAL where these youth when they could be
218making other choices, um, that are often made when there's not adult supervision, that we have these PAL programs that are fun, that are enjoyable, they don't realize we're deterring them from other choices. They're an environment where their self-esteem is growing. They're developing social skills, learning things. Willie is so good at this, learning things like wait your turn. I don't know about you guys, but so many adults I know need to learn that one. It's okay if we have a long line at the grocery store. Wait, your turn. Your turn's coming. Those skills, those are crucial life skills that are going to impact that child as they become and turn into an adult. Um, another statistic I wanted to share is that, you know, the consequence when our kids get involved with the juvenile system. Um,
219I don't know if you know this, but the the rate at 2023, and I couldn't find a more current one, but in 2023, the daily cost to our community to house a student in the dep um a youth at DJJ, the Department of Juvenile Justice, $588 a day. $588 a day. Whereas, we can invest those types of funds into preventative programs like PAL and completely change the trajectory of that youth's life. So to me, the dollars just it just makes sense. Um I think I think maybe that's enough data for now. He's a lot more interesting, I promise. Um something that we're really proud of. Um so our impact, PAL's direct impact um on the juvenile justice system is that we have a less than 5% referral rate. So less than 5% of our kids
220that have gone through that um program. So there's obviously a strong correlation between program participation and reduced delinquency. Um so this what I was talking about that um the triple impact the partnership between PAL the police department and the house next door um what we're able to do um and the farreaching impacts of that um working with our youth um Willie won't admit this but I think a lot of times he's working with our parents you know coaching those parents up too coaching those parents up excuse me to help them be the mentor that their child needs them to Okay. All right. Let's talk about the fun stuff. Willie. Okay. Um, my name is Willie Johnson and uh I'm the director and this has been an amazing journey. Um, from beginning to end. First, I've
221been working with kids since I was 16. So, it's been a lot of fun watching the kids grow and participate in the smiles on their face. Um, my whole goal was to bring back the things I did as a kid, right? I'm a baby boomer. Um, most people don't realize that, but um, I'm a I'm the last of the baby boomers born in ' 63. So, um, being outside playing jump rope and fishing and hopscotch, which they don't play anymore, by the way, um, just to be able to do things like that. So when I got the call that, hey, we're going to hire you for this position, first I was crazily amazed. I'm from New Jersey, so I called all my family and told them that I would be doing this. Um, but just
222to be able to implement some of those things, um, from fishing to cooking, uh, weight training. I was listening to the aan health um presentation and bikes in the last three years I think I've given away over 200 bikes. Um Walmart donates them. Um our community partner JC Bikes and Boards, they come in and check them and make sure they're all in working condition and we give them away. Um, my crowning jewel is actually leadership camp. Um, something we started two years ago. We were taking 10 kids, 10 boys, 10 girls out to Yumatillaa to the Elks lodge, the Elks youth summer camp, 400 acres of amazingness out there. But um we would take them out there and we would come up with different events and stuff for them to do and watch them compete
223against each other. This year's camp is actually the first weekend of May and with this team that sits behind me, Lieutenant Stacy, Sergeant Vice, it's going to be super amazing. Um having health is even coming out to help with the first aid and stuff like that. Um just amazing cooking class is the my favorite. I'm I get to eat every Saturday. Uh but um to have Bill from the elusive grape actually has been our cooking instructor every year. Um to be able to watch the kids and we make things from scratch. Um we even the blueberries we even went out picked their own blueberries came back and made blueberry cobbler. Um we've made tofu. We've made pizzas. Uh you'll be surprised. Tofu takes on the flavor of whatever it is. So the kids like, "Oh,
224tofu." Like, "Yep." Black bean burgers. Um showed them how to brine turkeys and actually gave to kids turkeys. Everything was once you do it, you get to take it home, right? And try it. So we had all the ingredients. Give the kids the ingredients. when they came to the next class, okay, what did you do? How did you change that recipe or whatever it is that we were doing that week and it was amazing uh the community bike ride and this is actually one of the fun events as well. all the police department participates. Um, again, we partner with JC bikes and boards and um that event is just brings out kids and I always say if you don't have a bike, let me know. We got I think right now I got about 25
225already ready to go. So, if you need a bike, come out. Parent, you want to ride you away either. We got a bike for you, too. Come on. ride with the kids because the more parent interaction you have actually the more eyes you have. So I don't have to watch 40 kids. If five of them are with their parent I'm good and I have to watch the rest. So um the way training um even basketball we partner with the YMCA here in the land to do basketball and it's friend ball right? It's no numbers, no names, no awards. We let everybody know that up front. Um, each team has a different color and just let them go out and play. You know, they give them a coach the day of they're going to play. Okay,
226here go your coach. And a lot of the high school coaches and middle school coaches, they come out and coach the kids and and play and watch them play. We're usually done in an hour. That's why we like the Y. It has so many courts. You can be done in an hour, hour and a half and not all day long drawn out thing like most basketball leagues do. So that was pretty amazing as well. Kids loved that cage. We um we were doing MMA at Dark Wolf MMA in Orange City and um the cage was just crazy fun for them. Um they got to take their shoes off and get in. They had real instructors. Um as you can see the c they were just in awe. They got to get in a real MMA
227cage and then they started watching on TV. So, they get to interact all of that. This event here, Welcome to the Woods, is actually this month. Um, I've been a little under the weather, so trying to figure out how to get that done. But, um, they get to go out to Semino National Forest. It's basically a eight hour day. They get to fish. They get to kayak. Each kid gets in their own kayak and FWC, we partner with them and they ride around the lake with them and it's my whole thing is to give them the opportunity to experience something that they would never have done, right? Um most kids you'll never get this Florida, but you don't get to go kayaking. You know, kids from Spring Hill are not going kayaking, let's face it,
228right? Um but you get to go kaying. um learn about archery. We have an archery class. So, we learn about archery. We just whatever I can get them to participate in. If it doesn't work, okay, next time we won't do that. We'll try something different. But we always always have something amazing, something fun. Um parents call me all the time. They want, oh, when is this starting up and make sure you remind me of that? Um is just so amazing. and to watch the kids light up. I have a young lady right now that's really parents approached me that has been a real problem for them and they started participating. Actually, she was in weightlifting last month and she's calling me, "Coach, what's going on? What we what are we doing next? I want to
229I'm ready to keep going." And the parents are watching how her behavior is getting better. And she interacts with our uh I guess it's SRO, the the resource officer at the school. and he keeps the track and let me know, okay, this is where she had her challenge was. But like I said, it's just been an amazing journey. Um, started off with 62 kids. I think the first year co year, we went all the way up to 400 kids and never had none of the kids diagnosed with COVID during the whole time. Um, we were fishing, we were bike riding, we were just outdoors having fun. Um numbers fluctuate uh as the year goes on. Um been on what's coming up like camp is coming up. So I know I'm going to get a bunch
230of kids for that. Um the Elks also sponsor kids for us. So last year I think I sent 25 kids four week summer camp which is like $225 per child for the summer. They give me 20 spaces automatically. They're like, "Yep, bring your 20 kids. don't cost you nothing. So, we'll go through the list and pick how many of the kids that parents are able to let their kids go and we send them out to summer camp. But, like I say, the numbers um really doesn't do it justice of a lot of the stuff that we're doing. Um just not having really not having enough manpower is one of my hurdles. Um, yes, we have the police department and stuff, but we run on volunteer power. So, this week you might be able to do
231my photography class, which is actually a program that we run as well, but this week we can't. So, I have to try to flip and find different people to run different parts of the program, but so far so good. Um, every month we have something going on with the exception of this month because I've been under the weather, but every month is something different. Um I I always invite parents and people to come out and just watch, you know, I'm like bring your kid and just sit and watch how we do what we do. Um the interaction with the police officers, um I've reached out to a couple of other PAL programs in our area and we're the only one that is not required for our officers to be in full uniform. Right. I think
232that's kind of a big sticking point for me is these guys, they come out, they bring their kids as well and they participate. They're not standing guard. When you go to Simino and you see the our police officers standing on the side, you know, that's like you standing guard over the kids. I don't I'm not a fan of that. So, our officers, they come out, they participate, they coach, they they be they're instructors. um they're going with me to camp because I don't think I could do camp without them actually and they stay overnight. Um it's just been an amazing journey and I'm so blessed to be able to be a part of it and our community partners as well. I know she mentioned Carrie which is our vice chair back there but um Cardinal
233Health is he's from Cardinal Health. They have been amazing. Um Walmart has been super duper amazing. Evan Health has been super amazing as well. JC's the city of the land. So, I just wanted to say thank y'all for giving me the opportunity to do this as a board. Um, it's really fulfilling for me and everybody know I love kids cuz my children, I have three boys, they're adults, no grandchildren. So, I get to steal everybody's kids, have fun, and send them home. So, thank you. Thank you. and I'm gonna turn it back to J. Okay, we're going to show you guys a little video here. I'm not quite sure how to make it start. Kind of see our kids in action here. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Hey, my name's Hunter Olsson
234and I was a part of the delay power program for about 3 years. Coach Willie and his team are amazing people that helped me so much throughout the 3 years that I was there. I can thankfully and 100% say that without them and their help, I wouldn't be where I am today. It helped me grow and learn a lot about myself and it honestly truly helped me find myself and who I really am. And it helped me achieve one of my biggest dreams of being in the army. I'm very grateful for the program and all the benefits and opportunities that it has provided to me over the 3 years that I've been there. I really can't wait to see it grow more and can't wait to see what's come next. [Music] I like doing uh
235the cooking, boxing, and um a lot of the other activities out there. It's really fun. Went to the Lucid Great Bringing, and it was just really fun. They taught us how to cook things like um blue bay cobbler and then we eventually cooked all of it together and served it to people. I feel like it was better since we made it ourselves and like um people didn't make it for us. Archery was fun. I wasn't great at archery. Um, they taught us about like the rules of it and how if you drop the arrow, you're not supposed to get it, which I almost got it and then I remembered you weren't supposed to get it. Yeah, it's fun. You guys should try it, too. [Applause] I feel like PAL is such a great program. I
236feel like you guys should join, too. There's a lot of different things. If you don't like archer, you can do cooking or a lot of other programs. [Music] Hi, my name is Marie. I am a parent volunteer with the Dan Police Athletic League. I have been volunteering for about a year and a half. I have three kids in the program that enjoy a variety of the programs that Dan Pal puts on, including cooking, car mechanics, basketball, there's archery, lots of fun activities going on. My oldest is now 17 and he is volunteering his time to help teach some of the programs that are put on. We look forward to seeing you and your kids. Chris Jackson, um, director of team 12 basketball. I've been a part of PAL since I was maybe about eight or
237nine years old. Um started playing basketball. Um now I'm a partner with my own program and been a part of PAL. Uh PAL has helped myself um my team and the community um far as bringing kids of all colors together. Um and through basketball, which is a global game now, um PAL has helped me um and other families uh reach a a higher level of understanding where everybody has came from, different different backgrounds and things of that sort. So with PAL, um I appreciate PAL. I'm probably going to continue, well, you know, probably I will continue to be a part of PAL until my days are out. So come join PAL. Come be a part of PAL and come support PAL and team 12 basketball. Thank you. [Music] As you can see, we have a
238very comprehensive program. Uh it's one that treats the whole child. And what's unique about it is after the school day, we're trying to do all that we can to pour into our kids because anymore, we all know here that it's not just something nice to do. We must do this. We have to pour into our children to make sure they understand our determination for them to help them be all that they can be. I truly believe each child has a God-given gift. It's up to us to provide for them the proper experiences to develop those. We don't know what they are, but they do show up eventually, but if we do our part, he will do the rest. And I believe this program does that and it attempts to make sure that these children have
239that comprehensive experience sometimes during the school day, but definitely beyond the school day. We're talking about weekends and, you know, during the summer months, Will is out there in the woods with these kids, you know, uh, having to give them that experience because we can't assume because they're growing up and living here in Florida that they understand the outdoors and the value of our environment. So, uh, we we really believe in this program. Uh we come to you because we're asking that you support us in this program uh through the uh that gem that you saw in the video uh does not belong to us but we hope that after today it will uh and that you will see the value of our use of that facility as well as the property around it. Uh
240there's much to be done there. You know, this would be a beginning for us and we have to find resources to bring it back to standard, but we believe we can do that. And you know what? We want to add Valuchia County Schools as a partner because we believe that you are in spirit. We've used that facility a long time and you've allowed us to do that, you know, and so we know that um we believe that you support us and um uh we we uh we look forward to what's to come and to develop the potential that is here for us that we must grasp fully develop and invest in uh as a process for our children. So, I believe that will conclude our presentation today and uh we thank you so very much
241for this time to allow us to bring this program to you just a little bit of what we're trying to do for our children. Thank you. So, are there any questions? One last thing, too. I want to give some accolade to uh Patty Core and uh BJ Vogus. two outstanding individuals, just good people, but excellent uh Valuchia County employees. They have been an absolute uh joy to work with in this program and this process. Miss Thompson. Yes. And it's not a question, it's a thank you for what you do. I know you all touched about the safety and security after school and that's I have two small kids and I know they have peers that after school even though they're in elementary school there's no one there you know to watch after and make sure
242that they don't do anything unsafe. So I really sincerely appreciate that and I love those programs. I want to be part of that. That cooking sounded amazing. I volunteer for taste testing. Only the best cooks in there. Um, but I do. But sincerely, I mean, those are some amazing things. And you mentioned the boomer generation. I remember I'm not that old, but I do remember I grew up in Seville and we played outside and we were in the woods and we were fishing and we were doing everything outside and so many kids today are in front of tablets and cell phones after school and they really miss out on that whole other realm of learning and doing things. So, thank you so much for taking the time for all those kids. Appreciate it. This is
243good. Rich, another thank you for all that you're doing. It's amazing. It um I don't know if you guys know the starfish story, but if you do, it's a guiding light of my life, and it sounds to me like you have about 250 starfish. So, congratulations. That's awesome. Um my daughter, I adopted her when she was 6 years old from the Department of Family and Children's Services. And I was lucky to have a village around me to um she was highly at risk. And the first time we encountered police officers, she hid um because that's what she was taught to do. So seeing the impact of having a village around her and the difference she had three siblings that um had a different scenario and it truly firsthand experience makes a massive difference in their
244life. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you're doing for all of them, Mr. Cologne. And so it takes a village and I don't know if we planned this uh but I must say we probably couldn't have planned this any better. I mean having been chair before you usually don't have these stars aligned but there's a there's a mission here today and it's I I I think that the overwhelming theme is it takes a village. you know, uh, before you all got here, we were talking about our budget and and and our why and and why we've got to make tough decisions as every one of you and your businesses and your organizations have to make as well. And, you know, it was kind of like a, you know, talking about
245the budget's never fun. And to to then this have this pick me up is is is definitely godscent is what I'll call it. Um and so it it does take a village and ironically you know as you mentioned it's an intertwined village and so uh one of the things that we've been able to do and and I guess this is a question for superintendent I normally would bring it offstage but I think there's an opportunity do you all collaborate with the school district to align the afterchool instruction that you all do um with what's coming from the schools. So with our um our homework co club program um so of the 250 kids that will serving 40 of them are the homework club and yes we are aligned with the um principal at Stark. Um
246we've identified some key students and some academic goals for them that we're working on. Awesome. So individualized. So, I'd be curious to see from an academic impact what so that you you can better quantify the work that you're doing and maybe even find opportunities to do it better. That's what we're all here for. So, uh that's great. Um I I want to thank you for your passion and providing the experiences. I will tell you I'm from South Florida. Grew up in North Miami Beach. Uh didn't touch a cow for the first time until like last year sometime. didn't know there was a difference between a cow and a heer and and just mindblowing and so thank you for providing these opportunities for those students. Uh again, you said it, I didn't. You know, what are
247the chances they're going to go kayaking out in the middle of you mentioned seinal something that's it sounds like the middle of nowhere. It is. It is. It is. And so of course you're going out of your own comfort zone to get on a kayak wondering what am I doing here cuz there's alligators in this water. Yes. Yeah. The FWC goes out with them. So I I feel comfortable. Um I'm over 300 lb. I'm not getting in a kayak. That's not going to happen. But yeah, the the kids love it though. You you have to see it. Um it's really an experience for a lot of them, especially the older ones, the the teenagers, 13, 14. We have some high schoolers. Actually, captain back there, his daughter goes with me, too, and she loves it.
248So, it's a real unique experience. So, next time you need someone to stand there with you and watch them go kayak, just let me know. We'll hang out. And then you mentioned cooking class and blueberries and something about a cobbler. Blueberry cobbler. Um, we we got to we got to work this out here. And so admittedly, I've never been to PAL uh in the land. I we almost made it there once when we were a while back, but um I would certainly love to come on one of those amazing peach cobbler days uh to to experience. But again, you know, I've always said this and it's it's something I ran on and you know, having been one of those kids if you couldn't tell. Um I always say, you know, we've got to get give
249kids something to lose. Now, that doesn't sound really exciting. That doesn't sound normally you would say you want to give them everything to gain, but when they have nothing to lose, what do they do? They get in trouble. And as you mentioned for that young lady that her family, she's got something to lose now. You can say you won't do this if and that's makes a world of difference. And so again, thank you. Thank you. Thank you not only to you all up here, but also your community partners and sponsors. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because as you can see if the village is vast and the village is interconnected. How the city works with the with the police department, works with the school system, works with the business partners, works with FWC. All
250of this intertwines into a big ball of yarn and our mission is the same. And I think it's important that we continue to collaborate to carry out that mission uh and raise uh wonderful citizens in our community. So, thank you. Mrs. Okay, Dr. Bman, go first. I I did want to ask them before they leave that they come up so we can also take a picture with you to promote the work that you're doing. Really, I want to say thank you because for your time first and foremost and second for the passion that you exhibit through the work that you do. But I want to commend Mr. Cologne for that question that he asked because I would strongly encourage that moving forward we continue that level of collaboration with the schools because then what what
251that time becomes it's extended learning opportunities for students and I will tell you um you know I was a principal for a high need school for five years and we went from being a DA school to the second year one of the second highest performing schools in the entire west learning community and one of the ways that we were able to maintain that is to ensure that everything that we were doing was vertically articulated. So I commend you for that collaboration that you have with Stark because I will tell you that we are seeing those students are Stark. They're they're doing really really well. That's because you've got that extended learning opportunity. So I would continuously look at all the schools that you're servicing and have that collaboration established with the leadership at that school
252because it's it's a dual benefit at that point in time. But again, thank you on behalf of our entire board and team for what you do, your time, and your passion. Mrs. Goodrich, sorry, I had a last minute question. Do we have anything like this on the east side? We don't talk about Bruno. Well, well, they they're not specifically this, but we do have extended learning opportunities on the east side. Yeah. And so I'll finish up. Um I I I want to add, you know, although the title of our program is the land pals, we serve children throughout the west side of Aluchia County, many of them come from Deltona or in city that are participants in this program and they're welcome. We we actually promote it that way. Everybody's welcome. So, I want to
253say thank you to each and every one of you because I realize a lot of you have dedicated many, many years to the students on the west side of Valuchia County. And having grown up with a father who was a pastor, um I did a lot of camping and um go taking students. At one point, we lived just outside of Detroit, Michigan. And every summer my dad would load up kids that had never been outside of Detroit, Michigan. And we would take bus loads of them because we he was on staff at a church there that had 10,000 in membership. And we would take them out to a camp. And every summer we would have experiences that they had never experienced. And it there's nothing greater than to take kids to a camp and see
254them outside knowing that they never would have that opportunity otherwise. And when you guys do that and the cooking, everything that you do, you are keeping the kids off of the streets and out of trouble. But more than that, you're giving them a purpose. And I heard you say, Mr. Johnson, it was hard to follow Advent Health. But here's what I want to say. every single day you make a difference. You're in front of those children every afternoon, on weekends, during the summer. Advent Health, yes, they they've donated a lot of wonderful things, but you're the people that are on the ground making the difference every day. So, please never think less of what you're doing because what you're doing is more powerful. It's just like in a classroom. Every day when a teacher stands
255in front of those students, they make the difference in that child's life. They may not see it for 10 years, but I guarantee you there are so many students that come back as young adults and they find you and they tell you. So, like even hearing the story of the difference it made in that young man's life and then listening to the young ladies who are in the program right now, you are making a difference and we appreciate you and I know this has been a long time coming for us to get to the point to be able to really support you and allow you to have the opportunity. So, I want you to know I totally support what we're looking at and I am hoping that we will be turning this over to you
256so you can continue on and you can access funding that you need to continue to build and make more of a difference every day in the lives of these children. And to everyone that partners with you, I thank each and every one of them too because and and I agree with you. I I'm happy that the Delane Police Department doesn't have to show up in their uniform. That they can actually show up and interact with these kids and the kids see them as real people. Cuz even just all the years I taught, you go into the grocery store and they're like, "That's my teacher and she buys groceries." I think they think you live at the school all the time. They think those of you as police officers, you must just live at the police
257department all the time. So kids need to see that interaction and have that interaction. So, thank you to each and every one of you. And we do want a photo. So, you have to come forward for a photo with Dr. Babin. [Applause] I need one of those. I when I drive my car supposedly cancelled. find us too. And I've [Applause] got you guys in the middle. The optics of the police officers in the middle. I thought you were everybody. [Laughter] Wherever you tell me. All right. You're ready. Oh, this professional camera definitely helps. [Applause] We'll see. I enjoy it's fun for me. When's your birthday? Did you say your birthday? Oh, I have no idea. I've been a drummer for 40 years. I don't trust my ears. I guess we're starting. Miss your nickname. It'll
258be a quick just I just got a Okay. She's going to We are going to take a 10 minute break and we will be back in here at 2:30. Okay. So, we're going to take a 10-minut break. We'll be back in here at 2:30. Awesome. All right. Thank you everyone. and got my blanket. Welcome back. It is 2:31 p.m. and we're moving on to item 5.01 01 under the workshop ERP implementation update. Dr. Valivan. Thank you, Madam Chair, board members. Um we have with us here this afternoon um Dr. Matt who is our chief technology officer joined by Mr. Paul Metzer who is our director for software and systems. Um actually last week as the team met regarding the ERP I was getting some updates and it's it's been good so far. So the team
259is here to share with you how that implementation is coming along, some areas of successes and what the next steps are. Um Dr. good afternoon. Afternoon Chair Haynes, Superintendent Belgamin, members of the board. I hope you're all warmed up from the previous presenters for the most exciting topic on your agenda this afternoon, ERP implementation. We may not be making blueberry cobbler, but we are making something very important for the school district. So, this aligns to guard rail 3, improving operational efficiency and maximizing resources to support student learning. So, first a little bit about what an ERP is. An ERP is the most important and largest software in the school district, but a lot of people don't know much about it because it runs often in the background. It runs all of the business operations, 19
260different modules that do all sorts of things in HR and finance and many other areas. By consolidating data and uh automating workflows, it improves efficiency, reduces redundancy, and philos facilitates all of our functions. Additionally, it provides data to the school district so that we can uh make datadriven decisions. Uh Mr. CE is very excited about implementation phase two because he needs data from our financial systems that's difficult to get with our current arrangement. Speaking of our current arrangement, uh this is the diagram uh the software architecture of our current ERP and it's actually ERPs with an S. This is two ERPs welded together uh by a jagged weld uh in the middle. Think of it as like a Ford Pinto on the front end of a car connected to a Honda Accord on the back
261end of the car with a bunch of weird things bolted on the sides of the car. Uh that's our current ERP. It it is it's obsolete. It's inefficient. It's costly. It's vulnerable. And it's very hard to learn. So if this looks confusing to you, it is. This is what we're trying to get to. So the previous diagram was Oracle and Cross Point, two different ERPs molded together. I'll talk more about why we have them in a moment, but this is what we want. This is a streamlined version of the ERP we're focusing towards, no pun intended. Uh, it's optimized, secure, stable, and supportable. This is a little bit of a oversimplified version, but you can see that in the middle there's a central processing database. That's the core brain of the ERP. then then connects
262to 19 different functional modules that run all of those business operations. In the gray boxes, those are other software programs outside of the envelope of the ERP that have to uh send data back and forth into our ERP system, such as our banking software or class link one sync, which is how we roster uh staff and students. So, how did we choose our new ERP? Well, about 10 years ago, uh, we made some choices for a new ERP because Cross Point had gone out of business. And it's pretty risky to be using a large important software program that has no company behind it. There's nobody to call. There's no updates. Um, you're just on your own when you're in that situation. So, about 10 years ago, we went through a process as a district to
263choose a new ERP. And there were many mistakes made in that choice. Oracle was that eventual choice. Uh we went through implementation with a third-party consultant named Cherry Road. Uh they also made many mistakes and they were costly mistakes. And so as we went down that road, we realized that uh eventually we could not actually implement Oracle fully and that's why we have two that's why we still have cross point as our HR half of our ERP. So, uh, Oracle only got halfway down the road and we have been buying Oracle at a high price ever since. So, we don't want to keep doing that. So, when we chose the new ERP, we did a autopsy of that process from 10 years ago, learned our lessons, and incorporated them into a new process. As we
264chose the new ERP, uh, we were very careful to incorporate the input of stakeholders, 23 different groups throughout the school district through many meetings and surveys. It took a while to get all that input. It created a spreadsheet of functional pieces that was over a thousand lines long of what we needed this software to do. Then I wrote the RFP with the help of the directors in IT and other department heads. It's the biggest RFP I've ever had to write and it's I've I've written many of them. And then as we uh evaluated the proposals, we put them through a vigorous rubric and came to six semi-finalists that you see there. Tyler, as Kronos, Focus, Powers School, and Skyward. We then invited them to do demonstrations. We grilled them in those demonstrations with a large
265team of stakeholders, a large committee. Then we took those six and narrowed it down to three finalists. Those three finalists, we visited actual school districts that used each one of those ERP systems. Also something not done 10 years ago of of actual visits with the users of those systems. They were all purpose-built systems for school districts, not like Oracle. Oracle is not built for K12 education. it has a hard time dealing with the structure of a nonprofit educational institution. Those three finalists were focus power school and Skyward. When we visited those school districts, we eventually chose focus. So why did we choose f focus? There are a number of advantages to choosing focus. Now nothing is perfect. As we look through the three finalists, we found positive and negative situations with all three including focus.
266But focus had the most overall advantages. One was we already were using it as our student information system. That's a another system outside of the ERP. It's not part of the ERP even though it's the same company. So we already had familiarity with how their company worked, how their support was and their support was reliable. It had been for years with their student information system and our staff was already wellversed in how to use focus student information system. So the training load was going to be less because it wasn't something completely unfamiliar to our staff. Uh other things that we liked about focus is the way it was programmed in its programming language. It uses something called PHP programming. Um Cobalt is the language of uh crossoint our half of our ERP right now. You
267probably haven't heard of a lot of graduates graduating with cobalt capabilities in programming because that doesn't exist anymore as a functional area in programming. You can't hire new cobalt programmers. So, it's a it's a very difficult thing to support these days. We're extremely lucky to have a manager of business applications named Audrey Delio who is an expert in in crossoint and cobalt, but she is unreplaceable in that particular function. So you can't keep going like that with an old programming language. Focus has SQL relational databases. You've probably heard of people knowing SQL coming out of college right now. So it is modern. It is supportable as a system that can be integrated with other modern systems. Now I'm going to turn it over to Paul Mezer and he's going to talk about where the implement
268implementation has been. And remember this only started last summer. So, we're talking last summer till now and then he'll take us into where it is now and then where it's going. Paul, thank you. Uh, let me just quickly say that uh to keep our reputations intact, neither Dr. nor I were here during the Oracle implementations. So, uh, you know, we're relatively new, but this slide tells you how we're going to be different than back then. uh we're doing this project managing this project in a uh with standards through the PMI institute project manage project management institute which are basically the processes and techniques used to launch that NASA uses to launch rockets into space you know there's project charters there's risk registers there's stakeholder registers there's issue all those those standards that are used across
269the world in uh in a a very standardized way um focus has a PMO a PM a project management office that uses these standards. I've been a PMP for a long time. So, uh it allows us to speak to each other in a in a very standardized way. And I won't use the word standard again, I promise. Uh the release schedule, phase one, which is what we're currently uh wrapping up in the next three months, started about a year ago. Um, and it we go live July 1st with the HR and payroll and time and attendance parts of the ERP. Phase two, which is beginning right now. We had our kickoff two weeks ago, uh, goes from now until April of 2026, and that's the finance part of the ERP. Phase one, dates and milestones,
270important dates. In March of 2024, we had the kickoff where we met with Miss Workman's staff. We came up with the business process or we met with the business process owners and we talked about all of the processes that Valuia County uses that we had a match in the new system. Then over the last year, we've taken the data from that old system and migrated it to the new system. We've talked about gaps which are well, I'll explain the rest of these uh on further slides. So next slide data migration process. There are over 400 data tables in the current system in cross point that had to get into the new system for just HR and payroll. So each one of those data tables has to be exported from that, verified, validated, mapped to the
271new system, the new structure of the new uh of the new system, put into the new system, verified in that system and then the whole thing is a circle until that is exactly right where we have to migrate that data. We can go to the next one. I think I mentioned that one. Gaps. gaps are the differences between what focus will offer and what we need for Valuja County. So things uh like um there we we identified 60 gaps that the focus the current state of the focus software did not have that Valuja County needed. To put that into context for a moment, remember I mentioned earlier that we did stakeholder meetings and we came up with a spreadsheet of over a thousand functional areas. So out of that over a thousand functional areas, 60
272of them were not something focus currently included in their package. So those gaps will be developed over the last year so that to make sure that they match what we needed to go live on July 1st. integrations over 20 integrations have to happen which are third-party systems outside of the ERP that have to be tied into the ERP through data m uh data going back and forth between the systems things like evaluations uh benefits uh real-time punches in where's the bus things like that they have all that data has to get into the ERP on an ondemand or uh system or or daily through uh daily updates parallels, which is running both of these systems at the same time, the old and the new together to make sure that the outputs are the same. And
273I'm happy to announce that the first parallel happened last week. And in payroll, when we ran a payroll, both the gross and the net matched perfectly. So that's a good start to our parallels. training. A lot of training happens in this. We started at the beginning of the project with technical training so that their IT staff and our IT staff can work together through that implementation uh uh so that they were on the same uh page. In February uh last last month we had district level training for the BPOS all of the heads of the departments and things that had to then train their people in this room right here. And that went very well as well. In June, end user trainings happened for everyone that actually uses this uh touches this system, which is
274most of the employees of Valuia County Schools have something to do with this ERP. And then August, we're going to have after we go live in July, there's postgo live training for any questions that come up after we go live and um refresher courses and things like that. To give you an idea of the extent of this project, there's 25 Valuja County school employees that have been working on this uh and then there's 24 members of focus that are working on this. So, this implementation has up to 50 people working on it at one time uh at any time. And that's phase one. Phase two is a smaller project. That's a little That's about 40 people that are going to be working on the finance part of this starting now through April of next year.
275How are we going? The data is ongoing and on schedule. The gap development and programming is ongoing and on schedule for July. Integration development and programming is ongoing and on schedule. The training the district level is complete. The end user is coming in June. The parallel testing uh internal parallel testing happened last week and then on-site parallel testing with our payroll department will be happening at the end of April into May. That is on schedule and we still are on schedule for a July 1 go live date for phase one for phase one. That's right. Phase two, we had the project kickoffs. This is the finance part of the ERP. We had the project kickoffs last week. They went very well. And then over the next year we will be bringing the data out of
276the of Oracle and and then putting it into focus. We will be doing a gap analysis soon which will then determine the gaps that we have to work on over the next year to make sure we do uh then district level training parallels happen toward the end of the project to go live April of 2026. All right. And uh thank you Paul. Now I'm going to go over some of the implementation challenges that we face that we have faced and we currently face. Right now is probably the most difficult time for the business applications team that's working mainly on the ERP because they're really doing three RP. They're they're administrating three ERPs at the same time at this moment. They're standing up the new one. So that's focus ERP. They're running Oracle uh half of
277the current ERP and they're still running cross point the other half. So those are all three very different ERP systems with different skills required. So our business apps team is is under stress right now. But July 1 when they can retire cross point and we are on just the focus ERP for half of it and then we start working on the Oracle part we'll be going down from two major systems I mean three major systems to two. Um, and that'll be a big relief for us because Cross Point is the most vulnerable of the three considering it's not even a a real company anymore. Whenever you make policy or when I I should say the district, when the district makes policy, um, if it has implications for HR or finance, which is often the case,
278there's often a large number of hours required of programming to reconfigure our systems. So we're having to make difficult decisions when policy is is implemented to see if it's something we want to implement now or if we have to schedule it it into the new system. So, for example, if you were to pass something today that had major implementations for Oracle, it would not be good for me to pull my team off of ERP implementation to implement that that new policy that would take hours and hours and hours to implement into Oracle for something we're about to try to retire next school year. So, some things may get a little delayed in terms of policy because we're trying to put them into the new system and not waste time putting them into the old systems.
279um coordination with other divisions, departments, and schools is required throughout this process. We're the technical people. We're not the decision makers in how much of this works. So, we have to talk with many of our other colleagues and they don't always have time for us. So, sometimes that challenges us. For instance, we're trying to implement or start phase two for the finance system now because we know that uh finance is going to be extremely busy in June as they close out the old budget and start the new one. So, they really don't have time to be messing with it in June. So, we need to talk to them now to get the information we need to get out of them. And there's many situations like that. Much of the project management scheduling that Paul was
280talking about, we have to do that very intentionally to make sure we get their time. unexpected staff shortages. Right now, knock on wood, everything's good, but if we were to lose some key staff, that could put us behind. Uh, other districts are also implementing Focus. For example, Penllis County Schools are implementing focus just ahead of us as an as their ERP. So, there is a schedule of focus programmers who are working on Penllis that are the same programmers that work for us. So at certain times we can't get their attention because they're scheduled for panelis and vice versa. Um training can only match reality to a certain point. It's scenario-based. So remember Paul mentioned that there would be postgo live training in August. That's to deal with what we don't know is going to occur.
281Like those things that only pop up when you really are using it for real the first time that we have to quickly adjust to and deal with. And then finally, other new software implementations. I've asked my other cabinet colleagues to minimize that and they've been kind in doing so. Um, we sometimes have to implement some sort of new software. Sometimes it just has to happen. But when it doesn't have to happen this next school year, we're asking them to delay that a year so that we can get the ERP fully implemented. so that then we can then turn to assist them because it's the same people that would be assisting them in implementing their new software that are working on the ERP implementation. So those are our challenges. What are the benefits when we're done?
282What happens when we're done? Well, when we're done, we'll have um a new ERP and older systems will be able to be retired. A lot of older systems, not just Cross Point and Oracle. There are systems that don't work in crosspoint and Oracle such as surf uh search soft for example and others that cost us a lot of money and when that time comes when the ERP is fully implemented in both phase one and two we'll be able to not buy that software anymore and not put people on it to system administer it. So that's a huge cost savings. Let me give you just one tiny example. Oracle costs about $811,000 a year to use to license. That is double the cost of the entire ERP for from focus and that's just one system. So
283there are many cost savings coming down the road when we get this efficient system implemented. Uh the new ERP will be easier to use but there is a little cautionary uh piece that I want to explain and that's called the implementation dip. Um, I've implemented many different softwares throughout my lifetime, throughout my career, and this always happens. There is a time period when it is confusing, when people second-guess it, when they can't find what they were looking for, when they ask us to put a feature in that's not there that we didn't realize we were going to need, bugs that we need to work out that crop up at the last second. All of that's going to happen and it's going to make people frustrated and they're going to feel like this maybe wasn't a
284great idea. But if they persevere through it, they will get through the implementation dip and then things will get better and then they'll realize, oh, this is much better. So, we have to have the grit and the perseverance to get through that implementation dip and then things will get better. Then we'll have an optimized, modern, secure, and technically stable ERP, something this district hasn't had for a very long time. And we'll have full vendor service, so we can call Focus if there's a problem. There's nobody to call if Cross Point goes down except for Audrey Delio on our own staff. Thank you. Uh, do you have any questions for us? Mrs. Brosmer, thank you for this. Um it for me it's a foreign language so I especially appreciate your work. Um I just have two
285random questions. You mentioned the gaps and having to develop systems that that uh filled those gaps. Are those proprietary? Do we have to create them ourselves or is that something we get from somewhere else? Well, there there's a couple of ways that's handled. Um, one is that focus realizes that sometimes when we ask for a gap to be filled, like a feature to be added, you might say, um, they realize that that could be a business opportunity for them across the state. So sometimes they will fill that gap and we don't have to do much, you know, to do that. We don't have to pay extra for it or anything like that because they see it as, you know, value ad to their software, right? There are other times though where we have a gap
286that is very unique to Valuchia County like we're the only one that wants that and so in that case we have to work with them a little more carefully. Um and they don't charge us because it is part of the implementation but they would charge us if we weren't in implementation. Um so down the road you know or for example our student information system right now is not in implementation. So when we ask for something very valu specific, we do have to pay for that sometimes. And and then just as a followup on that question, uh are they able to if someone else were to ask for something similar, can they use whatever it was they developed? Yes, it's not proprietary at all. It's part of focus's software becomes part of their focus software. But
287sometimes uh if it's Valuchia only, there's an instance of the software like a version of the software that is only for us. If we have something customized, we try to avoid that as much as we can because when you have too much customization in your software, it tends to break more often because it's not as supported as the standard version, you know, that focus gives to everyone. So, we try to get it into focus as a standard feature for everybody whenever we can do that. Okay. Thank you. That that makes sense. Um and you mentioned um if we adopt policies that require one system over another one that that may have something to do with the implementation of the policy. Do we have any way of knowing when we adopt a policy how that how
288that works or how that would be applied? Um well let me give you an example. Okay. um recently you are working on a policy that ups the requirements for um approval of finances right so for instance for for instance uh for me as a chief I might be able to approve something up to $50,000 instead of $20,000 as a purchase that sounds like a simple thing and it is kind of in policy but when you look at the software uh there's over 400 like mini programs inside of Oracle that make that work and it it's mapped to every single individual's account who has that power. So, we're talking coordinators, principles, lots of lots of people and it has to be manually touched to fix it. It's it's many many hours of programming time to implement
289that that change. So that change even though it may become policy won't be something in the software until we actually put it into the focus ERP because we we would have to do it in Oracle and then only months later we would be doing the same exact thing in in focus ERP and it would put our pol it would put our um release schedule behind because we would have to pull people off the implementation in order to do it. So that just doesn't make sense, right, for something for a software we're about to retire to put that kind of investment into Oracle rather put the investment in the new ERP and and have but that does mean that the policy would have some delay. So to answer your question, would you know? Um it's something
290that's policy by policy. Like sometimes it's not going to have much of an effect. And frankly, you could just always ask like, you know, I'll come up and say that one's not going to really be a bother for us. That one's going to be a little delayed because that would take a lot of programming. So it's not every single finance and HR policy. I'm not trying to, you know, scare you into all of them are going to be a problem, but some of them are more problematic than others. So, does that mean uh a few meetings back we changed our our our purchase limits for a variety of staff? So, is that an example? That's the one that's the one I was talking about. 400 little categories and and that kind of thing. It's like
291making 400 little software programs and um the amount of time I can't let the implementation schedule slip because remember I mentioned like Penllis is also implementing. So if I let our schedule slip, it's not just that it slips back like say a month or something like that. It now slips into the time that they have guaranteed to penelis. So now I get slipped even farther. And there are only certain times of the year that you want to turn something on. Like you don't want to turn something on in the middle of October, you know, when the when the first semester is like halfway going. So you have So it can then slip even further because you've missed your window of opportunity. So some of these things are just so important for me to keep people
292on task with what the schedule is that I have to delay like a policy implementation. So does that mean that that those just as a for instance does that mean that that those categories that we changed have not been implemented yet? Not exactly. It's not that the policy wouldn't be in effect. It's just not in effect in software. Okay. So there are ways to override things for instance in the software and these overrides would be easier to do because you wouldn't have to ask somebody. So for example, if my budget analyst uh submitted a purchase that had a new limit that was lower than 50 uh you know because the old limit was lower than 20, she would know that she could easily get finance to override that approval because it's by policy okay to
293do uh you know under 50. Um, so it'll just mean we have to do some kind of workarounds for a little while until we get it to be more smooth in the software. Okay. Thank you. That's all I had. Mr. Cologne, are we on are we on time and are we on budget? We are both. Beautiful. Thank you. That was my only question. That's good. Rich, mine was just a followup to Miss Brosmer. Um, if we don't know, cuz we don't know software like you do, if we don't, if we're making a decision that could financially impact or timeline impact what you're doing, would you be willing to pipe in? Oh, certainly. Yes. Because sometimes we just don't know. Yes. And yeah, most of the time all it's going to do is just mean that
294there'll be a little bit of a delay in programming that particular policy in the software. So, it doesn't even mean you have to, you know, do anything differently. It just means you have to be a little more patient with when you're going to see that in effect in an efficient way within the software. The closer we get to the go live of of phase two, the less of a problem this will be. But we could also say we we want this policy to be effective at a later date, you could put an effective date on it. We I've done a software upgrade before. I'm praying for you. Not it's not fun. Yeah. All right. So, as we um finalize this and uh you did a great job with the time um and presenting it. So,
295thank you very much. I heard that search soft will be one of the pieces that once you're fully implemented will go away. And could you tell me the time frame on that piece again? Just that one. Mhm. Cersoft is another delay piece because that was added later and so it was not in our schedule of implementation to begin with. Um it's only been added the last couple of months. So we had a demo from uh focus uh account uh applicant tracking module. We had a demo from them just uh about a month ago. So, we've only recently made the decision, okay, we're going to get rid of search off and we're going to go towards focus applicant tracking, but we're going to do that as a add-on after the other schedule has been completed. So,
296that's that's not going to start until a year from now, like April of next year. It shouldn't take a huge amount of time because we'll have all the other ERP pieces in place by then. So, you know, it's it's not going to be as difficult as some other parts, but we just can't wedge it in right now without risking um a time slip on our schedule. And then we all know Cross Point's going to go away and thank goodness it's been a long time. And I missed because you said another software and I missed what that one was. It's also going away. Yes. Well, Oracle I mentioned. Well, right. I had I knew Oracle and I knew Cross Point and um there's a number of them, but I'll give you another example. Time clock plus
297uh time clock plus we currently pay for and that one's going away pretty soon. Okay, because uh we're we're about to in phase one implement time tracking through focus. So that's another one that we won't have to pay for. Um you know it'll it'll be gone. Do you have any idea or have you anticipated when this is all complete and you remove all of the softwares that are no longer what we're going to use because focus is going to handle that? Do you have a ballpark idea of what the savings will be? I do not have that calculated. Um I I think I could come up with that for you but I just don't have that right now. So go back to the very first presentation that you did. It's there. Yes. I think it's
298changed though. And like for example, Searchoft is now in the mix. So I'd want to recalculate. Yeah. Yeah. So Searchoft will um we've still got a whole another year before we do because that's one that actually you don't want to do during the summer because that's their busiest time that people are applying for positions. you need to do that at a more quieter time to flip the switch on that one. Right. So, if if all goes well, I'm suspecting that CERSoft would would start its kickoff implementation in April of next year and it will probably take uh two or three months to get completely on its feet, but it'll be on its feet by summer. Okay. All right. Thank you very much and thank you for all of the information. And um um Dr. Balman's
299going to sum it up. I I just want to say again, thank you to Matt his leadership, and his entire team. You would know, I'll tell you, superintendents try to avoid ERP implementations at every cost because this is it. It's a huge huge undertaking. And uh we know that we've had two that did not um successfully were not successfully implemented, but there was so much meticulous intentional work that were done behind the scene and still taking place behind the scene to the point that this is perhaps one of the most seamless implementation thus far that I have experienced in my years in education. So really I want to say thank you to all of you because I know it's a lot of work behind the scene to the point that I will tell you Miss
300Haynes we were at Apple Park last week and it was a long day that we had an extremely long day but Matt was there with his team because they were doing that calibration and we were all like okay how did it go and um they met the for a good half a day I believe and we received information that had gone really really well. So Matt, I want to underscore the importance of this work and the amount of leg work that it takes from your entire team for for this type of implementation. Thank you again and we look forward to the next year or two to be smooth as well. Thank you. Thank you. So if there's no further questions or anything at this time, then it is 3:06 and this meeting is adjourned and
301we'll come back in here at 4:30 for the school board meeting.